With America's current two party system you are completely wrong. The two recent choices we've been blessed with for President would appear to be polar opposites and offer a world of difference but in fact there was no difference. Everyone who voted for Obama thought they WERE doing what you said and millions of young idealistic voters have been poisoned against voting for good because he was a sham. You can argue that you could tell he was a sham by his record and you probably could but he was as close as you can get in this country to actually appearing to offer a desperately needed changeâ¦. and he didn't change anything.
Obama has followed the Bush agenda on trashing civil liberties, spying on Americans, state secrets abuses, expanding the police state and war mongering and has actually pushed the agenda even farther and harder than Bush. Most liberals are reluctant to even criticize him for doing crap they eviscerated Bush and Cheney for doing.
On economics Obama appointed Geithner and Summers, Clinton appointed Rubin and Summers and they pushed the Wall Street agenda harder than Republicans do, caused even more damage, and completely sold the middle class down the river⦠like always.
Maybe you are arguing a majority of Americans should suddenly wake up and get a clue and start voting for some mysterious third party. Chances of that are miniscule. The system is completely rigged to favor the two parties. The media barely covers Ron Paul and he is actually in a major party and the third party candidates are either quacks or made to look that way by the beloved boob tube.
Candidates who are in any way out of the orthodoxy of what the establishment wants you to vote for die in obscurity, they get no coverage, no money, no respect and the vast majority of Americans are conditioned to think of them as throw away votes.
Just watch what happens to any candidate, even in the major parties, who in any way says anything critical of Israel, they are completely destroyed almost instantly by an establishment that is more concerned with what is good for Israel than what is good for America. Its just the sterling, easily visible, example of how a tiny elite decides who American's vote for and no matter who actually wins⦠they always win.
2004 is another great example, two wealthy Yale Skull and Bones establishmentarians running against each other to delude Americans in to thinking there was a choice to be had there...
As best I recall Kenya is fast becoming a new call center out sourcing hot spot. Population is already fluent in English, well educated,, they gained serious Internet fiber optic capacity in 2009, similar time zone to Europe, especially good for British customer support.
I think the rods at reactor 4 were recently removed from the reactor. You need to let the short lived isotopes decay and let the rods cool down before you transport them long distances. They need active cooling which would be dangerous and challenging in a truck or rail car. Your point may apply to long term storage but not to this case where the rods were still in need of aggressive cooling.
Deep down both movements come from the same place, extreme frustration with how our system works. But, the Tea Party seems extremely focused on just gutting government spending and cutting taxes. The only time that would have an adverse effect on Wall Street is if Wall Street need bailouts, but most of the bailouts were over before the Tea Party was formed. I wager Wall Street is mostly OK with the Tea Party since they want lower taxes and less government too. So the current Tea Party seems to be giving Wall Street a free pass, and going after the big spending politicians. The OWS is doing the exact opposite and going after Wall Street first and government not so much, except where it is doing Wall Street's bidding.
Maybe you can cite some instances of clear illegality or evem some laws that might have been broken.
The rating agencies clearly put triple A ratings on garbage but there was no law that said their rating had to be correct, though that has since been changed to some extent. They should have had the special charters they are given revoked and been put out of business but again its not really a case of illegality or perp walks.
Banks sold some total crap but there isn't any law against that. Buyer beware comes in to play. Again the rating agencies shouldn't have rated crap as triple AAA but investors buying billions in MBS's should have paid attention to what they were buying.
There are some indications a couple of the Fed bailout actions might have been technically illegal but that is the Fed not the Wall Street banks, and they are more technical readings of the law and not blatant.
There is a slim chance execs at Lehman or Bear Stearns could have been charged for misleading the public and shareholders about the state of their companies but so far none of that has stuck and its a hard charge to make stick.
The big banks have huge legal teams, they aren't very likely to do anything blatantly illegal, especially with the ease with which they can get laws changed in their favor to make whatever they want to do legal.
You didn't actually read my post did you... because I said exactly that...
I said there is illegality in the foreclosure process but that was post crisis. The topic here is illegality that caused the crash and the foreclosures in the first place. There really just isn't that much except in the mortgage origination which is a bunch of little fish, not Wall Stree bankers.
So you are saying its OK to ignore state laws on handling mortgage documents and doing foreclosures just so you can run everyone out of their homes quickly to make you feel better? How would you feel if your bank suddenly decided to foreclose on you using forged documents and you had no legal recourse as they rushed to judgement?
Those states have those laws on the books to keep people from being screwed by banks who foreclose on them wrongfully and improperly. A bank shouldn't be allowed to take someones home just because the banks says so... and to just trust them.
When banks created the MERS system, which electronically handles mortgage documents, they did it to maximize their profits. When they were bundling millions of mortgages in to MBS's they didn't want to handle all those actual mortgage papers and transfer them physically every time an MBS changed hands. As such, MERS is pretty much illegal on a number of levels because it has a tendency to lose legal mortgage documents which is why robosigning and forging documents suddenly became so popular. If the banks had been forced to properly handle mortgage documents during the bubble it might have slowed down some of their reckless abandon and would certainly have cut in to their profits.
The problem here is most of the stuff the banks did, and that caused the crash, wasn't really illegal. It was immoral but not really illegal. You see, the banks have anough control over the Fed and the Congress that they can make whatever they want to do legal so they don't have to break the law. If there was illegality most of it was at the low level where loans were originated and the easiest people to nail are the people who lied on loan applications which is the wrong group of people to go after.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses but that was after the crash, not the cause of it, and chances are the banks will pay a hefty fine and walk away otherwise unscathed.
