Granted, most of these have proprietary overlays, but it doesn't make the OS itself any less open.
What good is open if it's just a line of bash(1)? Software openness is supposed to benefit everyone, not just the companies that sell you their paint-by-numbers no-source-available iterations of it. It's not like any of these products are any cheaper to the end user because the OS is open, or the choice in applications isn't really all that better because it's open. And you're really evading the main point, that this is an OS for the exploitation of vast untapped smartphone markets. People want mobile internet, and Android is happy to give it to them on the carrier's terms. Apple at least had the good sense to see the cellular networks as adversaries, and to prevent their interference in the transaction between the hardware vendor and the end user. But Android is obsequious to their will -- the OHA is little more than a proxy for cellular network providers and commodity handset manufacturers.
This is the pursuit of "open software" as a marketing bullet-point, and not as a thoroughgoing commitment to the freedom of users to do "what they want" with "their phone." Rubin's tweet really encapsulates Google's attitude toward openness. What he left out was:
if you understood what this meant, share the lolz on #android. Otherwise RTFS, n00b; open is wasted on you.
Typical elite geek attitude that only people who know how to hack are entitled to the fullest benefits of computing.
That's not a problem with Android, it's a problem with the phones.
How is one supposed to use Android without the phone? You can't evaluate Android independent of its use on a particular piece of hardware.
the real evil is the phone companies.
And the distribution and marketing model of Android guarantees the carrier and phone manufacturer the ability to do whatever they please. Android strikes a blow for software freedom while grievously wounding network freedom. If you are a tinkerer the you'll benefit from the open OS, Google and Motorola certainly do, they get free bugfixes from users all over the world! But if you are a non-hacking end user Android is just another carrier and manufacturer straight-jacket. Android is a phone company's handmaiden.
Behold, the freedom the carriers have to create the branded experience, instead of the manufacturer.
It's well and good that you can build it yourself, but the practical effect is to allow the handset makers and cellular carriers to turn their subscriber's eyeballs into commodities they resell back to Google. "Open" is only a virtue to those who open the box, to everyone else the benefits accrue to others.
I am guessing this is one example of minimalism. There is no reason to disable MJPEG support unless you want to reduce software maintenance costs. MJPEG is one of the few formats which does not have any software patents.
Note, I can play MJPEG movies just fine without touching it, it only applies to the available authoring/exporting formats. I was able to play a MJPEG movie from 2002 last week without issue. Quicktime is just about the most stable media platform you'll ever find, from a compatibility standpoint... they still ship all the old codecs from the 80s and if you have a.mov from 1989 QuickTime 8 will still play it. Apple is to Quicktime as Microsoft has been to Win32.
The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar.
Nobody does xargs on the search bar, and Google and Bing have literally spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to make the search bar into an do-what-I-mean interface. It really isn't a command line in any sense that matters.
And FWIW, I had to drop into a terminal session on OSX yesterday to reenable MJPEG Quicktime codecs. It used to be a checkbox in the System Preferences, but since Snow Leopard you can only get at it through the defaults(1) interface.
We seem to vhave allowed ourselves to fall into an ethical hole that informs us that "anything goes" when it comes to making a profit.
That's not fair. We simply live in an era where the prevailing social ideology says that if something doesn't make you a profit, you have no moral obligation to do it. To imply that acting like an antisocial monster is "immoral" doesn't give a lot of credit to the people who constantly look for new and creative ways to rationalistically align "that which give me what I want" and "that which is right by me and my brother."
The biggest problem is the INTERFACE of the game. Let me know when I can create on-the-fly Picture-In-Picture overviews of the map in real-time, so I _actually_ can attack/defend on multiple fronts.
An interesting modification to StarCraft which would give AIs a run for their money would be cooperative play where several users operate one team on the field, and where the several users have a hierarchy and delegate command of corps of units to other players, maybe one player handling resources while another scouts while a third consolidates the offensive force.
You cite Lincoln, who was easily the least conservative Republican, well, ever. I'm thinking more like Regan, myself
I suppose I don't think I have to remind you that Reagan proved the deficits "don't matter," and that the deficit ballooned from $74 billion to over $2 trillion during his presidency. And that when his successor tried to raise taxes to lower the deficit, he was thrown out of office by the "conservative" Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America grift, and that GHW Bush's 'liberal" successor brought the federal budget into surplus. Reagan's legacy at least as a fiscal conservative is a fraud.
