Modification of your OWN property is not a crime. (Searches US Constitution.) I can not lay my hand on any part of this document which gives Congress the right to block you or Geohot from making mods.
That's the devious and sinister part of the DMCA. It doesn't do anything with your right to modify stuff you own. You can modify your PS3 all you want, Geohot can modify their PS3s all they want. What the DMCA makes illegal is trafficking in knowledge/software needed to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms. That is, it makes it illegal for Geohot to tell you how to modify your hardware.
Essentially, it's like saying it's legal to make or own a key to a lock you own. But it's illegal for anyone to sell or make you a key, teach you how to make a key, teach you how to pick locks, or sell you lockpicks. Technically we still have the right to fair use, they've just made it illegal for us to obtain any means to exercise that right. The people who came up with that legal loophole deserve to be shot by people claiming they were aiming at targets which happened to be behind their heads.
I Win7, I know you can assign QoS to an App or data stream. Let an ISP have 3 different priorities.
No no no. QoS should be applied on a per-user basis, not per app or data stream. I paid my ISP $40 this month. So did my neighbor. We should both be getting (potentially) the same level of service. If he chooses to use his service mostly for VoIP while I choose to use mine mostly for bittorrent, his packets should not get priority over mine. We paid the same amount.
I'm actually OK with ISPs implementing a lower "guaranteed bandwidth" threshold like you proposed in (1) (e.g. your connection can peak at 5 Mbps but you're only guaranteed 1.5 Mbps), or a monthly data cap (e.g. you can download 50 GB/mo, after which your connection speed is dropped to 0.5 Mbps, or you're charged more per 10 GB increment) in order to keep aggregate network usage below the limits of their upstream trunk line. But my neighbor and I paid the same amount so our ISP has no business setting up QoS rules which decide his packets are more worthy of transmission than mine just because we use different apps.
You have to keep a direct connection between bandwidth provided and revenue received if you want to keep the ISPs honest. If you let them break that connection, then it opens up the system to all sorts of abuses like ISPs offering to sell you a "higher priority" plan for a higher monthly fee. Said plan could involve no cost (no additional bandwidth) on the ISP's part, all they do is steal priority from their non-paying customers to give it to their paying customers, thus earning more money for zero network upgrades. To be fair, the system would have to involve "high priority" customers paying more, and "normal priority" customers paying less, unless the ISP invested in increasing their bandwidth so the high priority customers had no impact on normal priority customers. I can't think of an easy and transparent way to enforce that, so unless someone can come up with a better idea it needs to be enforced on a per-user basis.
Way to go Mother Nature Network (MNN), you have tied Genghis Khan to environmentalism.
On the contrary, I think it's a connection which is both telling and needs to be made more public. The modern environmental movement and most people who are concerned about the environment have the same goal - preservation and conservation of the natural world. But they have very different opinions on the means to achieve those goals.
Most people would prefer that preservation and conservation be achieved with as little inconvenience to our modern way of life as possible. Most hardcore environmentalists OTOH view controlling human population and consumption as the most effective means of achieving that goal. (Which is precisely what Ghengis Khan did through different means.)
The divergence is most telling with nuclear power. The only reason CO2 emissions are a tough problem is because of energy. CO2 is a byproduct of processes we use to extract energy. That puts the CO2 at a low energy state, and getting rid of it involves putting energy back into it. But putting energy back into CO2 defeats the purpose of burning the fuel which produced it in the first place. You'd be producing CO2 to extract energy which you then use to decompose CO2.
Nuclear doesn't have that problem. With a relatively cheap and nearly unlimited power source like nuclear, CO2 ceases to become a problem. We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2). The same thing for dangerous toxins like dioxin. They're only a problem because they're at a low energy state so natural processes (which generally don't have access to high energy levels) have a very difficult time breaking them down. With cheap energy, you can afford to run incinerators which atomize those compounds back into their constituent elements. These problems either go away or are greatly diminished with cheap energy, yet cheap energy seems to be one of the things the environmental movement vehemently opposes.
The same goes for population. Most of the developed world is close to zero population growth or even experiencing negative growth (families on average have only 2 or fewer kids). Nearly all of the world's exploding population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. Yet nearly every time you hear an environmentalist talk about overpopulation, they point to solutions involving changing what people in industrialized nations do, not changing developing nations where nearly all the population growth is happening.
We should be concentrating R&D on cheap energy sources for the future, not on cleaner but considerably more expensive "green" energy sources. It's only because productivity per person has vastly increased over the pre-industrialized era that we have the luxury to be spending time and effort doing things like worrying about the environment. But that increased productivity came about directly because of cheap energy. Make energy more expensive and our productivity goes down, meaning we can't afford some of our modern conveniences and/or we can't spend as much time and effort worrying about the environment. And we should be concentrating on modernizing and industrializing (and making contraceptives available to) undeveloped nations to arrest their population growth, not trying to get people in developed nations to adopt "low footprint" lifestyles similar to those in undeveloped nations.
The anthropogenic greenhouse effect was not a problem in the 13th century, and the the total amount of carbon dioxide that had been emitted by the entire human race at that point was trivial. To the extend that his conquests removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it was addressing a problem that didn't exist.