Much of the crisis was caused by repealing Glass Steagel. Why was this done? Because Citi and Travelers wanted to merge in to a giant mega corp offering all financial services. Glass Steagel made this illegal, so what did the do? Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Phil Graham pushed a new law that that repealed Glass Steagel under Clinton. Bob Rubin then went to work for Citi, Graham went to work for UBS, to reap the benefits of what they had sowed. Summers was hired by Obama to run the economy despite being as much to blame as anyone.
The solution to the 2008 crisis is, unfortunately, not criminal prosecution. You need to prevent the Fed and Washington from being completely controlled by Wall Street, and making everything they do legal. Unfortunately this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but it is exactly what OWS is all about.
I suppose it depends on what generation you are in but its not really about senior citizens at all. Current seniors paid almost nothing in to social security or medicare, the taxes were tiny until Reagan jacked them up in the 80's. They are getting way more out of those programs than they paid in, due to sky rocketing life expecency and health care costs
Today's seniors are completely screwing young people by transfering their wages to their social security and health care. Until recently young people were paying 12.5% of their salary just in payroll taxes, counting the employer contribution. Not even counting income and sales tax, young workers are already paying nearly as much in taxes as the wealthy pay total, with a 15% flat capital gains tax.
Young workers are being taxed for programs that will probably be completely bankrupt or completely gutted before they reach retirement age. Social security was running huge surpluses from the 80's until recently but all that money disappeared in to T-bills and is basically gone. It can't be replaced except by the government raising taxes or borrowing even more money.
Seniors are a powerful voting block, they have been getting everything they want at the expense of everyone else and they know it. Don't make this about them. They also were lucky enough to have had their productive years in the 50's and 60's when America was booming after World War II. Their children are unlucky enough to work in an era of high taxes, inflation and decliining real wages.
The problem with the Tea Party is it was coopted by people like Bachman, Palin and DeMint largely with the help of the main stream media and Republican establishment who wanted to gut the Tea Party's populist economic message and defend the status quo. They did a really great job at it too. They managed to turn the Tea Party image from economic populism in to right wing social conservatism. Social and racial issues have absolutely no place in the Tea Party. I really hope OWS saw what happened to the Tea Party and use their diffuse leadership structure to avoid being coopted. Unions and the Democratic party, in particular, will be pure poison to OWS if they manage to insert themselves in the spotlight. Unions are a nice idea in theory to counter corporate excess but in practice they've become just as bad, and corrupt, as corporations and just as much a part of the problem. They are a complete turn off to most American as a result. Its a total farce for Obama to think OWS is on his side, the second he hired Summers and Geitner to run the economy he proved he was part of the problem, not the solution, and "Change you can believe" was total bullshit.
The TARP was a TINY fraction of the free money the banks got. They paid back the TARP money they got directly but they didn't even have to pay back all the money that was funnelled through AIG directly in to their pockets, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank in particular. If AIG has been allowed to fail and those tax payer billions hadn't been funnelled through AIG, Goldman Sachs and the rest would have failed.
The banks are still getting free money by the truck loads.
First, they got to unload hundreds of billions in toxic assets on the Fed in exchange for fresh green backs at 100 cents on the dollar.
The Fed has their interest rates to banks set at approximately zero. The economists term for this is "financial repression", where interest rates are substantially below inflation. Its designed to completely screw people who save to bail out debtors including banks. It especially screws seniors who live on CD interest. It is designed to force them to gamble on the stock market to just stay even. Many seniors who remember the '29 crash dont want to play the stock market.
There are also still trillions in loan guarantees that will dealry cost someone if those assets crater which some of will if there is a double dip.
And the Fed constantly pumps hundreds of billions in short term, low interest loans, to all sorts of troubled banks, all the time through the discount window.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are pure gamblers, they pocket the profits when they win. They should NEVER be allowed to come to the U.S. taxpayer or the Fed when they lose.
Bottom line, banks get their money at zero percent. The poor get their money from payday loans at 30% and up.
If your read the thread he said the current KDE is a total mess too since they did the same thing GNOME did when they did KDE 4.x. That's when I stopped using KDE and pretty much stopped using Linux as a desktop. I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and GNOME 2.x on the occassions I still use desktop Linux.
I think its pretty much been established at this point the open source model totally doesn't work for developing a coherent desktop. A bunch of geeks just can't seem to do it, they simply don't grasp sane UI conventions, and are drunk on trying to do things new and different just so they can tell themselves they are being innovative, and are instead making UI that is completely unusable.
Desktops are hard, they require a lot of overarching design, a lot of in depth UI expertise, and a LOT of QA and usability testing. Its a bunch of things open source apparently just doesn't do well.
And after they were beat by a pair of deuces they wrote a 100+ page report that tried to shift most of the blame on to Transocean and Halliburton. This report is mostly a white wash to be used in a decade's worth of law suits and was largely discredited the second it was released. It tries to shift much of the blame on Haliburton's cement plug though Haliburton has a pretty extensive email trail showning BP demanded they do it a certain way and they strenuously warned BP there was a high risk of a dangerous gas leak if they did.
Dave Winer has/had some good ideas, but most of the time you need to add an "h" to his last name because he spends most of this time whining. He kind of reinforces the "ageism" stereotype which is another issue he whines about a lot. He spends a lot of his time shouting "Get Off My Lawn" at new tech and young technologists.
Whether its Twitter, PubSubHubBub, Buzz, JSON or iPad/Flash he has some legitimate points but he starts grinding axes, mostly because they are competing with his pet technologies RSS, RSS Cloud, XML and netbooks. He has a massive case of cognitive dissonance and Not Invented Here syndrome especially if the tech is in treading on tech he is attached to or help create. I remember a while back he absolutely refused to use some API because it was JSON only, since he is totally fixated on XML. Dave, JSON is smaller, faster, more efficient, simpler and easier to parse than XML. Your refusal to accept, adapt and use it says a lot about how inflexible you are.
