While your statement about Windows never shipping on a Mac is technically true, the "PC Compatibility Cards for Power Macintosh" cards came really close. They were basically most of a PC on a PCI card using a Pentium processor, so you could have a Windows machine running inside your PowerMac:
You are absolutely correct about the water plots in sic-fi being entertaining, but not realistic. Visitors to our solar system would be far more likely either grab icy asteroids from the asteroid belt (lots of them, and they are not at the bottom of a gravity well), or collect hydrogen and oxygen from any one of many sources and make your own. Sucking water off even an undefended planet is unlikely to make sense form an energy perspective.
But on the defense side: anyone with enough technology/experience to be able to cross interstellar space with the idea of fetching something (as opposed to colonization, where a desperate enough group could wing it) would have enough technology to wipe us off the face of the planet so quickly that we would have no chance. But the human race being obliterated by orbital bombardment does not make for entertaining cinema.
You have this a little wrong. The cost of the computers is trivial in comparison to other things. What you are seeing is that the bean counters are focusing on reducing one specific cost (computer hardware) without taking other costs into consideration (employe productivity). Undoutably this is a case of “penny wise, pound foolish”, and is probably because no-one can write up the other costs into a spreadsheet, so the one number that is easy to define wins.
This is what is wrong with the “if you can measure it, you can mange it” mantra that business schools have been drumming into MBAs for a generation now.
How is the ACA/Obamacare price controlls? There are lots of bits to the law, but the two main parts of the law fall into three parts:
1) Setting up marketplaces with clearly defined levels of service (so all of the comparable plans have to meet minimum specs). This takes away much of the complexity that has meant that average people can better judge what they are getting (so adding clarity, which the theory of capitolism takes as an assumption).
2) Sets up a penalty for not having health care insurance. This is effctivly a requirement that everyone have health insurance.
3) Requiring that all plans (on the marketplaces or not) cover certain things (e.g.: pregnancy, or mental health) and bars health insurance providers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions or certain other attributes (e.g: being a woman).
Nowhere here is there any price controls, rather it sets up a much more fair marketplace (i.e.: one more true to capitalist theory) than the deceptive an exclusionary one we have now.
And your “9% additional tax” number seems to come out of nowhere. Since you mention Texas, you are going to have to explain how having 1-in-3 Texans with NO insurance coverage (so effectively NO access to real healthcare) is anything like a good situation. Is it going to cost money to correct that? Yes absolutely, but how much more work is that going to allow people to do once they are not sick? Every company I have ever worked for has beat the drum that a helathy workforce is in the interest of the bottom line. Are you saying that Texas can’t figure that out?
Question #1 is not really asking for an opinion. It is asking that you evaluate the suggestions to see which is the best option. Given your sample story it is clear that the b) option is the correct one since it best summarizes the story. If your kid missed that question, then he/she is indeed missing the ability to evaluate the story. So the test seems to have done a good job corrctly evaluating your child.
Question #2 is indeed asking your child to come up with reasonable extensions on the story. They are expecting that your child not mearly comprehend the individual facts presented in the story, but have enough insight into what is going on to be able to extend it. Again if your child is incabable of doing this then the test has again correctly described the limits of your child’s abilites.
Both of these questions are exactly the sort of questions that should be on tests. They go beyond the wrote learning model, and test for true understanding, and even better: the second tests information sysnthisis. You should be celebrating a test that has accurately found a weakness in your child’s abilities, and working with your child to better develop these skills.
Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
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How BlackBerry Blew It
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BYOD may well be the number one headace for the CIO, but the "new shiny" that the CEO just bought and is demanding that the IT group support is why ActiveSync was such a great stroke: the CTO cound not say "that simply won't work". He/She tried explaining how much work it would be to validate and get working, but because it could not be a simple story it did not pass muster.
Except thre was no GPS logging ever. What they actually found was iOS caching observed WiFi and Cell tower locations that had been near where you were in order to more quickly locate you when an applicaiton you ran requested that information. Your actual location was never recorded, but since much of the data was timestamped with when it was last verified some rough guesses on where you had been on what days was possible from the information.
So there never was "GPS logging" and the best accuracy you could have gotten from the data was that someone had probably been within 5-10 miles of a location within 3-4 days of a specific time.
I have not read Tom Clancy's latest novels (the NetForce ones that he co-wrote turned me off), but all of my memories of his best characters have them going thorugh lots of training, with many of them being selected for "elite" units based on their performance in training exercises. He even shows those same characters continuing to practice their trade (e.g.: in Ranbow Force the show lots of time on the shooting ranges).
There is even a quote somewhere in one of the books (maybe Rainbow Force again) that goes something like "the way to make an elite unit is to tell the people they are an elite unit and give them the time and training to become one".
