The cult of standardized testing has made it virtually impossible for teachers to teach this sort of thing, much less teach it well. In most states, the curriculum is decided by a board of education with comments from various people pushing political agendas.
The result is that students are being imbued with memes (intentional oxymoron there) rather than understanding the most important parts of life, citizenship, scholarship, and humanity. For example, the Texas state exam requires that students know who wrote Common Sense. They don't have to know what it was about, when it was written, what "pamphleteering" is, or how it fits in with the American Revolution. All they have to know is that Thomas Paine wrote it.
I know it's fashionable to blame teachers for everything. But you have to remember, most teachers are not in the game for the big salaries or the glamour or the prestige. They're in it because they love to teach. If they were left to their own devices, most government and American history teachers would spend weeks on the Bill of Rights and discuss the implications of each amendment to American life today. But that's not on the test, so they don't because they can't.
You can't straitjacket and manacle a man, throw him into the ocean, and announce that he has to swim. States and the federal government have tied teachers' hands in the name of school improvement so important things that can't be answered by a multiple-choice exam are no longer deemed important.
The cult of testing wants schools to be equally excellent. But instead what we have is a communist (or perhaps Rawlsian) notion of equality: everyone is getting pulled down to the lowest common denomonator.
So don't blame the teachers, at least not completely. Parents, communities, administrators, voters, elected officials, and academia have a lot to answer for in this one.
The OED says that piracy (as in the theft of intellectual property) predates the American revolution. Damn. From the OED:
piracy
The action or practice of a pirate.
1. a. The practice or crime of robbery and depredation on the sea or navigable rivers, etc., or by descent from the sea upon the coast, by persons not holding a commission from an established civilized state; with a and pl., a single act or crime of this kind.
[1419 Charta Hen. V in Rymer F{oe}dera IX. 754/2 Per modum Piratiæ.] a1552 LELAND Itin. III. 33 Partely by Feates of Warre, partely by Pyracie. 1556 Acts Privy Council (1892) V. 358 He complained of a pyracie doone upon him by certain Englishe pirates. 1587 FLEMING Contn. Holinshed III. 1359/1 Fleeing first out of England for notable pirasies, and out of Ireland for trecheries not pardonable. 1630 R. Johnson's Kingd. & Commw. 224 On those coasts he rather exerciseth Pyracie, than Dominion. 1702 LUTTRELL Brief Rel. (1857) V. 198 Condemned by the court of admiralty for 4 several pyracies. 1727 A. HAMILTON New Acc. E. Ind. II. xxxiii. 5 Those Portugueze..betook themselves to Piracy among the Islands, at the Mouth of Ganges. 1807 G. CHALMERS Caledonia I. II. i. 213 The Vikings confined their odious piracies to the Baltic. 1879 FARRAR St. Paul (1883) 241 The total suppression of piracy by Pompey had rendered the Mediterranean safe.
fig. 1897 MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Sp. in Ho. Lords 16 July, It was feared..that under the appearance of educational reform a scheme of what he might call theological piracy would spring up.
b. Physical Geogr. = CAPTURE n. 1b.
1904 CHAMBERLIN & SALISBURY Geol. I. iii. 99 The foregoing case may be called foreign piracy because the valleys of different systems are concerned. Domestic piracy may also take place... Here a tributary to a crooked river may develop, working back until it taps the main at a higher point. 1939 Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. L. 1350 The stream pattern indicates that recent piracies have occurred. 1957 G. E. HUTCHINSON Treat. Limnol. I. i. 114 A wide valley, the main stream of which has been reduced by piracy. 1974 C. H. CRICKMAY Work of River iii. 62 Stream piracy.., of course, is not in every case effected by headwater extension.
2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
1771 LUCKOMBE Hist. Print. 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition. 1808 Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 He is charged with 'Literary Piracy', and an 'unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'. 1855 BREWSTER Newton I. iv. 71 With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.
Branson knows. Virgin Trains in the UK, while they are slow, smelly, randomly cancelled, etc., have one car (usually coach B or D) reserved as a "Quiet Coach." That means no cell phone use and, interestingly, it seems to give people the moxy that Britons normally lack to tell prats to stop being prats.
I usually ride in the quiet coach and put my phone on vibrate. When I get a call, I see if I want to take it, and if I do, I move to the vestibule. Many others do the same thing. It's quite nice to be able to travel without hearing moronic conversations.
I sincerely doubt, though, that Americans (of which I am one) would be able to handle this. People don't understand that there are others in the world anymore. The last time I asked someone to cease an annoying behavior it was in a bookstore. He wanted me to go outside with him to fight.
A bit of research and theory suggests that, while these patents are a big pain in the US, there might be a case for implementing them in developing countries, in order to reward entrepreneurs who find successful business models and practices. Currently, there are few incentives for discovery of new industries in developing countries, since as soon as they are discovered, everyone rushes in and the original entrepreneur is put out of business.
And rule one of capitalism: without incentives, there's no innovation.
I am a poor young professional in my mid-20s. I buy an MP3 player (say) for $299 with a $30 mail-in rebate. Now, $30 is big money for me, so I am sure to send it my rebate form! Let's say my demographic accounts for half of sales.
Bob is a rich attorney. He buys the same MP3 player, but does not send in the rebate form because he values the time required to do it at more than $30. Let's say Bob accounts for half of sales.
