For your information all coutries are terrorist targets. The US just happens to have the highest profile because other that Israel and Russia very few countries are actively trying to combat terrorism.
European nations have been the target of modern-day terrorism for decades. It's just that many Americans (you are an example) have been living in such ignorance that they never noticed that, either domestic or elsewhere. Only when terrorists struck a bunch of iconic buildings did the general US population finally notice, and the reaction has been paranoid and ineffective so far. It's been paranoid because, despite all the fear mongering by politicians, terrorism remains a negligible cause of death in the US.
As for why the US is the target of Islamic terrorism, that shouldn't be a mystery to anybody: it's because of US middle-east policies, foremost support of Israel. Those policies may or may not be justified, but whether they are doesn't change the fact that they are the cause of terrorism.
If other nations had done to the US what the US has done to a country like Iran, Americans like you would be literally up in arms: you'd be the terrorists. Those people are pretty much of the same mindset as you.
The US is a terrorist target because our way of life threatens their way of life.
That is true, but not in the way you intended. The US way of life threatens "their" way of life because of the voracious American appetite for natural resources and military influence. If the US stopped engaging in the Middle East, there would be no Middle Eastern terrorism against the US. Oh, sure, those people would still not like the US, but they wouldn't bother coming here to bomb us.
In other words, we seek freedom for ourselves and believe others should have the same choice.
Nations like Switzerland and Sweden are highly tolerant, open, and free societies, far more liberal socially and far less religious than the US. If terrorists acted because they felt threatened by political freedoms, sexuality, and godlessness, as you suggest, they'd pick Switzerland and Sweden as their primary targets. But, in reality, those countries are largely being left alone by terrorists.
I fail to see what your point is or why you are dragging Moore's film into this.
So, yes, Russia converts weapons into civilian launch capacity because they desparately need money and because they know that they simply aren't the superpower they once were.
What does that have to do with the US? The US isn't giving up on being a superpower. I don't know why the US converts Titan missiles for satellite purposes, but it clearly isn't because of any serious attempt to reduce US military dominance.
The US continues to maintain and develop a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, US politicians aren't apologetic about it, and the US military would probably use them if they believe it is in the best interests of the US, as they have before. The only reason the term "weapons of mass destruction" sounds vaguely terrorist and illegitimate is because the Bush administration has been using that terminology so indiscriminately and carelessly in their justification of the war with Iraq.
So, while the US may be converting missiles into launch vehicles, in a deeper sense, the US isn't "doing the same thing" at all: both the motivations and the consequences of the US actions are different.
Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel.
Provided you like the scroll wheel, that is. The scroll wheel is one of the reasons I don't like the iPod (poor battery life and lack of USB charging capability being others).
It's because we think that if the US subsidizes railroads, it's communism, but when the US subsidizes inefficient automobile and air travel, it's the free market.
Why is that? Brilliant marketing and lobbying over decades by the auto and airline industries.
I don't want a "richer" web experience. Things already blink too much. Worse, plug-ins kill a normal standardization process. If there hadn't been any plug-ins, people would have been forced to standardize something like SVG much earlier instead of relying on Flash and similar systems.
Also, the problem with plug-ins is not their availability, it's version hell: you need to have the right constellation of library versions, operating system versions, and application versions. A plug-in standard usually still uses APIs other than those provided through the plug-in standard, so a standard won't change that.
Altogether, I think it's a bad idea. Let's get rid of plug-ins altogether and instead work towards better, universally implemented, open web standards.
You don't have some magical right not to have things you own look different.
I do, however, have the right not to have their appearance altered. I'm sorry if you have trouble with the phrase "altering the appearance of something", but it doesn't mean "shining a blue light on it".
As for the leaves that blow into your yard...if I see my property laying in your yard, I have the right to go in and take it.
No, you don't. If you let your property carelessly fall into my yard, that doesn't give you a right to trespass.
You can take ownership of them by moving them in some way that they no longer move around randomly, just like you can pump water from the watertable and sell it. That doesn't mean you own the watertable, it means you can legally do what is called a 'conversion' under the law, converting commonly owned property to your own uses.
