Let me put it another way. If congress abuses its constitutional obligations and passes a budget that they had no intention of enforcing then what are the repercussions?
Remember it was 1995 when house republicans repealed the Gephardt rule that (since 1979) automatically raised the debt ceiling to an amount required to fund the passed budget. This was part of their showdown with President Clinton that caused two governmental shutdowns. Let me remind you that they only refused to pass a budget and never threatened the US' ability to borrow money.
Fast forward to today. We now have a bunch of house republicans that never intended to honor their constitution obligations to make sure that the US government doesn't default on its loans as explicitly required by the 14th amendment. So the only question before us today is what do we do when we have a rogue congress that refuses to do their constitutionally required duty?
This is uncharted territory, and I see it having several outcomes:
1. The president allows the government to default. The blame rest squarely on the shoulders of the house of representatives, after all they didn't perform their constitutionally defined function and allowed the government to default on its loans for the first time in US history.
2. The president issues an executive order that raises the debt ceiling. The house will of course impeach the president for "abuses of power". The senate will not have enough votes for a conviction. In the mean time, the judicial branch will also review the constitutionality of the actions of both the house and the executive branch. Oh yea, the republicans have to hope that this doesn't jeopardize their chances for 2012 like the 1995 house republicans blew their chances and gave Clinton a second term as president.
3. At the last minute the house will pass an emergency bill that raises the debt ceiling enough to fully fund the current fiscal year. A bonus would be that the emergency resolution would include changes in house rules so that it requires the debt ceiling to be raised with the passage of each years budget which basically reestablished the Gephardt Rule except this time it would be called the Boehner Rule which would be appropriate since unlike Gephardt's rule which made credit extension automatic, I can see Boehner's Rule requiring a vote on both the budget AND the credit limit.
I personally hope #3 happens. US continues to have an unblemished credit history. The house republicans save face and can brag that they brought the debate of the nation's debt to the nation's living rooms, while at the same time facilitating a rule change that in theory would set a spending limit first from which both parties could negotiate a "fair" budget. This would be a significant step to bring fiscal responsibility to government.
Baring that, I think the president should do the right thing and issue an executive order that would prevent us from paying a hidden tax caused by a credit default or having the government shut down. Since we are talking about option #2, that would require him to put the country's needs before his own.
It does seem that 68% of the country are not interested in fiscal responsibility.
You've confused fiscal responsibility with responsible governance. Time for fiscal responsibility is while the budget is being negotiated. Now that we have a budget, it is congress' job to make sure that the government continues to operate. There is always next's years budget and quite frankly it is more honest and honorable to have sincere debates during the budget negotiations and stick to the agreement once it has passed and signed into law.
The only thing the house republicans have proved is that they can't be civil during the negotiation and, once an agreement has been reached, they can't be trusted to honor it.
I'll just have to deal with this fact and once again revise my estimate of average human intelligence.
Yea. I grapple with the same problem every time a right winger asks for my money while at the same time calling me a RINO.
If you read a little further down you'll see that it is mostly the democrats who want to compromise. Republicans are about evenly divided. If our representatives were to follow these polls, the result ought to be that republicans should stand firm on their plan and let the democrats compromise on theirs.
Sorry but the total is what really counts. No political party's views has any more statistical wieight than the other. Face it 68% of the people asked wanted the debt ceiling to be raised. I didn't see a party breakdown in your quoted poll results nor in the partisan blog. Wow my suspicions are confirmed, as soon as the numbers countered your argument you abandoned the "democracy stance" and ran straight to party politics. Where's your spine?
Second, compromise does not mean surrender. Many people would like to see the debt accumulation stop sometime soon, but would be uneasy about making it happen next week. Raising the ceiling will not solve the problem; it merely postpones it. Soon somebody will have to make the choice to either default or inflate and default. There is no other outcome possible.
Oh moving the goal posts with weasel words aren't we? No one said that compromise is surrender. Your original post stated unequivically that 47% of the country didn't want to raise the debt ceiling. All I did was show a poll done by the very same group two weeks later that showed that opinions have changed and now 68% of the country not only want to raise the debt ceiling but wanted it raised even if it meant that their party had to make a compromise.
To reiterate: nothing whatsoever in the budget bill authorized debt. It only authorized spending. They are not the same.