I see the Tom Clancy books that I have read to be the antithesis to most Anime, as well as most "young adult" fiction (e.g.: Harry Potter), as well as any SuperHero story.
The vast majority of the basic research into disesases is done in univesity labs, funded by government grants. Only when the results hint at commercial viability do businesses (often the reasearchers by leaving the university) then take over and commercialize the work. I am not saying that there is not a lot of effort still left to do, but in many cases the patents are mostly comming out of the early work, and are then blocking people from doing the commercialization work.
While the drug companies might spend a lot of money to do the final commercialization work, the vast majority of the development cost (lots and lots of dead ends) is born by the government. I am not arguing that that is not how it should be (that is how science gets done), but rather saying that it is silly to think that without patent protections that new things would not be discoverd.
The case at hand the company was trying to use teh cour system to prevent anyone from creating tests that looked for naturally occuring genes. They were not just blocking people from using the test method they developed, but from using any conceviable method of teting for those specific genes.
Those are not terrorists, they are murderors. I know that this has gotten very confusing with all of the attention, but the basic definition of a terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to attempt to change other's behavior to accive a goal. For example the bombings in Boston were not terrorism: the bombers seemingly were just trying to cause mayhem, they did not have any goal in mind beyond the simple act of killing people. Of course we don't have the full story there, but at a minimum they were highly ineffective as terrorists, and tragicly effective as max-mudererors.
An clear example of terrorism would be what the IRA did durring the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. They were attempting to make it so un-worth governing there that the English would withdraw. I would argue that they failed, and that people with the same goals but more peaceful methods suceeded in their place. I am not actually aware of any terrorism campain that has ever had the desired effect.
In your example people our to kill a selection of people are commiting genocide, not terrorism. Rather if they were out to make it so difficult on the same group of people that that group of people would leave, then they could possibly be terrorists. Just the act of bombing does not a terrorist make.
Even taking everything you said as factually and thematically true. Are you saying that is worse than having the decision made by someone whose boss's main concern is a finantial stake in the decision (insurance companies)? Are you really sure that is the argument you want to make?
Given the choice between the same person employed by a company who would have to give up profits to see me healthy, and that same person as a govenment burocrat who's elected boss has to justify the policies to the electorate, I will take the govenment burocrat every time. It is simply a better moral situation with better accountability.
If you think you could get anything close to the quality of healthcare your employer is getting you on $13K a year then you have not looked at the indivedual market at all (normal, most people don't). Even mid-sized employers (your level) get substantial discounts (20% range) for bringing a number of people together (pooling the risk).
One of the big components of the Affordable Care Act is to force the insurance markets to treat the individual market more like a large pooled group, and thus reduce costs significantly. Still not nearly to the level that large corporations have, but significanly better than now. But the very provisisions that make that happen (elimination of pre-exisint conditions asa criteria, forbidding differnt permiums for men vs. women, etc) also create the necessity of putting in the requirement that eveyone have insurance, since otherwise they would be stuck with only those with massive costs without the low-cost people to even out the pool.
The ironic thing is that Mitt Romney actually did speak about a real solution for a couple of speaches, before the backlash from other Republicans killed off that idea, and it was his infamous "I like to fire people" speach. His wording was unfortunate giving his history with Bane Capital (and the many layoffs that company was responsibel for), but his meaning was much like what you are arguing.
But the reason for the total silencing of this idea was that in order to make it workable you have to take the Afordable Care Act as a starting point and keep going: you have to have the individual mandate to even out the risk pool (so healthy people paying for sick people), the elimination of pre-existing condition limitations, most or all of the variable pricing depending on health, and then eliminate all employer involvement in health insurance.
The difficulty is once you are there, then you are there, then it becomes obvious that market forces do not do any good in the healthcare industry (at least not on the health insurance side), and a "single payer" health system suddenly becomes the best option. And that is not a though that most Republicans are comfortable with.
Whether or not Sony gives back patches really won't have any significant impact on their sales. The vast majorty of people who would buy a PS4 will never hear about it, and would not care if they would.
I expect that they will not upstream the things people would probably care about most (graphics drivers), becuase they will be propritary and co-developed with vendors. However my guess is that they will contribute a steady stream of small incremental improvements that no one will ever hear about. These are the normal by-product of smart people working on a system.
The reason they will contribte these bits back is pure self-interest: the next time they upgrade they hopefully don't have to re-apply the patch they created. They are not giving the crown jewels away, the things that make Sony its money, but rather the things that Sony as a business does not care about. This is how FreeBSD works. It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view. And that is how we structure our society, for better or worse.
I see you argument for "simple", but where do you see this as an argument for "flat"? Those with more money have both more ability to pay, and are getting more of out of the society that taxes make possible (think police force as a simple example).
But you are missing the wider point here: this conversation is about foreign-based income. The disagreement here is whether companies (and by exentension individuals) should be subject to US taxation on income earned abroad.
