Dementia doesn't get anywhere near the funding it should. There's all these cancer charities -
Not to be rude, but at some level there's a limit to what can be funded. Perhaps more could be funded in total and there should be more dementia research funding over cancer research funding. But, I was always under the impression that cancer research got more attention because people were more concerned about children, teens, young adults, middle-aged adults, and pre-seniors all not dying of cancer than someone who has lived a full life having a few years--sadly, mind you--with a much reduced quality of life--a factor that's nearly guaranteed once you're old enough. Beyond that, cancer is a host of related problems which seems much more curable.
mostly focused on breast cancer
I'd attribute that to vanity, honestly, (as mastectomy is a very effective cure) but it could simply be that breast cancer is one of the most easily and early diagnosable cancers. Almost everything else requires an MRI or symptoms to even begin to suspect something is wrong.
whereas nobody appears to care about brain cancer or lung cancer (you don't just get it by smoking),
At least for brain cancer, I'd imagine it's because a lot of brain cancers are inoperable (in large part because they're so late detected and hence most of the damage is already done), but I agree lung cancer (IIRC, a good 20%+ are non-smoking related) should probably receive more focus/funding. Having said that, since cancer seems to be a serious of very similar ailments, a cure or treatment in one area could quite possible translate very strongly in almost all other areas, so any cancer research should do.
while demetia sufferers need far more support, cost far more time and money to treat, and frankly I'd take prostate cancer over altzheimers any day
Old age suffers need far more support (costing far more time and money to aid) than almost any other group (babies and toddlers require more) generally, so I don't think treating dementia matters greatly in that regard. As for prostate cancer, odds are good you'll suffer that anyways; it's just likely won't kill you. Truthfully, I imagine dementia research has suffered the same problem as brain cancer research: it's hard to diagnosis early and treatment seems near impossible. In fact, one major thing of recent history is that we can now diagnosis pre-alzheimers with a brain scan, which helps greatly in obtain more certain baselines (people might pass or fail the IQ tests given for other reasons and to pass implies you're already a sufferer) and in even thinking about making a treatment (since the best success rates happen most often pre-symptoms).
In short, I think a major reason for the lopsided funded has precisely to do with those factors that look to produce the best results: longer quality of life in more early and easily treatable diseases (worst case, you can remove a breast, but it's harder to remove most of a lung or a large section of brain and expect good results; and symptomatic dementia patients are unlikely to recover). Thankfully, new research with early detection and drug treatments in dementia may help, but we're simply so early in the field that it's only now I'd expect to see a surge in funding.
Sounds about right. "I'm lovin' it"? I'd really love a nutritious meal. Or from a competitor, "Have it your way"? My way would be a nutritious meal. About here I could make a reference to being part of the space age and how we can put a man on the moon but can't make a nutritious and delicious burger. Or more accurately, we probably could, but it might not sell as well, and it's all about the bottom line.
Just like we could have a Facebook that cares about privacy and actually responded to privacy concerns and resolved thems. Or how Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc could do a much better job with security all around, including making it a lot more sane when it comes to keeping up-to-date (requiring hotfixes is not part of the answer, but providing hotfixes may be).
Or more generally as has been stated to me, it seems that a company takes about how good or great they are at some precisely because they're overly bad at it. The best sort of lie is the outrageous one because so few are willing to believe in the seeming contradiction of calling attention to a deficit and yet believing no one will call them out on it. Clearly it works, though, if for no other reason than those who notice the lie don't bother saying anything and those who don't are left to believe.
Of course, if we'd reign in corporate taxes, we'd bring a lot of capital back home.
So, if we'd only lower taxes corporations who already have a sweet system setup to pay little or not taxes on some things are going to magically decide to increase their tax burden here. Pandering to corporations to manipulate them into paying a higher tax amount is unlikely to work because, as your quote implies, corporations are very set to find any possible loophole in paying less in taxes, especially as they view such actions as legal. More importantly, if at a whim a corporation were to invest heavily because the tax rate here is so low, it's fairly certainly they would just as easily on a whim move to invest somewhere else if another country were to have an even lower rate (until, of course, it reaches 0%, for which you possibly gain very little). It is also a mistaken belief that these efforts will be viewed as a partnership with the company who will look beyond their bottom-line (and how even a marginally better growth potential elsewhere good justify killing a profitable venture since the money spent elsewhere will grow faster).
In short, it would seem wise to come up with a better justification for a lower tax rate than trying to cater to flighty companies.
If you raise corporate taxes, the corporation raises prices to cover the tax.
I agree. Why, if you raise Google's taxes any more, they'll go from charging $0/search to charging $0/search!*
Why hide it like this? Just tax the customer, so we can all SEE how much tax we're paying.
Probably because it's easier to raise taxes on corporations than to raise taxes on the rich. Further, merely raising taxes on the rich would likely result in many leaving the US and that'd translate into either the US tax system possibly collapsing or some complex tracking system of corporate payments to shareholders. At that point, why not just tax the corporation itself since it's harder to loophole billions from one corporation (in that it'll be noticeable and is ripe for changes to the law to close the loophole) than millions from many shareholders (where even closing loopholes might not be enough).
It's the only way to keep people involved in the battle to lower government spending, which is out of control.
Well, given there's been deficit spending in the US for 40+ years (ignoring a few Clinton years), it's pretty clear people are used to not paying all the taxes they'd need for what they want. I don't think removing corporate taxes would magically change that.
*Yes, technically I'm not Google's customer--advertisers are. But, then that's just another example of hiding costs. Or, you know, it's because it's ineffective to charge individuals for searching and beneficial to advertisers to be able to pay to reach potential customers. Funny that you don't argue for taxing *just* corporations and companies since no matter how you look at it there's no way to magically make people associate what they pay in taxes to what benefit they receive in government spending, no matter how high or low taxes are. Yes, you could get rid of all taxes, but then you'd be nickeled and dimed (or I guess be ad-sponsored) everywhere and that's not really a tenable situation when you need unbiased courts, accessible travel for all, and a defense that can't be bought out.
Have you considered that those consumers were scared more by the seeming sudden rise in bugs and fixes than anything? Google strives to set the expectation that bugs will be fixed and they will be open not only of those bugs but the fixes. If there were to be a sudden and unannounced change to that policy I am certain it would frighten and confuse many of its users. So, while I agree that the developer in question should have been removed from creating the release notes henceforth, I don't agree on the reasoning. In communicating, after all, one has to consider one's audience and their expectations in deciding how best to provide them with information that you think important they should know; causing a panic strongly implies they failed in their duty.
Of course, if your previous employer and its customers would rather not have technical details like bug fixes in release notes, that is really something that should have been clear policy and the release notes should have been checked by a manager to verify it conformed to that policy.:/
Now maybe I'm out of the loop and haven't been going to my local Linux club meetings, and I certainly don't know the secret handshake, but seeing this choice with absolutely no explanation of what the hell the difference is does not inspire me about a distro famous for being "simple for newcomers".
