MS: Hey, Fed, we'd like you to charge a $299 tariff on Ubuntu because clearly Ubuntu is price dumping against Windows. Fed: Well, okay, if that's what you want. Everyone Else: Hey, MS just announced they consider Ubuntu not only a competitor against Windows but they feel it's worth $299. Hey, isn't that about the price of a retail copy of Windows? Hmm...maybe I should try out Ubuntu, given I can download it for free online. I mean, with a penny saved being a penny earned, I can effectively earn $299 and get a valuable replacement for Windows for now and the future.
The only way it'd make sense is if the tariff were actually enforceable in some reasonable effective sense and could be made to apply not only to Ubuntu but nearly every fork of Ubuntu that people would view as equivalent enough to Ubuntu to be that $299 value or for Microsoft to try to be constantly asking for new tariffs on every fork of Ubuntu as it arrives. And all the above ignores the obvious, that the second Ubuntu opens up an "office"--read a PO Box--in the US, then they can almost certainly bypass the tariff just like I'd assume most other corporations loophole around such tactics.
One idea mentioned is something about encryption. I can think of a handful of more generically useful stuff, such as a USB filter. That is, you could use it to plug in various USB devices and be assured that, for example, something that looks like a flash drive can't act like a HID device and start typing in things or otherwise root your computer by making a small, verified USB stack. Also, you could provide a pass-through for encryption of mass storage devices mapping only a section of a mass storage device so if you don't trust a computer, you can just plugin a keyboard to the Pi and restrict what the computer can access without having to ever give it your password. I'm sure there are other ideas, but those are off the top of my head. Unfortunately, they don't really have anything to do with QT.
Well, it's called Dancing Pigs. A user is confronted with a scary looking permissions list with "install" and "cancel". User wants to play this kewl game they were shown. User taps Install. It'll happen often enough to matter.
I think the fundamental issue is the binary choice of "install" or "cancel". Adding on a granulated permission system doesn't in itself solve the problem because all that happens is that developers push users to give them greater and greater permissions, even when it's not really necessary to complete a task. I'd say a partial solution is to offer not only sandboxing of every app but to provide simulated permissions. The latter of which is very hard to do right in some circumstances (for example, if an app wants to phone home) but in the general sense most apps can and should be reasonably lied to because quite honestly few apps really need all permissions all the time yet there are many that will certainly just break if outright blocked from those permissions.
So, the issue then becomes allowing a user to choosing when, how long, and how to give which permissions to an app. Or, more precisely, to provide an API to give a few trusted apps those permissions and let some smart security people develop a framework for the user to do what they really want. That's more or less what NoScript is all about, although it's rather kludgy at times as it expects a lot out of the user. But, I can certainly see people--and especially mobile phone carriers--paying a few companies to provide that sort of review and construction. Certainly, I think that's the only way to reasonably get enough coverage, as while I'd trust an open/free review/construction community to cover a lot of the popular, big, etc apps, I'm pretty sure it'd take money to convince someone to go through the mind numbing working of reviewing, processing, and bypassing every last app that tries to be overly clever. I just sort of wonder if the above violates the DMCA some how.
Thanks for the effort on the counting and all. That's what I get for skimming over the latest buzzword name for a new product and remembering it wrong then further skimming over the same name ever since.:/
It's stupid to say that Microsoft cannot have a rendering engine on their OS that is required to be there by other parts of the OS.
Last I checked, Meteo is supposed to be a HTML5 + Javascript based UI while IE is a lot more than that. What if I genuinely have no interest in allowing Meteo from connecting to the internet in any way? If Meteo is just latching into IE's rendering engine, how much real faith do I have that some time in the future some well crafted Meteo UI won't exploit one or more random non-HTML5/Javascript bugs? More generally, if Meteo used a well defined HTML5 + javascript engine, quite possible the same one IE uses, wouldn't that mean it'd be possible to both (1) port Meteo apps to other platforms rather easily using another engine and (2) allow people to replace that engine with a Gecko or Webkit based engine (since each HTML5 engine has their own advantages and disadvantages)?
I am more than welcome, I'm sure (hey look! a Bingy firefox!), to download my own browser of choice and use it. It just won't be used for the parts of the OS that require their own rendering engine. Which makes sense; how can MS make sure that Firefox would render Metro style UI apps correctly? They HAVE to provide something to render. The fact that it's the same engine as renders webpages is, in my opinion, reusing something they already had developed. Makes sense to me.
There's no guarantee that a well-defined Meteo style UI app will render properly in Meteo. The only way to be sure is to test. If people were to start using a Gecko based back-end for Meteo, developers would just have to test for it too. The issue really isn't why MS chose to use IE's HTML5 engine. The point is that it looks either sloppy to only support IE's HTML5 engine or an intentional act of tie-in. I'd imagine it's more the former without enough consideration of technology outside of MS and any real interest in working with other software. Mozilla has the same issue. Having said that, Mozilla isn't pre-installed on most computers so most people don't have to suffer that lack of consideration; instead people have to go out of their way to use Firefox and/or go out of their way to not use Windows/IE.
If they actually forced web browsing use it and didn't let you install Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc.... that'd be different.
No. They'd rather just force OEMs to not install Firefox, Safari, etc. It's too much hassle to go after the end-users. It's a lot easier to go after OEMs and rely upon the inertia of end-users to not move to use whatever you push on them. Having said that, you can't make utter crap or people do eventually start moving; and a flashy marketing campaign from the competition can do wonders, sometimes. Personally, I'm more annoyed with how Microsoft has pushed IE to be such a big target and did such a shitty job protecting IE users from crap. Can you imagine how Meteo might end up turning out?
I like hearing about how it is evil for companies to "hoard wealth" and then hearing from the same group how irresponsible companies are that didn't when they suffer an economic fall and don't have the reserves to survive without bailouts.
Perhaps that's because private, small companies are the only ones capable of actually hoarding the amount of wealth necessary to survive an economic fall? The larger ones are generally forced by stockholders to reinvest that wealth into stock. And since the same economic fall that causes the large company's stock to tank also causes all those investments to tank as well, then at least on paper large companies can quickly become undercapitalized. Worse, a bad stock market discourages the sort of recapitalization that's necessary for the company to keep going. Finally, large companies are large, clear places where short-term, government investment can be used to gloss over a short-term economic downturn or recession. Hence, small companies have to be wise and large companies get to ride on the coat tails of their own size.
I save money wherever I can in case something happens such as job loss or other unforeseen hardships. My household includes my wife (who has MS and whose treatments cost a small fortune) and a 12 year old daughter and our household income nets less than 50,000 but I manage not to "easily" spend all my money.
The real question is, what percentage of that money is spent (and not simply, say, reinvested into stocks, bonds, a savings account, etc) vs a person making $1 million/year. And what of the person that makes net than 20,000 a years? I'm pretty certain that increasing the salary of a person from net 20,000 to 30,000 per year would increase their spending (by percentage and overall) a good bit more than a person net 1,000,000 to 1,010,000 per year. I also assume the inverse is true, that cutting net from 20,000 to 15,000 per year would decrease their spending (by percentage and overall) a good bit more than a person net 1,000,000 to 995,000. Having said that, I agree with the general point that people could save more if they wanted to. But the point at hand is what one can reasonable expect without much consideration of personality of people of an income bracket based upon salary.
