Now you want to start bonding things to stuff and seeing what you can get it to attack... Why am I seeing cancer, kidney, and liver problems in the futures of patients treated with this stuff??
And just what do you think antibodies are, anyway? If you still don't like the idea, I've got a one-time offer for you: We'll turn off all your antibodies. No more cancer, kidney, and liver problems for you!
I'm sorry, you seem to be a decently smart guy, but this is just ridiculous. You are drawing rather tenuous conclusions that don't appear to be thoroughly supported, and then completely refusing to even consider any other possibilities. Moreover, you get all offended and have a fuss fit when people ask for more evidence.
You go on earlier about society compensating those who fulfill its needs. Maybe your book is no longer fulfilling societies needs, and thus you are no longer being compensated. This happens.
A) You might be right. It might be that the torrents are hurting your sales. I cannot deny that possibility.
B) On the other hand, you might be wrong. It might be that your sales would be approximately where they are regardless of the current and past levels of pirating.
So how do you claim to know (A) is right and (B) is wrong?
dig up reams and reams of data for you in which you can poke more holes
Sorry, but that's just how figuring out what's true works. It's called science. The burden of proof is on you, and you don't seem to have convinced anyone here yet.
Thats because acer put a retarded linux distro on their netbooks that no one knew anything about and there was no documentation at all about it.
Indeed. I have extensive Linux experience, and I decided that pruning out the -- never going to be upgraded and incompatible with all the other fedora packages for things you might want to install and inexplicably tied to things you want to uninstall -- acer/linpus specific packages was just not worth the trouble. I really tried to make things work for about a month. But, I couldn't just leave things as they were, because the acer/linpus NetworkManager didn't handle WPA2 and the acer/linpus wireless driver didn't reliably work with wpa_supplicant (or really at all). So I installed ubuntu, and things are fine ever since (well, ever since Jaunty; there were some bugs before then, but no showstoppers).
I'd (naively, I'm sure) expect battery life to be better. You wouldn't need to push nearly as much power through your radio to talk to another phone 50 ft away as to a tower a couple of miles away. OTOH, the traffic through your phone would be immensely higher, so maybe that would be the dominant effect at the end of the day. More careful analysis is indicated.
That's only going to work if we go to IPv6, of course. Every device would have a public facing IP address, and you'd wind up with several devices per person across the nation. Easily pass the ~4 billion limit in just the US this way.
Do you work for Verizon? Using 0.85 cents per mile, I get 510 dollars over 60,000 miles. This seems pretty reasonable for a set of decent tires. OTOH, dividing your 48,000 dollars by 60,000 miles, I get a figure of 80 cents per mile, which is apparently the figure you used. You see the difference between 0.85 cents and 85 cents?
Enriched Uranium Reactors or Heavy Water Reactors ?
Well, I was thinking of perennial favorite pebble bed reactors, or other late generation reactor designs. Most especially anything designed to be passively safe. I don't think I see exactly why heavy water reactors are particularly safer, since even with enriched uranium, the possibility of the reactor going off like an atom bomb is practically zero already.
As to wiping out the polar bears habitat, does it matter if it all goes boom, or just a portion of it starts glowing at night in time with the aurora australius (southern lights)??
Well, yes... Even Chernobyl didn't "wipe out" any species in its area. And since I was replying to someone who implied a claim that one of these "explod[ing]" would "wipe out the polar bears for good", the fact that it simply would not is quite relevant.
As for nuclear reactors being UNSTABLE and RADIOACTIVE, well, coal fly ash contains approximately as much radioactivity (Bq) per Watt as a fission reactor produces. Natural gas plants can certainly explode and kill dozens and dozens of people. Of course there is some danger in building and operating these things. The key is that it be less than alternatives. (and that it be worthwhile to pursue in terms of cost and especially power density.)
BTW, did you know that YOU are RADIOACTIVE? I've long thought the entire anti-nuclear lobby was UNSTABLE, too...