They are one in the same, we are only talking about difference of timing and who is being promised payment. The budget immediately created a debt to all the agencies and private businesses (eg. contractors who were award contracts) that were funded with that budget. The US government has promised to pay the amount of money allocated in the budget that was passed by the house, senate and signed by the president.
Now what you are talking about is the government's ability to refinance that debt from outside sources (ie bonds). Since all tax collections and budgetary expenditures have already been dictated by the passed federal law defining the budget, the only option left is the issuance of bonds. Constitutionally, congress is held accountable to all debt that it generates and must fullfil its obligations. The house has little choice but to finance the law that they passed.
Lawrence tribe is a fairly well recognized legal scholar. Not sure what the inverse of appeal to authority is, but it fails in this case.
Legal scholars are like economists. Don't like the opinion of that legal scholar, not to worry just ask a different one. Legal scholars have opinions not authority. Judges have authority.
The biggest issue is that the debt ceiling doesn't affect the paying of debts, it limits the increase of new debt, which is not actually the same thing. It's quite reasonable to say that Obama is required to cut spending in other areas in order to pay off existing debt, maybe by furlough or layoffs of the federal workforce.
What you don't seem to understand is that congress can furlough or cut spending in the NEXT fiscal year and not within the budget they just signed into law. Congress passed a law and now they are trying to circumvent that law by not providing adequate credit to enforce that law. There is no new debt, there is only the debt that was already signed into law.
The last time I checked, the US was still a democracy.
Check again, the US is a republic. We elect representatives to represent our interests in Washington DC. We do not have a direct vote.
Currently, 47% of the country [firedoglake.com] (including me) would prefer to not raise the debt ceiling, while 42% (presumably including you) are all in a panic that not raising it would be a catastrophe.
Please try to link to the actual Pew Research Poll and not a partisan blog. Please note that the numbers you are quoting are for a poll done during July 7-10 and has a margin of error of +/- 4% therefore it shows a virtual tie.
Another poll that was done during July 20-24 shows "Fully 68% say that lawmakers who share their views on this issue should compromise, even it means striking a deal they disagree with. Just 23% say lawmakers who share their views should stand by their principles, even if that leads to default."
What you are proposing that your view must be imposed on everybody in the country, ignoring the views of the other 47% of americans. That's not how democracy works. That's how a dictatorship works. If you like that system, try moving to China or something. In America we try to not allow a minority dictate the majority what to do (even though, unfortunately, it does happen).
So now that 68% of people questioned wants a compromise deal to raise the debt ceiling do you still stand by your convictions? Or will you be the one trying to subvert the will of the people?
The 14th amendment may not mean what you think it means [nytimes.com].
That is for a court to decide not a newspaper. Not to mention the following:
This argument goes too far. It would mean that any budget deficit, tax cut or spending increase could be attacked on constitutional grounds, because each of those actions slightly increases the probability of default.
doesn't even apply to subject at hand. The actions that are taking place now are (1) we have a law that passed authorizing the expenditure and collection of revenue for the current fiscal year and (2) the sole issue before congress and the president is the willingness to continue to pay on the debt that is already owed. Anything outside of those two facts are inconsequential. In other words, the 14th amendment enforces the law and obligation already signed into law and has nothing to do with how the budget was allotted. If congress wants to balance the budget then they have a legal responsibility to do it when they write the fiscal budget into law not afterwards.
Your title "Rewrite the Constitution of face default!" is a great summary of the Tea Party's position. The irony being that this extortion violates the very constitution that they pretend to follow. Section 4 of the 14th amendment states "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
John Boehner compared negotiating with President Obama to negotiating with Jell-O alluding to the president's changing stance in negotiations. However, John Boehner fails to acknowledge that he is renegotiating a budget that his party passed earlier this year. The debt ceiling only deals with the obligations already passed by this and previous house of representatives not future budgets. Who is really moving the goal posts here?
So, you understand that there is enough tax revenue coming in to pay the interest on the debt, social security, medicaid/medicare, education, VA and active duty payrolls. Right? The only way those won't get paid is the government (executive branch) CHOOSES not pay them. There is no real risk to defaulting.