None of that has anything to do with the fact that you are not permitted to clean my car, my house, or my dog, unless I give you permission. And in the case of publicly administered property, you need public permission to do so. These "graffiti artists" understood that apparently well enough to back down, even with some grumbling.
Those numbers tell you how different cars rate relative to one another in situations that approximate city traffic and highway traffic.
You can multiply that with a "personal factor", which depends on your driving habits and where you live, in order to get your true gas mileage. Just divide your actual mileage by the EPA mileage and multiply any EPA mileage you see for a new car by that.
Occasionally, EPA ratings will be way off for strange reasons, but they do try to measure them reproducibly and they do give you useful information.
The whole system should be dumped in favor of vehicle choice, not artificial limits put on cars by the government.
I'm all for it: it should be dumped in favor of making drivers pay the actual cost that they impose on the nation: highway construction, impact on air quality, health care costs, injury and death, political and military consequences of having to keep the oil flowing, etc. Current taxes on cars and fuel don't pay a fraction of the real costs; driving is currently heavily subsidized by even non-driving tax payers.
In different words, greatly increasing the gasoline tax would result in a nice free-market solution to the problems that cars create. Nobody would have to institute manipulable "gas guzzler" taxes, gas guzzlers would just tax themselves.
(In cases of hardships and exceptions, people could be exempted from the tax, either at the point of purchase or via refunds; such systems work well elsewhere.)
While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of),
I wouldn't take this on faith; go play around with some other MP3 players at a big electronics store (one that keeps them running) and see for yourself. The software part of the iPod seems OK, but I like the actual hardware controls on other devices better. And other devices are often cheaper.
Another problem with the iPod is that you can't recharge it through USB (at least last I looked at it)--when you travel, you need to travel with a power supply and other stuff. With other MP3 players, all you need is the player and a standard USB cable (and if you forget that, you can buy it anywhere). You can recharge the iPod through a thick FireWire connector, but most laptops don't have those, and even many desktops don't.
The hero or villain (as the case may be) pulls too much data out of the computer system too fast and soon sparks fly and the whole thing goes up in smoke. This kind of "system overload" is going to be a real problem with computers 10-20 years down the line, as Hollywood has shown us. The computers at the DOJ are just a little ahead of their time.
After more than 20 years of C programming, I must still be too stupid to avoid pointer errors. So, stupid people like myself can use languages other than C, and positively brilliant people like him can stick with C. But who the hell is writing all the applications, then, that keep crashing and that keep getting broken into?
No, actually, you do not have property rights to the dirt on your car. As proven by the incredibly obvious fact that you can't sue someone for hitting it with a hose,
Don't get hung up on the question of who owns the dirt particles. The fact is that you do not have the right to alter the appearance of my car, either by removing or by adding dirt, paint, or anything else. In most cases, there are no damages. But if you scrawl a racist message on my car and I suffer ill consequences, you may be liable. If you get my car wet in situations where I have a reasonable expectation that it won't get wet, you may be liable.
or sue God when it rains.
I don't have a reasonable expectation that it doesn't rain. I do have a reasonable expectation that you don't do anything to change the appearance of my car.
You do not own the dirt laying on your car, any more than you own leaves that have blown into your yard or CO2 exhaled from your lungs.
I certainly do own the leaves that have accumulated in my yard, as well as the dust and dirt that replenishes the soil, as well as the plants that grow by capturing the CO2 in the air.
It's economics, not game theory, that assumes human rationality. In 90% of circumstances, that assumption accurately predicts behavior.
Care to back up that claim? I think that if economics predicts human behavior accurately in 10% of circumstances, that is already giving it more credit than it is due.
Note that humans are thus called irrational, when in fact the game theory models is deficient, leaving out all of the factors that normal people use when making human decisions.
That use of the term "irrational" comes from economists, who started using it before it even dawned on them that social and other psychological rewards and concerns may be valuable as well. And many economists haven't figured it out to this day.
Biologists realized the rationality of emotions and their importance for survival much earlier.
I believe Sun is testing the waters for possibly fully releasing Java into the open source world.
This release of Java 3D is not an open source release, it's a release of proprietary software in source form under a restrictive license.
3D people out there.. utlize this stuff so they'll be encouraged to release Java.