As far as those who want to argue that "job creators" in the form the of the wealthy wouldn't create jobs if their personal income were taxed higher, the simple solution would be to offer tax breaks for the demonstrable creation of jobs. This mainly would affect small companies where only a handful of people actually own the companies in question, as they could say, "I didn't take $XX salary because instead I reinvested $XX in the company for salaries for workers" with the ability to produce those figures from the payroll books...
Yes, and that's precisely the reason that a lot of small businesses incorporate, so it's made patently clear for tax purposes where the money is going. And since reinvesting in the company reduces the profit for a company, it has lower taxes so long as it keeps reinvesting in itself. Having said that, salaries for workers are taxed at another level (payroll taxes). But, then, it all really comes down to whether the small company is interested in avoiding taxes for the sake of avoiding taxes, best utilizing their money for the growth of the business, or simply dolling out money to the company's owner(s). At the point at which a person is making a gross $1 million/year and there's actual discussion about how "unfair" it is to be taxed "so much", it makes me thing the person is either upset with the dollar figure on their pay stub or they have the mindset that their workers are unproductive and should be taxed to the point of slaver, as they don't deserve whatever they're paid. In short, it's a lack of consideration of their position relative to others or even simply relative to what their salary affords them.
I'd call it news. For years the Microsoft corporate culture has been shifting from a backwards compatibility-centric view of software towards a dropping support within a few versions in the name of security, removing cruft, etc. If Microsoft is willing to nearly drop x86 cold turkey in one release and in effect rather fully rebrand the Windows name*, it makes one wonder if the next step is dumping most of the Win32 API in a version or two as well. Dropping DOS took longer. Dropping Win16 took longer. To an extent, it's a win because it means a push for.NET and security. Still, it seems like a great way to kill a company.
*Yes, I know there have been versions of Windows that have supported other architectures, but they weren't sold as mainstream buzzworthy expectations (selling them towards high-end customers on bleeding edge (at the time), different architecture processors doesn't count; after all, they dropped everything but x86 pretty quickly and only migrated to x86_64 because it's a near superset of x86). It sounds like Microsoft is betting on tablets and tablets run ARM because x86 processors use way too much power. And yes, I know that Microsoft has been slapping "Windows" on all sorts of products that have nothing really to do with what one would consider Windows. But this is actually as much "Windows" as there is such a concept. It's not simply that they're porting the Windows API to another architecture or pushing behind a new architecture seriously. Windows is Microsoft in many ways, today. Radically changing what Windows is may be enough to really hurt Microsoft.
Don't be silly. The second the poor are dead, the super-rich will be calling for the deaths for the rich since obviously a billionaire is a thousand times richer than a millionaire. You can't eliminate the poor through death. You can only change who you call poor.
The reason is that the diamond planet is not being used to advance a political objective.
So, what you're saying is, if tomorrow it was through research by scientists discovered that an asteroid was heading towards Earth that would cause global ecological/extinction level damage, that the result of that wouldn't be a "political objective" that would be advanced by that research? Ie, don't you think it's a rather natural thing that as a consequence of evidence that there might be a desire by many, not necessarily the scientists themselves, to use that evidence to advance an agenda for the benefit of themselves and others? Or are you under some belief that the agenda came first and the evidence is all fabricated? I don't think there's credible evidence for the latter.
Climate science is. It's always unfortunate to see science politicized, but global warming mongers are abusing science to create an atmosphere of urgency in order to pass legislation to satisfy a leftist agenda.
Well, if it's "a leftist agenda" not to see myself and milllions of people suffer, then I guess I support a leftist agenda. But, then, I'm a rather sane person who doesn't want that suffering. Oh, right, all agendas are bad unless they're a rightist agenda and for economic development, people be damned.
Linux kernel is very mature at this point, but some basic functionalities like HAL (hardware abstraction layer) are not present and not even planned.
Perhaps you should read this recent article on LWN about Avoiding the OS abstraction trap. The core point to consider that a HAL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Linux's development doesn't need nor likely should it have a HAL like other closed OSs precisely because it doesn't deal with binary drivers. Instead, code is frequently refractored, reorganized, etc and the main issue is whether the user space ABI stays intact. All pushing a HAL would do is further constrain the kernel to maintaining another set user space ABI, which would likely end up being suboptimal since no HAL is perfect, and devote developer time to something that instead of forming organically as hardware/code demands would wall the expectations and the ability to provide functionality. Such might be great for a platform that's expected to be deployed, be infrequently changed, and for which driver development is a one-off affair, but that's pretty much the antithesis of the Linux kernel.
Linus is perhaps happy with the current 3.x state of Linux, but lots of people demand more..
I don't think Linus is "happy with the current 3.x state of Linux", but I wouldn't be surprised if he's happy with the development process in place that he's a part of that can change the 3.x line towards something better. The Linux kernel is constantly changing. There's unlikely to ever be a state, ie a one point snapshot, where the Linux kernel will ever make most people happy because there's too many people with too many diverse goals and they all desire to change the Linux kernel from what is to what it could be. That's the great thing about an open development model, where people can make that happen. And if nothing else, they can make their own fork of Linux if the Linus tree doesn't make them happy enough.
I recently ventured to ReactOS website and have seen lots of activity in the SVN. This is maybe thanks to Google Summer of Code 2011 ReactOS involvement, lots of commits on daily basis in the trunk now, the project seams to be getting in motion again.
While that's great news for ReactOS, and with no offense to the ReactOS developers, but if I did Linux kernel development, I wouldn't be jumping on board ReactOS development. ReactOS is a noble project and I'm sure in the future I'll get a lot of use out of it, but I view ReactOS as a stopgap project. That is, it's something like wine, which seems more than anything as a way to run the occasional Windows program and to allow those who are using Windows exclusively now to have a path to switching to using Linux (or OpenBSD or whatever) rather exclusively to run the occasional Windows program.
I say this primarily because Windows is a massive beast of an OS, produced through decades of development. Trying to re-implement it with incomplete documentation, reverse engineering, etc is a task like to take many times as long and as such I can even optimistically only see ReactOS as an open Windows 2000 or Windows XP clone for the 2020s or 2030s. Having more developers might speed up the process a bit, but assuming there's already a critical mass of developers to move development forward, I think the mythic man hour and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly, especially when it's hard to delegate a lot of the work on things when the things themselves are most a mass of "stuff we don't have documentation for but needs implemented anyways".
Now, if one has a personal interest in having a complete open Windows clone, then please join ReactOS development. I'm certain they'd appreciate the help, even if it doesn't speed up the completing time very much. I certainly commend anyone who works to better an open project that will give advantage to oneself and others. But, I wouldn't seriously consider
The whole INDUSTRY is anti-competitive and morally wrong, from the basic locking down of the hardware, to having to have all published works go through Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo in the first place.
The thing is, that's just a general side effect of a free market and contracts. Specifically, the reason the industry has degenerated into three main companies is precisely because of issues like the inherently obfuscation of complex technology and contracts that further enforce that upon licensed developers who would wish to enlighten unlicensed developers, the economy of scale issues to make a profit on open hardware modeled on crippled closed hardware even if there were no DMCA, and the inability for other players to get a real foothold precisely because many developers are so invested, financially, into reaching a large audience they're unwilling to do much of anything to court small time open players until those small time open players become big through many years of being very lucky at getting hit games on their open platform. And once that point is reached, someone can just clone the platform and that small time player may go out of business. I mean, look at the PC industry and what happened to of all companies IBM; the PC might have won nearly all the battles, but it seems IBM basically lost the war.