Thus, I pay $269 for my MP3 player and Bob pays $299. Since we're both half of the total purchasers, BB's expected value price for each MP3 player sold is $284. But I pay less than Bob does because I have a different valuation of my time than Bob has on his.
Bob is willing to pay $299 for the gizmo, and I'm willing to pay $269. Mail-in rebates allow stores to effectively create different prices for different consumers. Bob *could* send the form in if he wished, but he does not because he doesn't think $30 is worth it. I do.
End result: I get an MP3 player at the price I will pay, Bob gets one at the price he will pay, and Best Buy sells two MP3 players at the highest prices they can charge Bob and me.
So in the end, everyone walks away happier because of mail-in rebates. Without mail-in rebates, BB would have to charge $284 for every MP3 player, making me and the other tightwads like me (like you, probably) better off.
Actually, I do know "a little bit of history" but there's no sense in flapping about academic credentials.
When FDR signed EE 9066, he was in no way claiming that the executive had the right to detain citizens indefinately without the imprimatur of one of the other branches of government. In EE 9066, we were at war as declared by the US Congress. We are not right now. If Congress wants to declare war (as the Constitution -- remember that? -- says they have to for us to be at war) then things might look different.
Roosevelt also knew that the order would only last as long as hostilities continued in the Pacific. And they were over about 3 1/2 years to the day after he signed the order.
But Bush acknowledges that the war on terror is a *war without end*. What he is claiming is the right of the US President to detain anybody he so chooses for any length of time in any state of war or peace without any intervention by the legislature or the courts. That is a very scare precedent.
There's a major difference between rolling back rights and abridging them. Lincoln also suspended habeas corpus during the War of Northern Aggression. (That's a joke.) But he did not imply that the writ no longer existed as part of the common law tradition.
Bush does not claim to be temporarily abridging rights -- he is trying to rewrite common law and the Constitutional separation of powers.
FDR claimed the right to inter 112,000 people in a clearly defined order. Bush claims the right to deter as many people as he damn well wants for whatever reason he wants.
In WWII, we knew who the detainees were. Now, we're not told.
The Red Cross had access to the internment camps. They have no access to Guantanamo or Navy brigs.
When you're at war with a nation-state enemy, you can detain people who have ties to that nation-state.
But when you're at war against ideas, you have to begin detaining anybody who might have ties to those ideas. And they are never given a chance to prove themselves otherwise.
Bush is claiming a right that no leader in the common law tradition has claimed since Richard I. And that, my friend, is a serious rollback of civil liberties and rights.
And finally, I'd like to pose a question modelled after a similar question asked by Grover Norquist:
You may trust President George W. Bush with the authority to detain without trial.
But you trust President Hillary Clinton with that same authority?
If you like your civil liberties then vote for Kerry. It's a pretty simple equation. Bush has done more to roll back our constitutional rights than any president in history.
You could be on the next plane out to Guantanamo.
-MichiganDan
Hey, wait, where are you HEY YOU CANT I'm just typing its a free country what do you mean its not Stop ^F^F^F^F^F^F
Hey, it's no different than people who drive their living rooms around with them because other people have big cars and therefore they have to have bigger cars to be "safe." Soon, everyone in this dorm will be outputting levels of microwave that cause tumors in elephants.
Conservatives just believe in a definition of public good and natural monopoly that is less comprehensive than what those of a more liberal bent tend to believe.
You have to rememver that, by world standards, American conservatives aren't conservative -- they're full-fledged right-wingers who believe, in the words of Dick Armey, that "the purpose of government is to marshal an army, build roads, and I'm running out of reasons."
In America, conservatives want to abolish NPR and PBS. In Britain, they want to simply want to reform the system, eliminate the television license fee (probably a good idea, given the high costs of enforcement), and force the Beeb to be more competitive with for-profit entities. There's a world of difference between Tories and Republicans.
Actually, most studies by people who have data to make their points (and therefore actually have informed opinions) show that a minimal regulatory structure is ideal. The key is minimal: completely abolishing regulation yields incompatible standards and a situation much worse than with Soviet-style regulation. Look, for example, at Egypt and Turkey. They've greatly reduced telecom regs in the last few years, but they've not totally quit regulating.
Regulation is especially important in the area of cross-border EM traffic, a major problem in parts of the world. These problems have to be solved by nation-states, at least as long as the nation-state is the dominant form of political organization.
Privitisation is part of this. By 2005, all WTO members will have to shed any remains of state-owned telecom monopolies, which study after study have shown to cause high consumer prices, little innovation, and poor service quality. Multiple competing providers playing from the same ground rules is both theoretically and practically ideal.
It's easy to complain about regulation. It makes a good bumper sticker slogan. But it's not really a thoughtful answer to anything. There will always be regulation, either by the state or by profit-motivated companies. I'd rather the regulator be a neutral arbiter, or at least to neutral as Michael Powell can be.:)
Economic growth is the only way to raise standards of living in developing countries -- or any country for that matter. The Solow Growth Model explains that this is a function of capital-labor ratio and population growth, but technological growth can impact this as well.
In order to have growth, access to the rest of the world is pretty much a prerequisite, as is some element of a knowledge economy. For these to occur, access to the Internet is essential the way that the telephone was 50 years ago.