That's mostly easy. Some are 32-bit (like how there's Windows 7 32-bit) and some are 64-bit (like how there's Windows 7 64-bit). Meanwhile, the other big names (Gnome, KDE, etc) are the different focus (Home, Professional, Ultimate). Of course, a DVD that just contained everything and had a default option would simplify things. But, then you'd have to likely have to d/l 2+ GB and you'd likely need a DVD burner.
Perhaps there is ONE MAIN DEFAULT edition with some alternate editions available, but that isn't how it appears on their webpage.
Window managers (which are the big differences in the names) are like sects. Sure, you can be a Christian. But there's no "one main default" Christianity. Trying to push one as a default is only likely to piss off every other sect. It's precisely because there's such little differences that makes people so angry about it because if one actually choses one over another, it means you've actually spent a lot of time and energy on why one is right or one is wrong. Being nebulously Christian (or Muslim or Hindu) tends more to just being from an area where people just presume you are and for which outside of rejecting it, a lot of people don't seem to put a lot of thought into it.
It's the same way about one's favorite brand of soda (while less so whether one says "soda", "pop", or "Coca-cola"), btw. I just wanted to throw in a not-entirely-pointless religious reference.:)
But what's the difference between A. going to a web site and downloading an installer and B. going to a web site and downloading a line to put in sources.list?
Well, beyond the obvious (an installer could work on any distro, not just an apt-based one meanwhile a sources.list allows for apt to pull in updates), not much really. Both are bad because most distros and versions within a distro are incompatible with each other, possibly in subtle ways, and most developers aren't willing to both support many distros and versions in the short term let alone support them in the long term. Even within a distro community (Ubuntu), plenty of packages have been dropped in the last three years (something I noticed when upgrading from the 8.04 to 10.04) and while some individuals might have their own PPA, I'm not inclined to believe most will hang around in the long-term.
In short, the issue fundamentally is that Linux userspace is heavily fragment and constantly changing and the LSB standard was pretty much a complete failure. This is more or less precisely because of an unwillingness to maintain backwards compatibility in userspace and heavy API churn (either simply from bad first design or a desire to "start fresh"). Distros try to counter this by recompiling everything to work with whatever is the latest new thing, but then each distro revision ends up adding to the problem.
The only real way that these problems will be fixed in the long term is if both a newer LSB standard is created and if distros (RedHat and Debian being two big bases) actually follow them. Of course, that loses a major point of even having separate distros. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't see many current distros exactly jumping at the chance to obsolete themselves.
Funny, I had a similar idea involving product safety regulation, although it acknowledged that China isn't really the only country who does these sorts of things (you don't see massive import tariffs on oil from OPEC, for example*). And like other posters, I'm pessimistic that any such tariff increases would actually take place given how unpopular it would be.
*Come to think of it, the whole oil example might be better. Basically, we have higher taxes which are funneled into subsidizing national oil extraction. It's not enough to make us foreign oil independent, but it's enough to hedge somewhat against OPEC vastly manipulating the market**. In essence, it shifts the dead-weight loss of monopoly pricing into the dead-weight loss of taxation. Since taxes are more hidden (and admittedly, the US isn't taxing enough to cover it's debts), there's more support for such a scheme. Of course, such market manipulation can have unintended side-effects (like the US subsidizing oil production that ends up being sold to other countries) but the effective lower real oil price makes it work out to the US's and the world's advantage in the overall.
**And if China or OPEC were to boycott sales to the US, then supply shortages would cause a massive spike in the price. As a result, the increased tax revenue (presuming they were actually relative to price, which sadly they aren't in many cases) could be used to pay for material/energy diversification programs.
I find it rather disturbing the UNIX ideal that sysadmins should be programmers. The opinion seems to be that it is perfectly ok for someone to need to do a fair bit of programming work to solve a system problem.
I'd presume this comes about from the fact that [administration] software used to be very expensive so it was normally cheaper to hire a sysadmin/programmer than to hire a sysadmin and seperate software. The fact that most sysadmins used to be at least minimally programmers (ie, they could write a shell script) certainly helped in that.
Ok but the thing is programming and systems administration are not identical skills any more than say being a musician and being a recording engineer are. They are related, but proficiency in one is not the same as the other. I know more than a few programmers that are abysmal at system administration, and I know sysadmins that can't program. There is nothing wrong with this.
Quite true. Meanwhile, most companies demand the equivalent of musician/recording engineers for the price of slightly more than a musician. And that tends to drive down the wages of those who are the equivalent of just recording engineers. That's just economics at play.
While I realize a simple (emphasis on simple) script isn't quite the same thing, this attitude smacks of the "People should just get down and code what they need," thing. No, not really. Not everyone should have to learn that skill, and you could well be excluding people you want by requiring it.
Yes, and that's why Windows System Administrators tend to be paid less than UNIX/Linux System Administrators. And where Windows can be said to excel is in providing for common tasks for very small businesses (ie, they only have one or two IT staff) in a GUI format so no programmer is needed.
Also there's the simple matter that GUIs work better for unfamiliar situations. While it might be easy to just say "Well a good admin should know about this," that is rather stupid. Nobody knows everything, you never get someone with limitless experience.
No, I think it would be said that a good admin should know how to learn in an unfamiliar situation. GUIs can certainly facilitate this, but GUIs don't magically remove the need to understand.
Part of systems administration is being able to solve novel problems. Ok well GUIs help in that regard, at least when well designed. They show you your options, and how they flow, what ones exclude and influence others and so on. That can make it much faster to deal with something you are not familiar with. This is important and useful in real IT work.
I think that heavily depends on your use of the word "novel". Most problems in system administration aren't really novel. They're merely new to the system administrator. In that regard, GUIs are great for helping prove the mechanism to do useful IT work. But, once you step into areas which are actually novel, GUIs by definition can rarely be of help. But, then, CLIs may be of little help either. At that point, you really do need to program, be it a script or an actually C/Java/whatever program.
They also can help prevent errors. For example I can't count the number of times our DNS has been temporarily broken by a student messing up the file. If you do the formatting incorrect, screw up the serial number, etc and suddenly things stop working (we have it in a versioning system so it can be undone easily, of course). In Windows? Not a problem. The GUI keeps you from screwing things up. You can still make a bad entry or whatever, but you can't go and break the entire server.
Very true, much like how client-side javascript can aid people in validating their input before it's actually used. That's certainly good strength of a GUI when it's dealing with well-understood, common content.
If you read the article (yea, I know, I know), you'd notice the issue isn't "to use a ruler without injury". It's about "rigorous safety checks for lead, chemicals, flammability and other potential dangers", with I think emphasis on the lead. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 was passed almost certainly because of all the China-toys-with-lead-paint issues of late, so now there has to be testing to make sure child (12 years old and under) toys wouldn't just randomly make kids sick. Unsurprisingly, then, when you're trying to sell a science kit to elementary schools, you have to test everything. In short, rulers are precisely the sort of otherwise innocuous thing added to a child toy that should be covered under the new law.