Right. Nuclear power plants exploding... You do realize that we've gotten the things that made Chernobyl explode (and that explosion was actually a chemical explosion anyways) fixed, and neither chernobyl nor the atom bombs "wiped out" an area anywhere close to the size of the polar bears' habitat, and besides, fission is by far our safest and cleanest power source today (caveat: that's capable of sufficient power density to satisfy current and future demands without completely covering a tremendous amount of animal habitat). Actually learn something about the available power sources, their real (not imagined) effects on the environment, and then take a few days to carefully and logically ponder some future possibilities as to the development of humanity (You might look up what Kardashev Type I means, and think about what it would take to achieve that).
</rant> Yargh. I'll probably get modded flamebait, but I just finished reading Fallen Angels, so I'm pretty mad at uninformed and unthinking environmentalists like the anti-nuclear crowd right now. I'll simmer down in a few days I'm sure.
I'm pretty sure that the light coming from a white pixel on an LCD is linearly polarized. LCDs have a polarizing filter, then a liquid crystal that can polarize the light at a voltage dependent angle, than a perpendicular polarizing filter. If your liquid crystal layer is oriented parallel to either the front or back layer, then no light gets through. If it is oriented at 45 degrees to both front and back, then you get maximum brightness.
Unfortunately, if your light source is unpolarized to start, then after passing through one filter, it is reduced to 1/2 its brightness. Passing through another polarizer at 45 degrees reduces the brightness by 1/2 again (Malus' law), and then the third polarizer reduces the brightness by 1/2 again. This is maximum brightness for a typical LCD display, 1/8 of the backlight brightness.
Now, you could put just one fixed polarizer, and one liquid crystal layer. Then you could have a range of brightnesses from 1/2 incident to 0. If you only put the liquid crystal layer, you would simply be polarizing in a different direction depending on voltage. So you would always get brightness 1/2.
Now, this is all just extending the principles of LCDs. I don't know that much about the other properties of liquid crystals. It might very well be that you can turn their polarizing properties on and off to some degree, which would do what GP wants.
I didn't think that one out too carefully. The main point is that the mean free path of the photon increased dramatically and suddenly on cosmological scales. I just wrote a quick and dirty plausible reason (hence "vaguely") for this without looking up the extant research. Certainly though, that de-ionization would be caused by expansive cooling of the universe.
As I'm not myself a cosmologist, I don't have a link for you, unfortunately. I'm just extrapolating from my knowledge of statistical and particle physics.
Ah right. I looked at the temperature of the photosphere (wikipedia gives 5800 K), and then at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PlanckianLocus.png, and thought that that looked like it could be in the yellow. But I am colorblind, so it is not surprising that I goofed that bit up. A decent helping of confirmation bias undoubtedly came into play as well, I'm sure. Thank you for the correction!
You can see as far back (in light) as the time when the universe was last opaque. This (approximately the same distance from us in all directions, thus forming a sphere) is called the surface of last scattering.
At the time of and before last scattering (approx. 400,000 years after the Big Bang, if our cosmological theories are reasonably close to correct), light was constantly being absorbed and reemitted, as in the interior of a star today. If you suddenly removed all the matter from a star (obviously impossible, but bear with me here), then the photons that had last been emitted would travel off in all directions.
The universal last scattering was a vaguely similar event, in that matter became sufficiently dispersed (due to the expansion of the universe) that light could now travel long distances without interacting with matter. Obviously this was not instantaneous, but on cosmological scales, it was pretty quick.
Now, an object that is at a certain temperature will in general radiate a certain amount of light, distributed in a very particular way over a range of frequencies. For instance, the temperature of the Sun's photosphere (which is about as far into the Sun as you can get and still have the gases be reasonably transparent, thus, it is the Sun's surface of outermost scattering, one might say) almost determines the spectrum of light that the Sun emits, and therefore the color that we see (yellow). This is called blackbody radiation.
So, the universe at the time of last scattering contained a gas of photons with a certain spectrum determined by the overall temperature of the universe then. When the universe became transparent, this photon gas remained, and remained at the same spectrum. It still permeates the entire universe. However, due to the expansion of the universe, the wavelength of each and every photon has increased since then, and the density of photons has decreased, leading to a photon gas that looks as if it comes from a much cooler object. In fact, now the largest number of the photons in the universe lie in the region of the spectrum designated "micro-waves", thus we refer to this leftover photon gas as the cosmic microwave background.
The CMB was a direct prediction of Big Bang cosmological models, and not a prediction of any other cosmological models, and so its observation dealt a death blow to other models such as the steady state universe.