I will also point out that current carbon dioxide emission is about 30 billion tons per year. If the Mongols removed "700 million tons" of carbon from the atmosphere, then in the course of a century and a half of Mongol rule they accomplished the removal of an amount of carbon dioxide equal to about one week of modern emission.
You're forgetting consequential effects. If he culled 40 million people from the population during the 13th century, he didn't just remove those 40 million people. He also removed all their potential descendants. Given that the estimated population of the world at the time was about 400 million, a 40 million reduction works out to about 10%.
Since percentages aren't distorted by exponential growth, that means he's responsible for a 10% reduction in the world's current population. There are nearly 700 million fewer people alive today because of him. If we go with your 30 billion tons of CO2 globally figure, he's responsible for a 3 billion tons of CO2 annual reduction here and now.
While I am all for businesses making a profit, I am NOT all for a multi-billion dollar company paying effectively 2.4% while I continue to pay nearly 30% of my income.
The inequitable taxation also unfairly hits small businesses. They're unable to offshore their finances, and they end up bearing the brunt of the public's anger at multi-billion dollar companies evading taxes. Consequently in the U.S., small businesses pay some of the highest tax rates among OECD nations. The business taxes passed to assuage people upset at big corporations evading taxes, are instead helping big corporations by crippling the small businesses who could otherwise challenge their domination.
After a lot of thought, I actually reached the opposite conclusion as you. One of the core objections leading to the U.S. Revolutionary war was "No taxation without representation." That's a principle I think most people would still agree makes sense. And since I believe corporations should have no influence on government, I can't simultaneously justify to myself wanting to tax them.
The argument "Well, that gets turned into research and good pay for employees" still doesn't float IMO, when you have the higher executives of Google being paid millions. Reduce the salaries of those PHBs down to something reasonable, pay the rank and file programmers and researchers that money, and pay taxes like everyone else.
Sure it floats. All you have to do is raise the tax rate on the folks paid millions. I don't think this problem is as large as most people think it is though. If you pour over the IRS tax statistics, you'll find that the vast bulk of the income base (in the U.S. at least) is the upper-middle class and lower-upper class, roughly $75k-$250k/yr. What they lack in income, they make up for in population.
The area where it gets tricky is perks paid for by the business but which the individual doesn't report as an income-equivalent benefit. e.g. a CEO flies around in a corporate jet, but doesn't report the added expense of operating the private plane over a coach ticket as a taxable benefit.
Agreed. He was using Round Up on those crops.. a pesticide that kills unmodified crops, demonstrating that he knew what he was doing.
No, he wasn't using Round-Up on those crops. The Court specifically ruled that he didn't have to pay Monsanto any damages because he did not use Round Up on his crops, and therefore did not benefit from using Monsanto's patent without a license. He only noticed it was Round-Up resistant because he sprayed Round-Up in an adjacent ditch to kill weeds which were getting close to his crop. Some Canola which was also growing in the ditch survived the Round-Up. He never used Round-Up on his crop fields.
It is the use of Round Up on Round Up Ready crops which is what the patent describes and what the farmer was violating.
No, that was a miscarriage of justice. Monsanto argued that even though Schmeiser had no way of knowing the crop's Round-Up resistance was due to carrying the Monsanto gene, he should have known that was the reason why some of the canola survived being sprayed with Round-Up. The Court bought this argument hook, line, and sinker:
"I find that in 1998 Mr. Schmeiser planted canola seed saved from his 1997 crop in his field number 2 which seed he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and that seed was the primary source for seeding and for the defendants' crops in all nine fields of canola in 1998."
That quote from the decision contains a glaring assumption which has since been proven false. The court assumed (accepting Monsanto's argument without question) that the only way for a plant to be resistant to Round-Up was for it to contain Monsanto's patented gene. It has since been shown that plants can develop a natural resistance to Round-Up. Therefore, the Court erred in ruling that Mr. Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the plants which resisted Round-Up spraying contained Monsanto's patented gene. In light of the development of Round-Up resistance in weeds, we now know that short of extensive genetic testing, there was no way to Mr. Schmeiser to have known whether the resistance was natural or came from Monsanto's patented gene.
The problem is the social problem in this case is outside the direct control of the U.S. - corruption in Mexico's government and police force allowing certain groups of people (the extremely wealthy and drug cartels) to wield enormous political power while the average Mexican is disenfranchised. Ultimately, the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico (and Central America) goes away when those countries develop representative governments and functional economies which allow their citizens to live comfortably and feel represented, without feeling a need to try to "escape" to the U.S. to "make a better life for themselves."
If you subscribe to the reasoning that corruption needs to be stamped out irrespective of national sovereignty, then the correct social solution is to invade Mexico and set up a new less-corrupt government. Good luck getting support for that though after the fiasco in Iraq.
If you subscribe to the reasoning that national sovereignty prevents us from taking direct action, then we have to resort to indirect means. Trade sanctions (against our #2 supplier of imported oil?). Discouraging illegal immigration so that those in power in Mexico have to deal directly with social dissatisfaction and political dissent, instead of just letting the most-dissatisfied who could potentially cause them the most problems to simply flee into the U.S. And, yes, technological measures like building fences (virtual or real) to make it more difficult for Mexicans to enter illegally.
But beware, this is the sort of behavior that they want such lock down for. Not for your security, but to deliberately limit the lifespan of your device and make you buy a new one.