So Internet access impacts food, clothing, and shelter. Western countries can give handouts and solve the problem for the time being, or we can help promote Internet access and solve the problem permanently.
Moreover, many people in the US and EU do not have enough food, clothing, or shelter. Does this mean that we should ignore science and technology until everybody does? No rational economist would argue this.
There is a good deal of research that shows that deregulation of telecoms leads to wider access at lower prices. (Examples can be found in Turkey, Argentina, and Ghana.) So the best thing that developing countries can do is liberalize their telecom infrastructure and stimulate investment in telecoms and IT. Does this preclude subsidies? Of course not. We subsidize in the US and it's a good thing. And it's a good thing in developing countries.
Actually, I've used both Napster and iTMS. I've found iTMS to be much more difficult and restrictive than Napster. The Napster interface is clean, and the I like being able to listen to music that I don't want to buy.
I'm sure Napster isn't 3|i+3 enough for some of the k-rad H4X0R5 around here, but for me it's just great. They have a player built by Samsung. It gets pretty good reviews except from the iPod cult-of-Jobs crowd.
The iPod is overpriced, overrated, and has too many problems. Plus, with their white ear buds, they totally reek of poseur. They should come preloaded with Strokes and Hives tracks, a coupon for $10 off a ratty denim jacket, and a free sample of hair wax.
The Economist [economist.com - free] has an article in last week's edition about how phones are replacing cars [economist.com - suggar daddy required] and how this is "a good thing."
Full article text:
"PARKS beautifully", boasts an advertising hoarding for the XDA II, above a glimpse of its sleek silver lines. "Responsive to every turn", declares another poster. Yet these ads, seen recently in London, are selling not a car, but an advanced kind of mobile phone. Maybe that should not be a surprise. Using automotive imagery to sell a handset makes a lot of sense for, in many respects, mobile phones are replacing cars.
Phones are now the dominant technology with which young people, and urban youth in particular, now define themselves. What sort of phone you carry and how you customise it says a great deal about you, just as the choice of car did for a previous generation. In today's congested cities, you can no longer make a statement by pulling up outside a bar in a particular kind of car. Instead, you make a similar statement by displaying your mobile phone, with its carefully chosen ringtone, screen logo and slip cover. Mobile phones, like cars, are fashion items: in both cases, people buy new ones far more often than is actually necessary. Both are social technologies that bring people together; for teenagers, both act as symbols of independence. And cars and phones alike promote freedom and mobility, with unexpected social consequences.
The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.
Less visibly, as the structure of the mobile-phone industry changes, it increasingly resembles that of the car industry (see article). Handset-makers, like carmakers, build some models themselves and outsource the design and manufacturing of others. Specialist firms supply particular sub-assemblies in both industries. Outwardly different products are built on a handful of common underlying "platforms" in both industries, to reduce costs. In each case, branding and design are becoming more important as the underlying technology becomes increasingly interchangeable. In phones, as previously happened in cars, established western companies are facing stiff competition from nimbler Asian firms. Small wonder then that Nokia, the world's largest handset-maker, recruited its design chief, Frank Nuovo, from BMW.
That mobile phones are taking on many of the social functions of cars is to be welcomed. While it is a laudable goal that everyone on earth should someday have a mobile phone, cars' ubiquity produces mixed feelings. They are a horribly inefficient mode of transport--why move a ton of metal around in order to transport a few bags of groceries?--and they cause pollution, in the form of particulates and nasty gases. A chirping handset is a much greener form of self-expression than an old banger. It may irritate but it is safe. In the hands of a drunk driver, a car becomes a deadly weapon. That is not true of a phone (though terrorists recently rigged mobile phones to trigger bombs in Madrid). Despite concern that radiation from phones and masts causes health problems, there is no clear evidence of harm, and similar worries about power lines and computer screens proved unfounded. Less pollution, less traffic, fewer alcohol-related deaths and injuries: the switch from cars to phones cannot happen soon enough.
First, nobody knows that much about how this will actually be done. But the speculation is that the price will be determined partially by auction and partially by other factors. Stay tuned to see what those might be.
Second, every IPO is, effectively, an auction. People buy stocks and flip them, perhaps several times a day (even though initial investors usually have to promise that they won't, a promise that's not well kept). An auction is simply a means of reaching partial equilibrium between supply of a good and its demand. That's what stock markets do: reach the partial equilibrium of supply of a company's ownership and the demand for it at any given price.
Yes, some lucky sods will get to buy Google on the cheap. But when the stock price goes up, which it inevitably will, they will sell and take their money and run. It's at this point that the little guy (save the tokens who get a share at IPO) gets to buy.
What would be a better method, IMHO, is to sell the first 10 million shares, maximum of four per person, to the first x number of people who make it to the ticket counter. It would be great to see investors in their Armani suits camping out in Mountain View for weeks before the IPO like geeks at a new Star Wars movie.
Better yet, they should be required to dress up like Jar Jar.
Anybody can purchase it as soon as it goes public. Of course, the value is going to jump many thousands of percent in the first minute of trading, and if you're trading with a discount broker your odds of getting some before it peaks are very slim. You could put in a market order and get bled dry, or you could put in a limit order at a reasonable price that will never be filled.
The rich are going to get richer on this one, and the rest of us will just have to sit patiently. Because everyone assumes buying Google is a good idea, by the time your typical person has the opportunity to do so, it's not.