If you even so much as look at that code, you have looked at Sun's proprietary source code under a non-open source license. Rather than helping open source, you may be making yourself ineligible to work on open source 3D projects.
but people will foolishly ignore it, rather than implement it's plus points into Linux.
People will ignore Solaris source releases because they will not be open source releases, they, too, will be source releases under restrictive, proprietary, and dangerous licenses. (IMO, they will also ignore them because Solaris has nothing to offer technically to Linux, but that's a separate point of debate.)
People hate having inconsistent view of their files when they're working across machines in a lab enviornment or in a cluster.
I didn't say that GFS was completely useless, I said that enterprises are heading in a different direction. GFS may well be useful for a computer lab, a small workgroup, and other such applications.
Things like GFS are godsends because they reduce IT's need to be invovled. Set it up once, and go.
Anything that attempts to achieve consistency across an entire enterprise is going to be lots of work for IT staff, no matter how well it may have been implemented.
What would you say if your neighbor sneaked over and wrote offensive messages in the dirt on your car and your windows, for all to read? The first time, you may think it's a fluke, but after a few times, you'd get angry.
You have property rights to your car, your home, and the dirt that accumulate on it. You have the right to have them free of messages you don't like or approve of, whether painted on or scrawled in dirt. You have a right to have them look as dirty as you like.
Well, it's no different with city property: it's everybody's property that is administered on our behalf by the government. We have decided to keep it dirty, but that doesn't mean individuals can come in and clean it up, in particular, clean it up in a way that promotes businesses that people have not agreed to promote and might not want to promote.
an idea whose time has come ... and gone
on
Red Hat announces GFS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
GFS has a number of useful applications. But I think the times where you could design your enterprise around the idea of a globally consistent file storage system are over: enterprises are getting more flexible, more decentralized, and people would prefer not to have to deal with IT staff over issues such as file space and permissions. And they can avoid it--since many of them make the purchasing decisions.
Key portions of that code are not released under open source licenses. These kinds of "source releases" under proprietary licenses have only upsides for the company making them: they aren't giving away anything valuable (Java3D isn't exactly a hot property), the company still retains all the important rights, and they can claim that people copied stuff from them if there are similarities between their proprietary code and open source software. The latter is also the reason why you run the risk that open source projects will simply not let you participate if you as much as look at these kinds of proprietary source releases.
And even if Java3D were released under an open source license, it still wouldn't do you any good because you couldn't use it without Sun's proprietary Java implementation or uncertified, partially Java-compatible implementations of dubious legality (meaning, all the, incomplete, Java implementations that don't come from Sun).
Apple products are, by and large, nice designs. Apple makes some bad blunders, but they pay more attention to design than many companies. But you also pay for that. Other companies make good designs in that they manage to do good tradeoffs: the device may not be as sleek, but it's cheaper, for example, or has a more reasonable battery life.
But I frankly doubt these "designers" even considered such products because they didn't even think of them as "designer" products.
My ugly laptop, for example, is more convenient than my sleek Ti Powerbook. My ugly MP3 player is a lot more useful than the iPod. Etc. Unlike Apple products, those may not be designer products, but the no-name Asian companies that designed them did a great job with limited resources. And that's what good design is really all about.
While certain economists have a religious belief that governments are inefficient and private companies are not, there is no evidence of that.
That belief comes from anti-communist hysteria. Communist governments were enormously inefficient and needed to be abolished. But communist governments were also corrupt, run by bad administrators, and unaccountable.
Experience shows that, despite the whining of right wingers, the US government manages to do a lot of things very efficiently compared to private companies. And customer service may not be great, but it seems better than many private companies.
None of that should really surprise anyone: anyone who thinks that big private companies operate according to free market principles is naive.
Next problem that might arise is the need to move the cable not only for satellites (a few hundred in operation) but also for the thousands of pieces of spacejunk larger then 1 cm. An encounter with such a piece would probablyy make the cable make a nasty "snap" sound, which noone could ever hear cause it's space.
I'm not particularly enamored with the idea of a space elevator, but this particular issue does not seem to be a problem.
It's not one cable or multiple cables, it's multiple cables with cross-connections. A lot of stuff can hit them before the entire structure fails.