If they sell the hardware at a loss that's their problem. Having a monopoly built on top of that should be illegal,
I disagree. I'm strongly tempted to say I don't think they should be allowed to sell their hardware at a loss, period; except in rare circumstances, like getting rid of obsolete stock, such an action is indicative of anti-competitive dumping in a market. Further, AFAIK Nintendo doesn't as a general point ever sell a console at a loss (which a few rare exceptions when Yen/Dollar fluctuations might have caused that to happen) yet Nintendo, even as far back as the NES was pulling the anti-competitive exclusivity crap with Sunsoft and Batman.
legitimate start-up developers are being locked out or forced to pay fees in order to have their games released
The thing is, I'm fairly certain the licensing fees are the least of their problems. The real issue is that a lot of gamers seem to expect $1+ million production games. It's the same issue with movies, really. Video cameras are incredibly cheap now, yet it's not like there has been a flood of movies on the market--even if movie theaters wouldn't show them, the internet would clearly be a place for them; that's because without the expected production value, most people view "indie" films as crap which really limits the non-mainstream movie market to "indie" films that cost a lot or the rare good directed/edited "indie" film that was done on the cheap. Instead, we've see a flood of short, free youtube clips and a flood of short, free flash games.
and have their potential market share and exposure greatly marginalized if they can get a foothold at all (Microsoft have their Indie market albeit with crippled Managed code, Sony have nothing,)
Unfortunately, that's life. It's hard having an advertisement reach millions of potential customers so that thousands will buy your high quality game for $1-$5*, just so you can earn enough to prove yourself to MS or Nintendo or whoever so you can make $50* games and be considered a "real" developer. I don't really blame MS or Sony or Nintendo for that.
Somebody needs to drag them through the courts over this. It's ironic that many of the big players today started of by producing unlicensed software on consoles. Remember EA, Codemasters and unlicensed Sega carts?
It makes perfect sense. Like above, they started out small until they proved themselves, then they joined the ranks of "real" developers and now are forced into a situation where they have to make big-selling titles to break e
Well, let's see. Gnu Guile is a Scheme interpreter. Scheme is a functional language--although most implementations, and I assume Guile is one of them, aren't pure functional--which implies a lot of nice features, possibly including heavily parallelism, ready portability and modifiability of functions while the program/scrip is running, and a design that lends itself to support of garbage collection and protection from all sorts of security issues. C lacks about every part of that in exchange for more raw access and a design that's more vulnerable to potential bugs/abuse by others--admittedly a large part of that is an implementation detail, but it's a very consistent implementation detail.
As for the whole point of implementing languages in other languages, that's an inherent part of most any language you're likely to see. It's just that Lisp/Scheme (and almost certainly a few other languages) can do it more readily as an inherent part of the language. If there's one lesson I was actually taught is that sometimes the best choice in designing something is to make a sublanguage specific for a task instead of hand-coding everything down. Since the whole point of GNU Guile was to be that generic sublanguage for most such tasks, it'd make sense they'd further want GNU Guile to further support the development of a subsublanguage when GNU Guile was just too generic for some tasks. In essense, if a Lua-like language was better for some things, just make a small Lua-like macro overlay and write in the Lua-like language. That's probably a lot better than trying to hack Lua, Python, or whatever into all the GNU-specific things one needs. Of course, that assumes enough knowledge about Lisp/Scheme to whip up the few macros needed, and I think that's the real crux of the issue.
Yep, that's exactly why DS sales started tanking the second the iPhone and Android phones became big. Oh, right, they didn't. Perhaps the 3DS's 3D just sucks* and people are buying DSs/iPhones instead? Meanwhile, Nintendo is doing the whole cheaper downloadable games thing on the 3DS with DSiWare and Virtual Console games, although at closer to five times the price. Meanwhile, the "hardcore" gamers can still buy their $50, 50 hour games. Overall, I just don't see how price has to do with it though except the 3DS being priced up front and the iPhone's prices being spread over two years, although the iPhone ends up being a good bit more. The only real thing I could really see Nintendo doing to offset this would be a rent-to-own setup, but that seems pretty ridiculous given there being no obvious monthly setup for pricing.
*By this, I mean it's a gimmick. The DS only became a hit because there was no good strong competitor (the PSP had a bad reputation on load time/battery life and the DS leveraged years of GBA games). The Wii became a hit in part because it well targeted at the casual game (which the iPhone, if it were really ubiquitous, could do as well) and party because its competitors failed (the PS3 cost too much and the XBox 360 was too devote to hardcore gamers). I can certainly see the Wii's successor falling flat on its face for being gimmicky as well, much the same way the Dreamcast did. Yes, there might be a collection of games or uses for all those features like two screens, one a touch screen, or motion detection or tiny separate screens for multiplayer games, but it's not usually enough on its own to really drive sales.
That's in the same sort of logic of trying to rate a teen's credit worthiness when they're given blank checks by their wealthy parents. Common sense is that if the teen is overly greedy, their wealthy parents will close out the bank account as a lesson. Hence, the teen's credit worthiness boils down to a consideration of how trustworthy the teen is. Now, given the whole mortgage back securities were being done by people in the financial industry with a very vested interest in making the greediest, possibly questionably (say subprime) loans they can, S&P should have downgraded mortgage backed securities 5+ years ago when the portfolio of such securities started switching to more and more subprime loans. In short, the warning signs were there if S&P looked. So, perhaps I can see that they've learned from their mistake. Odds are good, though, it's just a different department who has more competent people at its head.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but at current spending levels, cutting $4T over 10 years still has us running a deficit.
Yes, and we've been running a deficit for decades. The real issue is that the national debt as a percentage of GDP is going up. There's multiple reasons for that including the Bush era tax cuts, the recession decreasing tax revenue, and the various stimulus/war spending on top of the already deficit spending that's been the standard for decades. As far as a way out goes, the simplest solution is to raise taxes (along with ending the Bush era tax cuts) and cut stimulus/war and regular spending in a few years to below average rates so the GDP has a chance to catch up. None of that need mean not running a deficit, just a smaller one than usual.
Considering that this deal was politically the best we could do, it's easy to agree with S&P's pessimistic view of our political budget woes.
I can see being pessimistic and believing at the moment that it's politically the best we can do. Some Republicans are dead-set on some fixated ideology to fix the problems in the US, ignoring that there is no perfect solution to the problems the country faces. Austerity measures alone in a recession can lead to a depression; the Great Depression is a pretty good example of that. Market corrections are pretty well inevitable given human nature and greed. Stimulant spending (or tax cuts) might not be enough of a boost to readily correct a massive market correction that effects multiple large industries. Tax decreases or increases might be appropriate at times, but such requires some actual analysis of the situation instead of using Macroeconomic 101 rules of thumb without any actual thought. All the above doesn't really fit into a sound bite and there's plenty of people unwilling to listen to experts given that some experts are so heavily biased, like the current DoD head begging to not have his funding reduced, it's hard to really know who to trust. And when actual figures are produced, trying to analyze them at a personal level requires near a college graduate level of knowledge on economics.