Of course, the real problem to me is focusing on just child toys instead of a more broad testing of products. The simple truth is that product testing in the US has been rather lax for quite a long while. There are also some externality costs to globalization, especially when it comes to the risks of other countries that are unlikely to act upon such gross fraud. Perhaps a system could be created where there would be tariffs on all imports for testing and taxes on all local sells, with refundable tariffs/taxing with sufficient supply-chain tracking and treaties that promise and actually enforce punishment on supply tainting. Of course, I imagine such a system would be largely ignored by the US and China, believing too many countries depend on them to raise tariffs or withhold importation for non-compliance with treaty terms.
So, I believe that at least as a pragmatic start, the CPSIA is on the right track no matter how absurd it first seems.
Um, I'm pretty sure the "native" word was to make clear that while now there are predators, they didn't get there on their own power.
And it's not like we genetically engineered the things.
Not yet.
They are natural too. It's not like species have not transferred locations before, it probably would have happened anyway someday even without humans.
I'm going to guess "no". The point is, it's a guess, just like your comment is a guess. Humans have intentionally or unintentionally introduced a lot of species into places where they would almost certainly would never have reached (ie, the birds would have died out before the cats came or the cats would have evolved and been a different species by the time they reached the islands). I think it's a bit too simple to act like humans aren't responsible for what has happened.
Basically, they found a comfortable place for a time but made bad evolutionary choices that ensured some day they would be screwed.
Or, you know, it could be that nature made good evolutionary choices. You know those feral cats killing the birds? What happens when all the birds die out? Yea, they might just all die out unless humans start feeding them (possibly with imported meat). There's a reason there's often not many, if any, largish mammals on islands: there's generally too much isolation for prey to move away resulting in large predator die-offs when their food supply runs low. Maybe the feral cats or rats will be small enough to survive. But it's not like the birds made a "bad evolutionary choice". You make it sound like they took the wrong path on a road or went out gambling and lost it big on the roulette.:)
I love it when people start with a simple analogy and then extend upon that idea, then tell you that you can use the idea in the original scenario.
All I need to do is put a drink machine next to my software, and then I'll be able to double my profits!
Maybe not, but the general point still stands. Price differentiation is done rather often in software (businesses, consumers, NGOs, and schools all receive very different rates). Sometimes, it's more economical to flex one's litigation arm to curb piracy. Plenty of times, it's better to decrease the price for select groups to reduce piracy. But, of course, this can also come in the form of different things (separating the price of software from the support costs for it so more people will pay at least something for your software). In the end, it's most often about finding new opportunities related to your software and finding a cost effective way to supply a demand that people are willing to pay for.
The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?
There are actually instances where that can happen. Media rarely covers instances of incompetence until it's brought to their attention. So, while one can certainly deny researchers access to information to mask incompetence, it's also quite possible to simply inundate researchers with so much information that, lacking the resources, it'd take literal decades to find clear instances of incompetence.
But, even with small amounts of information, there's plenty of room to hide incompetence. If you have a certain ideology and expose it as the effective pragmatic view of how the world works (open source means many eyes means fewer bugs), few people are interested in actually challenging your assumptions. Those that do tend to have an agenda, so few (including the media) tend to give them much weight on the fragile evidence that if it were being presented by an independent group might be considered of worth. Meanwhile, stringent evidence of incompetence is generally difficult, if not impossible, to prove. The result is you have ideologies that win out even when it would seem there's clear evidence to disprove the ideology (consider, for example, the US's focus on supporting small businesses for economic growth as being possibly questionable).
Most of all, consider the reverse psychology aspects that allow for all sorts of abuses to occur (Congressional laws that do the exact opposite of their title or say, criticizing the use of children as a political ploy while sitting at a seeming school desk with children in the background as you sign a bill/executive order). The emperor may have no clothes and people may even subconsciously realize it, but too often no one actually steps forward and frankly states it, not because everyone is intelligent adults and realizes the clear falseness of what is presented but because at some level people don't even bother thinking of what they see as much as what they're told.
He'll also have to forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic to farmers. You make a choice when you want to live out in the plains. It has many advantages, such as lower land cost, a lot of privacy and so on. However it has disadvantages, one of them being it costs more to deliver high speed access.
Quite true. I don't think people who do live in more rural settings believe high speed access has to be 100% identical in cost to more urban settings. The issue is the amount of the discrepancy.
What's more, farming is a business, so I don't see the problem if they have to pay more to get a business grade Internet line out there. No matter where you are in the US, you can get high speed Internet. However sometimes it is only the most costly kinds of lines, something like a DS-3. For a consumer that is unreasonable, for a business it is not and make no mistake, that's what farming is.
Perhaps so, but farmers make up a marginal percentage of the rural population (eg. only 0.7% of the total US population is employed in agriculture yet the Midwest holds about 22% of the US population); however, I think a farmer was used as an example because of the naive presumption that the common rural individual is a farmer. Meanwhile, all sorts of infrastructure (roads, postal or other; electric wires; telephone wires; etc) cost more to roll out in rural areas, yet there's plenty of those things in rural settings. One might believe that most people in rural settings don't want high speed internet (and hence it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to recoup the costs to build that infrastructure), and I'd imagine that might be true today; but, the same argue could have been made before widespread creation of roads and trains when it comes to Midwesterners desiring fresh tropical fruits. Yet, you don't see stores here selling bananas at $6/lb.
In short, I can appreciate your sentiments on the issue, especially when it comes to farmers being businesses. And you do seem to want to differentiate that most non-farmers/non-businesses are not in a position to pay for available high speed internet. I think the real question is, why aren't there more affordable options in rural areas (and by affordable, I mean on the order of at most 2-3x the cost of urban areas) for non-businesses.
BTW, it's quite rational to reject $0.01 when the other player receives $99.99, since after the game the richer player has more options available to spend money than the poorer player. If the two players have zero dollars in their pockets to begin with, then any outcome away from 50/50 leads to relative inequality after the game.
So, do you believe that after the game, one player has exactly $0.01 in worldly assets and the other has exactly $99.99 in worldly assets? Do you believe that there are no other people in the world, especially not individuals with assets in the billion dollar range or higher nor a total global economy in the multi-trillion dollar range? Why should you care that one person is suddenly enriched to the tune of $99.99 or $9,999,999.99? Unless you have a personal vendetta against the person in question, I really don't see why ideas of inequality should really matter.
The only way your idea really makes sense is if the game involved playing for an amount so large that possessing it was equivalent to having the buying power of most of the world combined. But, to that end, it is unlikely anyone would see your money as having any relative value precisely because it'd so depreciate their own assets' worth. The only thing left then is one only has reason to reject a value offered is if it's zero, for any other value imparts some benefit to oneself. The smallest such acceptable value is in the small available unit in the currency in question, a penny, so that's where the split would rationally occur.
If you want to talk about hyper-rationality, one would note that if one presumed the game was played many times and on average one played as both the offerer and receiver an equal number of times, then the average amount of money one would make for each game is $50 (o[fferer] = r[eciverer]; 0.01*o + 99.99r = 0.01o + 99.99o = 50o = 50r). So, on that basis, it really doesn't matter if one plays on the Nash equilibrium or if one tries to play "fair" on each round so long as everyone is consistent.