You do realize that the responsibility for creating the budget rests in the house, right? You know the one that already passed this year's fiscal budget, and is now playing games with our economy by giving themselves a chance to vote on that same fiscal budget twice. This is not a dictatorship. This is a republic and people seem to forget their civics lessons in their zeal to hang the blame solely on the President. Don't tell me you attended the same retarded civics class with Michelle Bachman.
Personally I believe the president should issue an executive order raising the arbitrary debt ceiling. Section 4 of the 14th amendment requires such drastic action since it states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." In other words, the republicans already authorized this year's debt when they passed the fiscal budget, and they are violating the constitution by refusing to make sure we have enough funds (from both taxes and credit) to meet those obligations.
I'm not sure if you've ever had a discussion with a Tea Party member, most of them are fairly reasonable folks and want a return to a government who's spending and legislative powers are bound by the constitution.
I have many times. They are individuals that may have good intentions but are easily led astray. They arguments have little basis in fact, and their misinterpretations of the constitution is horrifying.
Does Goggle have a written document giving them explicit permission to use the patents in question? I mean the thoughts of an old CEO may be enlightening about how Sun's CEO felt about Android at the time, but it means nothing since we are talking about a different CEO of a different company. If only Google had some sort of licensing agreement in place to indemnify themselves.
The only damning evidence I see is that Google probably should have presented an offer to Sun's board (and stockholders) to purchase Sun before Oracle had a chance.
The link you provide has nothing to do with this article other than it's Microsoft suing another company over IP issues.
While everyone can agree that Microsoft is aggressive with their IP catalog, I haven't seen any evidence that the patent deal between Microsoft and Novell or SUSE is part of their embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy.
Nothing changes. Haters hate, and people who hate change will bicker. Eventually 10.7.1 will come out and fix some of the problems that are discovered during general release and life will go on. I remember similar stories about Leopard and Snow leopard.
Administrators that are worthless getting paid 20X-30X of what the teachers get paid. Sorry, that will not cut it.
I think 20X-30X is an exaggeration. Mean wage of a primary school teacher in the US is $50,510/year. If administrators were really getting paid 20 times as much then they would all be millionaires. In reality, the mean wage of elementary and secondary school administrators in the US is $87,390/year. This is actually only 1.7 times the mean teacher pay. Administrators actually have more responsibility than a teacher and I don't see anything that disqualifies them from being compensated for their job description. Your argument is similar to an office clerk complaining that their manager makes more money - no shit.
I'm for compensating good teachers, but I believe having a mean salary of $50,000/year per teacher isn't anything to complain about. Also, I think we should get rid of collective bargaining and tenure. It's hard to feel sorry for people who have job security, full benefits with retirement, decent pay, and only required to work 9 out of 12 months. The reason we have poor teachers isn't because we don't pay enough to attract good teachers. It is because we can't get rid of the bad teachers to make room for these new teachers.
Administrators need to have a PAY cut to no more than 8X more than the MEDIAN pay of their school or district.
So you want to give them a raise?
Finally, expenses need to be realistic, teachers and kids using computers from more than 4 years ago is a waste of resources. IT budgets need to be changed.
I'll make a better suggestion. Get rid of the computers. Classrooms need to concentrate on teaching math, science, writing, history, music, and art. Save the computer education for the higher grades. Make the teacher teach and use the money that was wasted on purchasing computer equipment to pay for school supplies. Nothing irritates me more than seeing a school with an under used computer lab asking for donations to purchase basic school supplies (eg. pencil, paper, staples).
The school building needs to be maintained right, sorry but that 120 year old building is a LIABILITY not an advantage... tear it down and replace it with a efficient modern structure that will not rob the school of funds every month.
So lobby your local officials to raise taxes in order to build better schools. Don't expect the federal government to do it for you. It is your community's asset and your community should do a better job of maintaining it.
Sometimes a kid needs to be told "you're never going to be a professional singer/dancer/whatever, try something else..."
Who is qualified to make that judgement? I say stop being a dick and let the children define their own lives.
I think you'll find that people excel in fields that they like, and fail in those that they don't. One problem I see with today's educational system is the idea that we should educate people in fields that have the greatest chance for employment instead of what is in the best interest of the child. This lead to the decline of the "fundamentals" (ie Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic) in exchange for "technologies" (ie computer science, trade skills).