Knowing all of the above, though, there's not a single country that's well situated to fully comprehend all of the above and act responsibly, not even dicatorships--because it's hardly like one's appointed as leader because they're the most qualified in all matters. So, unless S&P is trying to, as others have suggested, send a political message to tell the US government to get its act together, I don't see the actual rational of S&P. And as far as that goes, I don't how S&Ps "message" really translates into anything that would effectively lead to the US government improving in that regard. After all, making it more difficult to borrow just means we'll have larger deficits but it does nothing to resolve the people who believe that military/entitlements/whatever can't be cut nor does it make those that believe tax increases are bad, to any degree upon anyone, are suddenly some sort of partial solution; I mean, some people really think the US government should operate on the sort of budget one could obtain from something like bake sales. Given the revenue of one the largest companies in the world, Walmart with $400 billion a year, as a comparison to the budget of the US, such a contraction would have pretty devastating short-term effects, and I don't see the long-term effects to be too good either.
Why? Do you know of any source that indicates that later.NET Frameworks have changed in this respect? I did bother to do some further searches on NGen on MSDN and all I got were the various optimization improvements on NGen's code general or a general rehash of why NGen should be used by people. All of that to me would indicate that you have to go out of your way to select NGen and to have native code generated and cached on disk. That makes a lot of sense in some ways, since there's situations in which a JIT solution may actually be faster--for example, it sounds like there's a circumstance where JIT can be 6x faster than NGen for Static Field Fetch, whatever that is, although with ASP.NET possibly making NGen 2x faster than JIT. Of course, overall program performance is based on what are the bottlenecks, most commonly used code, etc, so it's a non-trivial point.
The real question to me is how much NGen is hamstrung into sub-optimal situations because it has to be flexible enough to deal with JIT code generation or the other quirks of.NET vs if the code was linked against Win32 dlls. I don't know enough about Win32 to really have a clue. But my guess would be that Win32 programs don't have the same level of instructions overhead for a lot of the shared library interactions. Having said that, I can see a lot of special situations where JITing would easily win out because it can detect ways to better optimize frequently run loops which would more than compensate for any other more general kludginess.
Well, according to here, the JIT compiler is just a JIT compiler with the persistence at most to the life of a process. If you want something more persistent, you can use NGen which can store native code in the NGen cache. Having said that, NGen code seems to have some caveats that make it worse than native code (either less ability to share pages between processes or a potentially longer startup time). So, yes, there's an option for native code, but it doesn't sound like a default except for the.NET framework itself.
The point is that we're using way too much energy and food and pollute our own habitat and nobody cares.
Oh well. Evolution will find a way after we're gone:)
Reminds me of the whole default crisis with the US government. The fact that people are arguing over whether defaulting is good or bad *only* from the short-term base pragmatic effect of defaulting instead of the more idealistic "you should keep your promises" because that ideology would never have lead you to make promises to buy things then later be actually debating whether to borrow the money to buy those things; the whole point of the promise to buy things is a budget issue and that's the point where any issues about overspending should have been resolved.
But, nah, let's just look at the short-term and figure out how to punt the problem down the road by a few months/years. But yea, just let nature takes it course, and we'll all suffer as a species because too many of us were too arrogant.:/
IMHO, it's not even remotely reasonable to start making political decisions and implementing laws or policies based on climate information, if that information isn't freely available.
Out of curiosity, would you mind clarifying what "that information" is? I ask because I'm uncertain of what you expect as far as climate information goes. I also ask because I'm curious if you have the same standard for all sorts of other topics of similar scope. For example, I don't think I've seen much discussion about the raw data about the health effects of mercury, lead, etc, yet I don't really see anyone arguing that we should halt all consideration of pollution laws precisely for that reason; I have seen people argue over cost, constitutionality, etc reasons, though.
Just because someone sold the numbers to someone else doesn't mean it's automatically part of a protected class of information the general public shouldn't be allowed to see.
While I would certainly agree the information shouldn't fall automatically into a protected class of information the general public shouldn't be allowed to see--and further, I'd say it shouldn't be in a protected class of information the general public shouldn't be allowed to see--, that doesn't translate into the information being readily available to everyone. Consider, for example, how difficult is to track down how money is borrowed, collected, or spent in the government as a general point and you'd recognize that often times you have to do a good bit of leg work if you're interested. I wouldn't say that's a good thing, but it's just a natural course of things when there's no mandate to publicly divulge information.
It only makes sense that the most interested parties would be the ones to foot the bill to get the initial information collected up and bundled for their use -- but this content can't be treated like a copyrighted work you can't redistribute without permission!
Who are "the most interested parties", though? It'd seem the whole world is "the most interested parties" given the potential scope of climate change, but I don't think you're arguing that we're all responsible for footing the bill to collect the information and bundle it for our own use.
This is good news (except for Poland, who for SOME reason is holding out on releasing their numbers).
At this point, it almost looks as if Sony's security team isn't just incompetent. That's pretty obvious.... Its like having theft insurance on a car, then leaving that car unlocked in a bad neighborhood. After removing the locks. Then putting a sign on it that says "plz dont steal." Then wanting the insurance money to cover the car after it gets stolen. Its simply not going to happen, at least if the court is anywhere near competent (or unless there is some weird clause in the contract).
The issue is, if you go to an insurance company and explain you're going to leave your car unlocked in a bad neighborhood, locks removed, with a sign that says "plz dont steal" and they agree to cover you, then they should pay out. The general issue is likely that there's standard boilerplate legalism in the contract which would negate any sort of verbal agreement of coverage of such a scenario, so you'd have to rely upon a "weird clause in the contract" to receive any sort of coverage. In other words, your little analogy either makes the insurance company sound incompetent on its own right for offering the insurance or instigating willful fraud by promising something they'd expect a court to inherently dismiss. I'd imagine the real scenario isn't like that at all.
There's an odd little paradox I've thought about. Why is it that California, a bastion of environmentalism, large bulging government, and tons of regulation, has such a relatively robust economy compared to most other US states? Cheap labor? No, there's lots of migrant workers in the US. Perhaps it's ready access to electricity and oil? No, California is pretty notorious for having higher electricity and gas prices.
Maybe, then, it has something to do with recycling. Consider Japan which has virtually no natural resources to rely upon, including oil, which also has a robust economy and electricity availability troubles. To that end, recycling is a major economic consideration precisely because recycling is less energy intensive, especially for things like aluminum production. And as much as it has been noted that energy efficient standards, which California strongly pushes, can have the paradoxical effect of increasing energy consumption, it also tends to translates into completing more effective work--imagine the person who can complete one task with a gallon of gas in a 30MPG car vs the person who completes two tasks with one and a half gallons of gas in a 50MPG car.
Of course, in Japan recycling is a government pushed civic duty. And in California, it's a socially pushed norm invoked by environmentalist. Meanwhile, in a large part of the US, recycling is at best haphazardly followed and usually only the more economically advantageous parts, like aluminum can collection.