In fact those with high testosterone levels ended up doing things as irrational in any imaginable circumstance as to basically reject an offer of free money, just because they perceived it as being too low. You don't want someone like that making economic decisions.
Just a small point, but the "ultimatum game" has been conducted many times and the consistent issue it raises is that people often reject low offers, even though as you note it's to reject free money. The new study in part gives one possible explanation for why young men might reject free money in the "ultimatum game", but it doesn't explain everyone else's reasons nor is there any evidence that it's the young males who were the group that most often rejected in previous "ultimatum game" studies. Btw, the Nash equilibrium, optimal solution for splitting $100 would be to offer $0.01 and keep $99.99. Would you accept that?
Oil naturally leaks into the oceans. That doesn't mean all oil leaking into the oceans is natural. Lightning naturally starts forest fires. That doesn't mean all forest fires are natural.
Yes, it can happen naturally that a well might be contaminated with oil or natural gas. But, when it's the case that a well wasn't contaminated then suddenly becomes contaminated after recently drilling near or on your property, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about it being natural. Nor, really, would I find it "beyond a reasonable doubt" simply that it was contaminated from recent drilling.
However, if it's the case that the recent drilling involved pumping a trade secret mixture of chemicals into the ground and you can find it in your well, that's a pretty strong link. So, the situation becomes finding out, in some fashion, that trade secret mixture to perform a simply comparison. I think that's all that people who feel they are effected are really demanding. Of course, if they find that fingerprint mixture, I'm sure they'll want to file lawsuits, have passed regulation changes, and/or see criminal charges to be pressed. But, all of that's pretty reasonable.
Excuse me, I am unaware of any group that has a problem with legal immigrants.
Off-hand, I'd say a lot of workers have a problem with any increase in the labor pool as they fear it'll reduce their wages.
Most of the people I have seen who have a problem with illegal immigrants favor reducing the difficulty of legally immigrating into this country while increasing the enforcement against illegal immigration.
Well, I've got a great system for you then, cut-and-paste from Michael Badnarik (Libertarian candidate from 2004): "I advocate open immigration for individuals who are willing to enter at a Customs station and submit to a quick background check to ensure that they aren't criminals or terrorists. And I advocate treating people who cross the borders elsewhere as what they are: invaders."
Since we're so far away from that now, with the whole quota system favoring extant American families and skilled workers, I'd have to say our current distinction between illegal and legal immigration is pretty much a joke. But, then, I'm one of those crazy people who realizes the "move if you can't find work" really shouldn't limit yourself to national borders, no matter how "skilled" you are. If companies are globalized, workers should be too.
It is the job of marketing to figure out how to make good things (like bug fixes) sell, not to dictate to managers (and indirectly engineers) what to do. Of course, with open source it's less about "selling" and more about "what's fun and might get me positive attention", but then given that there is some PR being done by Mozilla about faster JS and what-not, it's hardly a reach for them to also highly congratulate and focus on those who do fix bugs of importance.
This is specifically why they only wanted land owners to be able to vote. The rational is land owners are typically more educated, have a vested interested in their community, are better informed, and are far less susceptible to "mob rule" mentality or easy manipulation. The day that was abolished was the day the US immediately began a downward spiral.
I hate to break it to you, but land owners weren't particularly vested in the interest of the country as a whole nor really the welfare of the local community. Southern land owners wanted to continue slavery, holding medium or large land stakes for farming which left it uneconomical for most people to own land; and the cotton gin basically demanded either very cheap or free labor (or machinery which only became viable after the exploitation of fossil fuels) to remain competitive. Meanwhile, Northern land owners wanted to have dormitories where hundreds of workers made finished goods, working 7 days a week (they could only get 6, thanks to the Bible), 16 hours a day for a penitence that would at best be sent home and with multiple other workers be enough to cover rent and food for the parents; in short, think a sweat shop but worse (since all of this was above board at the time, they could charge what they liked for the room and board (a non-negotiable aspect of the work), further decreasing effective wages. Hence, Southern land owners wanted high raw good tariffs, low finished good tariffs and Northerners wanted the reverse.
These days the uneducated (typically poor) are commonly manipulated for their vote come election. Its so prevalent they are frequently considered tipping votes. This means the uneducated, who have no idea what they are doing, are frequently the tipping voice in our elections. This means the ignorant and uneducated and often responsible for setting policy in the US. Our forefathers would absolutely be disgusted. And if you think about it, you should be too. I know I am.
Funny. It general holds true that more urban areas are better educated (on average) and vote Democrat (ie, the east and west coasts) and rural areas are inferior educated (on average) and vote Republican (ie, the middle of the US). Meanwhile, urban areas tend to have higher renting (because land prices are so high, urbanization tends to require more job switching which encourages more resident relocation through the years which encourages renting) and rural ares tend to have higher land ownership (because land prices are relatively cheap, the job market is a bit more stable, and with distances as far apart as they are most people already expect to drive long distances and hence are more intent on investing in property).
Now, it could reasonably be argued that the average people doesn't vote and the less educated or more inclined to vote. But, that says more about the apathy of the masses than it does about the stupidity of the minority or their bad voting habits. To that end, it doesn't really explain the voting behavior in the middle of the US which shouldn't see such swing voting behavior with many more land owners.
PS - Yes, I realize a lot of those "land owners" are really "mortgage holders". But, a great debt is also of rather deep concern and I think would still fit all your qualifications on why such individuals should vote better.
But some data containers, like the OGG container with is pushed forward by OSS at least for Vorbis and Theora (and could be used for VP8 too) are designed in such a way that different chunks can contain different level of details (think like a progressive JPEG). A more advanced software could download the metadata and then only selectively download parts of the file that contain the chunks that it can play within the bandwidth limit. (Think : only downloading the first part of a progressive JPEG which contain the lower resolution data).
I'd love to see this idea implemented in bittorrent. Not only would it allow for people to post one encoded HD video while allowing others to effectively pull out SD videos at much reduced bandwidth costs, it could be coupled with the idea of streaming video through bittorrent. That'd seem to be the main, elusive hindrance to (mostly) decentralized broadcasting of video. Perhaps they could even include the feature optionally into HTML5 (so websites don't get slashdotted just because they have a popular video)?:)
I see nothing wrong with advertising maximum rates, as that is a consideration. Yes it is putting their best foot forward but if you aren't used to that in advertising you are being willfully blind.
Ie, we should accept fraud in a free market because..um..it really helps people who commit fraud? Really, fraud is deception to gain value. If one knows full-well that one's maximum rate has little or no bearing on median rate or even on any real probability of seeing that maximum rate at any time ever, then describing one's product with that value is intentionally deceptive precisely to defraud. Advertisement should be to inform. Think Wikipedia's non-bias standard: qualify all statements made and include as complete a picture as one reasonably can.
One should not have to second-guess the complete truthfulness of advertisements. Such is precisely the reason why the US economy is so fucked up right now (literally, the recession is a byproduct of understating the risk of subprime mortgages during securitization and the derivatives market misrepresenting their capacity to payout on failed contracts).