He's been whining about iPad being closed and not having Flash for a while now. He isn't saying anything new that hasn't been said a million times already. My honest opinion is if you hate iPhone and iPad, or you have to have a device with Flash, don't buy Apple and then turnaround and bitch about limitations he knew were there when he bought them. Only way iPhone and iPad are going to die is if people don't buy them. If some people like the Apple experience then its their prerogative to vote for it with their pocketbooks.
Another of the axes he grinds a LOT is he bitches about not get invited to tech gatherings or to speak, like at SXSW. The world does owe him a little something for his work on RSS feeds and podcasts, but his refusal to adapt and change no doubt leads most conference organizers to leave him off their list because they dont want to listen to him whine, or subject attendees to his fixations.
There are open source battery chargers for iPhone at adafruit for 19.95. Someone had to figure out a slightly unusual set of resistors on the cable pins to get by Apple's obfuscations but it is known technology now. Kind of a tradeoff between having a phone that is better sealed (the iPhone) you have to charge from an external pack, or swap batteries on Android. As I recall the original knock against one of the early Android phones was the the battery cover kept falling off.
I certainly agree blaming "the American University System" is off the mark. As is the trendy delusion that somehow forcing every breathing American teen through to a college degree is going to fix anything.
To be globally competitive the U.S. needs to exactly three things:
A) Identify the most gifted and talented young people and remove every barrier to them getting the best education possible. You especially need to do this in fields that demand serious education like mathematics, physics and engineering. Programming not so much. Some computer science careers probably need that education, but many are better pursued by doing, trying, failing, (i.e. doing startups).
B) Encourage the worlds best and brightest to immigrate here. Much of America's past glory in science and engineering was due more to the fact that the world's best minds fled here to escape tyranny elsewhere and were welcomed with open arms, men like Einstein, Brin and Tesla. Over the last 10 years in particular the U.S. has turned openly hostile to the rest of the world, and now many of the best and brightest are going elsewhere to do amazing things. Its much easier to vacuam up the world's best and brightest than to try to educate them all from within.
C) The American political/financial system is for all practical purposes a failed state. Our financial system has abandoned its primary role, raising capital to build things. Instead it mostly games the system for quick, easy profits. Congress killed the Supercolliding Superconductor over a few billion in funding and ceeded American leadership in nuclear physics. No vision. Our space program is completely disfunctional partially because each new administartion cancels the previous presiden'ts plan, and starts a new one which is in turn cancelled by the next President. We squander vast sums on stupid stuff, not advancing anything, and no longer do anything that will motivate anyone to become a scientist or engineer unless you like building weapons or working in intelligence agencies that are mostly bureaucratic rat's nests. Apollo for all its short comings, inspired a lot of people to WANT to be engineers. What do we have to offer today with the same allure?
"No Child Left Behind" is particularly delusional. Some children should be left behind because they either lack the ability or desire to go to college or even finish high school. Some kids need to be routed in to trade educations especially if that is the direction where their interest lie. If they have no passion or no work ethic they need to be introduced to hunger at an early age. The important thing is for children to find their passion and be enabled to pursue it, rather than being slotted in to life as a corprate drone because thats what big corporations want. Truth is college degrees these days are more for corporations to help them sort there drones, and insure they are properly socialzed, than they are for the benefit of the people being forced to get them. This country would be vastly better off with a fifty million entrepenuers building small companies to do interesting and exciting things for which they have a passion, and provide them all with online educational resources as needed in the areas they need the help to succeed.
Oh and one of the reviled liberal arts classes I took back in the day was "Ethics". One wonders how much devestation America has suffered in the last ten years is because we turned out lawyers(politicians) and financeers(MBA's) who either either took it or defacto failed it. Shakespeare (literature), is full of life lessons on the consequences of making bad, immoral, decisions in that some of our politicians and financeers should have learned and taken to heart. Of course they seem to be getting away with it thanks to the broken system we live in.
"forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems"
Well it will solve one problem, some day you might wake up and realize there is more to life than hacking code or building bridges. There is a lot of value in being a well rounded person, and appreciating art, music, literature, film, theater, etc. You certainly can argue whether you should be forced to experience these things in colleges that are costing you an an arm and a leg now. Back in the day when the world sucked less, colleges was considered the best place to encourage well rounded cultured individuals. Today they seem more about winning championships, and turning out competitive drones for the global marketplace who are well socialized to cube farms and corporate cultures.
India and Japan have educational systems that do turn out extremely well honed drones for those niches deemed critical global competitiveness. I'll give them that. From what I've read Japanese companies are regimented horrors sucking the life and creativity out of their employees and I'm not totally surprised their economy has stagnated for the last 20 years. I've worked with and for products of India's educational system. They've tended to be bright, hard working, quick advancers, but they lack a certain creativity, and lack the irreverence I consider essential to actual success along with a sense of humor.
The problem with the athletics programs has little to do with the money. The problem with putting semiprofessional sports teams in universities is corruption and loss of focus. Schools often end up lowering academic standards to let in star athletes, and then you further lower them to make sure they get the grades to remain eligible with minimal class time to free them up for practice. You also end up with a large body of students focused on sports and partying who take down the rest of the students with them.
An even more fundamental problem is loss of focus on what should be the primary mission, a good education. When a university is more focused on winning football and basketball games, and is dedicating huge resources to that goal, than on producing world class graduates it results in loss of focus of the core mission. Its really scary how often you hear universities brag about how many students they attract because they have winning sports programs. That is totally nuts.