They don't care if you buy a new device. Except for T-Mobile, none of the carriers will give you a discount on your monthly bill once your service contract is up. Since most to all of the cost of a new phone is subsidized by your monthly bill, it makes little to no difference whether you buy a new phone or stick with your old one - you're still paying the subsidy.
In fact, I'd postulate that they make more money if you stick with your old phone. With a new phone, at least your subsidy payment is going to the phone manufacturer to help pay for the new phone you're holding. If you don't upgrade and continue using your old phone out of contract, the subsidy is going straight into the service provider's pockets.
To be fair, their trademark is on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, etc. That's why there's no real problem with OpenOffice. While they've filed some dubious lawsuits going after people who use "windows", "word", "office" in a more generic sense, if Apple tried/managed to get a trademark on "app store" then IMHO that's clearly way too generic.
You constantly see people that claim they're libertarians while preaching that the free market will fix 'everything'. On another forum I saw a person claim that "All" regulation is "Evil", no exceptions
You also constantly see people on the left claim that all corporations are "Evil" and that the free market never works.
The truth is that some of the time the free market works best when left alone, and some of the time it works best when regulated. The trick is in figuring out which is which, and not under-regulating nor over-regulating.
Sure, I -COULD- have emailed every single person I happen to have on facebook (Which ranges from close family to old school friends whom I have the odd bit of banter with), but emails are a bit too linear. Even with just say 20 people replying and commenting on different things, you end up with conversations within conversations, topics jump back and forth and hundreds of emails get flung all over the place. Sure, it "works", but it's not very elegant.
I agree and disagree. I agree that email is really better suited for one-to-one and one-to-many communications, not well suited for many-to-one and many-to-many communcations. But Google has it half figured out with gmail. They automatically sort all messages on one topic into a single "conversation". The quoted sections are automatically collapsed, resulting in a format identical to a linear web forum (or Facebook wall), whose format is suited for many-to-one and many-to-many communications.
The only reason it hasn't really caught on is that most email clients don't do this. If they did, and you added threaded view (based on quoted messages) auto-filtering (so mail in a conversation could be automatically directed to a specific folder/label without you having to manually set up a filter in order to keep it from "cluttering up my inbox"), then I could see it supplanting web forums for many applications. A problem I ran into recently has been web forums disappearing along with my contact info for people I only knew through those forums (they were on ezboard). The value of the old posts to the new owners of ezboard wasn't as high as their value to me. If I had had a copy of those forum postings archived in my email in a gmail-like format, I wouldn't have that problem.
That would never work with email, or IRC or even instant messaging.
Actually, yes those things would work over email or IM (not so much IRC). They wouldn't work as well since they're designed for 1-to-1 or 1-to-many communications, not many-to-1 or many-to-many like a web forum or Facebook wall. But they will work for keeping friends and relatives up to date on events.
The difference with Facebook is anonymity. With email, IRC, web forums, etc, you mostly don't really know who the people you're communicating are. In fact, most of them are anonymous blank faces whom you recognize only by their username. You could pass each other in the grocery store and never know it. You're linking with the username, and maybe you'll some day find out who the real person behind it is. Facebook is the opposite - you're linking with the real person, and the username is just a unique ID.
That's why I've been saying for a while now that the true value adding contribution of Facebook is that of a universal login - a username linked to a real identity. The photo sharing, the walls, etc. are just candy to get you to use the universal login.
Software companies already do this without government intervention. If I buy Adobe Photoshop, I pay full price. If they come out with a new version, I only need to pay for the upgrade, not the full retail price. In effect, my original purchase pays for the original license, and subsequent upgrades pay only to license the new features.
Of course software companies still have a soul and are rooted in real-world common sense. The movie/music studios have long since lost any semblance of common sense, and are off in their own la-la land where if you're willing to pay for it then it must be legit.
The whole gambling industry (including lotteries) is nothing more than a system of wealth redistribution. The rich love casinos (if they own the place) because it makes money for them and the government loves casinos because it means more tax revenue. Everyone else loses.
It's only a loss if you ignore the entertainment value. My friends who go to Las Vegas do so mostly because it lets them get a weekend's entertainment fairly cheaply (if you're into the sorts of things Vegas offers).
If you ignoring the entertainment value and looking strictly at what material goods or enhanced capability you've acquired for your money spent, then amusement parks, movie theaters, cable TV, computer games, plays, vacation travel, hiking trips, beach trips, etc. are all "losses". You could claim that the people running all those industries have simply created a system of wealth redistribution.
Yes, it's extraordinarily bad for a subset of people who have a gambling problem. But the same is true for nearly any activity.
Hell, removal of perfectly safe asbestos these days actually requires a team of hazmat workers, following hazmat procedures.
Here's my story relating to that. We were renovating a building built in the early 1900s and tore out the floor tiles from a room and threw them away them in our dumpster. The driver from our trash company came to pick up the dumpster, saw the tiles, and refused to take the dumpster. He said those types of tiles frequently have asbestos and the trash company wasn't legally licensed to deal with it.