At which point does it actually become acceptable to say "Look, you are disabled, you are different, and its not worth the cost of doing this - how about we look at it differently and stop trying to pretend that you have the same advantages in life that we non-disabled enjoy?".
The point at which society is willing to pay all disabled individuals a disability payment at least equivalent to median salary while being perfectly content to letting the disabled not work a day in their life. You do realize that that's a major reason for the law to allow accessibility is precisely to allow disabled individuals the opportunity to work, right? Without such laws, most places end up being unwilling to spend "thousands of pounds" or whatever just to hire one new individual. Hence, the employer pool drives down wages for all disabled, regardless of how little their disability effects their actual work. It also drives down employment opportunities, resulting in massive unemployment for the disabled (it was around 50% before the ADA was passed in the US and now is around 13% today; I presume figures in the UK are similar or perhaps worse).
I wonder, do you bemoan having to subsidize public transportation as well?
I do question the wisdom in choosing a real and current conflict as a game setting. An even slightly fictionalized setting, would do much to reduce this negative association.
And that'd rather defeat the purpose. Censor out the word nigger when it comes to the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement because you don't want to offend white/black relations. Censor out all the sex, adultery, and homosexuality that was happening in the 50s because you want to paint a rosy picture of a simpler, more innocent time. Censor out the drug use and abuse that's gone on for ages because it makes the issue seem like a modern problem. Try to block the construction of a mosque/community center because it'd be "insensitive" (which I guess justifies blocking such construction for 50 years at which point we can dish out some token apologies like we did to Japanese-Americans of WWII).
While I'd certain admit that EA probably included the option more for sensationalist purposes than any intent to help people both realize the horrors of war and to help those who went through those horrors to cope, it still achieves those things. Trying to dilute the pill might make it taste less bitter, but then it might not work well or at all if you do so.
Yes, it takes a good bit of strength and character to look past the pain one sees today and view the bigger picture. Yes, healing from one's loss will likely be harder when one has to acknowledge that one's son was a soldier not a peace keeper. In the end, though, perhaps it'll make for more questioning of the support of future needless wars that result in the death of even more soldiers, civilians, or whatever.
War might be necessary and even the necessary wars need to be questioned. For those who really think a war was necessary, questioning it constantly to constantly verify it is really was the only way is precisely the sort of thing one would wish. I guess, though, when you know that one's child was killed for questionable causes, it's easier to be in denial than to face the cold truth. But, the cold truth is no war, no matter how necessary, will make you feel warm and good inside when you really think about the horror that war is.
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Not to be rude, but at some level there's a limit to what can be funded. Perhaps more could be funded in total and there should be more dementia research funding over cancer research funding. But, I was always under the impression that cancer research got more attention because people were more concerned about children, teens, young adults, middle-aged adults, and pre-seniors all not dying of cancer than someone who has lived a full life having a few years--sadly, mind you--with a much reduced quality of life--a factor that's nearly guaranteed once you're old enough. Beyond that, cancer is a host of related problems which seems much more curable.
I'd attribute that to vanity, honestly, (as mastectomy is a very effective cure) but it could simply be that breast cancer is one of the most easily and early diagnosable cancers. Almost everything else requires an MRI or symptoms to even begin to suspect something is wrong.
At least for brain cancer, I'd imagine it's because a lot of brain cancers are inoperable (in large part because they're so late detected and hence most of the damage is already done), but I agree lung cancer (IIRC, a good 20%+ are non-smoking related) should probably receive more focus/funding. Having said that, since cancer seems to be a serious of very similar ailments, a cure or treatment in one area could quite possible translate very strongly in almost all other areas, so any cancer research should do.
Old age suffers need far more support (costing far more time and money to aid) than almost any other group (babies and toddlers require more) generally, so I don't think treating dementia matters greatly in that regard. As for prostate cancer, odds are good you'll suffer that anyways; it's just likely won't kill you. Truthfully, I imagine dementia research has suffered the same problem as brain cancer research: it's hard to diagnosis early and treatment seems near impossible. In fact, one major thing of recent history is that we can now diagnosis pre-alzheimers with a brain scan, which helps greatly in obtain more certain baselines (people might pass or fail the IQ tests given for other reasons and to pass implies you're already a sufferer) and in even thinking about making a treatment (since the best success rates happen most often pre-symptoms).
In short, I think a major reason for the lopsided funded has precisely to do with those factors that look to produce the best results: longer quality of life in more early and easily treatable diseases (worst case, you can remove a breast, but it's harder to remove most of a lung or a large section of brain and expect good results; and symptomatic dementia patients are unlikely to recover). Thankfully, new research with early detection and drug treatments in dementia may help, but we're simply so early in the field that it's only now I'd expect to see a surge in funding.
Sounds about right. "I'm lovin' it"? I'd really love a nutritious meal. Or from a competitor, "Have it your way"? My way would be a nutritious meal. About here I could make a reference to being part of the space age and how we can put a man on the moon but can't make a nutritious and delicious burger. Or more accurately, we probably could, but it might not sell as well, and it's all about the bottom line.
Just like we could have a Facebook that cares about privacy and actually responded to privacy concerns and resolved thems. Or how Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc could do a much better job with security all around, including making it a lot more sane when it comes to keeping up-to-date (requiring hotfixes is not part of the answer, but providing hotfixes may be).
Or more generally as has been stated to me, it seems that a company takes about how good or great they are at some precisely because they're overly bad at it. The best sort of lie is the outrageous one because so few are willing to believe in the seeming contradiction of calling attention to a deficit and yet believing no one will call them out on it. Clearly it works, though, if for no other reason than those who notice the lie don't bother saying anything and those who don't are left to believe.
So, if we'd only lower taxes corporations who already have a sweet system setup to pay little or not taxes on some things are going to magically decide to increase their tax burden here. Pandering to corporations to manipulate them into paying a higher tax amount is unlikely to work because, as your quote implies, corporations are very set to find any possible loophole in paying less in taxes, especially as they view such actions as legal. More importantly, if at a whim a corporation were to invest heavily because the tax rate here is so low, it's fairly certainly they would just as easily on a whim move to invest somewhere else if another country were to have an even lower rate (until, of course, it reaches 0%, for which you possibly gain very little). It is also a mistaken belief that these efforts will be viewed as a partnership with the company who will look beyond their bottom-line (and how even a marginally better growth potential elsewhere good justify killing a profitable venture since the money spent elsewhere will grow faster).
In short, it would seem wise to come up with a better justification for a lower tax rate than trying to cater to flighty companies.
I agree. Why, if you raise Google's taxes any more, they'll go from charging $0/search to charging $0/search!*
Probably because it's easier to raise taxes on corporations than to raise taxes on the rich. Further, merely raising taxes on the rich would likely result in many leaving the US and that'd translate into either the US tax system possibly collapsing or some complex tracking system of corporate payments to shareholders. At that point, why not just tax the corporation itself since it's harder to loophole billions from one corporation (in that it'll be noticeable and is ripe for changes to the law to close the loophole) than millions from many shareholders (where even closing loopholes might not be enough).