With the mindset of individualism and even anti-environmentalism and anti-government sentiment, I can certainly see why if mass recycling is a part of the short-term energy solution in the US there's been relatively little push by Democrats for a recycling program, even if they could sell it on the idea of patriotism. But, top down, government funded renewable energy platforms aren't a real solution either, if nothing else because there isn't a joint, bi-partisan support for such projects so their effectiveness is at best short-term and at worst they're not effective at all. Meanwhile, pushing for more recycling is virtually free in comparison. It's ironic to me that conservatives aren't pushing for conserving oil, conserving energy, or any part of recycling as a part of saving money, by increasing the supply of paper, plastic, aluminum, etc to decrease the price. But, then, Republicans are hardly conservative; they're the "you don't have to make sacrifices or put any effort into anything to solve problems--even though inherently we're for cutting government programs on the basis that private/charitable/social organizations will take over--and oh, by the way, we can always cut your taxes" party.
In related news, strong evidence shows that drunkards spend a good bit of money on alcohol, even when many free drinks are made available to them. Meanwhile, the average person's access to a few free drinks seems not to push nor dissuade them from the purchase of a glass of wine from time to time.
It's all infonography, and it flows into a pit that cannot be filled. Meanwhile, most normal people have some sort of life (or are at least obsessed with something else) and wouldn't bother pirated.
Military IS the government's job. Nice strawman attempt, though.
Um, you do realize I said that very thing, right? No, the strawman is talking about how financially efficient is for the government to do something relating to something being "the government's job". If that were the deciding factor, then by the logic of the original article, the military should be private.
I simply linked to an article demonstrating how private citizens CAN (in certain circumstances, such as the one to which this story pertains) find and implement a cheaper and more effective solution than what a government study will provide. It's not a controversial statement or political jab.
Except that's not what happened. The government intervened in the form of forcing more competition, not simply by throwing money at a problem or relying on the free market to magically take care of things. Financially speaking, it's proof that it is the government's job and a proper government study has to actually address what the market inefficiencies are and how the government can intervene properly, even if that means making and enforcing a few laws. Clearly it's not enough to simply go through lowest bidding contracts when only two or three companies are big enough to realistically create the demanded product in the required quantities. Nor are cheap loans some magic bullet. But nothing in the article suggests that people alone, without government involvement, would have came to their current situation. Then again, broadband is likely a special case.
But, I now have two sarcastic responses attempting to circle the wagons and protect the concept of mother-provider-government. Amazing.
Whatever works for you. But, then, I like being attacked when my sarcasm is missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, imagine this:
MS: Hey, Fed, we'd like you to charge a $299 tariff on Ubuntu because clearly Ubuntu is price dumping against Windows.
Fed: Well, okay, if that's what you want.
Everyone Else: Hey, MS just announced they consider Ubuntu not only a competitor against Windows but they feel it's worth $299. Hey, isn't that about the price of a retail copy of Windows? Hmm...maybe I should try out Ubuntu, given I can download it for free online. I mean, with a penny saved being a penny earned, I can effectively earn $299 and get a valuable replacement for Windows for now and the future.
The only way it'd make sense is if the tariff were actually enforceable in some reasonable effective sense and could be made to apply not only to Ubuntu but nearly every fork of Ubuntu that people would view as equivalent enough to Ubuntu to be that $299 value or for Microsoft to try to be constantly asking for new tariffs on every fork of Ubuntu as it arrives. And all the above ignores the obvious, that the second Ubuntu opens up an "office"--read a PO Box--in the US, then they can almost certainly bypass the tariff just like I'd assume most other corporations loophole around such tactics.
One idea mentioned is something about encryption. I can think of a handful of more generically useful stuff, such as a USB filter. That is, you could use it to plug in various USB devices and be assured that, for example, something that looks like a flash drive can't act like a HID device and start typing in things or otherwise root your computer by making a small, verified USB stack. Also, you could provide a pass-through for encryption of mass storage devices mapping only a section of a mass storage device so if you don't trust a computer, you can just plugin a keyboard to the Pi and restrict what the computer can access without having to ever give it your password. I'm sure there are other ideas, but those are off the top of my head. Unfortunately, they don't really have anything to do with QT.
I think the fundamental issue is the binary choice of "install" or "cancel". Adding on a granulated permission system doesn't in itself solve the problem because all that happens is that developers push users to give them greater and greater permissions, even when it's not really necessary to complete a task. I'd say a partial solution is to offer not only sandboxing of every app but to provide simulated permissions. The latter of which is very hard to do right in some circumstances (for example, if an app wants to phone home) but in the general sense most apps can and should be reasonably lied to because quite honestly few apps really need all permissions all the time yet there are many that will certainly just break if outright blocked from those permissions.
So, the issue then becomes allowing a user to choosing when, how long, and how to give which permissions to an app. Or, more precisely, to provide an API to give a few trusted apps those permissions and let some smart security people develop a framework for the user to do what they really want. That's more or less what NoScript is all about, although it's rather kludgy at times as it expects a lot out of the user. But, I can certainly see people--and especially mobile phone carriers--paying a few companies to provide that sort of review and construction. Certainly, I think that's the only way to reasonably get enough coverage, as while I'd trust an open/free review/construction community to cover a lot of the popular, big, etc apps, I'm pretty sure it'd take money to convince someone to go through the mind numbing working of reviewing, processing, and bypassing every last app that tries to be overly clever. I just sort of wonder if the above violates the DMCA some how.
Thanks for the effort on the counting and all. That's what I get for skimming over the latest buzzword name for a new product and remembering it wrong then further skimming over the same name ever since. :/
Last I checked, Meteo is supposed to be a HTML5 + Javascript based UI while IE is a lot more than that. What if I genuinely have no interest in allowing Meteo from connecting to the internet in any way? If Meteo is just latching into IE's rendering engine, how much real faith do I have that some time in the future some well crafted Meteo UI won't exploit one or more random non-HTML5/Javascript bugs? More generally, if Meteo used a well defined HTML5 + javascript engine, quite possible the same one IE uses, wouldn't that mean it'd be possible to both (1) port Meteo apps to other platforms rather easily using another engine and (2) allow people to replace that engine with a Gecko or Webkit based engine (since each HTML5 engine has their own advantages and disadvantages)?
There's no guarantee that a well-defined Meteo style UI app will render properly in Meteo. The only way to be sure is to test. If people were to start using a Gecko based back-end for Meteo, developers would just have to test for it too. The issue really isn't why MS chose to use IE's HTML5 engine. The point is that it looks either sloppy to only support IE's HTML5 engine or an intentional act of tie-in. I'd imagine it's more the former without enough consideration of technology outside of MS and any real interest in working with other software. Mozilla has the same issue. Having said that, Mozilla isn't pre-installed on most computers so most people don't have to suffer that lack of consideration; instead people have to go out of their way to use Firefox and/or go out of their way to not use Windows/IE.
No. They'd rather just force OEMs to not install Firefox, Safari, etc. It's too much hassle to go after the end-users. It's a lot easier to go after OEMs and rely upon the inertia of end-users to not move to use whatever you push on them. Having said that, you can't make utter crap or people do eventually start moving; and a flashy marketing campaign from the competition can do wonders, sometimes. Personally, I'm more annoyed with how Microsoft has pushed IE to be such a big target and did such a shitty job protecting IE users from crap. Can you imagine how Meteo might end up turning out?
Perhaps that's because private, small companies are the only ones capable of actually hoarding the amount of wealth necessary to survive an economic fall? The larger ones are generally forced by stockholders to reinvest that wealth into stock. And since the same economic fall that causes the large company's stock to tank also causes all those investments to tank as well, then at least on paper large companies can quickly become undercapitalized. Worse, a bad stock market discourages the sort of recapitalization that's necessary for the company to keep going. Finally, large companies are large, clear places where short-term, government investment can be used to gloss over a short-term economic downturn or recession. Hence, small companies have to be wise and large companies get to ride on the coat tails of their own size.