I would argue that they get the benifits of the US, then they should pay for them, just like regular individuals. I am open to arguments to what degree, but not open to ones that argue they should not be taxed.
You are missing a very important bit about US taxes in this case, one that invalidates your whole concept and semi-anticdote: as the laws work you only pay the higher of the two systems in total. A couple of examples to illustrate: if you would owe $50 in the other country, and $60 in the US, then you would pay $50 to that other country, and only $10 (the difference) to the US. If you reverse the numbers and the forign tax was higher then all of the money would go to the foreign government, and the US would get none.
There are odd cases where that tax codes in the seperate countries tax totally different ways, so making a hypothetical case where one country has only a value-add tax vs. the US's focus on proffits, in that case it could wind up that you would pay the full brunt of both taxes, but that is not anything like the "$110 for every $100 in profit" that you talked about.
I have personal experience with this, since my wife sold her apartment in Budapest, and we had to pay the difference in the taxes. We got caught a little, because a couple of exemptions that would have applied here did not apply because it was foreign (and thus not under those specific real-estate rules, but rather generic capital gains), but that was minor.
But the bigger concept here is that these multinationals rely on the services that the US provides both explictly and implictly. For example they are backed and defended by the US Military and State Department. Without the latter's constant negotiations (backed by the formers Big Stick) there is little chance that China would be do any inteletual property enforcement of "Western"-owned ideas at all. A somewhat stark example, but when you look into it further you will find more and more.
These companies are the biggest benifiters of the services that those taxes provide. It only makes sense that they pay for them.
Consider yourself corrected: in direct compliance with the EU agreement the micro USB connector is inclued with every relevent European sale for free. This is not true for non-European sales, but it is for sales inside Europe.
And the landfill thing was mostly about the electronics in the "wall wart" which can include nasty thing since it is a transformer. They really were not that concerned about the wire going to the device.
Your sited fact that we are at tle lowest participation rate since WWII is incorrect, as proof go to this page and then adjust the graphs to show the max timeline:
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
We are on our way down, but still have not hit the 1978 numbers again (62.5%). Of course these numbers don't take in to account the large social change that has happened over time with women in the workforce: the move from mothers expected to be at home to the "norm" of two-income households.
That all being said: we are definately on a long-term course to the unworkability of a capitalist society (much along the lines that Marx predicted, but not on the timeline he expected). But I don't think we are anywhere close to knowing what that course is going to look like.
This is a great point, an we should really de-focus the conversation that is happening in other threads from one about parties. Rather we should focus on the individuals who have chosen to abuse the responsibilities given to them as elected officials in order to stifle debate.
I will be asking my favorite news organization to make sure that they cover this during Monday's coverage, and do so by naming the elected officials who made the requests to have Derek Khanna fired. They should be completely free to express their opinions, but getting someone fired for doing their job (providing reasoned debate in a political organization) demonstrates a contempt for political debate that should be strongly discouraged. And the press is out best means of expressing this discouragement in the short term (the ballot box being the long term solution).
Lets make sure that those elected officials get this message.
I somewhat agree with you, but your examples are horrible: the near-requirement for header files and prototype functions in C stemms from a language deficiency, not from something that "beginner CS students" don't get. They are correctly seeing the situation as non-optimal. Java any Python have both (in differnt ways) are examples of langauages that handle these things with a multi-step parse. Note that I am not arguing aginst the option of having headder files, since they clearly have a use in large project (one that javadoc also servers). But the requirement to have function prototypes in order to have out-of-order functions is simply a language deficiency. The fact that people have been very sucessful while working around it for so long is a testiment to them, not to the language's inherint merit.
I don't know where you come up with the idea that charter schools are mostly in poor and minority areas. I know that many of the ones I know of are in middle-class predominately white areas. But since neither of us has more an anicdotal information I think we can call that a wash.
But you are perfectly correct starting down the list of unfair advantages they have:
1) They can be selective with their students. Sudents with bad grades, poor discipline, or any sort of handicap are routinely excluded. Those kids are enormously costly in terms both of money (think special access equipment), administrative overhead (each one needs to have multiple meetings to decide their Indivual Education Plan, and those meetings regularly have school system lawyers in attendance), and teacher time. Getting rid of most of the overhead costs really makes them seem efficent. But that is not a meaningfull cost savings, unless you are going to exlude them from the final system.
2) In most areas charter schools are exempt from many regulations and almost all mandated testing. So many of the costly reporting and complicance areas are simply wiped off the map. That is great for an experiment, but the moment you add these back in (as you would have to do in a non-expeiment) then suddnly you are back at square one.