If we actually taught the fundamental subjects in a way that didn't require it being reviewed at almost every grade level, we could actually have an educational system worth bragging about. Not to mention, we would have more time to really teach the advance topics instead of pretending.
I use both Linux and OSX as a server and a desktop. OSX makes a fine server OS. It is very capable of crunching large amounts of data with the multi-core / multi-processor Mac Pro. Linux excels at serving data either as a data repository or web server.
Granted OSX makes for a better desktop experience than Linux. However, this doesn't take away from OS X's capability as a server.
XServe had a problem with price positioning. I could purchase several Mac Minis and mount them on a rack (like RackSpace does) to serve webpages or offer colocation, or I could purchase a much powerful Mac Pro and do some serious number crunching (this is what we do). XServe was too expensive to compete with the Mac Mini setup, and not as computationally powerful as the Mac Pro which had a similar price.
There's fragmentation in iOS devices as well and nobody seems to mind.
That's because the fragmentation is small and separates the first generation of iOS hardware from the past two or three generations of hardware. There are advances in hardware that newer iOS versions would used (front facing camera for example, or amount of RAM). Of course this would mean older hardware can't support it. Other than these few differences in hardware, the majority of the apps still run on all versions of iOS.
Contrast this with Android which have fragmentation within the same generation of hardware.
There is no such thing as a copy of Suns JVM etc.
The only thing that is "similar" is the fact that the "language" used to program on Android "looks like" Java and is ofc from a programmers point of view the same as Java. However as soon as you start doing serious development, you realize there is no "Android Java Platform" there is only a language!
First of all JVM isn't Java SDK. Part of the process of compiling an Android program is to convert the byte-code instructions used by Oracle's JVM into another value which has a similar meaning used by Dalvik. I still believe that this byte-code translation is a half hearted attempt to distance Dalvik from JVM. It would look bad for Google if Dalvik could run jar files without any conversion necessary.
The main difference between Android SDK and Java SDK is the libraries being used not the language. Also, JVM is stacked based, and Dalvik is registered based. My point was that Oracle could learn a thing or two from Google.
I think people are so quick to defend Google, that they will completely ignore the white elephant in the room...
I do think $100 million is a bit much for licensing Java, however Google has to admit that the Java technology is worth a considerable amount of money since they worked hard to copy it.
If they both knew what was good for them, they would enter into some cross licensing agreement where Google can focus on something else besides trying to defend their blatant copy of JVM, and Oracle would have access to Google's refinements that made Java run better on underpowered hardware (register based v. stack based JVM). Also I think it would be nice not to have to do simple byte substitution to run a Java program on Dalvik (Google really you're not fooling anybody).
If they quickly settled :
Java's future as a platform would be more secure since more people would have a reason to learn Java. Look what iOS did for Objective-C. Oracle wake up and quit squandering your investment in Java. Let Google do something that Sun could never figure out which was making Java the dominate language for mobile computing. Oracle is in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Google make a peace offering. We all know $100 million is a BS figure designed to scare you into an unfavorable settlement. Make a counter settlement that is fair and reasonable. Offer to get rid of that stupid byte translation, and in exchange for cross licensing your technology (with very little money changing hands) you'd be willing to allow Oracle to advertise that the next version of Android is 100% Java. If Oracle was smart, they would understand that being associated with the fastest growing Mobile platform is worth more than a measly $100 million.
I think combining their efforts would bring true innovation to the market, but this patent war is doing the exact opposite. Google and Oracle both need to step back and see that they both are shooting themselves in the foot. If people needed a concrete example of how patents can stifle innovation they only need to look at this case.
I read the announcement as Oracle was just going to provide technical support exclusively for Oracle Enterprise Server, not that they would take K-Splice completely off the market.
Also the current version of K-Splice is GPL licensed, so fork away. Oracle is free to relicense future versions of K-Splice.
I've seen too may stories knee-jerk condemning Oracle and haven't seen too much in the way of most of those fears coming true. I reserve my judgment until Oracle actually does something bad.