So I took one of the tiles out of the trash, and sent it to a lab to have it analyzed. The tile wasn't asbestos, the adhesive didn't have asbestos, but it did have a fireproofing layer in between them which had asbestos. The refuse company wouldn't touch it, so we had to hire a full-blown asbestos removal company to deal with it. For $12,000 they tented the entrance to the building in plastic, taped up all the windows, and set up filtered fans to create back-pressure so any airborne asbestos would be caught by the filters. A dozen guys dressed in full hazmat suits and masks went in, broke up the floor tiles with sledgehammers, and carried out the pieces in double-wrapped heavy-duty plastic bags. Overall they carted out a couple hundred pounds of tile, and probably two dumpster-loads of plastic, tape, and used hazmat suits.
All for asbestos which was literally sealed between rock and glue. The whole thing struck me as a huge over-reaction to the scope of the problem. If the stuff was dangerous enough to warrant that level of precaution, everyone who was alive during the years when it was widely used should've died of lung cancer while they were young.
I am curious...why are scalpels, scissors, retractors, emergency rooms, doctors' and nurses' wages, etc...costing so much? [...] In Canada we are having the same crisis. No one seems to know where the money is going, but it is going somewhere. Please enlighten..
Truthfully, I don't know why it's so expensive. I listened to all the arguments and debates during the run up to the health care reform vote. I tried to model those factors as best I could, compared the similarities and differences to Canada and other Western nations. The only conclusion I ended up reaching is that the whole thing is so damn big and complicated that I honestly don't know what's causing the problems, nor what can be done to fix it.
That and the reason I outlined in my original post was why I didn't oppose the Dems with their health care reform bill. For better or worse, it was at least attempting to address the real problem. HCR may make it better, or it could make it worse. If it makes it worse, it's not the end of the world. We can always repeal it and try something else. But we have to try something different. Continuing along the path we were on would have guaranteed fiscal ruin.
The u.s. is like the decline of Rome. Most of the budget spent on the military to little gain.
The U.S. is in decline because a lot of people think the problem is overspending on the military. It's not. Don't get me wrong; yes there's lots of pork in the U.S. military budget which could be cut. But it doesn't comprise most of U.S. government spending, nor is it the cause of the U.S.'s budgetary woes. And a good part of the reason we're in the buget mess we're in now is because people like you who think that it is implement solutions which don't address the real problem.
U.S. military spending is actually one of the few parts of government spending which has been more or less steadily declining since WWII, both as a % of the budget and as a % of GDP. It started climbing after 9/11, but it's still close to the lowest it's been since WWII.
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero, all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
The first step in fixing a problem is to correctly identify what is causing it. The Congressional Budget Office hires a lot of really smart people to do nothing but identify the causes of the budget problems, and publishes a nifty report on it about every 2 years. Please go read it. Put aside any moralistic preconceptions you may have about which parts of the budget are good or bad. Look at it purely from an accounting standpoint - which parts are decreasing and which parts are ballooning out of control? The parts that are ballooning out of control are what we need to address to fix the problem, the parts that are decreasing are a much lower priority.
Really? They actually employed that strategy? "The market is saturated so we need to make more DRAM to raise profits." I don't understand, were they uninformed about demand being satisfied?
I mean, are they incapable of curbing production for a quarter?
Tragedy of the commons. If one company curbs production, that doesn't mean they make more money because prices rise. That means they lose money while their competitors make more money from the price increase. The average profit for the industry rises, but theirs falls while everyone else's goes up. As such, even though it's against the best interests of the industry as a whole, the best strategy for each company individually is to produce as many DRAM chips as they can.
This is actually one of the scenarios where a free market doesn't work well. An analogous situation happens with overfishing. It's best for the entire industry to limit their catch, but a single boat limiting its catch is bearing the costs while the other boats gain the benefit. So there's no individual incentive to limit your catch. The airlines suffer from this too during fare wars, with fares sometimes dropping below what's needed to make the business sustainable. Most people (especially those who are anti-business) don't really think about this because it works for the end customer, at least in the short term.
But that's not how it works in the print world, except for a small set of free papers. The vast majority of print periodicals require you to pay (either subscription or newsstand) AND have much of the cost subsidized by advertisers.
I suspect the amount you have to pay for print periodicals has little to do with revenue and more to do with preventing people from just grabbing a stack of them to use as firewood or raw materials for their kid's paper mache project. Essentially, your subscription pays for the paper, ink, and delivery. The advertising pays for the content.
Encryption is preventing Alex from seeing what Betty is saying to Charlie.
DRM is trying to prevent Betty from seeing what Betty is saying to Charlie. Since Betty has the keys in her physical possession, it's just a matter of time before the DRM is broken.
If the US would take such drastic measures, China would probably answer by selling their $2.5 trillions in foreign exchange reserves, most of them US Dollars. That would devalue the USD and EUR to virtually zero, bringing about economic turmoil of unprecedented magnitude.
I don't know why people keep saying this. China holds about $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities (so they're not even "most" of the $2.5 trillion foreign exchange reserves China holds). That's out of $4.3 trillion U.S. Treasury securities held by foreigners, and $9.1 trillion overall. While China holds the largest share (barely beating out Japan), it's small potatoes compared to the total. And the whole reason China has been buying them is to prop up the US Dollar, to help maintain the favorable (for them) Yuan/USD exchange ratio. The U.S. has actually been trying to devalue the USD relative to the Yuan to try to correct the trade imbalance with China (why do you think our interest rates have been so low for so long?). So devaluing the USD actually works against China and for the U.S.
