Spitzer was a person of interest because he was a public official engaging in activity indicative of corruption. His activities were monitored pursuant to warrant and under supervision of a Federal judge. The vigorous anti-corruption activities of the DoJ are one of the reasons this is such a good country to live in.
It is quite possible some powerful people decided to destroy Spitzer because of his crusade against the thieves on Wall Street who have been quite obviously stealing this country in to poverty.
Apparently your bias against "Wall Street" is strong enough that you're able to overlook Spitzer's McCarthy style tactics. As you may recall he'd get on television and pronounce people guilty of this or that when lacking evidence even for just an indictment. Yeah, a few people he nailed deserved it, but his tactics were inappropriate. You might also recall that he was caught using the State Police to undermine his political opponents.
Do you realize that you've just damned your argument?
I don't say that things changed, I doubt it has been different under Kennedy, Nixon or Carter. But the view of things and the way people look at them changed dramatically in the last 50 years. The government isn't the good Uncle Sam anymore. It's turned into the bad Big Brother.
So what you're saying is that "your generation" perceives the government as being the bad Big Brother. Ironically you don't seem to realize this meta point as you slide immediately from "haven't changed in fact" to "Its turned into".
No it hasn't; instead your negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it.
We see a discrepancy between our goals and the laws our governments make.
That is democracy. Such a discrepancy is almost surely a consequence of living in a republic and not in a totalitarian state that has brainwashed us to all have identical goals. I suspect you're experiencing Confirmation Bias and Selection Effect: surrounding yourself with like-minded people and restricting your reading to partisan sites.
thus the producer of IP really does have a monopoly on his specific good
Correct; I say just that. But that does not mean he can extract monopoly rents because alternative goods while different may be substitutes. e.g., OSX vs. Vista.
Microsoft owns the monopoly on Vista, and thus are the "price-setter". If they say it's $400, it's $400.
No. Copyright is a monopoly on a vary specific item. Just like an "iPhone" (r) is a monopoly on a specific designation for a cell phone. This does not mean that the person who controls the monopoly can charge monopoly rents. e.g., there are other OSs and there are cell phones in competition.
This is called a "monopolistically competitive market" in economics. Something that arises whenever there are many differentiated products comprising a class rather than a commodity--meaning that the producers produce interchangeable goods.
Microsoft's ability to set price depends on the presence or absence of competing products offered in the market place. Therefore their monopoly or lack thereof arises not because they posses a monopoly on distributing the "Microsoft OS" specifically but because there is no (or a limited) alternative product on the market.
Ironically the whole class A connects to the internet via a NAT. I'm not sure how many hosts could even be pinged on it. That doesn't really mean the space is "wasted".
That's exactly what it means. Thanks for completely conceding the precept. The map shown in link #1 of GGP is a map of those hosts who ping or have open ports. Its pretty darn sparse.
And current routing technologies basically make that inevitable. Unless routing tables grow to a point where/24s or smaller are routable at the top level you're going to end up making much larger allocations than are needed.
No, you only need to do that sort of routing at the leaves. This isn't really a problem for 'core' routers. Second, IPv6 wouldn't improve this situation either.
You're also neglecting that the big iron routers still suffer capacity and performance problems given the insane address length of IPv6. This has been and remains one of the principal barriers to deployment. IPv6 simply costs a heck of a lot more per route and per packet routed.
You should also keep in mind that using NAT gateways puts the internet back into the state it was designed to be. An internet being of course a "a network of networks"
However, as others have pointed out if you actually got all those companies to give up all their address space it would buy you 6-12 months max. There aren't really that many of them.
This is wrong. You clearly didn't take the trouble to look at the links I posted in the GP. While the instances of 'class a' abuse are somewhat constrained, there are plenty of poorly utilized allocations. Take a look, its shockingly sparse.
It just doesn't matter how many people repeat the shortage canard; it doesn't make it true.