3) As you have indicated, the parents who went through the hoops to get their kids are generally more motivated. So there are volenteers in the classrooms, and engaged parents making sure their kids do their homework. And the parents generally aren't telling their kids how awfull teachers are. Not only does this benifit the school by having all of these engaged parents in one place, but it also starves all of the other schools of the best resources. How again is this then compareable?
1) Thinking that the #1 problem in education is anywhere on school grounds is provably wrong. The #1 problem in the US education system is at home where the majority parrents are not spending enough time teaching their kids that education is important, and that teachers are to be respected. Just look at the animosity that is spewing out of the Republican canidates right now. Just immagine you are a kid and are hearing your parrents spout off about how horrible teachers are, how much respect do you think those kids are going to pay their teachers?
Remember in the last 3 generations we have gone from a society where Mom was expected to stay home and raise the kids (including manage their education), to one where there is no way that the majority of households could afford to have either parent not working full time. This change has put a lot more GDP on the plate, but has come with its own costs.
2) Competition works best when people have the reasonable ability to say "no" to a product. But in areas such as education and health care there is never a supply-demmand balance, and saying no is not a valid option (insert hand waving here). Everyone always demands the "best" so prices are always going to spiral out of control.
3) Competition works well when you buy multiple of the product you are purchasing over the life of your purchasing it. For example if I really hate the food at one restaraunt then I will go to another one the next time. But for practical purposes it is silly to talk about third grade the same way.
4) Universal schooling is something I consider a fundamental building block of "the American Dream". It is how someone who is born into a poor family can have a fighting chance to make it in our society. But market forces ("competition") are always going to focus on where the money is, which is not in poor neighborhoods. And people from poor neighborhoods often do not have the means of trnasporting their children to schools in better off neighborhoods. So the only people who are going to benifit from voucher systems are the people who have enough money that they already don't need them. So all you are doing with that is to give more money into alredy well-off schools, and further starve schools that are never going ot be able to recover.
5) I have never seen any study show that privatizing schools has ever shown any cost or quality difference, when applied to the same populations as a similar public school. Remember a public school has to take all comers, it can not reject students because of bad grades, bad behavior, or phisical/menatal handicaps. Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
I know that many schools keep multiple lawyers on retainer (and often use them full time) to keep defending themselves from law suits from parents of needy kids who want more and more services to flow to these kids. Trying to compare the results of private schools to public schools is a comparison that has the public schools competing with one hand tied behind their backs.
The push to a voucher system is just the push to make sure the rich only pay for their children, leaving the poor with meager scraps.
I don't understand how you think that most news orgainzations are just parroting the White House. The Obama administration regularly gets nocked by the mainstream press. Yes there are solidly liberal-leaning outlets out there (MSNBC being the largest), but that is not the mainstream press.
Fox News is the only news organization (that I am aware of) that has actually gone to court and testified under oath that their producers deliberatly wanted to lie to their viewers:
http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html
And it has been repeadly shown in studies that people who rely on Fox News have many of the important facts wrong about major events (e.g.: http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/final.pdf), in most cases doing worse than people who did not regularly watch any news.
If people are getting their news only from sources that are openly (or near-openly) slanting their news, what hope does Democracy have? I will take an incompotent press (e.g.: much of mainstream media) long before I will accept one that is deliberatly biased.
I personally listen to NPR's news programs (very good, and very balanced), and leven that out with the Economist and an ocassional German news magazine. The Economist has a bit of an over-focus on pro-buisness, but they do try to be fair, and the German magazines often have a very different perspective than either the US or Brittish take.
The market had adequate liquidity before high frequency trading, I challange you to find a reasonable arguemnt that it did not. The problem is the "more = better" argument being applied without any rational thought behind it. This is like using total calorie consumption in a country as a measure of health. In a place of absolute starvation it can be a worth-while absolute measurement: more calories is better. But once you hit a certain point you have to start paying more attention to distribution of calories, and then at another point more calories is damaging to health. We have long since hit the point where having more money flowing into the finantial sections of our econmy is just damaging, and that is totally ignoreing the evident distribution problem.
And high frequency trading does hurt you with you limit order: it makes it less likely that you are going to be able to make as much money out of your trades. They can try every combination up to $100 in microseconds to test the waters (without ever commiting to a trade) and so find the person willing to pay the least to buy that. Then they can figure out who is willing to pay a bit more, and in the blik of an eye become the middle-man, pocketing the difference. They have that unfair advantage over you, just because they are bigger and have more money. How is that ever going to benifit a just or equitable society? In a fair market your broker could have found the person willing to sell to you for $99. And before you argue that the high frequency trader is just replacing the broker, that broker should have been working for your best interests, if they are keeping the difference you can alwasy find a more moral broker.
Apple was actually a somewhat late adopter of USB. However the original iMac made enough of a splash, and perifieral makers had the decision of not being able to sell to Apple's market and using USB, and they (the perferial makers who were already in the Apple market) decided to go for it. Once they had made the leap, it was just good sense to start selling those same devices to Windows users as well.