Likewise, none of the current sentiment includes drenching anyone in pigs blood. However, bankrupting the United States in favor of endless Arab war is also not a position you're likely to see anywhere outside of the old Republican guard.
If you can find me a tea partier in a general election that actually speaks against war with Iran, or for immediate cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan, you can put the links here. But these people don't exist: you want them to, and you read your aspirations into others, just as Obama supporters read their aspirations into Obama. Just today, a Republican and frontrunnner in the West Virginia senate general tells us we should spend $20 billion on a space-based "thousand laser" missile defense system. Truly a small government proposal if ever there was one, though Raese was careful to include a "git r done!" in his speech, to let people know that, as much money as he may spend, he's coming from the right sort of people to do the spending.
Why is you expect me to 'slowly' read your statements , and you're not even pausing for a moment to try and comprehend mine? Isn't that a tad tedious?
You do have to respond to the argument here: a President is bound by the law, and the structure of the executive branch is created by law. This is done to improve accountability to Congress... If a President removed departments and reorganized titles, it would quickly become impossible for congressional committees to know who to call to testify and exercise their oversight -- it would become basically impossible to discover how money was being spent and if the executive was enforcing laws. If the President were a CEO, then he'd probably be as accountable as the average corporate CEO is accountable to his stockholders and board of directors. Which is to say, not at all.
I gotcha. Let's not discuss any particular topics here. Let's just bash the Tea Party
Again, you've got to respond to the problem here: the Tea Party is a constituency for reducing the federal deficit, but they have no agenda for doing so, aside from sending people to congress who promise gridlock -- which increases the deficit. Reducing the deficit without raising taxes will require decisions to be made, and most of the people in the Tea Party have a lot to lose from reductions in federal spending. Will the Tea Party support its candidates even if they must cut their benefits? That's the question.
They're changing what the Red Team does and says, permanently.
You can't even bring yourself to say their name. Republicans. The party of Lincoln, classical liberal values, and the modern values voter-libertarian "new-fusionism." I think you need to pay closer attention to who's bankrolling the Tea Party as a movement, corporatists like the Koch brothers, and its candidates, who are to a man ideologues and maladjusted no-accounts who come from nowhere and will tell people whatever they want to hear if it will only buy them the prestige of federal office. All the while in the background, Karl Rove and Ed Gilllespe and the rest of the grownups in the Republican party have successfully reorganized the entire funding apparatus of the GOP behind unaccountable 529 groups like Crossroads, on account of Michael Steele's profound incompetence. The Tea Party will take over the GOP just in time to discover that its entire funding apparatus has been hollowed out.
Because it is the principled thing to do? Because it would net trillions of dollars in savings? Because it wasn't sunny enough to play basketball that day???
BUT IT WON'T END THE WAR. All of his replacements in the Republican party are pledged to continue it. And spread it to Iran, for that matter.
Now this right here is total BS. I'm only illustrating how the Executive has control over his own branch of government. I'm not discussing anything covered by Congressional powers at all.
Read this slowly: The cabinet departments are created and sustained by Acts of Congress. The president is not a CEO, he cannot recreate his organization; he's bound by law.
Which is all I'm proposing. Let's elect someone who exhibits the leadership to give us what we want - smaller, less expensive government.
Nobody really wants that. They want government smaller, except for every program from which they derive benefit. No political actor in our system, Republican, Democrat, Tea Partier, Green or Religious Rightist has proposed a specific plan for spending reductions that could win majority support. People like their wars and social security and medicare just fine, and when you propose something that reduces the deficit, it's a "death panel" or it "hurts seniors" or it "hurts the troops." The Tea Party campaigns for lower deficits in the abstract, but no Tea Party candidate or group (while they're not dressing like SS officers or gaybashing or lying on their resume) has committed to a budget, and those that have, like Paul Ryan, have been marginalized and their proposals spiked, because the Tea Party is demographically loaded with Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, and their leadership in the Republican Party is institutionally committed to the security state.
End the wars. President uses Commander-in-Chief authority to redeploy every single unit, or just the desired units, to the United States, effective immediately. Anyone not obeying the order will be brought up for court martial. Failing that, simply veto any spending bills until they run out of money
As we've seen with Obama's attempt to reduce commitments in Afghanistan, against the will of the generals, it's practically impossible for a president to reduce troop deployments without the support of the generals, particularly as long as the party in opposition supports an open-ended commitment. The generals simply leak the content of their meetings to the war party, and leak negative stories about the policy decisions to the press, and work to eliminate and marginalize people who offer solutions that reduce commitments beneath what the generals think "will accomplish the mission." It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, of course, but why bother when your replacement will be an ultra-hawk Republican who will simply re-escalate? That's really the issue, there's a lot of competition for people to prove themselves the most belligerent, because there really isn't much of a consensus for ending the war among conservatives or liberals.