NAT to ISP customers would be a bad thing, but that isn't the solution people are recommending when they suggest switching to NAT. Instead of just po-poing NAT, we should be making clear that targetted applications of NAT make sense.
All the major backbone router manufacturers have included IPv6 natively for at least the last 3 to 6 years. Any internet company that has done a major upgrade to deal with ever increasing traffic levels and customer demands now have IPv6 capable hardware in service in the backbone. Some manufacturers may still charge more to turn the capability on. The ones that don't are seeing increasing sales because all their major clients don't like have a tiered system of features, where the only set with all the needed features is the most expensive one.
This is what's so frustrating to hear. It isn't enough for the router to have a checkbox, "supports IPv6". If you start using IPV6 in your routing tables, suddenly either your table capacity or your cycle-time decreases by a factor of 4. This is a BIG deal. IPv6 hasn't been adopted widely in part because IPv6 is a bad standard. Stupid ideas like bloating the address-space to 128 creating the aforementioned problem. Stupid ideas like trying to eliminate DHCP by using prefixes but ignoring the need for hosts to acquire OTHER configuration information. Stupid ideas like making the IPv6 header so large, you actually bloat the size of TCP SYN frames that otherwise could have fit within an ethernet minsize frame. etc, etc, etc.
I think you need to read more about the IPv4 allocation. "NAT" needs to be deployed by corporations for their internal workstations. This is the true cause of the shortage. Companies like Apple (gasp) have ancient class-A allocations--Yes you read that right, Apple controls a block of 16 Million IPs. Of these, only a few thousand are routable or whose ports are publically reachable (due to firewalls).
So stop the FUD. The question isn't whether home users will get NAT'd by their ISP. The question is whether 30 year old allocations need to be rebalanced to place more addresses in the hands of network service providers.
At my company all of our workstations are behind a NAT. We have fewer than 16 routable IPs but control the equivalent of an old "C" block allocation.
You should take a look at this: census vs. allocation. Only a small fraction of IPs are really in use.
Maybe you're missing the point that small changes could have made the product noticeably more useful. Unfortunately the story is out: Jobs and Ives worked on the form-factor mockup. Then the rest of the team got tasked to make stuff fit in there. Surprise, surprise someone (Jobs) needed to go back and budge on the form factor a bit. The tapered edges for instance steal substantial internal space from the case but don't offer the user very much.
You say that the MBA isn't for "road warriors" but rather for people who "cares about looking really good at client meeting". I don't know how your company works, but in my company our sales and field application engineers are most definitely "road warriors". "Client meetings" take place at the client's place of business.
Employees of major corporations assigned to opensource could be laid off or reassigned to directly profitable projects.
Bingo. This is precisely what happened to the FreeBSD probject when the dotcom bubble burst. Half of their developers got laid off in the middle of major architectural work (fine-grained locking). It took years for them to recover. Conversely, Linux in 2000 was much more of a hobbyist world (unlike now) and kept going without a hitch.
Do you realize that following someone is not 'stalking'. Stalking has a mens rea requirement in most states: to be guilty of stalking you must have the intention of inflicting emotional distress upon your target. Intention is the hardest mens rea to prove.
... and something a third party investigator can safely be clear of.
Actually there is a wikipedia policy against using the alleged modifier at all.
"alleged" is an editorial modifier; it renders the statement judgmental. In the first paragraph edit we go from "Alleged links... was mentioned..." to "Links were mentioned..."
The latter is literally correct. The media and the government mentioned links between Iraq and terrorism. An appropriate bit of balance would have been a citation to analysis of the recovered Iraqi government papers which showed, in retrospect, contacts but skepticism.
The edit also deleted a sentence quoting an editorial claiming that mentioning the links strained credulity. At the time that quote was written it was off the wall partisan. Only in retrospect is it clear how much the links were exaggerated. So the text sets a very biased tone.