Under the new plan, $8 will get you unlimited DVD per month with 1 DVD checked out a time. If you worked really hard at getting the most DVDs per month, you'd do well to get 5 DVDs a month considering round-trip time with weekend (no sunday pickup/delivery) gets you an average of 1.5 DVD/week using the following scenario (day:activity):
0: DVD arrived and watched
1: DVD returned in the mail
2: DVD Netflix acknowledge receipt and send email giving estimated delivery of next DVD
3: Next DVD in transit (You lucked up and they were able to process your outbound DVD the same day you inbound DVD was scanned).
4: DVD arrived in the mail and watched (repeat day 0)
If you're really lucky, the cycle would take a day less due to postal service delivering the DVD a day sooner. Thanks to sunday, you'd pretty much guaranteed that one cycle a week will take an extra day.
I averaged a peak of 4 DVDs a month, and Netflix received the DVDs in my zipcode. Though on regular occasions I'd get a reply envelope for Netflix receiving in another state (Netflix gaming the system?).
I'm charged $8/month regardless of how many DVDs I actually view. Considering the actual turn around time and price per effective DVD rental, I find it hard to justify the 1 DVD at a time plan getting the largest price hike. Especially if you are slow with mailing back your DVD which I assume is typical for the average Netflix subscriber.
RedBox charges me $1/DVD and I have until 9pm the next day to return it. The vending machine that I return my DVDs is literally at the end of my street (less than half mile). Going by my experience with Netflix, I could rent the same DVDs from RedBox for $4/month which is 50% less (not to mention an extra evening to watch the movie). This is why I dropped the DVD subscription and kept the $8 streaming.
I'm leaning towards dropping the $8 streaming if Starz Online is dropped especially considering that Sony removed their movies from the streaming library. In addition, Netflix already increased my subscription rate in January and here it is 7 months later and they announced a much higher increase in their rate.
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Let me put it another way. If congress abuses its constitutional obligations and passes a budget that they had no intention of enforcing then what are the repercussions?
Remember it was 1995 when house republicans repealed the Gephardt rule that (since 1979) automatically raised the debt ceiling to an amount required to fund the passed budget. This was part of their showdown with President Clinton that caused two governmental shutdowns. Let me remind you that they only refused to pass a budget and never threatened the US' ability to borrow money.
Fast forward to today. We now have a bunch of house republicans that never intended to honor their constitution obligations to make sure that the US government doesn't default on its loans as explicitly required by the 14th amendment. So the only question before us today is what do we do when we have a rogue congress that refuses to do their constitutionally required duty?
This is uncharted territory, and I see it having several outcomes:
1. The president allows the government to default. The blame rest squarely on the shoulders of the house of representatives, after all they didn't perform their constitutionally defined function and allowed the government to default on its loans for the first time in US history.
2. The president issues an executive order that raises the debt ceiling. The house will of course impeach the president for "abuses of power". The senate will not have enough votes for a conviction. In the mean time, the judicial branch will also review the constitutionality of the actions of both the house and the executive branch. Oh yea, the republicans have to hope that this doesn't jeopardize their chances for 2012 like the 1995 house republicans blew their chances and gave Clinton a second term as president.
3. At the last minute the house will pass an emergency bill that raises the debt ceiling enough to fully fund the current fiscal year. A bonus would be that the emergency resolution would include changes in house rules so that it requires the debt ceiling to be raised with the passage of each years budget which basically reestablished the Gephardt Rule except this time it would be called the Boehner Rule which would be appropriate since unlike Gephardt's rule which made credit extension automatic, I can see Boehner's Rule requiring a vote on both the budget AND the credit limit.
I personally hope #3 happens. US continues to have an unblemished credit history. The house republicans save face and can brag that they brought the debate of the nation's debt to the nation's living rooms, while at the same time facilitating a rule change that in theory would set a spending limit first from which both parties could negotiate a "fair" budget. This would be a significant step to bring fiscal responsibility to government.
Baring that, I think the president should do the right thing and issue an executive order that would prevent us from paying a hidden tax caused by a credit default or having the government shut down. Since we are talking about option #2, that would require him to put the country's needs before his own.
You've confused fiscal responsibility with responsible governance. Time for fiscal responsibility is while the budget is being negotiated. Now that we have a budget, it is congress' job to make sure that the government continues to operate. There is always next's years budget and quite frankly it is more honest and honorable to have sincere debates during the budget negotiations and stick to the agreement once it has passed and signed into law.