Furthermore, U.S.-China trade from Oct '09 to '10 was $253 billion in imports and $88 billion in exports, or about $340 billion overall. China's GDP is a bit over $5 trillion, while U.S. GDP is around $14 trillion. A trade war between China and the U.S. hurts China more than it does the U.S. In fact, due to the trade imbalance, the U.S. is in the role of customer. In a trade war, it's easy for the U.S. to change its shopping venue to another low-cost manufacturing nation like Malaysia or Thailand. It's hard for China to find another customer to buy the products it's currently selling to the U.S. So again, it's the U.S. which is in the driver's seat, not China.
I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery. It invariably goes of in time...
I started using my phone as an alarm clock after discovering that although a backup battery will allow a regular alarm clock to keep the time through a power failure, the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm.
The same argument is sometimes applied to certain fields like math, etc., where men seem to be more successful than women. On average, men and women perform at the same level; the difference comes in the distribution. Men supposedly tend to cluster at the really high and really low levels, so while 4/5 of the best may be male, 4/5 of the very worst will also be male. It's a thought-provoking theory, and there is actually some evidence for it, but there is also plenty of evidence against it and it isn't one to make lightly. Like many other areas, it is likely really smart women are tragically funneled elsewhere or pushed to do something "more appropriate."
So why then do women perform better than men on standardized verbal tests? When men perform better (like at math), everyone seems to try to come up with reasons why they're not really better, or how society is holding women back. But when women perform better, people just seem to accept that they're better than men at that activity.
This becomes more relevant when you consider that the male/female ratio of undergraduate students now favors women by a larger amount than their ratio in the population. If anything, it's the men who are falling behind and need help.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the devious and sinister part of the DMCA. It doesn't do anything with your right to modify stuff you own. You can modify your PS3 all you want, Geohot can modify their PS3s all they want. What the DMCA makes illegal is trafficking in knowledge/software needed to circumvent copyright protection mechanisms. That is, it makes it illegal for Geohot to tell you how to modify your hardware.
Essentially, it's like saying it's legal to make or own a key to a lock you own. But it's illegal for anyone to sell or make you a key, teach you how to make a key, teach you how to pick locks, or sell you lockpicks. Technically we still have the right to fair use, they've just made it illegal for us to obtain any means to exercise that right. The people who came up with that legal loophole deserve to be shot by people claiming they were aiming at targets which happened to be behind their heads.
No no no. QoS should be applied on a per-user basis, not per app or data stream. I paid my ISP $40 this month. So did my neighbor. We should both be getting (potentially) the same level of service. If he chooses to use his service mostly for VoIP while I choose to use mine mostly for bittorrent, his packets should not get priority over mine. We paid the same amount.
I'm actually OK with ISPs implementing a lower "guaranteed bandwidth" threshold like you proposed in (1) (e.g. your connection can peak at 5 Mbps but you're only guaranteed 1.5 Mbps), or a monthly data cap (e.g. you can download 50 GB/mo, after which your connection speed is dropped to 0.5 Mbps, or you're charged more per 10 GB increment) in order to keep aggregate network usage below the limits of their upstream trunk line. But my neighbor and I paid the same amount so our ISP has no business setting up QoS rules which decide his packets are more worthy of transmission than mine just because we use different apps.
You have to keep a direct connection between bandwidth provided and revenue received if you want to keep the ISPs honest. If you let them break that connection, then it opens up the system to all sorts of abuses like ISPs offering to sell you a "higher priority" plan for a higher monthly fee. Said plan could involve no cost (no additional bandwidth) on the ISP's part, all they do is steal priority from their non-paying customers to give it to their paying customers, thus earning more money for zero network upgrades. To be fair, the system would have to involve "high priority" customers paying more, and "normal priority" customers paying less, unless the ISP invested in increasing their bandwidth so the high priority customers had no impact on normal priority customers. I can't think of an easy and transparent way to enforce that, so unless someone can come up with a better idea it needs to be enforced on a per-user basis.
And why don't HTML italics tags work anymore?
On the contrary, I think it's a connection which is both telling and needs to be made more public. The modern environmental movement and most people who are concerned about the environment have the same goal - preservation and conservation of the natural world. But they have very different opinions on the means to achieve those goals. Most people would prefer that preservation and conservation be achieved with as little inconvenience to our modern way of life as possible. Most hardcore environmentalists OTOH view controlling human population and consumption as the most effective means of achieving that goal. (Which is precisely what Ghengis Khan did through different means.)
The divergence is most telling with nuclear power. The only reason CO2 emissions are a tough problem is because of energy. CO2 is a byproduct of processes we use to extract energy. That puts the CO2 at a low energy state, and getting rid of it involves putting energy back into it. But putting energy back into CO2 defeats the purpose of burning the fuel which produced it in the first place. You'd be producing CO2 to extract energy which you then use to decompose CO2.
Nuclear doesn't have that problem. With a relatively cheap and nearly unlimited power source like nuclear, CO2 ceases to become a problem. We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2). The same thing for dangerous toxins like dioxin. They're only a problem because they're at a low energy state so natural processes (which generally don't have access to high energy levels) have a very difficult time breaking them down. With cheap energy, you can afford to run incinerators which atomize those compounds back into their constituent elements. These problems either go away or are greatly diminished with cheap energy, yet cheap energy seems to be one of the things the environmental movement vehemently opposes.