Arguably the propaganda came not from the staffer's edits but from the original authors. Indeed now we have new propaganda being reported on slashdot about the evil congressional staffer. Hey wake up slashdot editors: the Inquirer is a left-wing publication and the article smears the right. Gee-wizz that can't be partisan spin in itself.
Bush et al were wrong but some people still need to get over their frenzied nonsense dogma about being lied into war. Being right was an accident.
Right, the caloric balance determines the ultimate weight gain/loss. The question then is what determines 'calories burned'. I don't know much about this subject, but I know enough to know that calories burned is a function of both the form of the calories consumed and your activity level.
A further complication is the idea that eating 1000 calories of fat is more harmful than 1000 calories of starch. This hypothesis is rampant but unsubstantiated.
Apparently you live in some sort of reality distortion field. Well here's the deal: communications used to use microwave communications. These were easily intercepted and routinely. This sort of stuff is called 'Signals Intelligence'. A nice British chap,a former assistant directory of MI-5, was at the forefront of this this, and he wrote a book about his experiences called spycatcher.
The book also provides an examination of the techniques used by the intelligence services, along with a candid expose of their ethics which had until then been mere speculation (notably the "11th commandment" which states that "thou shalt not get caught"). Wright explains many of the technologies used by MI5, some of which he developed himself, and which allowed the agency to bug rooms using a variety of clever electronic techniques.
These technologies have been updated for fiber-optics. Yes, a lot of interception takes place directly in the United States, but in fact it is going on all over the world. Its done by all of the major powers, not just the United States--and guess what, they are all spying on eachother
You're mistaken in thinking that privacy is better part of liberty. No, liberty is only liberty when it doesn't matter who knows or doesn't know what you are doing. Its our liberty that makes the US different from the autocratic regimes which rule many countries in the world. Every government is listening; only some let you do what you choose regardless.
Its worse than that. The contributions tend to be very biased and charged--which is part of the reason why you hear about these class projects from 'soft subjects'. e.g., women's studies programs have been doing this sort of thing for years. The result: substantial disinformation polluting the articles and an army of ideological enforcers to keep it there.
I'm not sure how immunity can be granted when it clearly go against the US Constitution, given that the president takes an oath "to uphold the United States Constitution", doesn't this mean he's in breach and therefore liable of contempt?
No, you're forgetting that there is another side to our constitutional protections: each branch of the government gets to draw its own conclusions about the meaning of the constitution. This is why for instance, when Congress passes a law and the executive enforces it, the court may nonetheless refuse to uphold any convictions under that law. Similarly, if Congress passes a law that the President believes violates the constitution he may ignore it; it is in his eyes, "not a law".
This is the keystone of the tripartite system of government.
In the case of the fourth amendment, the courts have developed the exclusionary rule to handle disagreements with the Executive as to the meaning of the 4th amendment. The executive may search and seize willy-nilly but the court does and will refuse to take notice of evidence that it believes was gathered in violation of the 4th amendment. No evidence means no conviction, no imprisonment, no loss of property, etc.
I think you are mistaken as to what is meant by "the percent of characters retained per contribution by each contributor."
"Vandalism : Revert : Vandalism : Revert" is counted such that Revert is credited with 100% retention and Vandalism is credited with 0% retention. What matters is which characters of an edit are preserved going forward, not if they were preserved in an immediate sense.
The "per-contribution" aspects refers to averaging/normalization.
After the MN jury verdict was announced, I realized that the file sharing crowd has a lot in common with the tax protester crowd. For those that aren't aware, tax protesters have a variety of reasons why the US Income tax doesn't need to be paid: the amendment wasn't correctly ratified, wages can't be taxed, the IRS doesn't have authority, etc, etc. And They still cling to these arguments even when no court has ever ruled in their favor (it's a conspiracy, after all).