There are two problems with this, and they are both problems that require looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, something that is extremely difficult.
Problem 1: ABUSE. Every example wherein more power has been given to the "authorities" has led to abuse, either personal (as in Bill Clinton's use of FBI files) or institutional (the FBI keeping many of those files to begin with). Certainly, giving up some power is necessary and good; this is the basis of democratic theory for everone from Locke to Mill. But every new power taken by the authorities must be met with a benefit-cost analysis of the risks involved versus the potential rewards. I think we will mostly agree that letting the state enforce rules about who may drive is generally a good thing; it means that you have to show competence in driving before being set loose to potentially hurt innocent people. I believe (tho' many/.ers will disagree) that mandatory instruction on gun safety should be a prerequisite to purchase a firearm or a hunting license. But this is a subject that reasonable people can disagree on; those against argue that it will lead to an abuse of power in the form of the government collecting our guns.
Problem 2: SLIPPERY SLOPE. This is somewhat overused as a cliche, but it's a valid point. Once we are desensitized to one thing, it becomes that much easier for the next thing to happen. The Third Reich (Godwin's law does not apply; I am not comparing any/.er to a Nazi!) did not go from election to Final Solution overnight; it took a gradual dehumanization of the Jews to get there. But if it's cameras checking our cars today, will we have to have RFID chips in our drivers licenses tomorrow to monitor our movements? Those could help catch speeders -- but at what cost?
The adage that "if you're not doing bad, you have nothing to fear" only works if 1) there is never any abuse of police power, and 2) the criminals all obey the rules.
Unfortunately, these two conditions are never possible.
I thought it was bad that students had to bring their own toilet paper to school. Now we're expecting parents to shell out over a grand for laptops so the school districts can stop buying textbooks?
Typical right-wing ploy. Eviscerate a useful program (like education) of all its funding, claim that it's broken, shift the cost burden, and write up some very friendly contracts for the companies that finance your campaign.
It might come as a shock to some people that not all families can spend $1300 at the drop of a hat for a new laptop. And if that financial aid is anything like financial aid for college, it will cover about $200 of the total cost, and if you make more than $10,000 per year, you don't qualify.
Some of the people jumping out of these white vans will be the parents of students, trying to grab some cash to buy their kids their "requisite school supplies," which used to total about $100 and are now over ten times that.
Verizon put towers (I guess you can call them that) in most of the tunnels a couple of years back. When I lived in DC ages ago (2000), you couldn't use you phone on the Metro... and it was bliss.
Of course, which line was the last to get Verizon's super-swell underground towers? The Green Line, of course, connecting black Washington to poor Washington.
Hopefully, airlines will use something similar to British "quiet coaches" where cell phone use is banned.
...either federalism or WTO rules. One of the WTO's specific clauses regards subterritorial jurisdictions, including provinces, states, regions, cities, etc. Under WTO rules, a subterritorial jurisdiction cannot violate a WTO DRU (dispute resolution unit) ruling; that puts the whole country in violation. Indeed, this matter is well settled in the United States. Several years ago, the US was taken to the WTO for a Massachusetts law aimed at drawing attention to human rights abuses in Myanmar. Massachusetts was forced to drop the law.
These cases are issues of trade, which Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution clearly delineates as being the province of the Congress. So, yes, Congress *can* say, "Okay, online gambling is legit everywhere." But more to the point -- Internet gambling laws are FEDERAL laws anyway, so there are no relevant STATE laws to overturn.
So, in summary, US states can't break WTO regulations, Congress has the power to pass Internet gaming laws, and the states don't have these laws anyway.
Yeah, good thing nobody ever tried to reproduce before cell phones. After all, how could you be parent without one?
For goodness sake, it's not like there is a "no telecom" ban in the building. Pagers seem to be still okay, and... there's probably something on his/her desk called a "landline" (pronounced LAND'lyn) that uses POTS (pronounced POTS) or VoIP (pronounced over'RAT'ed) from which children, spouses, sitters, etc. can call in.
Without cell phones, how would we be able to deal with them? Give me a break!
The first step is admitting you have a problem. Then you can go from there.
With a letter like that, I'm sure you'll get a response real soon. Why don't you go check the post now and not come back inside until your response arrives?
Some lawyers in a faculty room in Oklahoma are having quite a laugh at your expense, I reckon.
The Iowa Communications Network provides an interesting case study in ways that networks, concieved by politicians, can indeed be built without excessive pork attached. Governor Branstead pretty much put himself in charge of it. It has revolutionized educational communications throughout the state and brought theretofore unheard of opportunities to small colleges and high schools.
So, in a word, it *can* be done without the pork and failure. *Will* it is a different issue.
I hate to burst your bubble, but that $11k = $700k thing is off by an order of magnitude. The math should work like this:
11,000* [PPP(nominal)/GDP(nominal)] = $60,000.
PPP is purchasing power parity and nominal GDP is, well, nominal GDP. And your $60k is a bit less if you measure GDP in real terms, since Indian inflation runs around 4.5 percent.
Slashdot Mirror
The cult of standardized testing has made it virtually impossible for teachers to teach this sort of thing, much less teach it well. In most states, the curriculum is decided by a board of education with comments from various people pushing political agendas.