For cheese you just need to go to Wisconsin. Cheeses there regularly win international awards, and the cheese isles in the grocery stores are enormous (easily tripple the space that I see in my grocery store in California). As a transplanted Wisconsinite that is one of the things I miss most (followed closely by seasons).
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While your statement about Windows never shipping on a Mac is technically true, the "PC Compatibility Cards for Power Macintosh" cards came really close. They were basically most of a PC on a PCI card using a Pentium processor, so you could have a Windows machine running inside your PowerMac:
http://www.mug.jhmi.edu/mirrors/infoalley/0496/25/pc.html
They came with DOS installed, so you had to instal your own copy of Windows.
You are absolutely correct about the water plots in sic-fi being entertaining, but not realistic. Visitors to our solar system would be far more likely either grab icy asteroids from the asteroid belt (lots of them, and they are not at the bottom of a gravity well), or collect hydrogen and oxygen from any one of many sources and make your own. Sucking water off even an undefended planet is unlikely to make sense form an energy perspective.
But on the defense side: anyone with enough technology/experience to be able to cross interstellar space with the idea of fetching something (as opposed to colonization, where a desperate enough group could wing it) would have enough technology to wipe us off the face of the planet so quickly that we would have no chance. But the human race being obliterated by orbital bombardment does not make for entertaining cinema.
You have this a little wrong. The cost of the computers is trivial in comparison to other things. What you are seeing is that the bean counters are focusing on reducing one specific cost (computer hardware) without taking other costs into consideration (employe productivity). Undoutably this is a case of “penny wise, pound foolish”, and is probably because no-one can write up the other costs into a spreadsheet, so the one number that is easy to define wins.
This is what is wrong with the “if you can measure it, you can mange it” mantra that business schools have been drumming into MBAs for a generation now.
How is the ACA/Obamacare price controlls? There are lots of bits to the law, but the two main parts of the law fall into three parts:
1) Setting up marketplaces with clearly defined levels of service (so all of the comparable plans have to meet minimum specs). This takes away much of the complexity that has meant that average people can better judge what they are getting (so adding clarity, which the theory of capitolism takes as an assumption).
2) Sets up a penalty for not having health care insurance. This is effctivly a requirement that everyone have health insurance.
3) Requiring that all plans (on the marketplaces or not) cover certain things (e.g.: pregnancy, or mental health) and bars health insurance providers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions or certain other attributes (e.g: being a woman).
Nowhere here is there any price controls, rather it sets up a much more fair marketplace (i.e.: one more true to capitalist theory) than the deceptive an exclusionary one we have now.
And your “9% additional tax” number seems to come out of nowhere. Since you mention Texas, you are going to have to explain how having 1-in-3 Texans with NO insurance coverage (so effectively NO access to real healthcare) is anything like a good situation. Is it going to cost money to correct that? Yes absolutely, but how much more work is that going to allow people to do once they are not sick? Every company I have ever worked for has beat the drum that a helathy workforce is in the interest of the bottom line. Are you saying that Texas can’t figure that out?
Question #1 is not really asking for an opinion. It is asking that you evaluate the suggestions to see which is the best option. Given your sample story it is clear that the b) option is the correct one since it best summarizes the story. If your kid missed that question, then he/she is indeed missing the ability to evaluate the story. So the test seems to have done a good job corrctly evaluating your child.
Question #2 is indeed asking your child to come up with reasonable extensions on the story. They are expecting that your child not mearly comprehend the individual facts presented in the story, but have enough insight into what is going on to be able to extend it. Again if your child is incabable of doing this then the test has again correctly described the limits of your child’s abilites.
Both of these questions are exactly the sort of questions that should be on tests. They go beyond the wrote learning model, and test for true understanding, and even better: the second tests information sysnthisis. You should be celebrating a test that has accurately found a weakness in your child’s abilities, and working with your child to better develop these skills.
BYOD may well be the number one headace for the CIO, but the "new shiny" that the CEO just bought and is demanding that the IT group support is why ActiveSync was such a great stroke: the CTO cound not say "that simply won't work". He/She tried explaining how much work it would be to validate and get working, but because it could not be a simple story it did not pass muster.
Except thre was no GPS logging ever. What they actually found was iOS caching observed WiFi and Cell tower locations that had been near where you were in order to more quickly locate you when an applicaiton you ran requested that information. Your actual location was never recorded, but since much of the data was timestamped with when it was last verified some rough guesses on where you had been on what days was possible from the information.
So there never was "GPS logging" and the best accuracy you could have gotten from the data was that someone had probably been within 5-10 miles of a location within 3-4 days of a specific time.