Well, given there's been deficit spending in the US for 40+ years (ignoring a few Clinton years), it's pretty clear people are used to not paying all the taxes they'd need for what they want. I don't think removing corporate taxes would magically change that.
*Yes, technically I'm not Google's customer--advertisers are. But, then that's just another example of hiding costs. Or, you know, it's because it's ineffective to charge individuals for searching and beneficial to advertisers to be able to pay to reach potential customers. Funny that you don't argue for taxing *just* corporations and companies since no matter how you look at it there's no way to magically make people associate what they pay in taxes to what benefit they receive in government spending, no matter how high or low taxes are. Yes, you could get rid of all taxes, but then you'd be nickeled and dimed (or I guess be ad-sponsored) everywhere and that's not really a tenable situation when you need unbiased courts, accessible travel for all, and a defense that can't be bought out.
Have you considered that those consumers were scared more by the seeming sudden rise in bugs and fixes than anything? Google strives to set the expectation that bugs will be fixed and they will be open not only of those bugs but the fixes. If there were to be a sudden and unannounced change to that policy I am certain it would frighten and confuse many of its users. So, while I agree that the developer in question should have been removed from creating the release notes henceforth, I don't agree on the reasoning. In communicating, after all, one has to consider one's audience and their expectations in deciding how best to provide them with information that you think important they should know; causing a panic strongly implies they failed in their duty.
Of course, if your previous employer and its customers would rather not have technical details like bug fixes in release notes, that is really something that should have been clear policy and the release notes should have been checked by a manager to verify it conformed to that policy. :/
That's mostly easy. Some are 32-bit (like how there's Windows 7 32-bit) and some are 64-bit (like how there's Windows 7 64-bit). Meanwhile, the other big names (Gnome, KDE, etc) are the different focus (Home, Professional, Ultimate). Of course, a DVD that just contained everything and had a default option would simplify things. But, then you'd have to likely have to d/l 2+ GB and you'd likely need a DVD burner.
Window managers (which are the big differences in the names) are like sects. Sure, you can be a Christian. But there's no "one main default" Christianity. Trying to push one as a default is only likely to piss off every other sect. It's precisely because there's such little differences that makes people so angry about it because if one actually choses one over another, it means you've actually spent a lot of time and energy on why one is right or one is wrong. Being nebulously Christian (or Muslim or Hindu) tends more to just being from an area where people just presume you are and for which outside of rejecting it, a lot of people don't seem to put a lot of thought into it.
It's the same way about one's favorite brand of soda (while less so whether one says "soda", "pop", or "Coca-cola"), btw. I just wanted to throw in a not-entirely-pointless religious reference. :)
Well, beyond the obvious (an installer could work on any distro, not just an apt-based one meanwhile a sources.list allows for apt to pull in updates), not much really. Both are bad because most distros and versions within a distro are incompatible with each other, possibly in subtle ways, and most developers aren't willing to both support many distros and versions in the short term let alone support them in the long term. Even within a distro community (Ubuntu), plenty of packages have been dropped in the last three years (something I noticed when upgrading from the 8.04 to 10.04) and while some individuals might have their own PPA, I'm not inclined to believe most will hang around in the long-term.
In short, the issue fundamentally is that Linux userspace is heavily fragment and constantly changing and the LSB standard was pretty much a complete failure. This is more or less precisely because of an unwillingness to maintain backwards compatibility in userspace and heavy API churn (either simply from bad first design or a desire to "start fresh"). Distros try to counter this by recompiling everything to work with whatever is the latest new thing, but then each distro revision ends up adding to the problem.
The only real way that these problems will be fixed in the long term is if both a newer LSB standard is created and if distros (RedHat and Debian being two big bases) actually follow them. Of course, that loses a major point of even having separate distros. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't see many current distros exactly jumping at the chance to obsolete themselves.
Funny, I had a similar idea involving product safety regulation, although it acknowledged that China isn't really the only country who does these sorts of things (you don't see massive import tariffs on oil from OPEC, for example*). And like other posters, I'm pessimistic that any such tariff increases would actually take place given how unpopular it would be.
*Come to think of it, the whole oil example might be better. Basically, we have higher taxes which are funneled into subsidizing national oil extraction. It's not enough to make us foreign oil independent, but it's enough to hedge somewhat against OPEC vastly manipulating the market**. In essence, it shifts the dead-weight loss of monopoly pricing into the dead-weight loss of taxation. Since taxes are more hidden (and admittedly, the US isn't taxing enough to cover it's debts), there's more support for such a scheme. Of course, such market manipulation can have unintended side-effects (like the US subsidizing oil production that ends up being sold to other countries) but the effective lower real oil price makes it work out to the US's and the world's advantage in the overall.
**And if China or OPEC were to boycott sales to the US, then supply shortages would cause a massive spike in the price. As a result, the increased tax revenue (presuming they were actually relative to price, which sadly they aren't in many cases) could be used to pay for material/energy diversification programs.
I'd presume this comes about from the fact that [administration] software used to be very expensive so it was normally cheaper to hire a sysadmin/programmer than to hire a sysadmin and seperate software. The fact that most sysadmins used to be at least minimally programmers (ie, they could write a shell script) certainly helped in that.
Quite true. Meanwhile, most companies demand the equivalent of musician/recording engineers for the price of slightly more than a musician. And that tends to drive down the wages of those who are the equivalent of just recording engineers. That's just economics at play.
Yes, and that's why Windows System Administrators tend to be paid less than UNIX/Linux System Administrators. And where Windows can be said to excel is in providing for common tasks for very small businesses (ie, they only have one or two IT staff) in a GUI format so no programmer is needed.
No, I think it would be said that a good admin should know how to learn in an unfamiliar situation. GUIs can certainly facilitate this, but GUIs don't magically remove the need to understand.
I think that heavily depends on your use of the word "novel". Most problems in system administration aren't really novel. They're merely new to the system administrator. In that regard, GUIs are great for helping prove the mechanism to do useful IT work. But, once you step into areas which are actually novel, GUIs by definition can rarely be of help. But, then, CLIs may be of little help either. At that point, you really do need to program, be it a script or an actually C/Java/whatever program.
Very true, much like how client-side javascript can aid people in validating their input before it's actually used. That's certainly good strength of a GUI when it's dealing with well-understood, common content.
Clearly these teachers need a lesson in marketing! To explain why they should be teaching Word they need a qualifier, like "Word is good".
So, it should be "Teaching The Good Word". You can then thank Microsoft and Government for teaching a whole new religion in school.
PS - And for those who believe in inerrancy, "Teaching The Good WordPerfect"; is it any wonder lawyers stuck with WordPerfect for so long?