2) End "Department of X". Dismiss and/or reassign every appointee, refuse to nominate any new candidates. Failing that, set their home office in ANWAR and refuse to reimburse any mileage, due to the economy, of course.
All cabinet-level departments are created by acts of congress; a president cannot abrogate an act of congress. A failure to appoint a head will cause the civil-service interim appointee to run the department. Congress will attempt the fund the department through omnibus legislation.
3) Eliminate the Deficit. Veto, veto, veto. Line-item-veto, even. Signing statements stating that funding starts out at zero dollars this year and increases to the figures on the bill one year after the bill is no longer valid, or one year after the Union no longer exists, which ever comes last. Failing that, refuse to even read any more bills until you get what you want on your desk.
The President of the US has no line-item veto, because it's unconstitutional. The president has no right to dictate how the US spends its money, this is the responsibility of the House of Representatives. There is no evidence that people really want to eliminate the deficit. The deficit is a fundamentally popular institution and people would never vote someone out of office for increasing it. And deficit reformers, instead of actually trying to win the argument on the merits and win elections, propose ever more dictatorial powers for their great white hope, that one man who will, Cincinnatus-like, ride to the rescue of America, use untrammeled king-like authority to set the nation straight, and then disappear. The requirement that a president either affirm or veto bills in full is a fundamental check on executive power.
You call for dictatorship, if only to deal with the immediate crisis, but that's how it always starts... Congress is the institution in our system that prevents dictatorship. If you take powers away from congress and hand them to the president, you break the system.
The problem is that people don't actually vote for senators and representatives they respect any more, people who can -- they just vote for the person who has the highest propensity for giving them what they ask for.
For some reason I get the feeling that people with this complaint have never actually lived in a city with proper mass transportation. In London you can get within 6 blocks of your destination at 10 minute intervals during the daylight hours. If we wanted transit that worked we'd have it, but we don't so we don't. It's completely a question of priorities.
When your commute by road, including all traffic jams, frustrations and parking hassles is still an HOUR LESS EACH WAY than mass transit, for simple reasons of geography and demography, road wins. And before you laugh at my contrived example, that has been the usual case for me over more than the last decade.
We aren't talking about now, we're talking about solutions for the future, and what path we take.
Your commute is not an inescapable fact of nature -- travel by automobile is faster than mass transit in urban areas because of concrete policy decisions made by federal, state and local governments. And now we find ourselves trying harder and harder to make automobile transit into something it's not, mainly because perverse incentives in government policy lead people to continue to use cars even though it's plainly a waste of resources. It's like corn subsidies -- corn is far cheaper than it should be, it receives tax subsidies, thus, we have a wicked overabundance of it and we dream up all kinds of expensive kludges that we can put corn through in order to keep it in demand, like ethanol fuel or corn syrup.
And thus, since autos receive a huge subsidy compared to mass transit, due to policy inertia and cultural bias, when people think of ways to make transit faster, safer, more efficient and less labor intensive, instead of actually pursuing existing solutions to this problem, they think up expensive and kludgy ways of bending cars to the purpose.
By Thrun's own admission the soonest you'll have a robot car is in a decade, and it probably adds at least a few thousand dollars to your car's cost. Imagine being in a poor transit city like LA or Houston, if you collected mere hundreds of bucks in taxes from every car owner, in ten years you'd probably be able to build the most extensive and convenient urban rail network on Earth.
All I'm saying is that we have to be honest -- an automated car isn't a solution to the problem of how to make travel faster, cleaner, safer or less labor intensive, we have that already. It's a solution that solves these problems piecemeal while still conveying Americans in the manner and style to which they've become accustomed. It's fundamentally a solution to the "I-don't-wanna-sit-next-to-a-weirdo-on-the-bus" problem or the "I-don't-want-to-wait-5-minutes-on-the-platform" problem, not anything else.
If only urban areas would offer some sort of futuristic transit "system" whereby instead of burning 30 man-miles per gallon we were able to aggregate daily short and medium intra-city hops into "platoons" on single road vehicles or rail vehicles, that would leave the rider free to do work while a designated operator took care of the driving for them. Even BETTER is there was some sort of inter-city rail-type service that offered faster hops than any freeway without having to negotiate traffic.