Bandwidth is only a limited resource in the same sense as the number of seats on an airliner is a limited resource. There are no* problems with "heavy users" on airlines using the entire seat that they paid for, because airlines don't* double-book their seats. There are problems with "heavy users" on networks who use the entire amount of bandwidth (bits/s) they paid for, because everyone from backbones on down double-book their bandwidth (bits/s). The solution? Stop the overbooking!
Now, of course this will mean that most of the time, nearly all of the available bandwidth will go unused. So don't prevent heavy users from using available bandwidth, but anything above the level they paid for should be QoS shunted to the bottom of the list. You only need two QoS tiers: paid-for bandwidth and extra, currently-unused bandwidth. Then, assuming your QoS works properly, everyone is guaranteed the amount of bandwidth they paid for, and heavy users get to use what would otherwise go unused. Furthermore, because you didn't oversell your bandwidth, the maximum total amount of data transferred in say a week is equal to the total amount of data transferred in a week that you sold, so you have no need for caps.
I'm a scientist. I often transfer small portions of our datasets to my home computer so I can look at little things without walking a mile in to the lab. Small portions of 700GB datasets are still quite large. I'm not running a business, I'm just trying to use the connection and hardware I paid for and own respectively.
No, you end up with a lot of empty housing in which to put the evicted people. If they can't provide for themselves because their crack smoking habit is too bad, then there are charities that can help them (one big one is state mandated, but certainly doesn't have to be) both in terms of food and paying their rent (which is now much lower than their mortgage was) and in terms of getting off the drugs so they can stop being a burden to other people.
Did you ever ask if I thought anything else? I do want people to have healthcare. I don't want people to be living on the streets. But I also don't want to see the country go bankrupt bailing out people for their own bad decisions. You confuse "The poor are poor because they are stupid" with "People who do stupid things deserve to live with the consequences of their actions". Those are two very different statements. One of them I agree with. The other you are trying to set up as a straw man for me.
Anyways, I don't think that the government should be in the position of providing for the poor. I do think the poor should be provided for. Do you understand the difference? I believe that separation of church and state (or moral beliefs and government, to broaden it a little bit) is good for the country. I also believe that taking care of the poor is a moral obligation, but I recognize that others may not agree. There certainly are people out there who think that you should only ever be concerned with yourself. I do not think that having the government force them to do something that is so directly contrary to their moral beliefs as support the poor is a good idea. That is why I make sure that a decent portion of my money does go to support the poor, but nonetheless I advocate the end of the welfare state. Currently, most of my poor-supporting-money is channeled through the government, because I am required to pay taxes, and a certain percentage of those funds goes to supporting the poor. The remainder that I feel obligated to use to support the poor gets channeled through either churches or charities as I see fit. If welfare ever decreases, the portion going to charities will increase correspondingly.
It most certainly is my fault I'm living in a small run-down apartment. I made the choice to pursue a certain course of action (becoming a graduate student), in full knowledge that I could be earning a lot more money doing other things, and in full knowledge that by taking this course of action, I would be sacrificing some measure of material wealth. However, it is not my fault that the economy is currently doing so poorly, and I resent having to clean up other people's messes. All I ask is that people be held responsible for their actions, as I expect to be held responsible for mine.
Usually, it helps discussion move along more productively if you actually read before replying. GP advocated presenting children with a variety of different situations, softwares, and interfaces. GP specifically did not advocate presenting students with only Ubuntu/Gnome, as you seem to think...
Libertarians are almost always people who think that how you behave often has something to do with how well off you are, and don't like the idea of helping those who refuse to get their act together.
Fixed it for you.
Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't like the fact that while I'm sitting here in a small sort of run down apartment because that's what I can afford on a grad student salary without going into debt (I have no debt that lasts longer than a month), my tax dollars are going to pay off the mortgage belonging to some fat crack smoking douchebag from my same socioeconomic class who couldn't even make it through high school, who holds a crappy job that pays him about as much as I make, but who managed to coerce the dumb loan officer to give him a loan for a big house he couldn't afford.
I took care of my shit. He didn't. I don't like the fact that he gets his big house for free as a result of his bad behavior. That's why I'm libertarian leaning.