The result is that students are being imbued with memes (intentional oxymoron there) rather than understanding the most important parts of life, citizenship, scholarship, and humanity. For example, the Texas state exam requires that students know who wrote Common Sense. They don't have to know what it was about, when it was written, what "pamphleteering" is, or how it fits in with the American Revolution. All they have to know is that Thomas Paine wrote it.
I know it's fashionable to blame teachers for everything. But you have to remember, most teachers are not in the game for the big salaries or the glamour or the prestige. They're in it because they love to teach. If they were left to their own devices, most government and American history teachers would spend weeks on the Bill of Rights and discuss the implications of each amendment to American life today. But that's not on the test, so they don't because they can't.
You can't straitjacket and manacle a man, throw him into the ocean, and announce that he has to swim. States and the federal government have tied teachers' hands in the name of school improvement so important things that can't be answered by a multiple-choice exam are no longer deemed important.
The cult of testing wants schools to be equally excellent. But instead what we have is a communist (or perhaps Rawlsian) notion of equality: everyone is getting pulled down to the lowest common denomonator.
So don't blame the teachers, at least not completely. Parents, communities, administrators, voters, elected officials, and academia have a lot to answer for in this one.
The OED says that piracy (as in the theft of intellectual property) predates the American revolution. Damn. From the OED:
piracy
The action or practice of a pirate.
1. a. The practice or crime of robbery and depredation on the sea or navigable rivers, etc., or by descent from the sea upon the coast, by persons not holding a commission from an established civilized state; with a and pl., a single act or crime of this kind.
[1419 Charta Hen. V in Rymer F{oe}dera IX. 754/2 Per modum Piratiæ.] a1552 LELAND Itin. III. 33 Partely by Feates of Warre, partely by Pyracie. 1556 Acts Privy Council (1892) V. 358 He complained of a pyracie doone upon him by certain Englishe pirates. 1587 FLEMING Contn. Holinshed III. 1359/1 Fleeing first out of England for notable pirasies, and out of Ireland for trecheries not pardonable. 1630 R. Johnson's Kingd. & Commw. 224 On those coasts he rather exerciseth Pyracie, than Dominion. 1702 LUTTRELL Brief Rel. (1857) V. 198 Condemned by the court of admiralty for 4 several pyracies. 1727 A. HAMILTON New Acc. E. Ind. II. xxxiii. 5 Those Portugueze..betook themselves to Piracy among the Islands, at the Mouth of Ganges. 1807 G. CHALMERS Caledonia I. II. i. 213 The Vikings confined their odious piracies to the Baltic. 1879 FARRAR St. Paul (1883) 241 The total suppression of piracy by Pompey had rendered the Mediterranean safe.
fig. 1897 MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Sp. in Ho. Lords 16 July, It was feared..that under the appearance of educational reform a scheme of what he might call theological piracy would spring up.
b. Physical Geogr. = CAPTURE n. 1b.
1904 CHAMBERLIN & SALISBURY Geol. I. iii. 99 The foregoing case may be called foreign piracy because the valleys of different systems are concerned. Domestic piracy may also take place... Here a tributary to a crooked river may develop, working back until it taps the main at a higher point. 1939 Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. L. 1350 The stream pattern indicates that recent piracies have occurred. 1957 G. E. HUTCHINSON Treat. Limnol. I. i. 114 A wide valley, the main stream of which has been reduced by piracy. 1974 C. H. CRICKMAY Work of River iii. 62 Stream piracy.., of course, is not in every case effected by headwater extension.
2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.
1771 LUCKOMBE Hist. Print. 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition. 1808 Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 He is charged with 'Literary Piracy', and an 'unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'. 1855 BREWSTER Newton I. iv. 71 With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.
Branson knows. Virgin Trains in the UK, while they are slow, smelly, randomly cancelled, etc., have one car (usually coach B or D) reserved as a "Quiet Coach." That means no cell phone use and, interestingly, it seems to give people the moxy that Britons normally lack to tell prats to stop being prats.
I usually ride in the quiet coach and put my phone on vibrate. When I get a call, I see if I want to take it, and if I do, I move to the vestibule. Many others do the same thing. It's quite nice to be able to travel without hearing moronic conversations.
I sincerely doubt, though, that Americans (of which I am one) would be able to handle this. People don't understand that there are others in the world anymore. The last time I asked someone to cease an annoying behavior it was in a bookstore. He wanted me to go outside with him to fight.
A bit of research and theory suggests that, while these patents are a big pain in the US, there might be a case for implementing them in developing countries, in order to reward entrepreneurs who find successful business models and practices. Currently, there are few incentives for discovery of new industries in developing countries, since as soon as they are discovered, everyone rushes in and the original entrepreneur is put out of business.
And rule one of capitalism: without incentives, there's no innovation.
See for example Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, "Economic Development as Self-{Discovery"
Mail-in rebates are just a form of first degree price discrimination, like coupons or loyalty discounts. The way it works is this:
I am a poor young professional in my mid-20s. I buy an MP3 player (say) for $299 with a $30 mail-in rebate. Now, $30 is big money for me, so I am sure to send it my rebate form! Let's say my demographic accounts for half of sales.
Bob is a rich attorney. He buys the same MP3 player, but does not send in the rebate form because he values the time required to do it at more than $30. Let's say Bob accounts for half of sales.