If you read the article (yea, I know, I know), you'd notice the issue isn't "to use a ruler without injury". It's about "rigorous safety checks for lead, chemicals, flammability and other potential dangers", with I think emphasis on the lead. The
Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 was passed almost certainly because of all the China-toys-with-lead-paint issues of late, so now there has to be testing to make sure child (12 years old and under) toys wouldn't just randomly make kids sick. Unsurprisingly, then, when you're trying to sell a science kit to elementary schools, you have to test everything. In short, rulers are precisely the sort of otherwise innocuous thing added to a child toy that should be covered under the new law.
Of course, the real problem to me is focusing on just child toys instead of a more broad testing of products. The simple truth is that product testing in the US has been rather lax for quite a long while. There are also some externality costs to globalization, especially when it comes to the risks of other countries that are unlikely to act upon such gross fraud. Perhaps a system could be created where there would be tariffs on all imports for testing and taxes on all local sells, with refundable tariffs/taxing with sufficient supply-chain tracking and treaties that promise and actually enforce punishment on supply tainting. Of course, I imagine such a system would be largely ignored by the US and China, believing too many countries depend on them to raise tariffs or withhold importation for non-compliance with treaty terms.
So, I believe that at least as a pragmatic start, the CPSIA is on the right track no matter how absurd it first seems.
Um, I'm pretty sure the "native" word was to make clear that while now there are predators, they didn't get there on their own power.
Not yet.
I'm going to guess "no". The point is, it's a guess, just like your comment is a guess. Humans have intentionally or unintentionally introduced a lot of species into places where they would almost certainly would never have reached (ie, the birds would have died out before the cats came or the cats would have evolved and been a different species by the time they reached the islands). I think it's a bit too simple to act like humans aren't responsible for what has happened.
Or, you know, it could be that nature made good evolutionary choices. You know those feral cats killing the birds? What happens when all the birds die out? Yea, they might just all die out unless humans start feeding them (possibly with imported meat). There's a reason there's often not many, if any, largish mammals on islands: there's generally too much isolation for prey to move away resulting in large predator die-offs when their food supply runs low. Maybe the feral cats or rats will be small enough to survive. But it's not like the birds made a "bad evolutionary choice". You make it sound like they took the wrong path on a road or went out gambling and lost it big on the roulette. :)
Maybe not, but the general point still stands. Price differentiation is done rather often in software (businesses, consumers, NGOs, and schools all receive very different rates). Sometimes, it's more economical to flex one's litigation arm to curb piracy. Plenty of times, it's better to decrease the price for select groups to reduce piracy. But, of course, this can also come in the form of different things (separating the price of software from the support costs for it so more people will pay at least something for your software). In the end, it's most often about finding new opportunities related to your software and finding a cost effective way to supply a demand that people are willing to pay for.
There are actually instances where that can happen. Media rarely covers instances of incompetence until it's brought to their attention. So, while one can certainly deny researchers access to information to mask incompetence, it's also quite possible to simply inundate researchers with so much information that, lacking the resources, it'd take literal decades to find clear instances of incompetence.
But, even with small amounts of information, there's plenty of room to hide incompetence. If you have a certain ideology and expose it as the effective pragmatic view of how the world works (open source means many eyes means fewer bugs), few people are interested in actually challenging your assumptions. Those that do tend to have an agenda, so few (including the media) tend to give them much weight on the fragile evidence that if it were being presented by an independent group might be considered of worth. Meanwhile, stringent evidence of incompetence is generally difficult, if not impossible, to prove. The result is you have ideologies that win out even when it would seem there's clear evidence to disprove the ideology (consider, for example, the US's focus on supporting small businesses for economic growth as being possibly questionable).
Most of all, consider the reverse psychology aspects that allow for all sorts of abuses to occur (Congressional laws that do the exact opposite of their title or say, criticizing the use of children as a political ploy while sitting at a seeming school desk with children in the background as you sign a bill/executive order). The emperor may have no clothes and people may even subconsciously realize it, but too often no one actually steps forward and frankly states it, not because everyone is intelligent adults and realizes the clear falseness of what is presented but because at some level people don't even bother thinking of what they see as much as what they're told.
Quite true. I don't think people who do live in more rural settings believe high speed access has to be 100% identical in cost to more urban settings. The issue is the amount of the discrepancy.
Perhaps so, but farmers make up a marginal percentage of the rural population (eg. only 0.7% of the total US population is employed in agriculture yet the Midwest holds about 22% of the US population); however, I think a farmer was used as an example because of the naive presumption that the common rural individual is a farmer. Meanwhile, all sorts of infrastructure (roads, postal or other; electric wires; telephone wires; etc) cost more to roll out in rural areas, yet there's plenty of those things in rural settings. One might believe that most people in rural settings don't want high speed internet (and hence it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to recoup the costs to build that infrastructure), and I'd imagine that might be true today; but, the same argue could have been made before widespread creation of roads and trains when it comes to Midwesterners desiring fresh tropical fruits. Yet, you don't see stores here selling bananas at $6/lb.
In short, I can appreciate your sentiments on the issue, especially when it comes to farmers being businesses. And you do seem to want to differentiate that most non-farmers/non-businesses are not in a position to pay for available high speed internet. I think the real question is, why aren't there more affordable options in rural areas (and by affordable, I mean on the order of at most 2-3x the cost of urban areas) for non-businesses.
So, do you believe that after the game, one player has exactly $0.01 in worldly assets and the other has exactly $99.99 in worldly assets? Do you believe that there are no other people in the world, especially not individuals with assets in the billion dollar range or higher nor a total global economy in the multi-trillion dollar range? Why should you care that one person is suddenly enriched to the tune of $99.99 or $9,999,999.99? Unless you have a personal vendetta against the person in question, I really don't see why ideas of inequality should really matter.
The only way your idea really makes sense is if the game involved playing for an amount so large that possessing it was equivalent to having the buying power of most of the world combined. But, to that end, it is unlikely anyone would see your money as having any relative value precisely because it'd so depreciate their own assets' worth. The only thing left then is one only has reason to reject a value offered is if it's zero, for any other value imparts some benefit to oneself. The smallest such acceptable value is in the small available unit in the currency in question, a penny, so that's where the split would rationally occur.
If you want to talk about hyper-rationality, one would note that if one presumed the game was played many times and on average one played as both the offerer and receiver an equal number of times, then the average amount of money one would make for each game is $50 (o[fferer] = r[eciverer]; 0.01*o + 99.99r = 0.01o + 99.99o = 50o = 50r). So, on that basis, it really doesn't matter if one plays on the Nash equilibrium or if one tries to play "fair" on each round so long as everyone is consistent.
Just a small point, but the "ultimatum game" has been conducted many times and the consistent issue it raises is that people often reject low offers, even though as you note it's to reject free money. The new study in part gives one possible explanation for why young men might reject free money in the "ultimatum game", but it doesn't explain everyone else's reasons nor is there any evidence that it's the young males who were the group that most often rejected in previous "ultimatum game" studies. Btw, the Nash equilibrium, optimal solution for splitting $100 would be to offer $0.01 and keep $99.99. Would you accept that?
Oil naturally leaks into the oceans. That doesn't mean all oil leaking into the oceans is natural. Lightning naturally starts forest fires. That doesn't mean all forest fires are natural.