I do recognize that we probably do need to keep all these mortgages from defaulting. So sure, use government funds to pay them off. But then, evict the fools who couldn't pay them, and give the house to somebody who doesn't have any unmanageable debt.
Erm, developer usually refers to someone who produces encodings of algorithms, generally in a programming language. You are quite correct that the HyperText Markup Language is a language and documents using it are encodings of information. However, this is an entirely irrelevant point and in no way elucidates exactly what it is that you wish to call "bullshit".
You may be a troll or you may not, but I'll bite. The US federal government takes in a certain amount of money each year in taxes. It also pays out a certain amount of money each year in salaries, contracts, purchases of war material, simple handouts to the "deserving", etc, etc, etc. In nearly every year, it pays out more money than it takes in. In order to make up the difference, the government asks for billions of small long-term loans from anyone who will give them loans. This is more usually called selling bonds. You or anyone else can buy a bond from the US government, which means that you give a certain amount of money to the government, and they promise that after a certain amount of time (on the order of 10 years), they will give you your money back, plus some amount of extra interest (this is just like any loan). This extra income from bonds is enough to make up the difference between tax revenue and expenditures.
The end result of this is that the government owes money in small chunks to anyone who holds a bond. The sum total amount owed in bonds is the national debt. FWIW, nearly all governments in the world operate like this.
Some of it is in the hands of domestic individuals, some is in the hands of domestic corporations, some is in the hands of international or multinational corporations, some is the hands of US state or municipal, or foreign governments, some is in the hands of foreign individuals. The majority of the debt could be called in at any time, if the debtholders decided to call it in. This would be disastrous, so the major players wouldn't do it unless they thought they could somehow profit from worldwide economic chaos, and, in the case that the debtholder calling in a large chunk is a foreign government, likely war.
Having a national debt does give the government an extra way to affect the economy, by setting the interest rate on these bonds variously. See monetary policy. However, the debt need not be so precariously large in order to have an effective monetary policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you want to start bonding things to stuff and seeing what you can get it to attack... Why am I seeing cancer, kidney, and liver problems in the futures of patients treated with this stuff??
And just what do you think antibodies are, anyway? If you still don't like the idea, I've got a one-time offer for you: We'll turn off all your antibodies. No more cancer, kidney, and liver problems for you!
My wife has a pretty high opinion of Trudgill, although she did say he was "not always quite mainstream". :)
You go on earlier about society compensating those who fulfill its needs. Maybe your book is no longer fulfilling societies needs, and thus you are no longer being compensated. This happens.
A) You might be right. It might be that the torrents are hurting your sales. I cannot deny that possibility.
B) On the other hand, you might be wrong. It might be that your sales would be approximately where they are regardless of the current and past levels of pirating.
So how do you claim to know (A) is right and (B) is wrong?
dig up reams and reams of data for you in which you can poke more holes
Sorry, but that's just how figuring out what's true works. It's called science. The burden of proof is on you, and you don't seem to have convinced anyone here yet.
Just out of curiosity, what book? (My wife, a historical linguist, teaches a class called "Language, Sex, and Gender".)
Damn stupid politicians. Why hire engineers and other experts if you're not going to listen to them?
To stimulate the economy! </snark>
Thats because acer put a retarded linux distro on their netbooks that no one knew anything about and there was no documentation at all about it.
Indeed. I have extensive Linux experience, and I decided that pruning out the -- never going to be upgraded and incompatible with all the other fedora packages for things you might want to install and inexplicably tied to things you want to uninstall -- acer/linpus specific packages was just not worth the trouble. I really tried to make things work for about a month. But, I couldn't just leave things as they were, because the acer/linpus NetworkManager didn't handle WPA2 and the acer/linpus wireless driver didn't reliably work with wpa_supplicant (or really at all). So I installed ubuntu, and things are fine ever since (well, ever since Jaunty; there were some bugs before then, but no showstoppers).
I'd (naively, I'm sure) expect battery life to be better. You wouldn't need to push nearly as much power through your radio to talk to another phone 50 ft away as to a tower a couple of miles away. OTOH, the traffic through your phone would be immensely higher, so maybe that would be the dominant effect at the end of the day. More careful analysis is indicated.