The same goes for population. Most of the developed world is close to zero population growth or even experiencing negative growth (families on average have only 2 or fewer kids). Nearly all of the world's exploding population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. Yet nearly every time you hear an environmentalist talk about overpopulation, they point to solutions involving changing what people in industrialized nations do, not changing developing nations where nearly all the population growth is happening.
We should be concentrating R&D on cheap energy sources for the future, not on cleaner but considerably more expensive "green" energy sources. It's only because productivity per person has vastly increased over the pre-industrialized era that we have the luxury to be spending time and effort doing things like worrying about the environment. But that increased productivity came about directly because of cheap energy. Make energy more expensive and our productivity goes down, meaning we can't afford some of our modern conveniences and/or we can't spend as much time and effort worrying about the environment. And we should be concentrating on modernizing and industrializing (and making contraceptives available to) undeveloped nations to arrest their population growth, not trying to get people in developed nations to adopt "low footprint" lifestyles similar to those in undeveloped nations.
You're forgetting consequential effects. If he culled 40 million people from the population during the 13th century, he didn't just remove those 40 million people. He also removed all their potential descendants. Given that the estimated population of the world at the time was about 400 million, a 40 million reduction works out to about 10%.
Since percentages aren't distorted by exponential growth, that means he's responsible for a 10% reduction in the world's current population. There are nearly 700 million fewer people alive today because of him. If we go with your 30 billion tons of CO2 globally figure, he's responsible for a 3 billion tons of CO2 annual reduction here and now.
I thought a vacuum was the best thermal insulator known to man?
The inequitable taxation also unfairly hits small businesses. They're unable to offshore their finances, and they end up bearing the brunt of the public's anger at multi-billion dollar companies evading taxes. Consequently in the U.S., small businesses pay some of the highest tax rates among OECD nations. The business taxes passed to assuage people upset at big corporations evading taxes, are instead helping big corporations by crippling the small businesses who could otherwise challenge their domination.
After a lot of thought, I actually reached the opposite conclusion as you. One of the core objections leading to the U.S. Revolutionary war was "No taxation without representation." That's a principle I think most people would still agree makes sense. And since I believe corporations should have no influence on government, I can't simultaneously justify to myself wanting to tax them.
Sure it floats. All you have to do is raise the tax rate on the folks paid millions. I don't think this problem is as large as most people think it is though. If you pour over the IRS tax statistics, you'll find that the vast bulk of the income base (in the U.S. at least) is the upper-middle class and lower-upper class, roughly $75k-$250k/yr. What they lack in income, they make up for in population.
The area where it gets tricky is perks paid for by the business but which the individual doesn't report as an income-equivalent benefit. e.g. a CEO flies around in a corporate jet, but doesn't report the added expense of operating the private plane over a coach ticket as a taxable benefit.
No, he wasn't using Round-Up on those crops. The Court specifically ruled that he didn't have to pay Monsanto any damages because he did not use Round Up on his crops, and therefore did not benefit from using Monsanto's patent without a license. He only noticed it was Round-Up resistant because he sprayed Round-Up in an adjacent ditch to kill weeds which were getting close to his crop. Some Canola which was also growing in the ditch survived the Round-Up. He never used Round-Up on his crop fields.
No, that was a miscarriage of justice. Monsanto argued that even though Schmeiser had no way of knowing the crop's Round-Up resistance was due to carrying the Monsanto gene, he should have known that was the reason why some of the canola survived being sprayed with Round-Up. The Court bought this argument hook, line, and sinker:
"I find that in 1998 Mr. Schmeiser planted canola seed saved from his 1997 crop in his field number 2 which seed he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and that seed was the primary source for seeding and for the defendants' crops in all nine fields of canola in 1998."
That quote from the decision contains a glaring assumption which has since been proven false. The court assumed (accepting Monsanto's argument without question) that the only way for a plant to be resistant to Round-Up was for it to contain Monsanto's patented gene. It has since been shown that plants can develop a natural resistance to Round-Up. Therefore, the Court erred in ruling that Mr. Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the plants which resisted Round-Up spraying contained Monsanto's patented gene. In light of the development of Round-Up resistance in weeds, we now know that short of extensive genetic testing, there was no way to Mr. Schmeiser to have known whether the resistance was natural or came from Monsanto's patented gene.
The problem is the social problem in this case is outside the direct control of the U.S. - corruption in Mexico's government and police force allowing certain groups of people (the extremely wealthy and drug cartels) to wield enormous political power while the average Mexican is disenfranchised. Ultimately, the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico (and Central America) goes away when those countries develop representative governments and functional economies which allow their citizens to live comfortably and feel represented, without feeling a need to try to "escape" to the U.S. to "make a better life for themselves."
If you subscribe to the reasoning that corruption needs to be stamped out irrespective of national sovereignty, then the correct social solution is to invade Mexico and set up a new less-corrupt government. Good luck getting support for that though after the fiasco in Iraq.
If you subscribe to the reasoning that national sovereignty prevents us from taking direct action, then we have to resort to indirect means. Trade sanctions (against our #2 supplier of imported oil?). Discouraging illegal immigration so that those in power in Mexico have to deal directly with social dissatisfaction and political dissent, instead of just letting the most-dissatisfied who could potentially cause them the most problems to simply flee into the U.S. And, yes, technological measures like building fences (virtual or real) to make it more difficult for Mexicans to enter illegally.