Athletics belong in universities on an intermural level, encouraging students to exercise, socialize, participate and to learn team work, competition, etc. The semi professional athletes need to be put in to leagues where they can focus on athletics and not sham educations. If they want the education they should go to a university and focus on their education and not sports. It would probably be better if a much smaller percentage of men were deluded in to thinking they will make it in professional athletics when the vast majority wont.
The issue may well end up being moot anyway. I'm willing to bet in another 10-20 years most people who just want an education and training for a career will be getting it online. Universities are pricing themselves out of the market, and their loss of focus on the core mission, in favor of sports and partying, is becoming a pretty serious detriment. Great research schools like MIT, CalTech, Stanford, etc. should survive, but state universities focused more on football and degree milling than excellence aren't much of a win any more. With computers and networks you can get most of the important parts of the education at a much lower cost, with fewer distractions and while you've already started working. A solution to worthless tenured professors is to telepresence good teachers from wherever they may be and if they produce results reward them and bottle their essence, if they don't can them and get someone who will. I'd rather have limited access to a Richard Feynam to teach Physics via telepresence than personal instruction by a tenured hack who doesn't like teaching.
There was years of wrangling over patents for the electric light starting around 1880 and I doubt your old enough to remember before that. Patent disputes have existing pretty much since the U.S. was founded. They do server a useful purpose in allowing an inventor to recoup their R&D investment and make a profit before someone rips them off. Without them there would be little motiviation to sink years and larges amounts of money inventing anything. Of course with places like China ripping off IP on a wholesale basis they don't even really work anymore in a globalized world where they are only enforced on national boundries.
Software patents are just somewhat more insidious than hardware patents, and they weren't particularly common in the earlier years of software development which is maybe what you are talking about.
"Does Linden Labs pitch SL as a platform for for-pay items and scripts?"
Linden dollars, their currency, are convertible to and from U.S. dollars at an official peg of L $270 = US $1 and to Euros, though conversion rates vary on real exchanges. Linden Labs has always pushed it as a platform where you could make money from land, services and script/object sales, though at the same time their terms of service have said their currency has no actual value and if their database loses yours you are out of luck. During its boom time it was a mecca for gambling untill the U.S. Congress clamped down on online gambling. As I recall when Linden outlawed gambling it caused a significant decline in their user base and fortunes. They have also struggled with EU value added tax.
All indications are Linden wants their cake and to eat it too leading to the ambiguity the grandparent referenced. They want Second Life to be a fully functioning online economy amd at the same time shirk most of the complications that entails.
Like all game economies involving virtual goods and currencies, just about everything is arbitrary and can change at the whim of the people controlling the servers. There are fascinating parallels that can be drawn between virtual game economies and real world economies. When you have fiat currencies, central banks which can create money(wealth) out of thin air, and central banks/goverments which can the rules overnight and indulge in massive bailouts of the well connected, you start to notice real economies are pretty much the same kind of sham as virtual game economies, the stakes are just higher.
Cory Doctorow's latest creative commons book "For The Win" touchs on some of these issues, though like most of his books he raises interesting ideas and then falls a little short in making a good novel out of them.
Nice lengthy rant but NASA has spent most of their energy on Ares I the last 5 years. Ares I isn't even remotely as difficult as Apollo, Saturn or going to the Moon. Its closer to Soyuz, Gemini and Mercury. It was just launching a few people in a capsule in to LEO. After years of effort and billions of dollars all NASA had managed so far was to light off a largely unmodified Shuttle SRB with a bunch of dummy upper stages with a control system that was lifted wholesale out of an Atlas.
NASA and Ares simply haven't developed anything worth anything in a period of time comprable to one where the original NASA had gone from zero to early Saturn and Apollo launches. Sure back then NASA had a lot of money to throw at problems but they also had to develop a huge number of completely new technologies from scratch. Ares I is inventing next to no new technology and doing something we've been doing for 50 years, putting capsules with a few people in to LEO, something even the Chinese are doing now.
If this guy was the PM for this program he should be fired. Whatever the reason he didn't deliver. If he didn't have the resources to do the job he should have figured that out early, drawn a line in the sand and said either get me the resources or kill it. Instead he led a program that muddled along, did nothing but squander time and money, perpetuated a jobs program and didn't accomplish anything. Sure politicians helped screw it up, but still if you are the project manager, either you figure out a way to succeed or quit early.
Exactly right. The only KDE I can still stand to use is KDE 3.5 and I pretty much don't even use that anymore. And then you have GNOME in all its GTK crippled, Mono infected crappiness. As far as I'm concerned Linux has ceased to be a viable desktop. I had hopes for it for so long... all dashed. Macports FTW.
It would appear Android is about the only viable avenue left for Linux world domination in anything beyond servers and developer tools.
One wonders the dynamic within in the KDE team that allowed them to delude themselves in to thinking the track they took with KDE 4 wasn't completely broken. As nearly as I can tell their only way to stay viable is to flush KDE 4, start over with KDE 3.5 as the base, and revoke checkin privledges for whomever architected KDE 4.
What it actually means depends on whether they are bought by an ethical private equity firm or the other kind. If its the other kind they will use Novell as a vehicle to borrow a couple billion dollars which they will use to create an instant and imaginary profit for themselves, then they will cut and run leaving Novell saddled with a crushing debt burden which will result in layoffs and eventual collapse.
Sad to say that is frequently how the magnates of our financial system work now. They aren't out to build successful companies that make things, employ people, and make money the old fashioned way, they are out to make the quickest buck they can with no regard for the wreckage they leave in the wake.
Submitter's name is Taco Cowboy. No doubt he is the love child of Cmdr Taco and Cowboy Neal so you should set your expectactions for any submissions from this source low... very, very low.