That's only going to work if we go to IPv6, of course. Every device would have a public facing IP address, and you'd wind up with several devices per person across the nation. Easily pass the ~4 billion limit in just the US this way.
Do you work for Verizon? Using 0.85 cents per mile, I get 510 dollars over 60,000 miles. This seems pretty reasonable for a set of decent tires. OTOH, dividing your 48,000 dollars by 60,000 miles, I get a figure of 80 cents per mile, which is apparently the figure you used. You see the difference between 0.85 cents and 85 cents?
Enriched Uranium Reactors or Heavy Water Reactors ?
Well, I was thinking of perennial favorite pebble bed reactors, or other late generation reactor designs. Most especially anything designed to be passively safe. I don't think I see exactly why heavy water reactors are particularly safer, since even with enriched uranium, the possibility of the reactor going off like an atom bomb is practically zero already.
As to wiping out the polar bears habitat, does it matter if it all goes boom, or just a portion of it starts glowing at night in time with the aurora australius (southern lights)??
Well, yes... Even Chernobyl didn't "wipe out" any species in its area. And since I was replying to someone who implied a claim that one of these "explod[ing]" would "wipe out the polar bears for good", the fact that it simply would not is quite relevant.
As for nuclear reactors being UNSTABLE and RADIOACTIVE, well, coal fly ash contains approximately as much radioactivity (Bq) per Watt as a fission reactor produces. Natural gas plants can certainly explode and kill dozens and dozens of people. Of course there is some danger in building and operating these things. The key is that it be less than alternatives. (and that it be worthwhile to pursue in terms of cost and especially power density.)
BTW, did you know that YOU are RADIOACTIVE? I've long thought the entire anti-nuclear lobby was UNSTABLE, too...
Right. Nuclear power plants exploding... You do realize that we've gotten the things that made Chernobyl explode (and that explosion was actually a chemical explosion anyways) fixed, and neither chernobyl nor the atom bombs "wiped out" an area anywhere close to the size of the polar bears' habitat, and besides, fission is by far our safest and cleanest power source today (caveat: that's capable of sufficient power density to satisfy current and future demands without completely covering a tremendous amount of animal habitat). Actually learn something about the available power sources, their real (not imagined) effects on the environment, and then take a few days to carefully and logically ponder some future possibilities as to the development of humanity (You might look up what Kardashev Type I means, and think about what it would take to achieve that).
</rant> Yargh. I'll probably get modded flamebait, but I just finished reading Fallen Angels, so I'm pretty mad at uninformed and unthinking environmentalists like the anti-nuclear crowd right now. I'll simmer down in a few days I'm sure.
Doing that won't be a problem. But if you say it Omega times, Georg Cantor's ghost will turn you into dust.
I'm pretty sure that the light coming from a white pixel on an LCD is linearly polarized. LCDs have a polarizing filter, then a liquid crystal that can polarize the light at a voltage dependent angle, than a perpendicular polarizing filter. If your liquid crystal layer is oriented parallel to either the front or back layer, then no light gets through. If it is oriented at 45 degrees to both front and back, then you get maximum brightness.
Unfortunately, if your light source is unpolarized to start, then after passing through one filter, it is reduced to 1/2 its brightness. Passing through another polarizer at 45 degrees reduces the brightness by 1/2 again (Malus' law), and then the third polarizer reduces the brightness by 1/2 again. This is maximum brightness for a typical LCD display, 1/8 of the backlight brightness.
Now, you could put just one fixed polarizer, and one liquid crystal layer. Then you could have a range of brightnesses from 1/2 incident to 0. If you only put the liquid crystal layer, you would simply be polarizing in a different direction depending on voltage. So you would always get brightness 1/2.
Now, this is all just extending the principles of LCDs. I don't know that much about the other properties of liquid crystals. It might very well be that you can turn their polarizing properties on and off to some degree, which would do what GP wants.
I didn't think that one out too carefully. The main point is that the mean free path of the photon increased dramatically and suddenly on cosmological scales. I just wrote a quick and dirty plausible reason (hence "vaguely") for this without looking up the extant research. Certainly though, that de-ionization would be caused by expansive cooling of the universe.