But seriously, for people who don't live within reach of an adequate mass transit system this is of course a Good Thing, but we've literally been pouring millions of dollars and decades of research into allowing people to have all of the safety and free time benefits of riding the bus or subway without the efficiency or social stigma of... riding the bus or subway. To the point where urban planners are promising us the "freeway of the future" where your single-or-perhaps-dual-occupant car drives itself onto the freeway and platoons with other cars in order to merely take up THRICE the freeway capacity of a comparable bus instead of TEN TIMES to space.
Natch YMMV, but as a solution for reducing city congestion and city road safety this is so totally a wank. A sedan automobile has to be one of the least efficient modes of transportation ever devised, and only maintains its preeminence in the first world because pollution is unpriced, our national passenger rail system has been criminally mismanaged by the government, and we have a corrupt freeway funding mechanism.
You can't hold people responsible for the acts of their government in that way. People bear the responsibility for their government in a lot of ways, but whenever in history a people have been forced to suffer for the acts of their government, like Germans did after World War I, it only breeds iniquity and retribution. I'm sure there's some way of arguing that when the city drives the fire truck out to your house to merely watch it burn, that isn't necessarily the government forcing you to destroy your house, but as far as I'm concerened that's little more than a controlled demolition. It doesn't matter that they didn't start the fire, they have the means to stop it and they refuse through inaction; the lack of $75 doesn't absolve anyone.
I think you focus to much on the free rider issue, as if you don't have to argue the point that compelling people to pay for the fire department is really the only moral solution. Or maybe you are really nuts, and you think that public funding of fire departments CAUSES fires because of misaligned incentives. I really don't see how any of your analogies are comparable to this situation -- you're just trying to prove the hoary old canard that good intentions never go unpunished, so when you do bad or selfish things you can do so with a clear conscience. You might think this is playing the sucker to a mooch, but I do think this is the minimum required, if the Earth is to be considered fit for human habitation.
Neither one of us is winning the mods over, maybe it's a dumb argument.
I guess if you need him to be a "dickwad" too maybe that'll help you objectify the victim and somehow render moral judgement on him. But keep in mind that's all you're doing, and it's a crass, glib thing to do.
It's very, very simple - the county has limited resources.
They have limited resources because they're government is a bunch of anti-tax cranks who would rather pat themselves on the back for their defense of "individual responsibility" though their neighbors' houses burn. The issue of limited resources is a red herring; they'd have all the resources they'd need to behave like moral beings if they sent everyone a bill for $75. But no, it appears we must sacrifice love of thy neighbor and human brotherhood on the altar of "negative externalities" and "free rider problems" and all of the rationalistic claptrap people deploy to assuage their guilt when their inwardness, self-regard and selfishness creates suffering.
I assure you your approach, if made general law, would only amplify human suffering. All you really have to offer is angry defense of why the victim's misery is just and righteous. Unfortunately, in the real world, when men have the means to help a another in need and refuse, it's never just or righteous, period. It's really not the firemen's fault, they simply work for a local government that regards their citizens as mere customers, and not as brothers who should never be forced to watch their house burn. To not tax and provide for mandatory fire service, in the first world in the twenty-first-fucking century, is uncivilized, and it is a capitulation of social order and the general welfare to the whim of the avarice and the brain-dead ideology used to absolve it.
The beautiful thing about believing strongly in something abstract, like I guess in this case "libertarianism" though even most libertarians (setting aside a few American cranks) believe in tax-funded fire services, is that you can convince yourself that doing something evil is in fact good and necessary, given certain unrealistic assumptions reality. You can imagine the talk the fire chief gave the volunteers afterwards:
Now I know guys it was tough to watch a man's house burn down, but it was really the right thing to do. You can feel proud that as the man pleaded with you to turn on the hoses, you resisted him, and in your resistance YOU TOO were fighting for individual liberty, you were the minuteman, the freedom fighter. Because, as awful as watching another man's life being destroyed can be, it is nothing compared to the horrible crime of using the coercive power of the state to force him to pay $75 a year.
That's really sortof the issue. If you don't make people pay the $75 and allow them to do it voluntarily, you're going to have situations where the fire brigade is forced to watch a person's life be destroyed, while possessing the means to stop it, which is plainly evil and wrong -- let's just call it what it is, huh? It makes men into monsters, much greater monsters than they would have been if they'd just bloody sent a bill every year to everyone.