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With America's current two party system you are completely wrong. The two recent choices we've been blessed with for President would appear to be polar opposites and offer a world of difference but in fact there was no difference. Everyone who voted for Obama thought they WERE doing what you said and millions of young idealistic voters have been poisoned against voting for good because he was a sham. You can argue that you could tell he was a sham by his record and you probably could but he was as close as you can get in this country to actually appearing to offer a desperately needed changeâ¦. and he didn't change anything.
Obama has followed the Bush agenda on trashing civil liberties, spying on Americans, state secrets abuses, expanding the police state and war mongering and has actually pushed the agenda even farther and harder than Bush. Most liberals are reluctant to even criticize him for doing crap they eviscerated Bush and Cheney for doing.
On economics Obama appointed Geithner and Summers, Clinton appointed Rubin and Summers and they pushed the Wall Street agenda harder than Republicans do, caused even more damage, and completely sold the middle class down the river⦠like always.
Maybe you are arguing a majority of Americans should suddenly wake up and get a clue and start voting for some mysterious third party. Chances of that are miniscule. The system is completely rigged to favor the two parties. The media barely covers Ron Paul and he is actually in a major party and the third party candidates are either quacks or made to look that way by the beloved boob tube.
Candidates who are in any way out of the orthodoxy of what the establishment wants you to vote for die in obscurity, they get no coverage, no money, no respect and the vast majority of Americans are conditioned to think of them as throw away votes.
Just watch what happens to any candidate, even in the major parties, who in any way says anything critical of Israel, they are completely destroyed almost instantly by an establishment that is more concerned with what is good for Israel than what is good for America. Its just the sterling, easily visible, example of how a tiny elite decides who American's vote for and no matter who actually wins⦠they always win.
2004 is another great example, two wealthy Yale Skull and Bones establishmentarians running against each other to delude Americans in to thinking there was a choice to be had there...
As best I recall Kenya is fast becoming a new call center out sourcing hot spot. Population is already fluent in English, well educated,, they gained serious Internet fiber optic capacity in 2009, similar time zone to Europe, especially good for British customer support.
I think the rods at reactor 4 were recently removed from the reactor. You need to let the short lived isotopes decay and let the rods cool down before you transport them long distances. They need active cooling which would be dangerous and challenging in a truck or rail car. Your point may apply to long term storage but not to this case where the rods were still in need of aggressive cooling.
Deep down both movements come from the same place, extreme frustration with how our system works. But, the Tea Party seems extremely focused on just gutting government spending and cutting taxes. The only time that would have an adverse effect on Wall Street is if Wall Street need bailouts, but most of the bailouts were over before the Tea Party was formed. I wager Wall Street is mostly OK with the Tea Party since they want lower taxes and less government too. So the current Tea Party seems to be giving Wall Street a free pass, and going after the big spending politicians. The OWS is doing the exact opposite and going after Wall Street first and government not so much, except where it is doing Wall Street's bidding.
Maybe you can cite some instances of clear illegality or evem some laws that might have been broken.
The rating agencies clearly put triple A ratings on garbage but there was no law that said their rating had to be correct, though that has since been changed to some extent. They should have had the special charters they are given revoked and been put out of business but again its not really a case of illegality or perp walks.
Banks sold some total crap but there isn't any law against that. Buyer beware comes in to play. Again the rating agencies shouldn't have rated crap as triple AAA but investors buying billions in MBS's should have paid attention to what they were buying.
There are some indications a couple of the Fed bailout actions might have been technically illegal but that is the Fed not the Wall Street banks, and they are more technical readings of the law and not blatant.
There is a slim chance execs at Lehman or Bear Stearns could have been charged for misleading the public and shareholders about the state of their companies but so far none of that has stuck and its a hard charge to make stick.
The big banks have huge legal teams, they aren't very likely to do anything blatantly illegal, especially with the ease with which they can get laws changed in their favor to make whatever they want to do legal.
You didn't actually read my post did you... because I said exactly that...
I said there is illegality in the foreclosure process but that was post crisis. The topic here is illegality that caused the crash and the foreclosures in the first place. There really just isn't that much except in the mortgage origination which is a bunch of little fish, not Wall Stree bankers.
So you are saying its OK to ignore state laws on handling mortgage documents and doing foreclosures just so you can run everyone out of their homes quickly to make you feel better? How would you feel if your bank suddenly decided to foreclose on you using forged documents and you had no legal recourse as they rushed to judgement?
Those states have those laws on the books to keep people from being screwed by banks who foreclose on them wrongfully and improperly. A bank shouldn't be allowed to take someones home just because the banks says so... and to just trust them.
When banks created the MERS system, which electronically handles mortgage documents, they did it to maximize their profits. When they were bundling millions of mortgages in to MBS's they didn't want to handle all those actual mortgage papers and transfer them physically every time an MBS changed hands. As such, MERS is pretty much illegal on a number of levels because it has a tendency to lose legal mortgage documents which is why robosigning and forging documents suddenly became so popular. If the banks had been forced to properly handle mortgage documents during the bubble it might have slowed down some of their reckless abandon and would certainly have cut in to their profits.
The problem here is most of the stuff the banks did, and that caused the crash, wasn't really illegal. It was immoral but not really illegal. You see, the banks have anough control over the Fed and the Congress that they can make whatever they want to do legal so they don't have to break the law. If there was illegality most of it was at the low level where loans were originated and the easiest people to nail are the people who lied on loan applications which is the wrong group of people to go after.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses but that was after the crash, not the cause of it, and chances are the banks will pay a hefty fine and walk away otherwise unscathed.