The only thing the house republicans have proved is that they can't be civil during the negotiation and, once an agreement has been reached, they can't be trusted to honor it.
Yea. I grapple with the same problem every time a right winger asks for my money while at the same time calling me a RINO.
Sorry but the total is what really counts. No political party's views has any more statistical wieight than the other. Face it 68% of the people asked wanted the debt ceiling to be raised. I didn't see a party breakdown in your quoted poll results nor in the partisan blog. Wow my suspicions are confirmed, as soon as the numbers countered your argument you abandoned the "democracy stance" and ran straight to party politics. Where's your spine?
Oh moving the goal posts with weasel words aren't we? No one said that compromise is surrender. Your original post stated unequivically that 47% of the country didn't want to raise the debt ceiling. All I did was show a poll done by the very same group two weeks later that showed that opinions have changed and now 68% of the country not only want to raise the debt ceiling but wanted it raised even if it meant that their party had to make a compromise.
They are one in the same, we are only talking about difference of timing and who is being promised payment. The budget immediately created a debt to all the agencies and private businesses (eg. contractors who were award contracts) that were funded with that budget. The US government has promised to pay the amount of money allocated in the budget that was passed by the house, senate and signed by the president.
Now what you are talking about is the government's ability to refinance that debt from outside sources (ie bonds). Since all tax collections and budgetary expenditures have already been dictated by the passed federal law defining the budget, the only option left is the issuance of bonds. Constitutionally, congress is held accountable to all debt that it generates and must fullfil its obligations. The house has little choice but to finance the law that they passed.
Legal scholars are like economists. Don't like the opinion of that legal scholar, not to worry just ask a different one. Legal scholars have opinions not authority. Judges have authority.
What you don't seem to understand is that congress can furlough or cut spending in the NEXT fiscal year and not within the budget they just signed into law. Congress passed a law and now they are trying to circumvent that law by not providing adequate credit to enforce that law. There is no new debt, there is only the debt that was already signed into law.
Check again, the US is a republic. We elect representatives to represent our interests in Washington DC. We do not have a direct vote.
Please try to link to the actual Pew Research Poll and not a partisan blog. Please note that the numbers you are quoting are for a poll done during July 7-10 and has a margin of error of +/- 4% therefore it shows a virtual tie.
Another poll that was done during July 20-24 shows "Fully 68% say that lawmakers who share their views on this issue should compromise, even it means striking a deal they disagree with. Just 23% say lawmakers who share their views should stand by their principles, even if that leads to default."
So now that 68% of people questioned wants a compromise deal to raise the debt ceiling do you still stand by your convictions? Or will you be the one trying to subvert the will of the people?
That is for a court to decide not a newspaper. Not to mention the following:
This argument goes too far. It would mean that any budget deficit, tax cut or spending increase could be attacked on constitutional grounds, because each of those actions slightly increases the probability of default.
doesn't even apply to subject at hand. The actions that are taking place now are (1) we have a law that passed authorizing the expenditure and collection of revenue for the current fiscal year and (2) the sole issue before congress and the president is the willingness to continue to pay on the debt that is already owed. Anything outside of those two facts are inconsequential. In other words, the 14th amendment enforces the law and obligation already signed into law and has nothing to do with how the budget was allotted. If congress wants to balance the budget then they have a legal responsibility to do it when they write the fiscal budget into law not afterwards.
Your title "Rewrite the Constitution of face default!" is a great summary of the Tea Party's position. The irony being that this extortion violates the very constitution that they pretend to follow. Section 4 of the 14th amendment states "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
John Boehner compared negotiating with President Obama to negotiating with Jell-O alluding to the president's changing stance in negotiations. However, John Boehner fails to acknowledge that he is renegotiating a budget that his party passed earlier this year. The debt ceiling only deals with the obligations already passed by this and previous house of representatives not future budgets. Who is really moving the goal posts here?
You do realize that the responsibility for creating the budget rests in the house, right? You know the one that already passed this year's fiscal budget, and is now playing games with our economy by giving themselves a chance to vote on that same fiscal budget twice. This is not a dictatorship. This is a republic and people seem to forget their civics lessons in their zeal to hang the blame solely on the President. Don't tell me you attended the same retarded civics class with Michelle Bachman.