I have not read Tom Clancy's latest novels (the NetForce ones that he co-wrote turned me off), but all of my memories of his best characters have them going thorugh lots of training, with many of them being selected for "elite" units based on their performance in training exercises. He even shows those same characters continuing to practice their trade (e.g.: in Ranbow Force the show lots of time on the shooting ranges).
There is even a quote somewhere in one of the books (maybe Rainbow Force again) that goes something like "the way to make an elite unit is to tell the people they are an elite unit and give them the time and training to become one".
I see the Tom Clancy books that I have read to be the antithesis to most Anime, as well as most "young adult" fiction (e.g.: Harry Potter), as well as any SuperHero story.
The vast majority of the basic research into disesases is done in univesity labs, funded by government grants. Only when the results hint at commercial viability do businesses (often the reasearchers by leaving the university) then take over and commercialize the work. I am not saying that there is not a lot of effort still left to do, but in many cases the patents are mostly comming out of the early work, and are then blocking people from doing the commercialization work.
While the drug companies might spend a lot of money to do the final commercialization work, the vast majority of the development cost (lots and lots of dead ends) is born by the government. I am not arguing that that is not how it should be (that is how science gets done), but rather saying that it is silly to think that without patent protections that new things would not be discoverd.
The case at hand the company was trying to use teh cour system to prevent anyone from creating tests that looked for naturally occuring genes. They were not just blocking people from using the test method they developed, but from using any conceviable method of teting for those specific genes.
Those are not terrorists, they are murderors. I know that this has gotten very confusing with all of the attention, but the basic definition of a terrorist is someone who uses terror in order to attempt to change other's behavior to accive a goal. For example the bombings in Boston were not terrorism: the bombers seemingly were just trying to cause mayhem, they did not have any goal in mind beyond the simple act of killing people. Of course we don't have the full story there, but at a minimum they were highly ineffective as terrorists, and tragicly effective as max-mudererors.
An clear example of terrorism would be what the IRA did durring the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. They were attempting to make it so un-worth governing there that the English would withdraw. I would argue that they failed, and that people with the same goals but more peaceful methods suceeded in their place. I am not actually aware of any terrorism campain that has ever had the desired effect.
In your example people our to kill a selection of people are commiting genocide, not terrorism. Rather if they were out to make it so difficult on the same group of people that that group of people would leave, then they could possibly be terrorists. Just the act of bombing does not a terrorist make.
Even taking everything you said as factually and thematically true. Are you saying that is worse than having the decision made by someone whose boss's main concern is a finantial stake in the decision (insurance companies)? Are you really sure that is the argument you want to make?
Given the choice between the same person employed by a company who would have to give up profits to see me healthy, and that same person as a govenment burocrat who's elected boss has to justify the policies to the electorate, I will take the govenment burocrat every time. It is simply a better moral situation with better accountability.
If you think you could get anything close to the quality of healthcare your employer is getting you on $13K a year then you have not looked at the indivedual market at all (normal, most people don't). Even mid-sized employers (your level) get substantial discounts (20% range) for bringing a number of people together (pooling the risk).
One of the big components of the Affordable Care Act is to force the insurance markets to treat the individual market more like a large pooled group, and thus reduce costs significantly. Still not nearly to the level that large corporations have, but significanly better than now. But the very provisisions that make that happen (elimination of pre-exisint conditions asa criteria, forbidding differnt permiums for men vs. women, etc) also create the necessity of putting in the requirement that eveyone have insurance, since otherwise they would be stuck with only those with massive costs without the low-cost people to even out the pool.
The ironic thing is that Mitt Romney actually did speak about a real solution for a couple of speaches, before the backlash from other Republicans killed off that idea, and it was his infamous "I like to fire people" speach. His wording was unfortunate giving his history with Bane Capital (and the many layoffs that company was responsibel for), but his meaning was much like what you are arguing.
But the reason for the total silencing of this idea was that in order to make it workable you have to take the Afordable Care Act as a starting point and keep going: you have to have the individual mandate to even out the risk pool (so healthy people paying for sick people), the elimination of pre-existing condition limitations, most or all of the variable pricing depending on health, and then eliminate all employer involvement in health insurance.
The difficulty is once you are there, then you are there, then it becomes obvious that market forces do not do any good in the healthcare industry (at least not on the health insurance side), and a "single payer" health system suddenly becomes the best option. And that is not a though that most Republicans are comfortable with.
Whether or not Sony gives back patches really won't have any significant impact on their sales. The vast majorty of people who would buy a PS4 will never hear about it, and would not care if they would.
I expect that they will not upstream the things people would probably care about most (graphics drivers), becuase they will be propritary and co-developed with vendors. However my guess is that they will contribute a steady stream of small incremental improvements that no one will ever hear about. These are the normal by-product of smart people working on a system.