The real problem is the size of the non-discretionary programs. Since they're entitlements, they're much harder to cut, and the cost of those programs will soon consume 60-70% of the _total_ budget.
They are entitlements because you paid for them, dollar for dollar. You are entitled to them. They are like your car insurance, your home owners insurance, or your 401k. The only difference is that the federal government happens to administer and run them in order to ensure that (1) everybody participates, and (2) they are going to be there when they are needed.
Why do we need that? Because if not everybody participates, you get what we had before: large numbers of old people with nothing. You could just let them starve, of course, and for centuries, we did. But, eventually, people decided that that wasn't a good way of treating the elderly, so a minimal safety net was created.
The only problem with the non-discretionary programs is that politicians like to dip their hands into them. Social security can be run perfectly, but if politicians siphon off huge amounts of money to (effectively) pay for wars, you aren't getting what you paid for, and that is not a problem with the entitlement programs, it's a problem with what the federal government is primarily wasting money on: the military.
In 2003, the US federal government employed between 21 and 22 million people. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Of those, 1.4 million were active duty military (U.S. Census). So yeah, the military is what makes our government a leviathan. RIIIGGHHHTT.
So, what are those 1.4 million people doing with half the discretionary spending? The other 22 million have to make do with what is left. Seems to me, they are doing a lot with comparatively little, then: keep the roads running, keep you from catching communicable diseases, keep your food safe, keep the forests safe, etc.
I think the fundamental point of disagreement is whether one thinks that Social Security, Medicare, et. al., are being run well. I'd have to say no.
People are never satisfied with anything. But the existing, large public health care system in the US is far more efficient than private health care in the US, so claims that privatization would improve things are probably wrong. And the S&L disaster shows you what can happen when private businesses take in large amounts of deposits and can just disappear when they have mismanaged them--do you want to repeat that with retirement savings?
The US has, overall, a pretty well-run, efficient, and corruption free federal bureaucracy. We should be grateful for that and use it effectively, not try to dismantle it: the alternatives are far worse and more costly.
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For your information all coutries are terrorist targets. The US just happens to have the highest profile because other that Israel and Russia very few countries are actively trying to combat terrorism.
European nations have been the target of modern-day terrorism for decades. It's just that many Americans (you are an example) have been living in such ignorance that they never noticed that, either domestic or elsewhere. Only when terrorists struck a bunch of iconic buildings did the general US population finally notice, and the reaction has been paranoid and ineffective so far. It's been paranoid because, despite all the fear mongering by politicians, terrorism remains a negligible cause of death in the US.
As for why the US is the target of Islamic terrorism, that shouldn't be a mystery to anybody: it's because of US middle-east policies, foremost support of Israel. Those policies may or may not be justified, but whether they are doesn't change the fact that they are the cause of terrorism.
If other nations had done to the US what the US has done to a country like Iran, Americans like you would be literally up in arms: you'd be the terrorists. Those people are pretty much of the same mindset as you.
The US is a terrorist target because our way of life threatens their way of life.
That is true, but not in the way you intended. The US way of life threatens "their" way of life because of the voracious American appetite for natural resources and military influence. If the US stopped engaging in the Middle East, there would be no Middle Eastern terrorism against the US. Oh, sure, those people would still not like the US, but they wouldn't bother coming here to bomb us.
In other words, we seek freedom for ourselves and believe others should have the same choice.
Nations like Switzerland and Sweden are highly tolerant, open, and free societies, far more liberal socially and far less religious than the US. If terrorists acted because they felt threatened by political freedoms, sexuality, and godlessness, as you suggest, they'd pick Switzerland and Sweden as their primary targets. But, in reality, those countries are largely being left alone by terrorists.
I fail to see what your point is or why you are dragging Moore's film into this.
So, yes, Russia converts weapons into civilian launch capacity because they desparately need money and because they know that they simply aren't the superpower they once were.
What does that have to do with the US? The US isn't giving up on being a superpower. I don't know why the US converts Titan missiles for satellite purposes, but it clearly isn't because of any serious attempt to reduce US military dominance.