"Save" it? It was the most profitable film of 2000. I mean it was BAD on a certain level, but that's just a value judgement. What's your (or my) opinion compared to tens of millions of dollars?:)
I really want to emphasize I'm not endorsing the free market here, I think it's really creating sub-optimal outcomes. But we have to be honest about what's making films meh. And we have to face that movies that are "meh" have a certain sort of efficiency.
The Blender Foundation raises its money from us, the viewing public, who is inspired to buy their stuff because they treat us so well.
I don't understand, how is this different from selling tickets? Or going to see a film directed by Darren Aronofsky, without necessarily knowing ahead of time wether it's good or bad, because you like his work?
Films are funded on the basis of demand for ticket sales. If "Hollywood" doesn't think something will sell tickets, it isn't getting money. I think the problem with a lot of slashdotters/creative commons types is that they think moviegoers are rational in just the way they are, therefore any movie that doesn't meet their particular expectations is evidence that Hollywood is corrupt.
The truth is, in fact, Hollywood gives people exactly what they ask for, with the scientific precision that only the free market can provide. The fact that people want visionless, unchallenging dreck, and that foreign audiences will pay good money to watch anything (no really, anything) as long as it has an American movie star, is beside the point.
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What good is open if it's just a line of bash(1)? Software openness is supposed to benefit everyone, not just the companies that sell you their paint-by-numbers no-source-available iterations of it. It's not like any of these products are any cheaper to the end user because the OS is open, or the choice in applications isn't really all that better because it's open. And you're really evading the main point, that this is an OS for the exploitation of vast untapped smartphone markets. People want mobile internet, and Android is happy to give it to them on the carrier's terms. Apple at least had the good sense to see the cellular networks as adversaries, and to prevent their interference in the transaction between the hardware vendor and the end user. But Android is obsequious to their will -- the OHA is little more than a proxy for cellular network providers and commodity handset manufacturers.
This is the pursuit of "open software" as a marketing bullet-point, and not as a thoroughgoing commitment to the freedom of users to do "what they want" with "their phone." Rubin's tweet really encapsulates Google's attitude toward openness. What he left out was:
Typical elite geek attitude that only people who know how to hack are entitled to the fullest benefits of computing.
How is one supposed to use Android without the phone? You can't evaluate Android independent of its use on a particular piece of hardware.
And the distribution and marketing model of Android guarantees the carrier and phone manufacturer the ability to do whatever they please. Android strikes a blow for software freedom while grievously wounding network freedom. If you are a tinkerer the you'll benefit from the open OS, Google and Motorola certainly do, they get free bugfixes from users all over the world! But if you are a non-hacking end user Android is just another carrier and manufacturer straight-jacket. Android is a phone company's handmaiden.
Behold, the freedom the carriers have to create the branded experience, instead of the manufacturer.
It's well and good that you can build it yourself, but the practical effect is to allow the handset makers and cellular carriers to turn their subscriber's eyeballs into commodities they resell back to Google. "Open" is only a virtue to those who open the box, to everyone else the benefits accrue to others.
Note, I can play MJPEG movies just fine without touching it, it only applies to the available authoring/exporting formats. I was able to play a MJPEG movie from 2002 last week without issue. Quicktime is just about the most stable media platform you'll ever find, from a compatibility standpoint... they still ship all the old codecs from the 80s and if you have a .mov from 1989 QuickTime 8 will still play it. Apple is to Quicktime as Microsoft has been to Win32.
Nobody does xargs on the search bar, and Google and Bing have literally spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to make the search bar into an do-what-I-mean interface. It really isn't a command line in any sense that matters.
And FWIW, I had to drop into a terminal session on OSX yesterday to reenable MJPEG Quicktime codecs. It used to be a checkbox in the System Preferences, but since Snow Leopard you can only get at it through the defaults(1) interface.
7 hectares on a single liter of kerosene.
"Sharks in a school of tuna" is sorta imprecise, could you give us the fuel efficiency in Libraries of Congress?
That's not fair. We simply live in an era where the prevailing social ideology says that if something doesn't make you a profit, you have no moral obligation to do it. To imply that acting like an antisocial monster is "immoral" doesn't give a lot of credit to the people who constantly look for new and creative ways to rationalistically align "that which give me what I want" and "that which is right by me and my brother."
I wasn't aware of this, I'm an idiot :)
An interesting modification to StarCraft which would give AIs a run for their money would be cooperative play where several users operate one team on the field, and where the several users have a hierarchy and delegate command of corps of units to other players, maybe one player handling resources while another scouts while a third consolidates the offensive force.