Thus, I pay $269 for my MP3 player and Bob pays $299. Since we're both half of the total purchasers, BB's expected value price for each MP3 player sold is $284. But I pay less than Bob does because I have a different valuation of my time than Bob has on his.
Bob is willing to pay $299 for the gizmo, and I'm willing to pay $269. Mail-in rebates allow stores to effectively create different prices for different consumers. Bob *could* send the form in if he wished, but he does not because he doesn't think $30 is worth it. I do.
End result: I get an MP3 player at the price I will pay, Bob gets one at the price he will pay, and Best Buy sells two MP3 players at the highest prices they can charge Bob and me.
So in the end, everyone walks away happier because of mail-in rebates. Without mail-in rebates, BB would have to charge $284 for every MP3 player, making me and the other tightwads like me (like you, probably) better off.
Actually, I do know "a little bit of history" but there's no sense in flapping about academic credentials.
When FDR signed EE 9066, he was in no way claiming that the executive had the right to detain citizens indefinately without the imprimatur of one of the other branches of government. In EE 9066, we were at war as declared by the US Congress. We are not right now. If Congress wants to declare war (as the Constitution -- remember that? -- says they have to for us to be at war) then things might look different.
Roosevelt also knew that the order would only last as long as hostilities continued in the Pacific. And they were over about 3 1/2 years to the day after he signed the order.
But Bush acknowledges that the war on terror is a *war without end*. What he is claiming is the right of the US President to detain anybody he so chooses for any length of time in any state of war or peace without any intervention by the legislature or the courts. That is a very scare precedent.
There's a major difference between rolling back rights and abridging them. Lincoln also suspended habeas corpus during the War of Northern Aggression. (That's a joke.) But he did not imply that the writ no longer existed as part of the common law tradition.
Bush does not claim to be temporarily abridging rights -- he is trying to rewrite common law and the Constitutional separation of powers.
FDR claimed the right to inter 112,000 people in a clearly defined order. Bush claims the right to deter as many people as he damn well wants for whatever reason he wants.
In WWII, we knew who the detainees were. Now, we're not told.
The Red Cross had access to the internment camps. They have no access to Guantanamo or Navy brigs.
When you're at war with a nation-state enemy, you can detain people who have ties to that nation-state.
But when you're at war against ideas, you have to begin detaining anybody who might have ties to those ideas. And they are never given a chance to prove themselves otherwise.
Bush is claiming a right that no leader in the common law tradition has claimed since Richard I. And that, my friend, is a serious rollback of civil liberties and rights.
And finally, I'd like to pose a question modelled after a similar question asked by Grover Norquist:
You may trust President George W. Bush with the authority to detain without trial.
But you trust President Hillary Clinton with that same authority?
If you like your civil liberties then vote for Kerry. It's a pretty simple equation. Bush has done more to roll back our constitutional rights than any president in history.
You could be on the next plane out to Guantanamo.
-MichiganDan
Hey, wait, where are you HEY YOU CANT I'm just typing its a free country what do you mean its not Stop ^F^F^F^F^F^F
NO CARRIER
Hey, it's no different than people who drive their living rooms around with them because other people have big cars and therefore they have to have bigger cars to be "safe." Soon, everyone in this dorm will be outputting levels of microwave that cause tumors in elephants.
The best hummers are the ones that are free.
Conservatives just believe in a definition of public good and natural monopoly that is less comprehensive than what those of a more liberal bent tend to believe.
You have to rememver that, by world standards, American conservatives aren't conservative -- they're full-fledged right-wingers who believe, in the words of Dick Armey, that "the purpose of government is to marshal an army, build roads, and I'm running out of reasons."
In America, conservatives want to abolish NPR and PBS. In Britain, they want to simply want to reform the system, eliminate the television license fee (probably a good idea, given the high costs of enforcement), and force the Beeb to be more competitive with for-profit entities. There's a world of difference between Tories and Republicans.
Actually, most studies by people who have data to make their points (and therefore actually have informed opinions) show that a minimal regulatory structure is ideal. The key is minimal: completely abolishing regulation yields incompatible standards and a situation much worse than with Soviet-style regulation. Look, for example, at Egypt and Turkey. They've greatly reduced telecom regs in the last few years, but they've not totally quit regulating.
:)
Regulation is especially important in the area of cross-border EM traffic, a major problem in parts of the world. These problems have to be solved by nation-states, at least as long as the nation-state is the dominant form of political organization.
Privitisation is part of this. By 2005, all WTO members will have to shed any remains of state-owned telecom monopolies, which study after study have shown to cause high consumer prices, little innovation, and poor service quality. Multiple competing providers playing from the same ground rules is both theoretically and practically ideal.
It's easy to complain about regulation. It makes a good bumper sticker slogan. But it's not really a thoughtful answer to anything. There will always be regulation, either by the state or by profit-motivated companies. I'd rather the regulator be a neutral arbiter, or at least to neutral as Michael Powell can be.
Economic growth is the only way to raise standards of living in developing countries -- or any country for that matter. The Solow Growth Model explains that this is a function of capital-labor ratio and population growth, but technological growth can impact this as well.
In order to have growth, access to the rest of the world is pretty much a prerequisite, as is some element of a knowledge economy. For these to occur, access to the Internet is essential the way that the telephone was 50 years ago.