The US continues to maintain and develop a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, US politicians aren't apologetic about it, and the US military would probably use them if they believe it is in the best interests of the US, as they have before. The only reason the term "weapons of mass destruction" sounds vaguely terrorist and illegitimate is because the Bush administration has been using that terminology so indiscriminately and carelessly in their justification of the war with Iraq.
So, while the US may be converting missiles into launch vehicles, in a deeper sense, the US isn't "doing the same thing" at all: both the motivations and the consequences of the US actions are different.
Microsoft claims over one billion web pages searched, but admits the fact that searching is a little slow.
That's OK: once they copy Google's distributed computing technology and put it all on top of Linux, it will then be fast.
Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel.
Provided you like the scroll wheel, that is. The scroll wheel is one of the reasons I don't like the iPod (poor battery life and lack of USB charging capability being others).
It's because we think that if the US subsidizes railroads, it's communism, but when the US subsidizes inefficient automobile and air travel, it's the free market.
Why is that? Brilliant marketing and lobbying over decades by the auto and airline industries.
I don't want a "richer" web experience. Things already blink too much. Worse, plug-ins kill a normal standardization process. If there hadn't been any plug-ins, people would have been forced to standardize something like SVG much earlier instead of relying on Flash and similar systems.
Also, the problem with plug-ins is not their availability, it's version hell: you need to have the right constellation of library versions, operating system versions, and application versions. A plug-in standard usually still uses APIs other than those provided through the plug-in standard, so a standard won't change that.
Altogether, I think it's a bad idea. Let's get rid of plug-ins altogether and instead work towards better, universally implemented, open web standards.
You don't have some magical right not to have things you own look different.
I do, however, have the right not to have their appearance altered. I'm sorry if you have trouble with the phrase "altering the appearance of something", but it doesn't mean "shining a blue light on it".
As for the leaves that blow into your yard...if I see my property laying in your yard, I have the right to go in and take it.
No, you don't. If you let your property carelessly fall into my yard, that doesn't give you a right to trespass.
You can take ownership of them by moving them in some way that they no longer move around randomly, just like you can pump water from the watertable and sell it. That doesn't mean you own the watertable, it means you can legally do what is called a 'conversion' under the law, converting commonly owned property to your own uses.
None of that has anything to do with the fact that you are not permitted to clean my car, my house, or my dog, unless I give you permission. And in the case of publicly administered property, you need public permission to do so. These "graffiti artists" understood that apparently well enough to back down, even with some grumbling.
Those numbers tell you how different cars rate relative to one another in situations that approximate city traffic and highway traffic.
You can multiply that with a "personal factor", which depends on your driving habits and where you live, in order to get your true gas mileage. Just divide your actual mileage by the EPA mileage and multiply any EPA mileage you see for a new car by that.
Occasionally, EPA ratings will be way off for strange reasons, but they do try to measure them reproducibly and they do give you useful information.
The whole system should be dumped in favor of vehicle choice, not artificial limits put on cars by the government.
I'm all for it: it should be dumped in favor of making drivers pay the actual cost that they impose on the nation: highway construction, impact on air quality, health care costs, injury and death, political and military consequences of having to keep the oil flowing, etc. Current taxes on cars and fuel don't pay a fraction of the real costs; driving is currently heavily subsidized by even non-driving tax payers.
In different words, greatly increasing the gasoline tax would result in a nice free-market solution to the problems that cars create. Nobody would have to institute manipulable "gas guzzler" taxes, gas guzzlers would just tax themselves.
(In cases of hardships and exceptions, people could be exempted from the tax, either at the point of purchase or via refunds; such systems work well elsewhere.)
While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of),
I wouldn't take this on faith; go play around with some other MP3 players at a big electronics store (one that keeps them running) and see for yourself. The software part of the iPod seems OK, but I like the actual hardware controls on other devices better. And other devices are often cheaper.
Another problem with the iPod is that you can't recharge it through USB (at least last I looked at it)--when you travel, you need to travel with a power supply and other stuff. With other MP3 players, all you need is the player and a standard USB cable (and if you forget that, you can buy it anywhere). You can recharge the iPod through a thick FireWire connector, but most laptops don't have those, and even many desktops don't.