Much of the crisis was caused by repealing Glass Steagel. Why was this done? Because Citi and Travelers wanted to merge in to a giant mega corp offering all financial services. Glass Steagel made this illegal, so what did the do? Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Phil Graham pushed a new law that that repealed Glass Steagel under Clinton. Bob Rubin then went to work for Citi, Graham went to work for UBS, to reap the benefits of what they had sowed. Summers was hired by Obama to run the economy despite being as much to blame as anyone.
The solution to the 2008 crisis is, unfortunately, not criminal prosecution. You need to prevent the Fed and Washington from being completely controlled by Wall Street, and making everything they do legal. Unfortunately this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but it is exactly what OWS is all about.
"This is about our parents, our grandparents..."
I suppose it depends on what generation you are in but its not really about senior citizens at all. Current seniors paid almost nothing in to social security or medicare, the taxes were tiny until Reagan jacked them up in the 80's. They are getting way more out of those programs than they paid in, due to sky rocketing life expecency and health care costs
Today's seniors are completely screwing young people by transfering their wages to their social security and health care. Until recently young people were paying 12.5% of their salary just in payroll taxes, counting the employer contribution. Not even counting income and sales tax, young workers are already paying nearly as much in taxes as the wealthy pay total, with a 15% flat capital gains tax.
Young workers are being taxed for programs that will probably be completely bankrupt or completely gutted before they reach retirement age. Social security was running huge surpluses from the 80's until recently but all that money disappeared in to T-bills and is basically gone. It can't be replaced except by the government raising taxes or borrowing even more money.
Seniors are a powerful voting block, they have been getting everything they want at the expense of everyone else and they know it. Don't make this about them. They also were lucky enough to have had their productive years in the 50's and 60's when America was booming after World War II. Their children are unlucky enough to work in an era of high taxes, inflation and decliining real wages.
The problem with the Tea Party is it was coopted by people like Bachman, Palin and DeMint largely with the help of the main stream media and Republican establishment who wanted to gut the Tea Party's populist economic message and defend the status quo. They did a really great job at it too. They managed to turn the Tea Party image from economic populism in to right wing social conservatism. Social and racial issues have absolutely no place in the Tea Party. I really hope OWS saw what happened to the Tea Party and use their diffuse leadership structure to avoid being coopted. Unions and the Democratic party, in particular, will be pure poison to OWS if they manage to insert themselves in the spotlight. Unions are a nice idea in theory to counter corporate excess but in practice they've become just as bad, and corrupt, as corporations and just as much a part of the problem. They are a complete turn off to most American as a result. Its a total farce for Obama to think OWS is on his side, the second he hired Summers and Geitner to run the economy he proved he was part of the problem, not the solution, and "Change you can believe" was total bullshit.
The TARP was a TINY fraction of the free money the banks got. They paid back the TARP money they got directly but they didn't even have to pay back all the money that was funnelled through AIG directly in to their pockets, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank in particular. If AIG has been allowed to fail and those tax payer billions hadn't been funnelled through AIG, Goldman Sachs and the rest would have failed.
The banks are still getting free money by the truck loads.
First, they got to unload hundreds of billions in toxic assets on the Fed in exchange for fresh green backs at 100 cents on the dollar.
The Fed has their interest rates to banks set at approximately zero. The economists term for this is "financial repression", where interest rates are substantially below inflation. Its designed to completely screw people who save to bail out debtors including banks. It especially screws seniors who live on CD interest. It is designed to force them to gamble on the stock market to just stay even. Many seniors who remember the '29 crash dont want to play the stock market.
There are also still trillions in loan guarantees that will dealry cost someone if those assets crater which some of will if there is a double dip.
And the Fed constantly pumps hundreds of billions in short term, low interest loans, to all sorts of troubled banks, all the time through the discount window.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are pure gamblers, they pocket the profits when they win. They should NEVER be allowed to come to the U.S. taxpayer or the Fed when they lose.
Bottom line, banks get their money at zero percent. The poor get their money from payday loans at 30% and up.
If your read the thread he said the current KDE is a total mess too since they did the same thing GNOME did when they did KDE 4.x. That's when I stopped using KDE and pretty much stopped using Linux as a desktop. I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and GNOME 2.x on the occassions I still use desktop Linux.
I think its pretty much been established at this point the open source model totally doesn't work for developing a coherent desktop. A bunch of geeks just can't seem to do it, they simply don't grasp sane UI conventions, and are drunk on trying to do things new and different just so they can tell themselves they are being innovative, and are instead making UI that is completely unusable.
Desktops are hard, they require a lot of overarching design, a lot of in depth UI expertise, and a LOT of QA and usability testing. Its a bunch of things open source apparently just doesn't do well.
And after they were beat by a pair of deuces they wrote a 100+ page report that tried to shift most of the blame on to Transocean and Halliburton. This report is mostly a white wash to be used in a decade's worth of law suits and was largely discredited the second it was released. It tries to shift much of the blame on Haliburton's cement plug though Haliburton has a pretty extensive email trail showning BP demanded they do it a certain way and they strenuously warned BP there was a high risk of a dangerous gas leak if they did.
Dave Winer has/had some good ideas, but most of the time you need to add an "h" to his last name because he spends most of this time whining. He kind of reinforces the "ageism" stereotype which is another issue he whines about a lot. He spends a lot of his time shouting "Get Off My Lawn" at new tech and young technologists.
Whether its Twitter, PubSubHubBub, Buzz, JSON or iPad/Flash he has some legitimate points but he starts grinding axes, mostly because they are competing with his pet technologies RSS, RSS Cloud, XML and netbooks. He has a massive case of cognitive dissonance and Not Invented Here syndrome especially if the tech is in treading on tech he is attached to or help create. I remember a while back he absolutely refused to use some API because it was JSON only, since he is totally fixated on XML. Dave, JSON is smaller, faster, more efficient, simpler and easier to parse than XML. Your refusal to accept, adapt and use it says a lot about how inflexible you are.