As I'm not myself a cosmologist, I don't have a link for you, unfortunately. I'm just extrapolating from my knowledge of statistical and particle physics.
Ah right. I looked at the temperature of the photosphere (wikipedia gives 5800 K), and then at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PlanckianLocus.png, and thought that that looked like it could be in the yellow. But I am colorblind, so it is not surprising that I goofed that bit up. A decent helping of confirmation bias undoubtedly came into play as well, I'm sure. Thank you for the correction!
You can see as far back (in light) as the time when the universe was last opaque. This (approximately the same distance from us in all directions, thus forming a sphere) is called the surface of last scattering.
At the time of and before last scattering (approx. 400,000 years after the Big Bang, if our cosmological theories are reasonably close to correct), light was constantly being absorbed and reemitted, as in the interior of a star today. If you suddenly removed all the matter from a star (obviously impossible, but bear with me here), then the photons that had last been emitted would travel off in all directions.
The universal last scattering was a vaguely similar event, in that matter became sufficiently dispersed (due to the expansion of the universe) that light could now travel long distances without interacting with matter. Obviously this was not instantaneous, but on cosmological scales, it was pretty quick.
Now, an object that is at a certain temperature will in general radiate a certain amount of light, distributed in a very particular way over a range of frequencies. For instance, the temperature of the Sun's photosphere (which is about as far into the Sun as you can get and still have the gases be reasonably transparent, thus, it is the Sun's surface of outermost scattering, one might say) almost determines the spectrum of light that the Sun emits, and therefore the color that we see (yellow). This is called blackbody radiation.
So, the universe at the time of last scattering contained a gas of photons with a certain spectrum determined by the overall temperature of the universe then. When the universe became transparent, this photon gas remained, and remained at the same spectrum. It still permeates the entire universe. However, due to the expansion of the universe, the wavelength of each and every photon has increased since then, and the density of photons has decreased, leading to a photon gas that looks as if it comes from a much cooler object. In fact, now the largest number of the photons in the universe lie in the region of the spectrum designated "micro-waves", thus we refer to this leftover photon gas as the cosmic microwave background.
The CMB was a direct prediction of Big Bang cosmological models, and not a prediction of any other cosmological models, and so its observation dealt a death blow to other models such as the steady state universe.
Bandwidth is only a limited resource in the same sense as the number of seats on an airliner is a limited resource. There are no* problems with "heavy users" on airlines using the entire seat that they paid for, because airlines don't* double-book their seats. There are problems with "heavy users" on networks who use the entire amount of bandwidth (bits/s) they paid for, because everyone from backbones on down double-book their bandwidth (bits/s). The solution? Stop the overbooking!
Now, of course this will mean that most of the time, nearly all of the available bandwidth will go unused. So don't prevent heavy users from using available bandwidth, but anything above the level they paid for should be QoS shunted to the bottom of the list. You only need two QoS tiers: paid-for bandwidth and extra, currently-unused bandwidth. Then, assuming your QoS works properly, everyone is guaranteed the amount of bandwidth they paid for, and heavy users get to use what would otherwise go unused. Furthermore, because you didn't oversell your bandwidth, the maximum total amount of data transferred in say a week is equal to the total amount of data transferred in a week that you sold, so you have no need for caps.
I'm a scientist. I often transfer small portions of our datasets to my home computer so I can look at little things without walking a mile in to the lab. Small portions of 700GB datasets are still quite large. I'm not running a business, I'm just trying to use the connection and hardware I paid for and own respectively.
No, you end up with a lot of empty housing in which to put the evicted people. If they can't provide for themselves because their crack smoking habit is too bad, then there are charities that can help them (one big one is state mandated, but certainly doesn't have to be) both in terms of food and paying their rent (which is now much lower than their mortgage was) and in terms of getting off the drugs so they can stop being a burden to other people.
Did you ever ask if I thought anything else? I do want people to have healthcare. I don't want people to be living on the streets. But I also don't want to see the country go bankrupt bailing out people for their own bad decisions. You confuse "The poor are poor because they are stupid" with "People who do stupid things deserve to live with the consequences of their actions". Those are two very different statements. One of them I agree with. The other you are trying to set up as a straw man for me.