I don't know much about the tax protesters, so I'm going to decline to engage your specific example and challenge the logic of your argument. The critical remark you make is "They still cling to these arguments even when no court has ever ruled in their favor". Because of Stare Decisis it is possible for the court system to repeatedly act contrary to fact and logic. And here lies an important point, there is a distinct difference between what courts do and what the law is. Those two things are not the same, but a trial judge is not (usually) receptive to interpretations of the law at variance with precedent. This is why we have appellate courts and the supreme court; those judges and justices have a bit of discretion to reconsider whether the precedent and the actual law agree.
But here again is an important point: neither the appellate courts nor the supreme court act of their own volition. They require first that a party challenge the interpretation. Consequently, I find your attitude of "give up, you lost already" rather out-of-touch with how the court system functions and the meaning of truth.
I think it's funny that you are so certain "AT&T" is to blame for this situation. Granted _thirty_ to _forty_ years ago, AT&T was embroiled in a bit of scandal over their attempt to maintain a closed network. BUT you might recall that they eventually gave-up (or lost) that fight. Meanwhile, Apple has a rather consistent history of opposing user access to their innards of their products.
It really shame b.c. apple is squandering good will over this. Unfortunately, the iPhone is complex enough that you have to start worrying about it being trojaned. I'd guess that there was some sort of question posed to engineering to protect the user from this. The answer that came back was to keep everything in a sandbox within the web browser.
Given apple's politics, this sort of anti-libertarian thinking is hardly surprising.
I don't see how you can equate phone unlocking to hacking. People don't seem to realize that your carrier has to unlock your phone upon your request. Indeed, why should the carrier care? You've already signed a two-year contract with termination fee with them. I've done this with T-Mobile USA and AT&T. You just have to be insistent and assert you want to be able to use your phone overseas.
This whole situation is a classic example of ignorance breeding presumption that has now been re-enforced by a company (Apple) making a radical change in historic practice all while believing (perhaps) and convincing most people (likely) that this is just a marginal step.
One can only "innovate" a gallon of milk so much. So, food prices generally rise with inflation. (IIRC, they're actually one of the prime measures of inflation.)
You are right, but if only the BLS agreed with you. Most of the inflation numbers people quote are so-called core inflation which excludes food prices. This makes sense if we want to talk about last months inflation, but not so much if want to discuss year over year inflation. I don't know why more careful distinctions aren't drawn by the press when they report this sort of stuff, but that's the breaks.
Second, inflation is more likely around 6%. See for background: http://www.shadowstats.com/ The gist of which is BLS changed its method of computing CPI at the beginning of the Clinton Administration.
Shadow stats gives a pretty rigorous assessment. My own analysis of Federal Reserve Annual Reports pegs inflation at roughly 10%, but my work was very rough back-of-the-envelope type stuff based on trends in Fed's SOMA account. So, I am willing to believe 6%. Other analysis: http://www.nowandfutures.com/cpi_lie.html
If you read the Economist, the last page publishes a commodity price index. The percent change over one year ago is roughly 15-20% per year, consistently every publication week.
Its funny how much we've been conditioned to think that the price of things should go up not down. Think about it, all other things being equal, as we get smarter, more efficient with our production of goods prices should go down. Prices only go up because inflation is an even more powerful force than innovation in our economy.
Second, the cost of everything has an fixed component and a quantity component. One reason an F22 fighter is so expensive is that relatively few are built. The same thing happened with the iPhone. At the beginning they weren't sure if they'd sell 1 or 1 million. They had to guess and price accordingly. Now that so many are sold, the fixed costs (like engineering) are paid-in.
Meanwhile, they are competing with many other kinds of smart phones. Most of which were cheaper already. Doesn't anyone remember all the talk about how the iPhone was outrageously priced above competing smart phones?
Yeah. So after their profit margin was clearly fat, they cut prices to be competitive and more than just fan-boy enthusiasm. We should be worried? This article is drawing ridiculous connections between the iPhone and the panic over the sub-prime mortgage market.