Personally I believe the president should issue an executive order raising the arbitrary debt ceiling. Section 4 of the 14th amendment requires such drastic action since it states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." In other words, the republicans already authorized this year's debt when they passed the fiscal budget, and they are violating the constitution by refusing to make sure we have enough funds (from both taxes and credit) to meet those obligations.
I have many times. They are individuals that may have good intentions but are easily led astray. They arguments have little basis in fact, and their misinterpretations of the constitution is horrifying.
Does Goggle have a written document giving them explicit permission to use the patents in question? I mean the thoughts of an old CEO may be enlightening about how Sun's CEO felt about Android at the time, but it means nothing since we are talking about a different CEO of a different company. If only Google had some sort of licensing agreement in place to indemnify themselves.
The only damning evidence I see is that Google probably should have presented an offer to Sun's board (and stockholders) to purchase Sun before Oracle had a chance.
The link you provide has nothing to do with this article other than it's Microsoft suing another company over IP issues.
While everyone can agree that Microsoft is aggressive with their IP catalog, I haven't seen any evidence that the patent deal between Microsoft and Novell or SUSE is part of their embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy.
Well then they are not only sneaky, but incredibly slow. This extends a patent deal that was signed in 2006.
Nothing changes. Haters hate, and people who hate change will bicker. Eventually 10.7.1 will come out and fix some of the problems that are discovered during general release and life will go on. I remember similar stories about Leopard and Snow leopard.
I think 20X-30X is an exaggeration. Mean wage of a primary school teacher in the US is $50,510/year. If administrators were really getting paid 20 times as much then they would all be millionaires. In reality, the mean wage of elementary and secondary school administrators in the US is $87,390/year. This is actually only 1.7 times the mean teacher pay. Administrators actually have more responsibility than a teacher and I don't see anything that disqualifies them from being compensated for their job description. Your argument is similar to an office clerk complaining that their manager makes more money - no shit.
I'm for compensating good teachers, but I believe having a mean salary of $50,000/year per teacher isn't anything to complain about. Also, I think we should get rid of collective bargaining and tenure. It's hard to feel sorry for people who have job security, full benefits with retirement, decent pay, and only required to work 9 out of 12 months. The reason we have poor teachers isn't because we don't pay enough to attract good teachers. It is because we can't get rid of the bad teachers to make room for these new teachers.
So you want to give them a raise?
I'll make a better suggestion. Get rid of the computers. Classrooms need to concentrate on teaching math, science, writing, history, music, and art. Save the computer education for the higher grades. Make the teacher teach and use the money that was wasted on purchasing computer equipment to pay for school supplies. Nothing irritates me more than seeing a school with an under used computer lab asking for donations to purchase basic school supplies (eg. pencil, paper, staples).
So lobby your local officials to raise taxes in order to build better schools. Don't expect the federal government to do it for you. It is your community's asset and your community should do a better job of maintaining it.
Who is qualified to make that judgement? I say stop being a dick and let the children define their own lives.
I think you'll find that people excel in fields that they like, and fail in those that they don't. One problem I see with today's educational system is the idea that we should educate people in fields that have the greatest chance for employment instead of what is in the best interest of the child. This lead to the decline of the "fundamentals" (ie Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic) in exchange for "technologies" (ie computer science, trade skills).
If we actually taught the fundamental subjects in a way that didn't require it being reviewed at almost every grade level, we could actually have an educational system worth bragging about. Not to mention, we would have more time to really teach the advance topics instead of pretending.
I use both Linux and OSX as a server and a desktop. OSX makes a fine server OS. It is very capable of crunching large amounts of data with the multi-core / multi-processor Mac Pro. Linux excels at serving data either as a data repository or web server.
Granted OSX makes for a better desktop experience than Linux. However, this doesn't take away from OS X's capability as a server.
XServe had a problem with price positioning. I could purchase several Mac Minis and mount them on a rack (like RackSpace does) to serve webpages or offer colocation, or I could purchase a much powerful Mac Pro and do some serious number crunching (this is what we do). XServe was too expensive to compete with the Mac Mini setup, and not as computationally powerful as the Mac Pro which had a similar price.