I suppose I don't think I have to remind you that Reagan proved the deficits "don't matter," and that the deficit ballooned from $74 billion to over $2 trillion during his presidency. And that when his successor tried to raise taxes to lower the deficit, he was thrown out of office by the "conservative" Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America grift, and that GHW Bush's 'liberal" successor brought the federal budget into surplus. Reagan's legacy at least as a fiscal conservative is a fraud.
If you can find me a tea partier in a general election that actually speaks against war with Iran, or for immediate cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan, you can put the links here. But these people don't exist: you want them to, and you read your aspirations into others, just as Obama supporters read their aspirations into Obama. Just today, a Republican and frontrunnner in the West Virginia senate general tells us we should spend $20 billion on a space-based "thousand laser" missile defense system. Truly a small government proposal if ever there was one, though Raese was careful to include a "git r done!" in his speech, to let people know that, as much money as he may spend, he's coming from the right sort of people to do the spending.
You do have to respond to the argument here: a President is bound by the law, and the structure of the executive branch is created by law. This is done to improve accountability to Congress... If a President removed departments and reorganized titles, it would quickly become impossible for congressional committees to know who to call to testify and exercise their oversight -- it would become basically impossible to discover how money was being spent and if the executive was enforcing laws. If the President were a CEO, then he'd probably be as accountable as the average corporate CEO is accountable to his stockholders and board of directors. Which is to say, not at all.
Again, you've got to respond to the problem here: the Tea Party is a constituency for reducing the federal deficit, but they have no agenda for doing so, aside from sending people to congress who promise gridlock -- which increases the deficit. Reducing the deficit without raising taxes will require decisions to be made, and most of the people in the Tea Party have a lot to lose from reductions in federal spending. Will the Tea Party support its candidates even if they must cut their benefits? That's the question.
You can't even bring yourself to say their name. Republicans. The party of Lincoln, classical liberal values, and the modern values voter-libertarian "new-fusionism." I think you need to pay closer attention to who's bankrolling the Tea Party as a movement, corporatists like the Koch brothers, and its candidates, who are to a man ideologues and maladjusted no-accounts who come from nowhere and will tell people whatever they want to hear if it will only buy them the prestige of federal office. All the while in the background, Karl Rove and Ed Gilllespe and the rest of the grownups in the Republican party have successfully reorganized the entire funding apparatus of the GOP behind unaccountable 529 groups like Crossroads, on account of Michael Steele's profound incompetence. The Tea Party will take over the GOP just in time to discover that its entire funding apparatus has been hollowed out.
FWIW, I so zero evidence that any member or cadre of the Republican Party is anti-war, even the Tea Party. When was the last time a Tea Partier spoke up against the war? Go to any Tea Party candidate website and even try to search for the word "Afghanistan." You will find nothing, so cowed are they by the pro-war GOP constituencies. Here's Christine O'Donnell's, here's Carl Paladino's, here's Sharron Angle's tepid pro-war comments against Harry Reid; Rand Paul is happy to tell you he supports the war, would have voted for it, on pages which appear only in cache and can no longer be viewed. What makes you think these people will suddenly grow a spine when they're the low men on the totem pole in DC?
BUT IT WON'T END THE WAR. All of his replacements in the Republican party are pledged to continue it. And spread it to Iran, for that matter.
Read this slowly: The cabinet departments are created and sustained by Acts of Congress. The president is not a CEO, he cannot recreate his organization; he's bound by law.
Nobody really wants that. They want government smaller, except for every program from which they derive benefit. No political actor in our system, Republican, Democrat, Tea Partier, Green or Religious Rightist has proposed a specific plan for spending reductions that could win majority support. People like their wars and social security and medicare just fine, and when you propose something that reduces the deficit, it's a "death panel" or it "hurts seniors" or it "hurts the troops." The Tea Party campaigns for lower deficits in the abstract, but no Tea Party candidate or group (while they're not dressing like SS officers or gaybashing or lying on their resume) has committed to a budget, and those that have, like Paul Ryan, have been marginalized and their proposals spiked, because the Tea Party is demographically loaded with Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, and their leadership in the Republican Party is institutionally committed to the security state.
As we've seen with Obama's attempt to reduce commitments in Afghanistan, against the will of the generals, it's practically impossible for a president to reduce troop deployments without the support of the generals, particularly as long as the party in opposition supports an open-ended commitment. The generals simply leak the content of their meetings to the war party, and leak negative stories about the policy decisions to the press, and work to eliminate and marginalize people who offer solutions that reduce commitments beneath what the generals think "will accomplish the mission." It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, of course, but why bother when your replacement will be an ultra-hawk Republican who will simply re-escalate? That's really the issue, there's a lot of competition for people to prove themselves the most belligerent, because there really isn't much of a consensus for ending the war among conservatives or liberals.