The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?
The little bit of editorializing in this submission is a little bit too much. I fail to see how making countries directly responsible will depoliticize the process. ICANN, is a flawed organization, but it is an effort to make management of the domain name system independent of governments and technically driven.
The IEEE is not a UN body; Its voting membership, and its activities are a combination of academics and engineers employed by major technology companies. Given this, I find it hard to see how the "surely" remark in the story summary can even be regarded as reasonable.
I for one would prefer a more technical, more independent ICANN--not a less technical, more political ICANN such as is embodied by the sluggish and highly politicized ITU.
I don't think it will happen this way. First, GP computing is just a small slice of the VLSI application space. It isn't obvious that all the other problems in the world will suddenly become quantum computing problems. I see two effects: first because of cost reasons performance gains will not appear across all sections of the GP market. e.g., home systems will begin to fall further behind top-end computing. Second, Moore's law will slow down before it "ends" at a physical limit. So if it predicts we have five more generations to go, those may smear out over 20 years not 10.
Also: there are many other problems in silicon manufacturing not relating to feature size (the primary subject of Moore's law). i.e., there are ways we could build faster (but not denser) devices than we do now. Thus, the density aspect may stall and emphasis could return more to performance. e.g., using photonic interconnects for long distance signaling, lower Vt with less leakage, etc. The emphasis could also shift to cost. If the per-design mask costs go down than these really advanced process technologies will be available to more low-volume application specific situations. That could be potentially a very big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Spitzer was a person of interest because he was a public official engaging in activity indicative of corruption. His activities were monitored pursuant to warrant and under supervision of a Federal judge. The vigorous anti-corruption activities of the DoJ are one of the reasons this is such a good country to live in.
Apparently your bias against "Wall Street" is strong enough that you're able to overlook Spitzer's McCarthy style tactics. As you may recall he'd get on television and pronounce people guilty of this or that when lacking evidence even for just an indictment. Yeah, a few people he nailed deserved it, but his tactics were inappropriate. You might also recall that he was caught using the State Police to undermine his political opponents.Do you realize that you've just damned your argument?
So what you're saying is that "your generation" perceives the government as being the bad Big Brother. Ironically you don't seem to realize this meta point as you slide immediately from "haven't changed in fact" to "Its turned into".
No it hasn't; instead your negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it.
That is democracy. Such a discrepancy is almost surely a consequence of living in a republic and not in a totalitarian state that has brainwashed us to all have identical goals. I suspect you're experiencing Confirmation Bias and Selection Effect: surrounding yourself with like-minded people and restricting your reading to partisan sites.
Correct; I say just that. But that does not mean he can extract monopoly rents because alternative goods while different may be substitutes. e.g., OSX vs. Vista.
No. Copyright is a monopoly on a vary specific item. Just like an "iPhone" (r) is a monopoly on a specific designation for a cell phone. This does not mean that the person who controls the monopoly can charge monopoly rents. e.g., there are other OSs and there are cell phones in competition.
This is called a "monopolistically competitive market" in economics. Something that arises whenever there are many differentiated products comprising a class rather than a commodity--meaning that the producers produce interchangeable goods.
Microsoft's ability to set price depends on the presence or absence of competing products offered in the market place. Therefore their monopoly or lack thereof arises not because they posses a monopoly on distributing the "Microsoft OS" specifically but because there is no (or a limited) alternative product on the market.
Ah easy: you tax the income it generates instead. Oh wait that's called an income tax...
No, you only need to do that sort of routing at the leaves. This isn't really a problem for 'core' routers. Second, IPv6 wouldn't improve this situation either.
You're also neglecting that the big iron routers still suffer capacity and performance problems given the insane address length of IPv6. This has been and remains one of the principal barriers to deployment. IPv6 simply costs a heck of a lot more per route and per packet routed.