That's because the fragmentation is small and separates the first generation of iOS hardware from the past two or three generations of hardware. There are advances in hardware that newer iOS versions would used (front facing camera for example, or amount of RAM). Of course this would mean older hardware can't support it. Other than these few differences in hardware, the majority of the apps still run on all versions of iOS.
Contrast this with Android which have fragmentation within the same generation of hardware.
First of all JVM isn't Java SDK. Part of the process of compiling an Android program is to convert the byte-code instructions used by Oracle's JVM into another value which has a similar meaning used by Dalvik. I still believe that this byte-code translation is a half hearted attempt to distance Dalvik from JVM. It would look bad for Google if Dalvik could run jar files without any conversion necessary.
The main difference between Android SDK and Java SDK is the libraries being used not the language. Also, JVM is stacked based, and Dalvik is registered based. My point was that Oracle could learn a thing or two from Google.
I think people are so quick to defend Google, that they will completely ignore the white elephant in the room...
I suspect we'll see a bunch of news stories concerning the topic of that movie.
I do think $100 million is a bit much for licensing Java, however Google has to admit that the Java technology is worth a considerable amount of money since they worked hard to copy it.
If they both knew what was good for them, they would enter into some cross licensing agreement where Google can focus on something else besides trying to defend their blatant copy of JVM, and Oracle would have access to Google's refinements that made Java run better on underpowered hardware (register based v. stack based JVM). Also I think it would be nice not to have to do simple byte substitution to run a Java program on Dalvik (Google really you're not fooling anybody).
If they quickly settled :
I think combining their efforts would bring true innovation to the market, but this patent war is doing the exact opposite. Google and Oracle both need to step back and see that they both are shooting themselves in the foot. If people needed a concrete example of how patents can stifle innovation they only need to look at this case.
Glad to hear! Wonderful thing about averages, some people will get above average DVDs per month and others below average DVDs per month.
Still I have better things to do than working to keep my DVD throughput up.
I read the announcement as Oracle was just going to provide technical support exclusively for Oracle Enterprise Server, not that they would take K-Splice completely off the market.
Also the current version of K-Splice is GPL licensed, so fork away. Oracle is free to relicense future versions of K-Splice.
I've seen too may stories knee-jerk condemning Oracle and haven't seen too much in the way of most of those fears coming true. I reserve my judgment until Oracle actually does something bad.
Let's clarify your argument a little.
Under the new plan, $8 will get you unlimited DVD per month with 1 DVD checked out a time. If you worked really hard at getting the most DVDs per month, you'd do well to get 5 DVDs a month considering round-trip time with weekend (no sunday pickup/delivery) gets you an average of 1.5 DVD/week using the following scenario (day:activity):
0: DVD arrived and watched
1: DVD returned in the mail
2: DVD Netflix acknowledge receipt and send email giving estimated delivery of next DVD
3: Next DVD in transit (You lucked up and they were able to process your outbound DVD the same day you inbound DVD was scanned).
4: DVD arrived in the mail and watched (repeat day 0)
If you're really lucky, the cycle would take a day less due to postal service delivering the DVD a day sooner. Thanks to sunday, you'd pretty much guaranteed that one cycle a week will take an extra day.
I averaged a peak of 4 DVDs a month, and Netflix received the DVDs in my zipcode. Though on regular occasions I'd get a reply envelope for Netflix receiving in another state (Netflix gaming the system?).
I'm charged $8/month regardless of how many DVDs I actually view. Considering the actual turn around time and price per effective DVD rental, I find it hard to justify the 1 DVD at a time plan getting the largest price hike. Especially if you are slow with mailing back your DVD which I assume is typical for the average Netflix subscriber.
RedBox charges me $1/DVD and I have until 9pm the next day to return it. The vending machine that I return my DVDs is literally at the end of my street (less than half mile). Going by my experience with Netflix, I could rent the same DVDs from RedBox for $4/month which is 50% less (not to mention an extra evening to watch the movie). This is why I dropped the DVD subscription and kept the $8 streaming.
I'm leaning towards dropping the $8 streaming if Starz Online is dropped especially considering that Sony removed their movies from the streaming library. In addition, Netflix already increased my subscription rate in January and here it is 7 months later and they announced a much higher increase in their rate.
How many of these 'Why Netflix raised their rates' articles will Netflix PR department spawn?
We're still here. We are just outnumbered by the new "geeks".