All cabinet-level departments are created by acts of congress; a president cannot abrogate an act of congress. A failure to appoint a head will cause the civil-service interim appointee to run the department. Congress will attempt the fund the department through omnibus legislation.
The President of the US has no line-item veto, because it's unconstitutional. The president has no right to dictate how the US spends its money, this is the responsibility of the House of Representatives. There is no evidence that people really want to eliminate the deficit. The deficit is a fundamentally popular institution and people would never vote someone out of office for increasing it. And deficit reformers, instead of actually trying to win the argument on the merits and win elections, propose ever more dictatorial powers for their great white hope, that one man who will, Cincinnatus-like, ride to the rescue of America, use untrammeled king-like authority to set the nation straight, and then disappear. The requirement that a president either affirm or veto bills in full is a fundamental check on executive power.
You call for dictatorship, if only to deal with the immediate crisis, but that's how it always starts... Congress is the institution in our system that prevents dictatorship. If you take powers away from congress and hand them to the president, you break the system.
The problem is that people don't actually vote for senators and representatives they respect any more, people who can -- they just vote for the person who has the highest propensity for giving them what they ask for.
Begun, the patent wars have?
There was already a well-established patent Cold War, is this the end of it?
For some reason I get the feeling that people with this complaint have never actually lived in a city with proper mass transportation. In London you can get within 6 blocks of your destination at 10 minute intervals during the daylight hours. If we wanted transit that worked we'd have it, but we don't so we don't. It's completely a question of priorities.
We aren't talking about now, we're talking about solutions for the future, and what path we take.
Your commute is not an inescapable fact of nature -- travel by automobile is faster than mass transit in urban areas because of concrete policy decisions made by federal, state and local governments. And now we find ourselves trying harder and harder to make automobile transit into something it's not, mainly because perverse incentives in government policy lead people to continue to use cars even though it's plainly a waste of resources. It's like corn subsidies -- corn is far cheaper than it should be, it receives tax subsidies, thus, we have a wicked overabundance of it and we dream up all kinds of expensive kludges that we can put corn through in order to keep it in demand, like ethanol fuel or corn syrup.
And thus, since autos receive a huge subsidy compared to mass transit, due to policy inertia and cultural bias, when people think of ways to make transit faster, safer, more efficient and less labor intensive, instead of actually pursuing existing solutions to this problem, they think up expensive and kludgy ways of bending cars to the purpose.
By Thrun's own admission the soonest you'll have a robot car is in a decade, and it probably adds at least a few thousand dollars to your car's cost. Imagine being in a poor transit city like LA or Houston, if you collected mere hundreds of bucks in taxes from every car owner, in ten years you'd probably be able to build the most extensive and convenient urban rail network on Earth.
All I'm saying is that we have to be honest -- an automated car isn't a solution to the problem of how to make travel faster, cleaner, safer or less labor intensive, we have that already. It's a solution that solves these problems piecemeal while still conveying Americans in the manner and style to which they've become accustomed. It's fundamentally a solution to the "I-don't-wanna-sit-next-to-a-weirdo-on-the-bus" problem or the "I-don't-want-to-wait-5-minutes-on-the-platform" problem, not anything else.
If only urban areas would offer some sort of futuristic transit "system" whereby instead of burning 30 man-miles per gallon we were able to aggregate daily short and medium intra-city hops into "platoons" on single road vehicles or rail vehicles, that would leave the rider free to do work while a designated operator took care of the driving for them. Even BETTER is there was some sort of inter-city rail-type service that offered faster hops than any freeway without having to negotiate traffic.
But seriously, for people who don't live within reach of an adequate mass transit system this is of course a Good Thing, but we've literally been pouring millions of dollars and decades of research into allowing people to have all of the safety and free time benefits of riding the bus or subway without the efficiency or social stigma of... riding the bus or subway. To the point where urban planners are promising us the "freeway of the future" where your single-or-perhaps-dual-occupant car drives itself onto the freeway and platoons with other cars in order to merely take up THRICE the freeway capacity of a comparable bus instead of TEN TIMES to space.