You should also keep in mind that using NAT gateways puts the internet back into the state it was designed to be. An internet being of course a "a network of networks"
This is wrong. You clearly didn't take the trouble to look at the links I posted in the GP. While the instances of 'class a' abuse are somewhat constrained, there are plenty of poorly utilized allocations. Take a look, its shockingly sparse.
It just doesn't matter how many people repeat the shortage canard; it doesn't make it true.
NAT to ISP customers would be a bad thing, but that isn't the solution people are recommending when they suggest switching to NAT. Instead of just po-poing NAT, we should be making clear that targetted applications of NAT make sense.
This is what's so frustrating to hear. It isn't enough for the router to have a checkbox, "supports IPv6". If you start using IPV6 in your routing tables, suddenly either your table capacity or your cycle-time decreases by a factor of 4. This is a BIG deal. IPv6 hasn't been adopted widely in part because IPv6 is a bad standard. Stupid ideas like bloating the address-space to 128 creating the aforementioned problem. Stupid ideas like trying to eliminate DHCP by using prefixes but ignoring the need for hosts to acquire OTHER configuration information. Stupid ideas like making the IPv6 header so large, you actually bloat the size of TCP SYN frames that otherwise could have fit within an ethernet minsize frame. etc, etc, etc.
I think you need to read more about the IPv4 allocation. "NAT" needs to be deployed by corporations for their internal workstations. This is the true cause of the shortage. Companies like Apple (gasp) have ancient class-A allocations--Yes you read that right, Apple controls a block of 16 Million IPs. Of these, only a few thousand are routable or whose ports are publically reachable (due to firewalls).
So stop the FUD. The question isn't whether home users will get NAT'd by their ISP. The question is whether 30 year old allocations need to be rebalanced to place more addresses in the hands of network service providers.
At my company all of our workstations are behind a NAT. We have fewer than 16 routable IPs but control the equivalent of an old "C" block allocation.
You should take a look at this: census vs. allocation. Only a small fraction of IPs are really in use.
Maybe you're missing the point that small changes could have made the product noticeably more useful. Unfortunately the story is out: Jobs and Ives worked on the form-factor mockup. Then the rest of the team got tasked to make stuff fit in there. Surprise, surprise someone (Jobs) needed to go back and budge on the form factor a bit. The tapered edges for instance steal substantial internal space from the case but don't offer the user very much.
You say that the MBA isn't for "road warriors" but rather for people who "cares about looking really good at client meeting". I don't know how your company works, but in my company our sales and field application engineers are most definitely "road warriors". "Client meetings" take place at the client's place of business.
Do you realize that following someone is not 'stalking'. Stalking has a mens rea requirement in most states: to be guilty of stalking you must have the intention of inflicting emotional distress upon your target. Intention is the hardest mens rea to prove.
... and something a third party investigator can safely be clear of.
Actually there is a wikipedia policy against using the alleged modifier at all.
"alleged" is an editorial modifier; it renders the statement judgmental. In the first paragraph edit we go from "Alleged links... was mentioned..." to "Links were mentioned..."
The latter is literally correct. The media and the government mentioned links between Iraq and terrorism. An appropriate bit of balance would have been a citation to analysis of the recovered Iraqi government papers which showed, in retrospect, contacts but skepticism.
The edit also deleted a sentence quoting an editorial claiming that mentioning the links strained credulity. At the time that quote was written it was off the wall partisan. Only in retrospect is it clear how much the links were exaggerated. So the text sets a very biased tone.
Arguably the propaganda came not from the staffer's edits but from the original authors. Indeed now we have new propaganda being reported on slashdot about the evil congressional staffer. Hey wake up slashdot editors: the Inquirer is a left-wing publication and the article smears the right. Gee-wizz that can't be partisan spin in itself.
Bush et al were wrong but some people still need to get over their frenzied nonsense dogma about being lied into war. Being right was an accident.