They don't care if you buy a new device. Except for T-Mobile, none of the carriers will give you a discount on your monthly bill once your service contract is up. Since most to all of the cost of a new phone is subsidized by your monthly bill, it makes little to no difference whether you buy a new phone or stick with your old one - you're still paying the subsidy.
In fact, I'd postulate that they make more money if you stick with your old phone. With a new phone, at least your subsidy payment is going to the phone manufacturer to help pay for the new phone you're holding. If you don't upgrade and continue using your old phone out of contract, the subsidy is going straight into the service provider's pockets.
To be fair, their trademark is on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Office, etc. That's why there's no real problem with OpenOffice. While they've filed some dubious lawsuits going after people who use "windows", "word", "office" in a more generic sense, if Apple tried/managed to get a trademark on "app store" then IMHO that's clearly way too generic.
In Soviet Russia, Facebook spies on you!
Wait a minute, that didn't come out right...
You also constantly see people on the left claim that all corporations are "Evil" and that the free market never works.
The truth is that some of the time the free market works best when left alone, and some of the time it works best when regulated. The trick is in figuring out which is which, and not under-regulating nor over-regulating.
I agree and disagree. I agree that email is really better suited for one-to-one and one-to-many communications, not well suited for many-to-one and many-to-many communcations. But Google has it half figured out with gmail. They automatically sort all messages on one topic into a single "conversation". The quoted sections are automatically collapsed, resulting in a format identical to a linear web forum (or Facebook wall), whose format is suited for many-to-one and many-to-many communications.
The only reason it hasn't really caught on is that most email clients don't do this. If they did, and you added threaded view (based on quoted messages) auto-filtering (so mail in a conversation could be automatically directed to a specific folder/label without you having to manually set up a filter in order to keep it from "cluttering up my inbox"), then I could see it supplanting web forums for many applications. A problem I ran into recently has been web forums disappearing along with my contact info for people I only knew through those forums (they were on ezboard). The value of the old posts to the new owners of ezboard wasn't as high as their value to me. If I had had a copy of those forum postings archived in my email in a gmail-like format, I wouldn't have that problem.
Actually, yes those things would work over email or IM (not so much IRC). They wouldn't work as well since they're designed for 1-to-1 or 1-to-many communications, not many-to-1 or many-to-many like a web forum or Facebook wall. But they will work for keeping friends and relatives up to date on events.
The difference with Facebook is anonymity. With email, IRC, web forums, etc, you mostly don't really know who the people you're communicating are. In fact, most of them are anonymous blank faces whom you recognize only by their username. You could pass each other in the grocery store and never know it. You're linking with the username, and maybe you'll some day find out who the real person behind it is. Facebook is the opposite - you're linking with the real person, and the username is just a unique ID.
That's why I've been saying for a while now that the true value adding contribution of Facebook is that of a universal login - a username linked to a real identity. The photo sharing, the walls, etc. are just candy to get you to use the universal login.
Software companies already do this without government intervention. If I buy Adobe Photoshop, I pay full price. If they come out with a new version, I only need to pay for the upgrade, not the full retail price. In effect, my original purchase pays for the original license, and subsequent upgrades pay only to license the new features.
Of course software companies still have a soul and are rooted in real-world common sense. The movie/music studios have long since lost any semblance of common sense, and are off in their own la-la land where if you're willing to pay for it then it must be legit.
It's only a loss if you ignore the entertainment value. My friends who go to Las Vegas do so mostly because it lets them get a weekend's entertainment fairly cheaply (if you're into the sorts of things Vegas offers).
If you ignoring the entertainment value and looking strictly at what material goods or enhanced capability you've acquired for your money spent, then amusement parks, movie theaters, cable TV, computer games, plays, vacation travel, hiking trips, beach trips, etc. are all "losses". You could claim that the people running all those industries have simply created a system of wealth redistribution.
Yes, it's extraordinarily bad for a subset of people who have a gambling problem. But the same is true for nearly any activity.
Here's my story relating to that. We were renovating a building built in the early 1900s and tore out the floor tiles from a room and threw them away them in our dumpster. The driver from our trash company came to pick up the dumpster, saw the tiles, and refused to take the dumpster. He said those types of tiles frequently have asbestos and the trash company wasn't legally licensed to deal with it.
So I took one of the tiles out of the trash, and sent it to a lab to have it analyzed. The tile wasn't asbestos, the adhesive didn't have asbestos, but it did have a fireproofing layer in between them which had asbestos. The refuse company wouldn't touch it, so we had to hire a full-blown asbestos removal company to deal with it. For $12,000 they tented the entrance to the building in plastic, taped up all the windows, and set up filtered fans to create back-pressure so any airborne asbestos would be caught by the filters. A dozen guys dressed in full hazmat suits and masks went in, broke up the floor tiles with sledgehammers, and carried out the pieces in double-wrapped heavy-duty plastic bags. Overall they carted out a couple hundred pounds of tile, and probably two dumpster-loads of plastic, tape, and used hazmat suits.