The reason they will contribte these bits back is pure self-interest: the next time they upgrade they hopefully don't have to re-apply the patch they created. They are not giving the crown jewels away, the things that make Sony its money, but rather the things that Sony as a business does not care about. This is how FreeBSD works. It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view. And that is how we structure our society, for better or worse.
I see you argument for "simple", but where do you see this as an argument for "flat"? Those with more money have both more ability to pay, and are getting more of out of the society that taxes make possible (think police force as a simple example).
But you are missing the wider point here: this conversation is about foreign-based income. The disagreement here is whether companies (and by exentension individuals) should be subject to US taxation on income earned abroad.
I would argue that they get the benifits of the US, then they should pay for them, just like regular individuals. I am open to arguments to what degree, but not open to ones that argue they should not be taxed.
You are missing a very important bit about US taxes in this case, one that invalidates your whole concept and semi-anticdote: as the laws work you only pay the higher of the two systems in total. A couple of examples to illustrate: if you would owe $50 in the other country, and $60 in the US, then you would pay $50 to that other country, and only $10 (the difference) to the US. If you reverse the numbers and the forign tax was higher then all of the money would go to the foreign government, and the US would get none.
There are odd cases where that tax codes in the seperate countries tax totally different ways, so making a hypothetical case where one country has only a value-add tax vs. the US's focus on proffits, in that case it could wind up that you would pay the full brunt of both taxes, but that is not anything like the "$110 for every $100 in profit" that you talked about.
I have personal experience with this, since my wife sold her apartment in Budapest, and we had to pay the difference in the taxes. We got caught a little, because a couple of exemptions that would have applied here did not apply because it was foreign (and thus not under those specific real-estate rules, but rather generic capital gains), but that was minor.
But the bigger concept here is that these multinationals rely on the services that the US provides both explictly and implictly. For example they are backed and defended by the US Military and State Department. Without the latter's constant negotiations (backed by the formers Big Stick) there is little chance that China would be do any inteletual property enforcement of "Western"-owned ideas at all. A somewhat stark example, but when you look into it further you will find more and more.
These companies are the biggest benifiters of the services that those taxes provide. It only makes sense that they pay for them.
Consider yourself corrected: in direct compliance with the EU agreement the micro USB connector is inclued with every relevent European sale for free. This is not true for non-European sales, but it is for sales inside Europe.
And the landfill thing was mostly about the electronics in the "wall wart" which can include nasty thing since it is a transformer. They really were not that concerned about the wire going to the device.
Your sited fact that we are at tle lowest participation rate since WWII is incorrect, as proof go to this page and then adjust the graphs to show the max timeline:
http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
We are on our way down, but still have not hit the 1978 numbers again (62.5%). Of course these numbers don't take in to account the large social change that has happened over time with women in the workforce: the move from mothers expected to be at home to the "norm" of two-income households.
That all being said: we are definately on a long-term course to the unworkability of a capitalist society (much along the lines that Marx predicted, but not on the timeline he expected). But I don't think we are anywhere close to knowing what that course is going to look like.
This is a great point, an we should really de-focus the conversation that is happening in other threads from one about parties. Rather we should focus on the individuals who have chosen to abuse the responsibilities given to them as elected officials in order to stifle debate.
I will be asking my favorite news organization to make sure that they cover this during Monday's coverage, and do so by naming the elected officials who made the requests to have Derek Khanna fired. They should be completely free to express their opinions, but getting someone fired for doing their job (providing reasoned debate in a political organization) demonstrates a contempt for political debate that should be strongly discouraged. And the press is out best means of expressing this discouragement in the short term (the ballot box being the long term solution).
Lets make sure that those elected officials get this message.
I somewhat agree with you, but your examples are horrible: the near-requirement for header files and prototype functions in C stemms from a language deficiency, not from something that "beginner CS students" don't get. They are correctly seeing the situation as non-optimal. Java any Python have both (in differnt ways) are examples of langauages that handle these things with a multi-step parse. Note that I am not arguing aginst the option of having headder files, since they clearly have a use in large project (one that javadoc also servers). But the requirement to have function prototypes in order to have out-of-order functions is simply a language deficiency. The fact that people have been very sucessful while working around it for so long is a testiment to them, not to the language's inherint merit.
I don't know where you come up with the idea that charter schools are mostly in poor and minority areas. I know that many of the ones I know of are in middle-class predominately white areas. But since neither of us has more an anicdotal information I think we can call that a wash.
But you are perfectly correct starting down the list of unfair advantages they have:
1) They can be selective with their students. Sudents with bad grades, poor discipline, or any sort of handicap are routinely excluded. Those kids are enormously costly in terms both of money (think special access equipment), administrative overhead (each one needs to have multiple meetings to decide their Indivual Education Plan, and those meetings regularly have school system lawyers in attendance), and teacher time. Getting rid of most of the overhead costs really makes them seem efficent. But that is not a meaningfull cost savings, unless you are going to exlude them from the final system.