So Internet access impacts food, clothing, and shelter. Western countries can give handouts and solve the problem for the time being, or we can help promote Internet access and solve the problem permanently.
Moreover, many people in the US and EU do not have enough food, clothing, or shelter. Does this mean that we should ignore science and technology until everybody does? No rational economist would argue this.
There is a good deal of research that shows that deregulation of telecoms leads to wider access at lower prices. (Examples can be found in Turkey, Argentina, and Ghana.) So the best thing that developing countries can do is liberalize their telecom infrastructure and stimulate investment in telecoms and IT. Does this preclude subsidies? Of course not. We subsidize in the US and it's a good thing. And it's a good thing in developing countries.
Actually, I've used both Napster and iTMS. I've found iTMS to be much more difficult and restrictive than Napster. The Napster interface is clean, and the I like being able to listen to music that I don't want to buy.
I'm sure Napster isn't 3|i+3 enough for some of the k-rad H4X0R5 around here, but for me it's just great. They have a player built by Samsung. It gets pretty good reviews except from the iPod cult-of-Jobs crowd.
The iPod is overpriced, overrated, and has too many problems. Plus, with their white ear buds, they totally reek of poseur. They should come preloaded with Strokes and Hives tracks, a coupon for $10 off a ratty denim jacket, and a free sample of hair wax.
The Economist [economist.com - free] has an article in last week's edition about how phones are replacing cars [economist.com - suggar daddy required] and how this is "a good thing."
Full article text:
"PARKS beautifully", boasts an advertising hoarding for the XDA II, above a glimpse of its sleek silver lines. "Responsive to every turn", declares another poster. Yet these ads, seen recently in London, are selling not a car, but an advanced kind of mobile phone. Maybe that should not be a surprise. Using automotive imagery to sell a handset makes a lot of sense for, in many respects, mobile phones are replacing cars.
Phones are now the dominant technology with which young people, and urban youth in particular, now define themselves. What sort of phone you carry and how you customise it says a great deal about you, just as the choice of car did for a previous generation. In today's congested cities, you can no longer make a statement by pulling up outside a bar in a particular kind of car. Instead, you make a similar statement by displaying your mobile phone, with its carefully chosen ringtone, screen logo and slip cover. Mobile phones, like cars, are fashion items: in both cases, people buy new ones far more often than is actually necessary. Both are social technologies that bring people together; for teenagers, both act as symbols of independence. And cars and phones alike promote freedom and mobility, with unexpected social consequences.
The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.
Less visibly, as the structure of the mobile-phone industry changes, it increasingly resembles that of the car industry (see article). Handset-makers, like carmakers, build some models themselves and outsource the design and manufacturing of others. Specialist firms supply particular sub-assemblies in both industries. Outwardly different products are built on a handful of common underlying "platforms" in both industries, to reduce costs. In each case, branding and design are becoming more important as the underlying technology becomes increasingly interchangeable. In phones, as previously happened in cars, established western companies are facing stiff competition from nimbler Asian firms. Small wonder then that Nokia, the world's largest handset-maker, recruited its design chief, Frank Nuovo, from BMW.
That mobile phones are taking on many of the social functions of cars is to be welcomed. While it is a laudable goal that everyone on earth should someday have a mobile phone, cars' ubiquity produces mixed feelings. They are a horribly inefficient mode of transport--why move a ton of metal around in order to transport a few bags of groceries?--and they cause pollution, in the form of particulates and nasty gases. A chirping handset is a much greener form of self-expression than an old banger. It may irritate but it is safe. In the hands of a drunk driver, a car becomes a deadly weapon. That is not true of a phone (though terrorists recently rigged mobile phones to trigger bombs in Madrid). Despite concern that radiation from phones and masts causes health problems, there is no clear evidence of harm, and similar worries about power lines and computer screens proved unfounded. Less pollution, less traffic, fewer alcohol-related deaths and injuries: the switch from cars to phones cannot happen soon enough.
First, nobody knows that much about how this will actually be done. But the speculation is that the price will be determined partially by auction and partially by other factors. Stay tuned to see what those might be.
Second, every IPO is, effectively, an auction. People buy stocks and flip them, perhaps several times a day (even though initial investors usually have to promise that they won't, a promise that's not well kept). An auction is simply a means of reaching partial equilibrium between supply of a good and its demand. That's what stock markets do: reach the partial equilibrium of supply of a company's ownership and the demand for it at any given price.
Yes, some lucky sods will get to buy Google on the cheap. But when the stock price goes up, which it inevitably will, they will sell and take their money and run. It's at this point that the little guy (save the tokens who get a share at IPO) gets to buy.
What would be a better method, IMHO, is to sell the first 10 million shares, maximum of four per person, to the first x number of people who make it to the ticket counter. It would be great to see investors in their Armani suits camping out in Mountain View for weeks before the IPO like geeks at a new Star Wars movie.
Better yet, they should be required to dress up like Jar Jar.
Anybody can purchase it as soon as it goes public. Of course, the value is going to jump many thousands of percent in the first minute of trading, and if you're trading with a discount broker your odds of getting some before it peaks are very slim. You could put in a market order and get bled dry, or you could put in a limit order at a reasonable price that will never be filled.