He's been whining about iPad being closed and not having Flash for a while now. He isn't saying anything new that hasn't been said a million times already. My honest opinion is if you hate iPhone and iPad, or you have to have a device with Flash, don't buy Apple and then turnaround and bitch about limitations he knew were there when he bought them. Only way iPhone and iPad are going to die is if people don't buy them. If some people like the Apple experience then its their prerogative to vote for it with their pocketbooks.
Another of the axes he grinds a LOT is he bitches about not get invited to tech gatherings or to speak, like at SXSW. The world does owe him a little something for his work on RSS feeds and podcasts, but his refusal to adapt and change no doubt leads most conference organizers to leave him off their list because they dont want to listen to him whine, or subject attendees to his fixations.
There are open source battery chargers for iPhone at adafruit for 19.95. Someone had to figure out a slightly unusual set of resistors on the cable pins to get by Apple's obfuscations but it is known technology now. Kind of a tradeoff between having a phone that is better sealed (the iPhone) you have to charge from an external pack, or swap batteries on Android. As I recall the original knock against one of the early Android phones was the the battery cover kept falling off.
I certainly agree blaming "the American University System" is off the mark. As is the trendy delusion that somehow forcing every breathing American teen through to a college degree is going to fix anything.
To be globally competitive the U.S. needs to exactly three things:
A) Identify the most gifted and talented young people and remove every barrier to them getting the best education possible. You especially need to do this in fields that demand serious education like mathematics, physics and engineering. Programming not so much. Some computer science careers probably need that education, but many are better pursued by doing, trying, failing, (i.e. doing startups).
B) Encourage the worlds best and brightest to immigrate here. Much of America's past glory in science and engineering was due more to the fact that the world's best minds fled here to escape tyranny elsewhere and were welcomed with open arms, men like Einstein, Brin and Tesla. Over the last 10 years in particular the U.S. has turned openly hostile to the rest of the world, and now many of the best and brightest are going elsewhere to do amazing things. Its much easier to vacuam up the world's best and brightest than to try to educate them all from within.
C) The American political/financial system is for all practical purposes a failed state. Our financial system has abandoned its primary role, raising capital to build things. Instead it mostly games the system for quick, easy profits. Congress killed the Supercolliding Superconductor over a few billion in funding and ceeded American leadership in nuclear physics. No vision. Our space program is completely disfunctional partially because each new administartion cancels the previous presiden'ts plan, and starts a new one which is in turn cancelled by the next President. We squander vast sums on stupid stuff, not advancing anything, and no longer do anything that will motivate anyone to become a scientist or engineer unless you like building weapons or working in intelligence agencies that are mostly bureaucratic rat's nests. Apollo for all its short comings, inspired a lot of people to WANT to be engineers. What do we have to offer today with the same allure?
"No Child Left Behind" is particularly delusional. Some children should be left behind because they either lack the ability or desire to go to college or even finish high school. Some kids need to be routed in to trade educations especially if that is the direction where their interest lie. If they have no passion or no work ethic they need to be introduced to hunger at an early age. The important thing is for children to find their passion and be enabled to pursue it, rather than being slotted in to life as a corprate drone because thats what big corporations want. Truth is college degrees these days are more for corporations to help them sort there drones, and insure they are properly socialzed, than they are for the benefit of the people being forced to get them. This country would be vastly better off with a fifty million entrepenuers building small companies to do interesting and exciting things for which they have a passion, and provide them all with online educational resources as needed in the areas they need the help to succeed.
Oh and one of the reviled liberal arts classes I took back in the day was "Ethics". One wonders how much devestation America has suffered in the last ten years is because we turned out lawyers(politicians) and financeers(MBA's) who either either took it or defacto failed it. Shakespeare (literature), is full of life lessons on the consequences of making bad, immoral, decisions in that some of our politicians and financeers should have learned and taken to heart. Of course they seem to be getting away with it thanks to the broken system we live in.
"forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems"
Well it will solve one problem, some day you might wake up and realize there is more to life than hacking code or building bridges. There is a lot of value in being a well rounded person, and appreciating art, music, literature, film, theater, etc. You certainly can argue whether you should be forced to experience these things in colleges that are costing you an an arm and a leg now. Back in the day when the world sucked less, colleges was considered the best place to encourage well rounded cultured individuals. Today they seem more about winning championships, and turning out competitive drones for the global marketplace who are well socialized to cube farms and corporate cultures.
India and Japan have educational systems that do turn out extremely well honed drones for those niches deemed critical global competitiveness. I'll give them that. From what I've read Japanese companies are regimented horrors sucking the life and creativity out of their employees and I'm not totally surprised their economy has stagnated for the last 20 years. I've worked with and for products of India's educational system. They've tended to be bright, hard working, quick advancers, but they lack a certain creativity, and lack the irreverence I consider essential to actual success along with a sense of humor.
The problem with the athletics programs has little to do with the money. The problem with putting semiprofessional sports teams in universities is corruption and loss of focus. Schools often end up lowering academic standards to let in star athletes, and then you further lower them to make sure they get the grades to remain eligible with minimal class time to free them up for practice. You also end up with a large body of students focused on sports and partying who take down the rest of the students with them.
An even more fundamental problem is loss of focus on what should be the primary mission, a good education. When a university is more focused on winning football and basketball games, and is dedicating huge resources to that goal, than on producing world class graduates it results in loss of focus of the core mission. Its really scary how often you hear universities brag about how many students they attract because they have winning sports programs. That is totally nuts.