Right, the caloric balance determines the ultimate weight gain/loss. The question then is what determines 'calories burned'. I don't know much about this subject, but I know enough to know that calories burned is a function of both the form of the calories consumed and your activity level.
A further complication is the idea that eating 1000 calories of fat is more harmful than 1000 calories of starch. This hypothesis is rampant but unsubstantiated.
Apparently you live in some sort of reality distortion field. Well here's the deal: communications used to use microwave communications. These were easily intercepted and routinely. This sort of stuff is called 'Signals Intelligence'. A nice British chap,a former assistant directory of MI-5, was at the forefront of this this, and he wrote a book about his experiences called spycatcher .
These technologies have been updated for fiber-optics. Yes, a lot of interception takes place directly in the United States, but in fact it is going on all over the world. Its done by all of the major powers, not just the United States--and guess what, they are all spying on eachother
You're mistaken in thinking that privacy is better part of liberty. No, liberty is only liberty when it doesn't matter who knows or doesn't know what you are doing. Its our liberty that makes the US different from the autocratic regimes which rule many countries in the world. Every government is listening; only some let you do what you choose regardless.
Its worse than that. The contributions tend to be very biased and charged--which is part of the reason why you hear about these class projects from 'soft subjects'. e.g., women's studies programs have been doing this sort of thing for years. The result: substantial disinformation polluting the articles and an army of ideological enforcers to keep it there.
No, you're forgetting that there is another side to our constitutional protections: each branch of the government gets to draw its own conclusions about the meaning of the constitution. This is why for instance, when Congress passes a law and the executive enforces it, the court may nonetheless refuse to uphold any convictions under that law. Similarly, if Congress passes a law that the President believes violates the constitution he may ignore it; it is in his eyes, "not a law".
This is the keystone of the tripartite system of government.
In the case of the fourth amendment, the courts have developed the exclusionary rule to handle disagreements with the Executive as to the meaning of the 4th amendment. The executive may search and seize willy-nilly but the court does and will refuse to take notice of evidence that it believes was gathered in violation of the 4th amendment. No evidence means no conviction, no imprisonment, no loss of property, etc.
I think you are mistaken as to what is meant by "the percent of characters retained per contribution by each contributor."
"Vandalism : Revert : Vandalism : Revert" is counted such that Revert is credited with 100% retention and Vandalism is credited with 0% retention. What matters is which characters of an edit are preserved going forward, not if they were preserved in an immediate sense.
The "per-contribution" aspects refers to averaging/normalization.
I don't know much about the tax protesters, so I'm going to decline to engage your specific example and challenge the logic of your argument. The critical remark you make is "They still cling to these arguments even when no court has ever ruled in their favor". Because of Stare Decisis it is possible for the court system to repeatedly act contrary to fact and logic. And here lies an important point, there is a distinct difference between what courts do and what the law is. Those two things are not the same, but a trial judge is not (usually) receptive to interpretations of the law at variance with precedent. This is why we have appellate courts and the supreme court; those judges and justices have a bit of discretion to reconsider whether the precedent and the actual law agree.
But here again is an important point: neither the appellate courts nor the supreme court act of their own volition. They require first that a party challenge the interpretation. Consequently, I find your attitude of "give up, you lost already" rather out-of-touch with how the court system functions and the meaning of truth.
I think it's funny that you are so certain "AT&T" is to blame for this situation. Granted _thirty_ to _forty_ years ago, AT&T was embroiled in a bit of scandal over their attempt to maintain a closed network. BUT you might recall that they eventually gave-up (or lost) that fight. Meanwhile, Apple has a rather consistent history of opposing user access to their innards of their products.
It really shame b.c. apple is squandering good will over this. Unfortunately, the iPhone is complex enough that you have to start worrying about it being trojaned. I'd guess that there was some sort of question posed to engineering to protect the user from this. The answer that came back was to keep everything in a sandbox within the web browser.