The hero or villain (as the case may be) pulls too much data out of the computer system too fast and soon sparks fly and the whole thing goes up in smoke. This kind of "system overload" is going to be a real problem with computers 10-20 years down the line, as Hollywood has shown us. The computers at the DOJ are just a little ahead of their time.
After more than 20 years of C programming, I must still be too stupid to avoid pointer errors. So, stupid people like myself can use languages other than C, and positively brilliant people like him can stick with C. But who the hell is writing all the applications, then, that keep crashing and that keep getting broken into?
No, actually, you do not have property rights to the dirt on your car. As proven by the incredibly obvious fact that you can't sue someone for hitting it with a hose,
Don't get hung up on the question of who owns the dirt particles. The fact is that you do not have the right to alter the appearance of my car, either by removing or by adding dirt, paint, or anything else. In most cases, there are no damages. But if you scrawl a racist message on my car and I suffer ill consequences, you may be liable. If you get my car wet in situations where I have a reasonable expectation that it won't get wet, you may be liable.
or sue God when it rains.
I don't have a reasonable expectation that it doesn't rain. I do have a reasonable expectation that you don't do anything to change the appearance of my car.
You do not own the dirt laying on your car, any more than you own leaves that have blown into your yard or CO2 exhaled from your lungs.
I certainly do own the leaves that have accumulated in my yard, as well as the dust and dirt that replenishes the soil, as well as the plants that grow by capturing the CO2 in the air.
It's economics, not game theory, that assumes human rationality. In 90% of circumstances, that assumption accurately predicts behavior.
Care to back up that claim? I think that if economics predicts human behavior accurately in 10% of circumstances, that is already giving it more credit than it is due.
Note that humans are thus called irrational, when in fact the game theory models is deficient, leaving out all of the factors that normal people use when making human decisions.
That use of the term "irrational" comes from economists, who started using it before it even dawned on them that social and other psychological rewards and concerns may be valuable as well. And many economists haven't figured it out to this day.
Biologists realized the rationality of emotions and their importance for survival much earlier.
I believe Sun is testing the waters for possibly fully releasing Java into the open source world.
.. utlize this stuff so they'll be encouraged to release Java.
This release of Java 3D is not an open source release, it's a release of proprietary software in source form under a restrictive license.
3D people out there
If you even so much as look at that code, you have looked at Sun's proprietary source code under a non-open source license. Rather than helping open source, you may be making yourself ineligible to work on open source 3D projects.
but people will foolishly ignore it, rather than implement it's plus points into Linux.
People will ignore Solaris source releases because they will not be open source releases, they, too, will be source releases under restrictive, proprietary, and dangerous licenses. (IMO, they will also ignore them because Solaris has nothing to offer technically to Linux, but that's a separate point of debate.)
People hate having inconsistent view of their files when they're working across machines in a lab enviornment or in a cluster.
I didn't say that GFS was completely useless, I said that enterprises are heading in a different direction. GFS may well be useful for a computer lab, a small workgroup, and other such applications.
Things like GFS are godsends because they reduce IT's need to be invovled. Set it up once, and go.
Anything that attempts to achieve consistency across an entire enterprise is going to be lots of work for IT staff, no matter how well it may have been implemented.
What would you say if your neighbor sneaked over and wrote offensive messages in the dirt on your car and your windows, for all to read? The first time, you may think it's a fluke, but after a few times, you'd get angry.
You have property rights to your car, your home, and the dirt that accumulate on it. You have the right to have them free of messages you don't like or approve of, whether painted on or scrawled in dirt. You have a right to have them look as dirty as you like.
Well, it's no different with city property: it's everybody's property that is administered on our behalf by the government. We have decided to keep it dirty, but that doesn't mean individuals can come in and clean it up, in particular, clean it up in a way that promotes businesses that people have not agreed to promote and might not want to promote.
GFS has a number of useful applications. But I think the times where you could design your enterprise around the idea of a globally consistent file storage system are over: enterprises are getting more flexible, more decentralized, and people would prefer not to have to deal with IT staff over issues such as file space and permissions. And they can avoid it--since many of them make the purchasing decisions.