The real question is, what percentage of that money is spent (and not simply, say, reinvested into stocks, bonds, a savings account, etc) vs a person making $1 million/year. And what of the person that makes net than 20,000 a years? I'm pretty certain that increasing the salary of a person from net 20,000 to 30,000 per year would increase their spending (by percentage and overall) a good bit more than a person net 1,000,000 to 1,010,000 per year. I also assume the inverse is true, that cutting net from 20,000 to 15,000 per year would decrease their spending (by percentage and overall) a good bit more than a person net 1,000,000 to 995,000. Having said that, I agree with the general point that people could save more if they wanted to. But the point at hand is what one can reasonable expect without much consideration of personality of people of an income bracket based upon salary.
So, what do you call this bell curve? The Tax Fraud Curve? How does it interact with the Laffer Curve? :)
Yes, and that's precisely the reason that a lot of small businesses incorporate, so it's made patently clear for tax purposes where the money is going. And since reinvesting in the company reduces the profit for a company, it has lower taxes so long as it keeps reinvesting in itself. Having said that, salaries for workers are taxed at another level (payroll taxes). But, then, it all really comes down to whether the small company is interested in avoiding taxes for the sake of avoiding taxes, best utilizing their money for the growth of the business, or simply dolling out money to the company's owner(s). At the point at which a person is making a gross $1 million/year and there's actual discussion about how "unfair" it is to be taxed "so much", it makes me thing the person is either upset with the dollar figure on their pay stub or they have the mindset that their workers are unproductive and should be taxed to the point of slaver, as they don't deserve whatever they're paid. In short, it's a lack of consideration of their position relative to others or even simply relative to what their salary affords them.
I'd call it news. For years the Microsoft corporate culture has been shifting from a backwards compatibility-centric view of software towards a dropping support within a few versions in the name of security, removing cruft, etc. If Microsoft is willing to nearly drop x86 cold turkey in one release and in effect rather fully rebrand the Windows name*, it makes one wonder if the next step is dumping most of the Win32 API in a version or two as well. Dropping DOS took longer. Dropping Win16 took longer. To an extent, it's a win because it means a push for .NET and security. Still, it seems like a great way to kill a company.
*Yes, I know there have been versions of Windows that have supported other architectures, but they weren't sold as mainstream buzzworthy expectations (selling them towards high-end customers on bleeding edge (at the time), different architecture processors doesn't count; after all, they dropped everything but x86 pretty quickly and only migrated to x86_64 because it's a near superset of x86). It sounds like Microsoft is betting on tablets and tablets run ARM because x86 processors use way too much power. And yes, I know that Microsoft has been slapping "Windows" on all sorts of products that have nothing really to do with what one would consider Windows. But this is actually as much "Windows" as there is such a concept. It's not simply that they're porting the Windows API to another architecture or pushing behind a new architecture seriously. Windows is Microsoft in many ways, today. Radically changing what Windows is may be enough to really hurt Microsoft.
Don't be silly. The second the poor are dead, the super-rich will be calling for the deaths for the rich since obviously a billionaire is a thousand times richer than a millionaire. You can't eliminate the poor through death. You can only change who you call poor.
So, what you're saying is, if tomorrow it was through research by scientists discovered that an asteroid was heading towards Earth that would cause global ecological/extinction level damage, that the result of that wouldn't be a "political objective" that would be advanced by that research? Ie, don't you think it's a rather natural thing that as a consequence of evidence that there might be a desire by many, not necessarily the scientists themselves, to use that evidence to advance an agenda for the benefit of themselves and others? Or are you under some belief that the agenda came first and the evidence is all fabricated? I don't think there's credible evidence for the latter.
Well, if it's "a leftist agenda" not to see myself and milllions of people suffer, then I guess I support a leftist agenda. But, then, I'm a rather sane person who doesn't want that suffering. Oh, right, all agendas are bad unless they're a rightist agenda and for economic development, people be damned.
Perhaps you should read this recent article on LWN about Avoiding the OS abstraction trap. The core point to consider that a HAL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Linux's development doesn't need nor likely should it have a HAL like other closed OSs precisely because it doesn't deal with binary drivers. Instead, code is frequently refractored, reorganized, etc and the main issue is whether the user space ABI stays intact. All pushing a HAL would do is further constrain the kernel to maintaining another set user space ABI, which would likely end up being suboptimal since no HAL is perfect, and devote developer time to something that instead of forming organically as hardware/code demands would wall the expectations and the ability to provide functionality. Such might be great for a platform that's expected to be deployed, be infrequently changed, and for which driver development is a one-off affair, but that's pretty much the antithesis of the Linux kernel.
I don't think Linus is "happy with the current 3.x state of Linux", but I wouldn't be surprised if he's happy with the development process in place that he's a part of that can change the 3.x line towards something better. The Linux kernel is constantly changing. There's unlikely to ever be a state, ie a one point snapshot, where the Linux kernel will ever make most people happy because there's too many people with too many diverse goals and they all desire to change the Linux kernel from what is to what it could be. That's the great thing about an open development model, where people can make that happen. And if nothing else, they can make their own fork of Linux if the Linus tree doesn't make them happy enough.
While that's great news for ReactOS, and with no offense to the ReactOS developers, but if I did Linux kernel development, I wouldn't be jumping on board ReactOS development. ReactOS is a noble project and I'm sure in the future I'll get a lot of use out of it, but I view ReactOS as a stopgap project. That is, it's something like wine, which seems more than anything as a way to run the occasional Windows program and to allow those who are using Windows exclusively now to have a path to switching to using Linux (or OpenBSD or whatever) rather exclusively to run the occasional Windows program.
I say this primarily because Windows is a massive beast of an OS, produced through decades of development. Trying to re-implement it with incomplete documentation, reverse engineering, etc is a task like to take many times as long and as such I can even optimistically only see ReactOS as an open Windows 2000 or Windows XP clone for the 2020s or 2030s. Having more developers might speed up the process a bit, but assuming there's already a critical mass of developers to move development forward, I think the mythic man hour and the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly, especially when it's hard to delegate a lot of the work on things when the things themselves are most a mass of "stuff we don't have documentation for but needs implemented anyways".
Now, if one has a personal interest in having a complete open Windows clone, then please join ReactOS development. I'm certain they'd appreciate the help, even if it doesn't speed up the completing time very much. I certainly commend anyone who works to better an open project that will give advantage to oneself and others. But, I wouldn't seriously consider
The thing is, that's just a general side effect of a free market and contracts. Specifically, the reason the industry has degenerated into three main companies is precisely because of issues like the inherently obfuscation of complex technology and contracts that further enforce that upon licensed developers who would wish to enlighten unlicensed developers, the economy of scale issues to make a profit on open hardware modeled on crippled closed hardware even if there were no DMCA, and the inability for other players to get a real foothold precisely because many developers are so invested, financially, into reaching a large audience they're unwilling to do much of anything to court small time open players until those small time open players become big through many years of being very lucky at getting hit games on their open platform. And once that point is reached, someone can just clone the platform and that small time player may go out of business. I mean, look at the PC industry and what happened to of all companies IBM; the PC might have won nearly all the battles, but it seems IBM basically lost the war.