Given apple's politics, this sort of anti-libertarian thinking is hardly surprising.
I don't see how you can equate phone unlocking to hacking. People don't seem to realize that your carrier has to unlock your phone upon your request. Indeed, why should the carrier care? You've already signed a two-year contract with termination fee with them. I've done this with T-Mobile USA and AT&T. You just have to be insistent and assert you want to be able to use your phone overseas.
This whole situation is a classic example of ignorance breeding presumption that has now been re-enforced by a company (Apple) making a radical change in historic practice all while believing (perhaps) and convincing most people (likely) that this is just a marginal step.
You are right, but if only the BLS agreed with you. Most of the inflation numbers people quote are so-called core inflation which excludes food prices. This makes sense if we want to talk about last months inflation, but not so much if want to discuss year over year inflation. I don't know why more careful distinctions aren't drawn by the press when they report this sort of stuff, but that's the breaks.
Second, inflation is more likely around 6%. See for background: http://www.shadowstats.com/ The gist of which is BLS changed its method of computing CPI at the beginning of the Clinton Administration.
Shadow stats gives a pretty rigorous assessment. My own analysis of Federal Reserve Annual Reports pegs inflation at roughly 10%, but my work was very rough back-of-the-envelope type stuff based on trends in Fed's SOMA account. So, I am willing to believe 6%. Other analysis: http://www.nowandfutures.com/cpi_lie.html
If you read the Economist, the last page publishes a commodity price index. The percent change over one year ago is roughly 15-20% per year, consistently every publication week.
Its funny how much we've been conditioned to think that the price of things should go up not down. Think about it, all other things being equal, as we get smarter, more efficient with our production of goods prices should go down. Prices only go up because inflation is an even more powerful force than innovation in our economy.
Second, the cost of everything has an fixed component and a quantity component. One reason an F22 fighter is so expensive is that relatively few are built. The same thing happened with the iPhone. At the beginning they weren't sure if they'd sell 1 or 1 million. They had to guess and price accordingly. Now that so many are sold, the fixed costs (like engineering) are paid-in.
Meanwhile, they are competing with many other kinds of smart phones. Most of which were cheaper already. Doesn't anyone remember all the talk about how the iPhone was outrageously priced above competing smart phones?
Yeah. So after their profit margin was clearly fat, they cut prices to be competitive and more than just fan-boy enthusiasm. We should be worried? This article is drawing ridiculous connections between the iPhone and the panic over the sub-prime mortgage market.
The little bit of editorializing in this submission is a little bit too much. I fail to see how making countries directly responsible will depoliticize the process. ICANN, is a flawed organization, but it is an effort to make management of the domain name system independent of governments and technically driven.
The IEEE is not a UN body; Its voting membership, and its activities are a combination of academics and engineers employed by major technology companies. Given this, I find it hard to see how the "surely" remark in the story summary can even be regarded as reasonable.
I for one would prefer a more technical, more independent ICANN--not a less technical, more political ICANN such as is embodied by the sluggish and highly politicized ITU.
I don't think it will happen this way. First, GP computing is just a small slice of the VLSI application space. It isn't obvious that all the other problems in the world will suddenly become quantum computing problems. I see two effects: first because of cost reasons performance gains will not appear across all sections of the GP market. e.g., home systems will begin to fall further behind top-end computing. Second, Moore's law will slow down before it "ends" at a physical limit. So if it predicts we have five more generations to go, those may smear out over 20 years not 10.
Also: there are many other problems in silicon manufacturing not relating to feature size (the primary subject of Moore's law). i.e., there are ways we could build faster (but not denser) devices than we do now. Thus, the density aspect may stall and emphasis could return more to performance. e.g., using photonic interconnects for long distance signaling, lower Vt with less leakage, etc. The emphasis could also shift to cost. If the per-design mask costs go down than these really advanced process technologies will be available to more low-volume application specific situations. That could be potentially a very big deal.