Yes, it can happen naturally that a well might be contaminated with oil or natural gas. But, when it's the case that a well wasn't contaminated then suddenly becomes contaminated after recently drilling near or on your property, I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about it being natural. Nor, really, would I find it "beyond a reasonable doubt" simply that it was contaminated from recent drilling.
However, if it's the case that the recent drilling involved pumping a trade secret mixture of chemicals into the ground and you can find it in your well, that's a pretty strong link. So, the situation becomes finding out, in some fashion, that trade secret mixture to perform a simply comparison. I think that's all that people who feel they are effected are really demanding. Of course, if they find that fingerprint mixture, I'm sure they'll want to file lawsuits, have passed regulation changes, and/or see criminal charges to be pressed. But, all of that's pretty reasonable.
Off-hand, I'd say a lot of workers have a problem with any increase in the labor pool as they fear it'll reduce their wages.
Well, I've got a great system for you then, cut-and-paste from Michael Badnarik (Libertarian candidate from 2004): "I advocate open immigration for individuals who are willing to enter at a Customs station and submit to a quick background check to ensure that they aren't criminals or terrorists. And I advocate treating people who cross the borders elsewhere as what they are: invaders."
Since we're so far away from that now, with the whole quota system favoring extant American families and skilled workers, I'd have to say our current distinction between illegal and legal immigration is pretty much a joke. But, then, I'm one of those crazy people who realizes the "move if you can't find work" really shouldn't limit yourself to national borders, no matter how "skilled" you are. If companies are globalized, workers should be too.
It is the job of marketing to figure out how to make good things (like bug fixes) sell, not to dictate to managers (and indirectly engineers) what to do. Of course, with open source it's less about "selling" and more about "what's fun and might get me positive attention", but then given that there is some PR being done by Mozilla about faster JS and what-not, it's hardly a reach for them to also highly congratulate and focus on those who do fix bugs of importance.
I hate to break it to you, but land owners weren't particularly vested in the interest of the country as a whole nor really the welfare of the local community. Southern land owners wanted to continue slavery, holding medium or large land stakes for farming which left it uneconomical for most people to own land; and the cotton gin basically demanded either very cheap or free labor (or machinery which only became viable after the exploitation of fossil fuels) to remain competitive. Meanwhile, Northern land owners wanted to have dormitories where hundreds of workers made finished goods, working 7 days a week (they could only get 6, thanks to the Bible), 16 hours a day for a penitence that would at best be sent home and with multiple other workers be enough to cover rent and food for the parents; in short, think a sweat shop but worse (since all of this was above board at the time, they could charge what they liked for the room and board (a non-negotiable aspect of the work), further decreasing effective wages. Hence, Southern land owners wanted high raw good tariffs, low finished good tariffs and Northerners wanted the reverse.
Funny. It general holds true that more urban areas are better educated (on average) and vote Democrat (ie, the east and west coasts) and rural areas are inferior educated (on average) and vote Republican (ie, the middle of the US). Meanwhile, urban areas tend to have higher renting (because land prices are so high, urbanization tends to require more job switching which encourages more resident relocation through the years which encourages renting) and rural ares tend to have higher land ownership (because land prices are relatively cheap, the job market is a bit more stable, and with distances as far apart as they are most people already expect to drive long distances and hence are more intent on investing in property).
Now, it could reasonably be argued that the average people doesn't vote and the less educated or more inclined to vote. But, that says more about the apathy of the masses than it does about the stupidity of the minority or their bad voting habits. To that end, it doesn't really explain the voting behavior in the middle of the US which shouldn't see such swing voting behavior with many more land owners.
PS - Yes, I realize a lot of those "land owners" are really "mortgage holders". But, a great debt is also of rather deep concern and I think would still fit all your qualifications on why such individuals should vote better.
I'd love to see this idea implemented in bittorrent. Not only would it allow for people to post one encoded HD video while allowing others to effectively pull out SD videos at much reduced bandwidth costs, it could be coupled with the idea of streaming video through bittorrent. That'd seem to be the main, elusive hindrance to (mostly) decentralized broadcasting of video. Perhaps they could even include the feature optionally into HTML5 (so websites don't get slashdotted just because they have a popular video)? :)
Ie, we should accept fraud in a free market because..um..it really helps people who commit fraud? Really, fraud is deception to gain value. If one knows full-well that one's maximum rate has little or no bearing on median rate or even on any real probability of seeing that maximum rate at any time ever, then describing one's product with that value is intentionally deceptive precisely to defraud. Advertisement should be to inform. Think Wikipedia's non-bias standard: qualify all statements made and include as complete a picture as one reasonably can.
One should not have to second-guess the complete truthfulness of advertisements. Such is precisely the reason why the US economy is so fucked up right now (literally, the recession is a byproduct of understating the risk of subprime mortgages during securitization and the derivatives market misrepresenting their capacity to payout on failed contracts).
The point at which society is willing to pay all disabled individuals a disability payment at least equivalent to median salary while being perfectly content to letting the disabled not work a day in their life. You do realize that that's a major reason for the law to allow accessibility is precisely to allow disabled individuals the opportunity to work, right? Without such laws, most places end up being unwilling to spend "thousands of pounds" or whatever just to hire one new individual. Hence, the employer pool drives down wages for all disabled, regardless of how little their disability effects their actual work. It also drives down employment opportunities, resulting in massive unemployment for the disabled (it was around 50% before the ADA was passed in the US and now is around 13% today; I presume figures in the UK are similar or perhaps worse).
I wonder, do you bemoan having to subsidize public transportation as well?
And that'd rather defeat the purpose. Censor out the word nigger when it comes to the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement because you don't want to offend white/black relations. Censor out all the sex, adultery, and homosexuality that was happening in the 50s because you want to paint a rosy picture of a simpler, more innocent time. Censor out the drug use and abuse that's gone on for ages because it makes the issue seem like a modern problem. Try to block the construction of a mosque/community center because it'd be "insensitive" (which I guess justifies blocking such construction for 50 years at which point we can dish out some token apologies like we did to Japanese-Americans of WWII).
While I'd certain admit that EA probably included the option more for sensationalist purposes than any intent to help people both realize the horrors of war and to help those who went through those horrors to cope, it still achieves those things. Trying to dilute the pill might make it taste less bitter, but then it might not work well or at all if you do so.
Yes, it takes a good bit of strength and character to look past the pain one sees today and view the bigger picture. Yes, healing from one's loss will likely be harder when one has to acknowledge that one's son was a soldier not a peace keeper. In the end, though, perhaps it'll make for more questioning of the support of future needless wars that result in the death of even more soldiers, civilians, or whatever.
War might be necessary and even the necessary wars need to be questioned. For those who really think a war was necessary, questioning it constantly to constantly verify it is really was the only way is precisely the sort of thing one would wish. I guess, though, when you know that one's child was killed for questionable causes, it's easier to be in denial than to face the cold truth. But, the cold truth is no war, no matter how necessary, will make you feel warm and good inside when you really think about the horror that war is.