Key portions of that code are not released under open source licenses. These kinds of "source releases" under proprietary licenses have only upsides for the company making them: they aren't giving away anything valuable (Java3D isn't exactly a hot property), the company still retains all the important rights, and they can claim that people copied stuff from them if there are similarities between their proprietary code and open source software. The latter is also the reason why you run the risk that open source projects will simply not let you participate if you as much as look at these kinds of proprietary source releases.
And even if Java3D were released under an open source license, it still wouldn't do you any good because you couldn't use it without Sun's proprietary Java implementation or uncertified, partially Java-compatible implementations of dubious legality (meaning, all the, incomplete, Java implementations that don't come from Sun).
Apple products are, by and large, nice designs. Apple makes some bad blunders, but they pay more attention to design than many companies. But you also pay for that. Other companies make good designs in that they manage to do good tradeoffs: the device may not be as sleek, but it's cheaper, for example, or has a more reasonable battery life.
But I frankly doubt these "designers" even considered such products because they didn't even think of them as "designer" products.
My ugly laptop, for example, is more convenient than my sleek Ti Powerbook. My ugly MP3 player is a lot more useful than the iPod. Etc. Unlike Apple products, those may not be designer products, but the no-name Asian companies that designed them did a great job with limited resources. And that's what good design is really all about.
While certain economists have a religious belief that governments are inefficient and private companies are not, there is no evidence of that.
That belief comes from anti-communist hysteria. Communist governments were enormously inefficient and needed to be abolished. But communist governments were also corrupt, run by bad administrators, and unaccountable.
Experience shows that, despite the whining of right wingers, the US government manages to do a lot of things very efficiently compared to private companies. And customer service may not be great, but it seems better than many private companies.
None of that should really surprise anyone: anyone who thinks that big private companies operate according to free market principles is naive.
Next problem that might arise is the need to move the cable not only for satellites (a few hundred in operation) but also for the thousands of pieces of spacejunk larger then 1 cm. An encounter with such a piece would probablyy make the cable make a nasty "snap" sound, which noone could ever hear cause it's space.
I'm not particularly enamored with the idea of a space elevator, but this particular issue does not seem to be a problem.
It's not one cable or multiple cables, it's multiple cables with cross-connections. A lot of stuff can hit them before the entire structure fails.
The real problem is the size of the non-discretionary programs. Since they're entitlements, they're much harder to cut, and the cost of those programs will soon consume 60-70% of the _total_ budget.
They are entitlements because you paid for them, dollar for dollar. You are entitled to them. They are like your car insurance, your home owners insurance, or your 401k. The only difference is that the federal government happens to administer and run them in order to ensure that (1) everybody participates, and (2) they are going to be there when they are needed.
Why do we need that? Because if not everybody participates, you get what we had before: large numbers of old people with nothing. You could just let them starve, of course, and for centuries, we did. But, eventually, people decided that that wasn't a good way of treating the elderly, so a minimal safety net was created.
The only problem with the non-discretionary programs is that politicians like to dip their hands into them. Social security can be run perfectly, but if politicians siphon off huge amounts of money to (effectively) pay for wars, you aren't getting what you paid for, and that is not a problem with the entitlement programs, it's a problem with what the federal government is primarily wasting money on: the military.
In 2003, the US federal government employed between 21 and 22 million people. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Of those, 1.4 million were active duty military (U.S. Census). So yeah, the military is what makes our government a leviathan. RIIIGGHHHTT.
So, what are those 1.4 million people doing with half the discretionary spending? The other 22 million have to make do with what is left. Seems to me, they are doing a lot with comparatively little, then: keep the roads running, keep you from catching communicable diseases, keep your food safe, keep the forests safe, etc.
I think the fundamental point of disagreement is whether one thinks that Social Security, Medicare, et. al., are being run well. I'd have to say no.
People are never satisfied with anything. But the existing, large public health care system in the US is far more efficient than private health care in the US, so claims that privatization would improve things are probably wrong. And the S&L disaster shows you what can happen when private businesses take in large amounts of deposits and can just disappear when they have mismanaged them--do you want to repeat that with retirement savings?
The US has, overall, a pretty well-run, efficient, and corruption free federal bureaucracy. We should be grateful for that and use it effectively, not try to dismantle it: the alternatives are far worse and more costly.