I disagree. I'm strongly tempted to say I don't think they should be allowed to sell their hardware at a loss, period; except in rare circumstances, like getting rid of obsolete stock, such an action is indicative of anti-competitive dumping in a market. Further, AFAIK Nintendo doesn't as a general point ever sell a console at a loss (which a few rare exceptions when Yen/Dollar fluctuations might have caused that to happen) yet Nintendo, even as far back as the NES was pulling the anti-competitive exclusivity crap with Sunsoft and Batman.
The thing is, I'm fairly certain the licensing fees are the least of their problems. The real issue is that a lot of gamers seem to expect $1+ million production games. It's the same issue with movies, really. Video cameras are incredibly cheap now, yet it's not like there has been a flood of movies on the market--even if movie theaters wouldn't show them, the internet would clearly be a place for them; that's because without the expected production value, most people view "indie" films as crap which really limits the non-mainstream movie market to "indie" films that cost a lot or the rare good directed/edited "indie" film that was done on the cheap. Instead, we've see a flood of short, free youtube clips and a flood of short, free flash games.
Unfortunately, that's life. It's hard having an advertisement reach millions of potential customers so that thousands will buy your high quality game for $1-$5*, just so you can earn enough to prove yourself to MS or Nintendo or whoever so you can make $50* games and be considered a "real" developer. I don't really blame MS or Sony or Nintendo for that.
It makes perfect sense. Like above, they started out small until they proved themselves, then they joined the ranks of "real" developers and now are forced into a situation where they have to make big-selling titles to break e
Well, let's see. Gnu Guile is a Scheme interpreter. Scheme is a functional language--although most implementations, and I assume Guile is one of them, aren't pure functional--which implies a lot of nice features, possibly including heavily parallelism, ready portability and modifiability of functions while the program/scrip is running, and a design that lends itself to support of garbage collection and protection from all sorts of security issues. C lacks about every part of that in exchange for more raw access and a design that's more vulnerable to potential bugs/abuse by others--admittedly a large part of that is an implementation detail, but it's a very consistent implementation detail.
As for the whole point of implementing languages in other languages, that's an inherent part of most any language you're likely to see. It's just that Lisp/Scheme (and almost certainly a few other languages) can do it more readily as an inherent part of the language. If there's one lesson I was actually taught is that sometimes the best choice in designing something is to make a sublanguage specific for a task instead of hand-coding everything down. Since the whole point of GNU Guile was to be that generic sublanguage for most such tasks, it'd make sense they'd further want GNU Guile to further support the development of a subsublanguage when GNU Guile was just too generic for some tasks. In essense, if a Lua-like language was better for some things, just make a small Lua-like macro overlay and write in the Lua-like language. That's probably a lot better than trying to hack Lua, Python, or whatever into all the GNU-specific things one needs. Of course, that assumes enough knowledge about Lisp/Scheme to whip up the few macros needed, and I think that's the real crux of the issue.
Yep, that's exactly why DS sales started tanking the second the iPhone and Android phones became big. Oh, right, they didn't. Perhaps the 3DS's 3D just sucks* and people are buying DSs/iPhones instead? Meanwhile, Nintendo is doing the whole cheaper downloadable games thing on the 3DS with DSiWare and Virtual Console games, although at closer to five times the price. Meanwhile, the "hardcore" gamers can still buy their $50, 50 hour games. Overall, I just don't see how price has to do with it though except the 3DS being priced up front and the iPhone's prices being spread over two years, although the iPhone ends up being a good bit more. The only real thing I could really see Nintendo doing to offset this would be a rent-to-own setup, but that seems pretty ridiculous given there being no obvious monthly setup for pricing.
*By this, I mean it's a gimmick. The DS only became a hit because there was no good strong competitor (the PSP had a bad reputation on load time/battery life and the DS leveraged years of GBA games). The Wii became a hit in part because it well targeted at the casual game (which the iPhone, if it were really ubiquitous, could do as well) and party because its competitors failed (the PS3 cost too much and the XBox 360 was too devote to hardcore gamers). I can certainly see the Wii's successor falling flat on its face for being gimmicky as well, much the same way the Dreamcast did. Yes, there might be a collection of games or uses for all those features like two screens, one a touch screen, or motion detection or tiny separate screens for multiplayer games, but it's not usually enough on its own to really drive sales.
That's in the same sort of logic of trying to rate a teen's credit worthiness when they're given blank checks by their wealthy parents. Common sense is that if the teen is overly greedy, their wealthy parents will close out the bank account as a lesson. Hence, the teen's credit worthiness boils down to a consideration of how trustworthy the teen is. Now, given the whole mortgage back securities were being done by people in the financial industry with a very vested interest in making the greediest, possibly questionably (say subprime) loans they can, S&P should have downgraded mortgage backed securities 5+ years ago when the portfolio of such securities started switching to more and more subprime loans. In short, the warning signs were there if S&P looked. So, perhaps I can see that they've learned from their mistake. Odds are good, though, it's just a different department who has more competent people at its head.
Yes, and we've been running a deficit for decades. The real issue is that the national debt as a percentage of GDP is going up. There's multiple reasons for that including the Bush era tax cuts, the recession decreasing tax revenue, and the various stimulus/war spending on top of the already deficit spending that's been the standard for decades. As far as a way out goes, the simplest solution is to raise taxes (along with ending the Bush era tax cuts) and cut stimulus/war and regular spending in a few years to below average rates so the GDP has a chance to catch up. None of that need mean not running a deficit, just a smaller one than usual.
I can see being pessimistic and believing at the moment that it's politically the best we can do. Some Republicans are dead-set on some fixated ideology to fix the problems in the US, ignoring that there is no perfect solution to the problems the country faces. Austerity measures alone in a recession can lead to a depression; the Great Depression is a pretty good example of that. Market corrections are pretty well inevitable given human nature and greed. Stimulant spending (or tax cuts) might not be enough of a boost to readily correct a massive market correction that effects multiple large industries. Tax decreases or increases might be appropriate at times, but such requires some actual analysis of the situation instead of using Macroeconomic 101 rules of thumb without any actual thought. All the above doesn't really fit into a sound bite and there's plenty of people unwilling to listen to experts given that some experts are so heavily biased, like the current DoD head begging to not have his funding reduced, it's hard to really know who to trust. And when actual figures are produced, trying to analyze them at a personal level requires near a college graduate level of knowledge on economics.
Knowing all of the above, though, there's not a single country that's well situated to fully comprehend all of the above and act responsibly, not even dicatorships--because it's hardly like one's appointed as leader because they're the most qualified in all matters. So, unless S&P is trying to, as others have suggested, send a political message to tell the US government to get its act together, I don't see the actual rational of S&P. And as far as that goes, I don't how S&Ps "message" really translates into anything that would effectively lead to the US government improving in that regard. After all, making it more difficult to borrow just means we'll have larger deficits but it does nothing to resolve the people who believe that military/entitlements/whatever can't be cut nor does it make those that believe tax increases are bad, to any degree upon anyone, are suddenly some sort of partial solution; I mean, some people really think the US government should operate on the sort of budget one could obtain from something like bake sales. Given the revenue of one the largest companies in the world, Walmart with $400 billion a year, as a comparison to the budget of the US, such a contraction would have pretty devastating short-term effects, and I don't see the long-term effects to be too good either.