All for asbestos which was literally sealed between rock and glue. The whole thing struck me as a huge over-reaction to the scope of the problem. If the stuff was dangerous enough to warrant that level of precaution, everyone who was alive during the years when it was widely used should've died of lung cancer while they were young.
Truthfully, I don't know why it's so expensive. I listened to all the arguments and debates during the run up to the health care reform vote. I tried to model those factors as best I could, compared the similarities and differences to Canada and other Western nations. The only conclusion I ended up reaching is that the whole thing is so damn big and complicated that I honestly don't know what's causing the problems, nor what can be done to fix it.
That and the reason I outlined in my original post was why I didn't oppose the Dems with their health care reform bill. For better or worse, it was at least attempting to address the real problem. HCR may make it better, or it could make it worse. If it makes it worse, it's not the end of the world. We can always repeal it and try something else. But we have to try something different. Continuing along the path we were on would have guaranteed fiscal ruin.
The U.S. is in decline because a lot of people think the problem is overspending on the military. It's not. Don't get me wrong; yes there's lots of pork in the U.S. military budget which could be cut. But it doesn't comprise most of U.S. government spending, nor is it the cause of the U.S.'s budgetary woes. And a good part of the reason we're in the buget mess we're in now is because people like you who think that it is implement solutions which don't address the real problem.
U.S. military spending is actually one of the few parts of government spending which has been more or less steadily declining since WWII, both as a % of the budget and as a % of GDP. It started climbing after 9/11, but it's still close to the lowest it's been since WWII.
What's killing the budget (indeed, where most of the money is spent) are the social programs; specifically, medicare and medicaid. They're projected to grow so quickly that even if you stopped all military spending, dropped it to zero , all the money that saved would be eaten up by growth in medicare and medicaid within 20-25 years. In other words, in 20-25 years we would have no military, no military spending, and our budgetary problems would be the same as they are now.
The first step in fixing a problem is to correctly identify what is causing it. The Congressional Budget Office hires a lot of really smart people to do nothing but identify the causes of the budget problems, and publishes a nifty report on it about every 2 years. Please go read it. Put aside any moralistic preconceptions you may have about which parts of the budget are good or bad. Look at it purely from an accounting standpoint - which parts are decreasing and which parts are ballooning out of control? The parts that are ballooning out of control are what we need to address to fix the problem, the parts that are decreasing are a much lower priority.
Tragedy of the commons. If one company curbs production, that doesn't mean they make more money because prices rise. That means they lose money while their competitors make more money from the price increase. The average profit for the industry rises, but theirs falls while everyone else's goes up. As such, even though it's against the best interests of the industry as a whole, the best strategy for each company individually is to produce as many DRAM chips as they can.
This is actually one of the scenarios where a free market doesn't work well. An analogous situation happens with overfishing. It's best for the entire industry to limit their catch, but a single boat limiting its catch is bearing the costs while the other boats gain the benefit. So there's no individual incentive to limit your catch. The airlines suffer from this too during fare wars, with fares sometimes dropping below what's needed to make the business sustainable. Most people (especially those who are anti-business) don't really think about this because it works for the end customer, at least in the short term.
I suspect the amount you have to pay for print periodicals has little to do with revenue and more to do with preventing people from just grabbing a stack of them to use as firewood or raw materials for their kid's paper mache project. Essentially, your subscription pays for the paper, ink, and delivery. The advertising pays for the content.
Encryption is preventing Alex from seeing what Betty is saying to Charlie.
DRM is trying to prevent Betty from seeing what Betty is saying to Charlie. Since Betty has the keys in her physical possession, it's just a matter of time before the DRM is broken.
I don't know why people keep saying this. China holds about $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities (so they're not even "most" of the $2.5 trillion foreign exchange reserves China holds). That's out of $4.3 trillion U.S. Treasury securities held by foreigners, and $9.1 trillion overall. While China holds the largest share (barely beating out Japan), it's small potatoes compared to the total. And the whole reason China has been buying them is to prop up the US Dollar, to help maintain the favorable (for them) Yuan/USD exchange ratio. The U.S. has actually been trying to devalue the USD relative to the Yuan to try to correct the trade imbalance with China (why do you think our interest rates have been so low for so long?). So devaluing the USD actually works against China and for the U.S.
Furthermore, U.S.-China trade from Oct '09 to '10 was $253 billion in imports and $88 billion in exports, or about $340 billion overall. China's GDP is a bit over $5 trillion, while U.S. GDP is around $14 trillion. A trade war between China and the U.S. hurts China more than it does the U.S. In fact, due to the trade imbalance, the U.S. is in the role of customer. In a trade war, it's easy for the U.S. to change its shopping venue to another low-cost manufacturing nation like Malaysia or Thailand. It's hard for China to find another customer to buy the products it's currently selling to the U.S. So again, it's the U.S. which is in the driver's seat, not China.
I started using my phone as an alarm clock after discovering that although a backup battery will allow a regular alarm clock to keep the time through a power failure, the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm.
So why then do women perform better than men on standardized verbal tests? When men perform better (like at math), everyone seems to try to come up with reasons why they're not really better, or how society is holding women back. But when women perform better, people just seem to accept that they're better than men at that activity.
This becomes more relevant when you consider that the male/female ratio of undergraduate students now favors women by a larger amount than their ratio in the population. If anything, it's the men who are falling behind and need help.