The rich are going to get richer on this one, and the rest of us will just have to sit patiently. Because everyone assumes buying Google is a good idea, by the time your typical person has the opportunity to do so, it's not.
IMHO.
There are two problems with this, and they are both problems that require looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, something that is extremely difficult.
/.ers will disagree) that mandatory instruction on gun safety should be a prerequisite to purchase a firearm or a hunting license. But this is a subject that reasonable people can disagree on; those against argue that it will lead to an abuse of power in the form of the government collecting our guns.
/.er to a Nazi!) did not go from election to Final Solution overnight; it took a gradual dehumanization of the Jews to get there. But if it's cameras checking our cars today, will we have to have RFID chips in our drivers licenses tomorrow to monitor our movements? Those could help catch speeders -- but at what cost?
Problem 1: ABUSE. Every example wherein more power has been given to the "authorities" has led to abuse, either personal (as in Bill Clinton's use of FBI files) or institutional (the FBI keeping many of those files to begin with). Certainly, giving up some power is necessary and good; this is the basis of democratic theory for everone from Locke to Mill. But every new power taken by the authorities must be met with a benefit-cost analysis of the risks involved versus the potential rewards. I think we will mostly agree that letting the state enforce rules about who may drive is generally a good thing; it means that you have to show competence in driving before being set loose to potentially hurt innocent people. I believe (tho' many
Problem 2: SLIPPERY SLOPE. This is somewhat overused as a cliche, but it's a valid point. Once we are desensitized to one thing, it becomes that much easier for the next thing to happen. The Third Reich (Godwin's law does not apply; I am not comparing any
The adage that "if you're not doing bad, you have nothing to fear" only works if 1) there is never any abuse of police power, and 2) the criminals all obey the rules.
Unfortunately, these two conditions are never possible.
I thought it was bad that students had to bring their own toilet paper to school. Now we're expecting parents to shell out over a grand for laptops so the school districts can stop buying textbooks?
Typical right-wing ploy. Eviscerate a useful program (like education) of all its funding, claim that it's broken, shift the cost burden, and write up some very friendly contracts for the companies that finance your campaign.
It might come as a shock to some people that not all families can spend $1300 at the drop of a hat for a new laptop. And if that financial aid is anything like financial aid for college, it will cover about $200 of the total cost, and if you make more than $10,000 per year, you don't qualify.
Some of the people jumping out of these white vans will be the parents of students, trying to grab some cash to buy their kids their "requisite school supplies," which used to total about $100 and are now over ten times that.
Verizon put towers (I guess you can call them that) in most of the tunnels a couple of years back. When I lived in DC ages ago (2000), you couldn't use you phone on the Metro... and it was bliss.
Of course, which line was the last to get Verizon's super-swell underground towers? The Green Line, of course, connecting black Washington to poor Washington.
Hopefully, airlines will use something similar to British "quiet coaches" where cell phone use is banned.
Maybe you can spend the week working on spelling.
As you can see from my expensive cell phone, I am not poor.
...either federalism or WTO rules. One of the WTO's specific clauses regards subterritorial jurisdictions, including provinces, states, regions, cities, etc. Under WTO rules, a subterritorial jurisdiction cannot violate a WTO DRU (dispute resolution unit) ruling; that puts the whole country in violation. Indeed, this matter is well settled in the United States. Several years ago, the US was taken to the WTO for a Massachusetts law aimed at drawing attention to human rights abuses in Myanmar. Massachusetts was forced to drop the law.
These cases are issues of trade, which Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution clearly delineates as being the province of the Congress. So, yes, Congress *can* say, "Okay, online gambling is legit everywhere." But more to the point -- Internet gambling laws are FEDERAL laws anyway, so there are no relevant STATE laws to overturn.
So, in summary, US states can't break WTO regulations, Congress has the power to pass Internet gaming laws, and the states don't have these laws anyway.
Yeah, good thing nobody ever tried to reproduce before cell phones. After all, how could you be parent without one?
For goodness sake, it's not like there is a "no telecom" ban in the building. Pagers seem to be still okay, and... there's probably something on his/her desk called a "landline" (pronounced LAND'lyn) that uses POTS (pronounced POTS) or VoIP (pronounced over'RAT'ed) from which children, spouses, sitters, etc. can call in.
Without cell phones, how would we be able to deal with them? Give me a break!
The first step is admitting you have a problem. Then you can go from there.
With a letter like that, I'm sure you'll get a response real soon. Why don't you go check the post now and not come back inside until your response arrives?
Some lawyers in a faculty room in Oklahoma are having quite a laugh at your expense, I reckon.
The Iowa Communications Network provides an interesting case study in ways that networks, concieved by politicians, can indeed be built without excessive pork attached. Governor Branstead pretty much put himself in charge of it. It has revolutionized educational communications throughout the state and brought theretofore unheard of opportunities to small colleges and high schools.
So, in a word, it *can* be done without the pork and failure. *Will* it is a different issue.
See:
I hate to burst your bubble, but that $11k = $700k thing is off by an order of magnitude. The math should work like this:
11,000* [PPP(nominal)/GDP(nominal)] = $60,000.
PPP is purchasing power parity and nominal GDP is, well, nominal GDP. And your $60k is a bit less if you measure GDP in real terms, since Indian inflation runs around 4.5 percent.
$60k is a nice salary, but not $700k.