Why? Do you know of any source that indicates that later .NET Frameworks have changed in this respect? I did bother to do some further searches on NGen on MSDN and all I got were the various optimization improvements on NGen's code general or a general rehash of why NGen should be used by people. All of that to me would indicate that you have to go out of your way to select NGen and to have native code generated and cached on disk. That makes a lot of sense in some ways, since there's situations in which a JIT solution may actually be faster--for example, it sounds like there's a circumstance where JIT can be 6x faster than NGen for Static Field Fetch, whatever that is, although with ASP.NET possibly making NGen 2x faster than JIT. Of course, overall program performance is based on what are the bottlenecks, most commonly used code, etc, so it's a non-trivial point.
The real question to me is how much NGen is hamstrung into sub-optimal situations because it has to be flexible enough to deal with JIT code generation or the other quirks of .NET vs if the code was linked against Win32 dlls. I don't know enough about Win32 to really have a clue. But my guess would be that Win32 programs don't have the same level of instructions overhead for a lot of the shared library interactions. Having said that, I can see a lot of special situations where JITing would easily win out because it can detect ways to better optimize frequently run loops which would more than compensate for any other more general kludginess.
Well, according to here, the JIT compiler is just a JIT compiler with the persistence at most to the life of a process. If you want something more persistent, you can use NGen which can store native code in the NGen cache. Having said that, NGen code seems to have some caveats that make it worse than native code (either less ability to share pages between processes or a potentially longer startup time). So, yes, there's an option for native code, but it doesn't sound like a default except for the .NET framework itself.
Reminds me of the whole default crisis with the US government. The fact that people are arguing over whether defaulting is good or bad *only* from the short-term base pragmatic effect of defaulting instead of the more idealistic "you should keep your promises" because that ideology would never have lead you to make promises to buy things then later be actually debating whether to borrow the money to buy those things; the whole point of the promise to buy things is a budget issue and that's the point where any issues about overspending should have been resolved.
But, nah, let's just look at the short-term and figure out how to punt the problem down the road by a few months/years. But yea, just let nature takes it course, and we'll all suffer as a species because too many of us were too arrogant. :/
Out of curiosity, would you mind clarifying what "that information" is? I ask because I'm uncertain of what you expect as far as climate information goes. I also ask because I'm curious if you have the same standard for all sorts of other topics of similar scope. For example, I don't think I've seen much discussion about the raw data about the health effects of mercury, lead, etc, yet I don't really see anyone arguing that we should halt all consideration of pollution laws precisely for that reason; I have seen people argue over cost, constitutionality, etc reasons, though.
While I would certainly agree the information shouldn't fall automatically into a protected class of information the general public shouldn't be allowed to see--and further, I'd say it shouldn't be in a protected class of information the general public shouldn't be allowed to see--, that doesn't translate into the information being readily available to everyone. Consider, for example, how difficult is to track down how money is borrowed, collected, or spent in the government as a general point and you'd recognize that often times you have to do a good bit of leg work if you're interested. I wouldn't say that's a good thing, but it's just a natural course of things when there's no mandate to publicly divulge information.
Who are "the most interested parties", though? It'd seem the whole world is "the most interested parties" given the potential scope of climate change, but I don't think you're arguing that we're all responsible for footing the bill to collect the information and bundle it for our own use.
Well, at least you didn't forget Poland. :)
The issue is, if you go to an insurance company and explain you're going to leave your car unlocked in a bad neighborhood, locks removed, with a sign that says "plz dont steal" and they agree to cover you, then they should pay out. The general issue is likely that there's standard boilerplate legalism in the contract which would negate any sort of verbal agreement of coverage of such a scenario, so you'd have to rely upon a "weird clause in the contract" to receive any sort of coverage. In other words, your little analogy either makes the insurance company sound incompetent on its own right for offering the insurance or instigating willful fraud by promising something they'd expect a court to inherently dismiss. I'd imagine the real scenario isn't like that at all.
There's an odd little paradox I've thought about. Why is it that California, a bastion of environmentalism, large bulging government, and tons of regulation, has such a relatively robust economy compared to most other US states? Cheap labor? No, there's lots of migrant workers in the US. Perhaps it's ready access to electricity and oil? No, California is pretty notorious for having higher electricity and gas prices.
Maybe, then, it has something to do with recycling. Consider Japan which has virtually no natural resources to rely upon, including oil, which also has a robust economy and electricity availability troubles. To that end, recycling is a major economic consideration precisely because recycling is less energy intensive, especially for things like aluminum production. And as much as it has been noted that energy efficient standards, which California strongly pushes, can have the paradoxical effect of increasing energy consumption, it also tends to translates into completing more effective work--imagine the person who can complete one task with a gallon of gas in a 30MPG car vs the person who completes two tasks with one and a half gallons of gas in a 50MPG car.
Of course, in Japan recycling is a government pushed civic duty. And in California, it's a socially pushed norm invoked by environmentalist. Meanwhile, in a large part of the US, recycling is at best haphazardly followed and usually only the more economically advantageous parts, like aluminum can collection.
With the mindset of individualism and even anti-environmentalism and anti-government sentiment, I can certainly see why if mass recycling is a part of the short-term energy solution in the US there's been relatively little push by Democrats for a recycling program, even if they could sell it on the idea of patriotism. But, top down, government funded renewable energy platforms aren't a real solution either, if nothing else because there isn't a joint, bi-partisan support for such projects so their effectiveness is at best short-term and at worst they're not effective at all. Meanwhile, pushing for more recycling is virtually free in comparison. It's ironic to me that conservatives aren't pushing for conserving oil, conserving energy, or any part of recycling as a part of saving money, by increasing the supply of paper, plastic, aluminum, etc to decrease the price. But, then, Republicans are hardly conservative; they're the "you don't have to make sacrifices or put any effort into anything to solve problems--even though inherently we're for cutting government programs on the basis that private/charitable/social organizations will take over--and oh, by the way, we can always cut your taxes" party.
I guess that ends my rant.
In related news, strong evidence shows that drunkards spend a good bit of money on alcohol, even when many free drinks are made available to them. Meanwhile, the average person's access to a few free drinks seems not to push nor dissuade them from the purchase of a glass of wine from time to time.
It's all infonography, and it flows into a pit that cannot be filled. Meanwhile, most normal people have some sort of life (or are at least obsessed with something else) and wouldn't bother pirated.
Um, you do realize I said that very thing, right? No, the strawman is talking about how financially efficient is for the government to do something relating to something being "the government's job". If that were the deciding factor, then by the logic of the original article, the military should be private.
Except that's not what happened. The government intervened in the form of forcing more competition, not simply by throwing money at a problem or relying on the free market to magically take care of things. Financially speaking, it's proof that it is the government's job and a proper government study has to actually address what the market inefficiencies are and how the government can intervene properly, even if that means making and enforcing a few laws. Clearly it's not enough to simply go through lowest bidding contracts when only two or three companies are big enough to realistically create the demanded product in the required quantities. Nor are cheap loans some magic bullet. But nothing in the article suggests that people alone, without government involvement, would have came to their current situation. Then again, broadband is likely a special case.
Whatever works for you. But, then, I like being attacked when my sarcasm is missed.