Athletics belong in universities on an intermural level, encouraging students to exercise, socialize, participate and to learn team work, competition, etc. The semi professional athletes need to be put in to leagues where they can focus on athletics and not sham educations. If they want the education they should go to a university and focus on their education and not sports. It would probably be better if a much smaller percentage of men were deluded in to thinking they will make it in professional athletics when the vast majority wont.
The issue may well end up being moot anyway. I'm willing to bet in another 10-20 years most people who just want an education and training for a career will be getting it online. Universities are pricing themselves out of the market, and their loss of focus on the core mission, in favor of sports and partying, is becoming a pretty serious detriment. Great research schools like MIT, CalTech, Stanford, etc. should survive, but state universities focused more on football and degree milling than excellence aren't much of a win any more. With computers and networks you can get most of the important parts of the education at a much lower cost, with fewer distractions and while you've already started working. A solution to worthless tenured professors is to telepresence good teachers from wherever they may be and if they produce results reward them and bottle their essence, if they don't can them and get someone who will. I'd rather have limited access to a Richard Feynam to teach Physics via telepresence than personal instruction by a tenured hack who doesn't like teaching.
There was years of wrangling over patents for the electric light starting around 1880 and I doubt your old enough to remember before that. Patent disputes have existing pretty much since the U.S. was founded. They do server a useful purpose in allowing an inventor to recoup their R&D investment and make a profit before someone rips them off. Without them there would be little motiviation to sink years and larges amounts of money inventing anything. Of course with places like China ripping off IP on a wholesale basis they don't even really work anymore in a globalized world where they are only enforced on national boundries.
Software patents are just somewhat more insidious than hardware patents, and they weren't particularly common in the earlier years of software development which is maybe what you are talking about.
"Does Linden Labs pitch SL as a platform for for-pay items and scripts?"
Linden dollars, their currency, are convertible to and from U.S. dollars at an official peg of L $270 = US $1 and to Euros, though conversion rates vary on real exchanges. Linden Labs has always pushed it as a platform where you could make money from land, services and script/object sales, though at the same time their terms of service have said their currency has no actual value and if their database loses yours you are out of luck. During its boom time it was a mecca for gambling untill the U.S. Congress clamped down on online gambling. As I recall when Linden outlawed gambling it caused a significant decline in their user base and fortunes. They have also struggled with EU value added tax.
All indications are Linden wants their cake and to eat it too leading to the ambiguity the grandparent referenced. They want Second Life to be a fully functioning online economy amd at the same time shirk most of the complications that entails.
Like all game economies involving virtual goods and currencies, just about everything is arbitrary and can change at the whim of the people controlling the servers. There are fascinating parallels that can be drawn between virtual game economies and real world economies. When you have fiat currencies, central banks which can create money(wealth) out of thin air, and central banks/goverments which can the rules overnight and indulge in massive bailouts of the well connected, you start to notice real economies are pretty much the same kind of sham as virtual game economies, the stakes are just higher.
Cory Doctorow's latest creative commons book "For The Win" touchs on some of these issues, though like most of his books he raises interesting ideas and then falls a little short in making a good novel out of them.
Nice lengthy rant but NASA has spent most of their energy on Ares I the last 5 years. Ares I isn't even remotely as difficult as Apollo, Saturn or going to the Moon. Its closer to Soyuz, Gemini and Mercury. It was just launching a few people in a capsule in to LEO. After years of effort and billions of dollars all NASA had managed so far was to light off a largely unmodified Shuttle SRB with a bunch of dummy upper stages with a control system that was lifted wholesale out of an Atlas.
NASA and Ares simply haven't developed anything worth anything in a period of time comprable to one where the original NASA had gone from zero to early Saturn and Apollo launches. Sure back then NASA had a lot of money to throw at problems but they also had to develop a huge number of completely new technologies from scratch. Ares I is inventing next to no new technology and doing something we've been doing for 50 years, putting capsules with a few people in to LEO, something even the Chinese are doing now.
If this guy was the PM for this program he should be fired. Whatever the reason he didn't deliver. If he didn't have the resources to do the job he should have figured that out early, drawn a line in the sand and said either get me the resources or kill it. Instead he led a program that muddled along, did nothing but squander time and money, perpetuated a jobs program and didn't accomplish anything. Sure politicians helped screw it up, but still if you are the project manager, either you figure out a way to succeed or quit early.
Exactly right. The only KDE I can still stand to use is KDE 3.5 and I pretty much don't even use that anymore. And then you have GNOME in all its GTK crippled, Mono infected crappiness. As far as I'm concerned Linux has ceased to be a viable desktop. I had hopes for it for so long... all dashed. Macports FTW.
It would appear Android is about the only viable avenue left for Linux world domination in anything beyond servers and developer tools.
One wonders the dynamic within in the KDE team that allowed them to delude themselves in to thinking the track they took with KDE 4 wasn't completely broken. As nearly as I can tell their only way to stay viable is to flush KDE 4, start over with KDE 3.5 as the base, and revoke checkin privledges for whomever architected KDE 4.
What it actually means depends on whether they are bought by an ethical private equity firm or the other kind. If its the other kind they will use Novell as a vehicle to borrow a couple billion dollars which they will use to create an instant and imaginary profit for themselves, then they will cut and run leaving Novell saddled with a crushing debt burden which will result in layoffs and eventual collapse.
Sad to say that is frequently how the magnates of our financial system work now. They aren't out to build successful companies that make things, employ people, and make money the old fashioned way, they are out to make the quickest buck they can with no regard for the wreckage they leave in the wake.
Submitter's name is Taco Cowboy. No doubt he is the love child of Cmdr Taco and Cowboy Neal so you should set your expectactions for any submissions from this source low... very, very low.