Anyways, I don't think that the government should be in the position of providing for the poor. I do think the poor should be provided for. Do you understand the difference? I believe that separation of church and state (or moral beliefs and government, to broaden it a little bit) is good for the country. I also believe that taking care of the poor is a moral obligation, but I recognize that others may not agree. There certainly are people out there who think that you should only ever be concerned with yourself. I do not think that having the government force them to do something that is so directly contrary to their moral beliefs as support the poor is a good idea. That is why I make sure that a decent portion of my money does go to support the poor, but nonetheless I advocate the end of the welfare state. Currently, most of my poor-supporting-money is channeled through the government, because I am required to pay taxes, and a certain percentage of those funds goes to supporting the poor. The remainder that I feel obligated to use to support the poor gets channeled through either churches or charities as I see fit. If welfare ever decreases, the portion going to charities will increase correspondingly.
It most certainly is my fault I'm living in a small run-down apartment. I made the choice to pursue a certain course of action (becoming a graduate student), in full knowledge that I could be earning a lot more money doing other things, and in full knowledge that by taking this course of action, I would be sacrificing some measure of material wealth. However, it is not my fault that the economy is currently doing so poorly, and I resent having to clean up other people's messes. All I ask is that people be held responsible for their actions, as I expect to be held responsible for mine.
Usually, it helps discussion move along more productively if you actually read before replying. GP advocated presenting children with a variety of different situations, softwares, and interfaces. GP specifically did not advocate presenting students with only Ubuntu/Gnome, as you seem to think...
Libertarians are almost always people who think that how you behave often has something to do with how well off you are, and don't like the idea of helping those who refuse to get their act together.
Fixed it for you.
Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't like the fact that while I'm sitting here in a small sort of run down apartment because that's what I can afford on a grad student salary without going into debt (I have no debt that lasts longer than a month), my tax dollars are going to pay off the mortgage belonging to some fat crack smoking douchebag from my same socioeconomic class who couldn't even make it through high school, who holds a crappy job that pays him about as much as I make, but who managed to coerce the dumb loan officer to give him a loan for a big house he couldn't afford.
I took care of my shit. He didn't. I don't like the fact that he gets his big house for free as a result of his bad behavior. That's why I'm libertarian leaning.
I do recognize that we probably do need to keep all these mortgages from defaulting. So sure, use government funds to pay them off. But then, evict the fools who couldn't pay them, and give the house to somebody who doesn't have any unmanageable debt.
I'm happy to pay a little bit extra to ride the train, just to avoid the horrible and invasive security theater farce at the airport...
Erm, developer usually refers to someone who produces encodings of algorithms, generally in a programming language. You are quite correct that the HyperText Markup Language is a language and documents using it are encodings of information. However, this is an entirely irrelevant point and in no way elucidates exactly what it is that you wish to call "bullshit".
You may be a troll or you may not, but I'll bite. The US federal government takes in a certain amount of money each year in taxes. It also pays out a certain amount of money each year in salaries, contracts, purchases of war material, simple handouts to the "deserving", etc, etc, etc. In nearly every year, it pays out more money than it takes in. In order to make up the difference, the government asks for billions of small long-term loans from anyone who will give them loans. This is more usually called selling bonds. You or anyone else can buy a bond from the US government, which means that you give a certain amount of money to the government, and they promise that after a certain amount of time (on the order of 10 years), they will give you your money back, plus some amount of extra interest (this is just like any loan). This extra income from bonds is enough to make up the difference between tax revenue and expenditures.
The end result of this is that the government owes money in small chunks to anyone who holds a bond. The sum total amount owed in bonds is the national debt. FWIW, nearly all governments in the world operate like this.
Some of it is in the hands of domestic individuals, some is in the hands of domestic corporations, some is in the hands of international or multinational corporations, some is the hands of US state or municipal, or foreign governments, some is in the hands of foreign individuals. The majority of the debt could be called in at any time, if the debtholders decided to call it in. This would be disastrous, so the major players wouldn't do it unless they thought they could somehow profit from worldwide economic chaos, and, in the case that the debtholder calling in a large chunk is a foreign government, likely war.
Having a national debt does give the government an extra way to affect the economy, by setting the interest rate on these bonds variously. See monetary policy. However, the debt need not be so precariously large in order to have an effective monetary policy.