Natch YMMV, but as a solution for reducing city congestion and city road safety this is so totally a wank. A sedan automobile has to be one of the least efficient modes of transportation ever devised, and only maintains its preeminence in the first world because pollution is unpriced, our national passenger rail system has been criminally mismanaged by the government, and we have a corrupt freeway funding mechanism.
I don't see how facebook could prevent this sort of attack by any means...
You can't hold people responsible for the acts of their government in that way. People bear the responsibility for their government in a lot of ways, but whenever in history a people have been forced to suffer for the acts of their government, like Germans did after World War I, it only breeds iniquity and retribution. I'm sure there's some way of arguing that when the city drives the fire truck out to your house to merely watch it burn, that isn't necessarily the government forcing you to destroy your house, but as far as I'm concerened that's little more than a controlled demolition. It doesn't matter that they didn't start the fire, they have the means to stop it and they refuse through inaction; the lack of $75 doesn't absolve anyone.
I think you focus to much on the free rider issue, as if you don't have to argue the point that compelling people to pay for the fire department is really the only moral solution. Or maybe you are really nuts, and you think that public funding of fire departments CAUSES fires because of misaligned incentives. I really don't see how any of your analogies are comparable to this situation -- you're just trying to prove the hoary old canard that good intentions never go unpunished, so when you do bad or selfish things you can do so with a clear conscience. You might think this is playing the sucker to a mooch, but I do think this is the minimum required, if the Earth is to be considered fit for human habitation.
Neither one of us is winning the mods over, maybe it's a dumb argument.
I guess if you need him to be a "dickwad" too maybe that'll help you objectify the victim and somehow render moral judgement on him. But keep in mind that's all you're doing, and it's a crass, glib thing to do.
They have limited resources because they're government is a bunch of anti-tax cranks who would rather pat themselves on the back for their defense of "individual responsibility" though their neighbors' houses burn. The issue of limited resources is a red herring; they'd have all the resources they'd need to behave like moral beings if they sent everyone a bill for $75. But no, it appears we must sacrifice love of thy neighbor and human brotherhood on the altar of "negative externalities" and "free rider problems" and all of the rationalistic claptrap people deploy to assuage their guilt when their inwardness, self-regard and selfishness creates suffering.
I assure you your approach, if made general law, would only amplify human suffering. All you really have to offer is angry defense of why the victim's misery is just and righteous. Unfortunately, in the real world, when men have the means to help a another in need and refuse, it's never just or righteous, period. It's really not the firemen's fault, they simply work for a local government that regards their citizens as mere customers, and not as brothers who should never be forced to watch their house burn. To not tax and provide for mandatory fire service, in the first world in the twenty-first-fucking century, is uncivilized, and it is a capitulation of social order and the general welfare to the whim of the avarice and the brain-dead ideology used to absolve it.
So yeah, you're wrong.
The beautiful thing about believing strongly in something abstract, like I guess in this case "libertarianism" though even most libertarians (setting aside a few American cranks) believe in tax-funded fire services, is that you can convince yourself that doing something evil is in fact good and necessary, given certain unrealistic assumptions reality. You can imagine the talk the fire chief gave the volunteers afterwards:
That's really sortof the issue. If you don't make people pay the $75 and allow them to do it voluntarily, you're going to have situations where the fire brigade is forced to watch a person's life be destroyed, while possessing the means to stop it, which is plainly evil and wrong -- let's just call it what it is, huh? It makes men into monsters, much greater monsters than they would have been if they'd just bloody sent a bill every year to everyone.
"Save" it? It was the most profitable film of 2000. I mean it was BAD on a certain level, but that's just a value judgement. What's your (or my) opinion compared to tens of millions of dollars? :)
I really want to emphasize I'm not endorsing the free market here, I think it's really creating sub-optimal outcomes. But we have to be honest about what's making films meh. And we have to face that movies that are "meh" have a certain sort of efficiency.
I don't understand, how is this different from selling tickets? Or going to see a film directed by Darren Aronofsky, without necessarily knowing ahead of time wether it's good or bad, because you like his work?
Films are funded on the basis of demand for ticket sales. If "Hollywood" doesn't think something will sell tickets, it isn't getting money. I think the problem with a lot of slashdotters/creative commons types is that they think moviegoers are rational in just the way they are, therefore any movie that doesn't meet their particular expectations is evidence that Hollywood is corrupt.
The truth is, in fact, Hollywood gives people exactly what they ask for, with the scientific precision that only the free market can provide. The fact that people want visionless, unchallenging dreck, and that foreign audiences will pay good money to watch anything (no really, anything) as long as it has an American movie star, is beside the point.