2) In most areas charter schools are exempt from many regulations and almost all mandated testing. So many of the costly reporting and complicance areas are simply wiped off the map. That is great for an experiment, but the moment you add these back in (as you would have to do in a non-expeiment) then suddnly you are back at square one.
3) As you have indicated, the parents who went through the hoops to get their kids are generally more motivated. So there are volenteers in the classrooms, and engaged parents making sure their kids do their homework. And the parents generally aren't telling their kids how awfull teachers are. Not only does this benifit the school by having all of these engaged parents in one place, but it also starves all of the other schools of the best resources. How again is this then compareable?
I disagree with you on a few fronts:
1) Thinking that the #1 problem in education is anywhere on school grounds is provably wrong. The #1 problem in the US education system is at home where the majority parrents are not spending enough time teaching their kids that education is important, and that teachers are to be respected. Just look at the animosity that is spewing out of the Republican canidates right now. Just immagine you are a kid and are hearing your parrents spout off about how horrible teachers are, how much respect do you think those kids are going to pay their teachers?
Remember in the last 3 generations we have gone from a society where Mom was expected to stay home and raise the kids (including manage their education), to one where there is no way that the majority of households could afford to have either parent not working full time. This change has put a lot more GDP on the plate, but has come with its own costs.
2) Competition works best when people have the reasonable ability to say "no" to a product. But in areas such as education and health care there is never a supply-demmand balance, and saying no is not a valid option (insert hand waving here). Everyone always demands the "best" so prices are always going to spiral out of control.
3) Competition works well when you buy multiple of the product you are purchasing over the life of your purchasing it. For example if I really hate the food at one restaraunt then I will go to another one the next time. But for practical purposes it is silly to talk about third grade the same way.
4) Universal schooling is something I consider a fundamental building block of "the American Dream". It is how someone who is born into a poor family can have a fighting chance to make it in our society. But market forces ("competition") are always going to focus on where the money is, which is not in poor neighborhoods. And people from poor neighborhoods often do not have the means of trnasporting their children to schools in better off neighborhoods. So the only people who are going to benifit from voucher systems are the people who have enough money that they already don't need them. So all you are doing with that is to give more money into alredy well-off schools, and further starve schools that are never going ot be able to recover.
5) I have never seen any study show that privatizing schools has ever shown any cost or quality difference, when applied to the same populations as a similar public school. Remember a public school has to take all comers, it can not reject students because of bad grades, bad behavior, or phisical/menatal handicaps. Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
I know that many schools keep multiple lawyers on retainer (and often use them full time) to keep defending themselves from law suits from parents of needy kids who want more and more services to flow to these kids. Trying to compare the results of private schools to public schools is a comparison that has the public schools competing with one hand tied behind their backs.
The push to a voucher system is just the push to make sure the rich only pay for their children, leaving the poor with meager scraps.
I don't understand how you think that most news orgainzations are just parroting the White House. The Obama administration regularly gets nocked by the mainstream press. Yes there are solidly liberal-leaning outlets out there (MSNBC being the largest), but that is not the mainstream press.
Fox News is the only news organization (that I am aware of) that has actually gone to court and testified under oath that their producers deliberatly wanted to lie to their viewers:
http://www.relfe.com/media_can_legally_lie.html
And it has been repeadly shown in studies that people who rely on Fox News have many of the important facts wrong about major events (e.g.: http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/final.pdf), in most cases doing worse than people who did not regularly watch any news.
If people are getting their news only from sources that are openly (or near-openly) slanting their news, what hope does Democracy have? I will take an incompotent press (e.g.: much of mainstream media) long before I will accept one that is deliberatly biased.
I personally listen to NPR's news programs (very good, and very balanced), and leven that out with the Economist and an ocassional German news magazine. The Economist has a bit of an over-focus on pro-buisness, but they do try to be fair, and the German magazines often have a very different perspective than either the US or Brittish take.
"The provide liquidity"
The market had adequate liquidity before high frequency trading, I challange you to find a reasonable arguemnt that it did not. The problem is the "more = better" argument being applied without any rational thought behind it. This is like using total calorie consumption in a country as a measure of health. In a place of absolute starvation it can be a worth-while absolute measurement: more calories is better. But once you hit a certain point you have to start paying more attention to distribution of calories, and then at another point more calories is damaging to health. We have long since hit the point where having more money flowing into the finantial sections of our econmy is just damaging, and that is totally ignoreing the evident distribution problem.
And high frequency trading does hurt you with you limit order: it makes it less likely that you are going to be able to make as much money out of your trades. They can try every combination up to $100 in microseconds to test the waters (without ever commiting to a trade) and so find the person willing to pay the least to buy that. Then they can figure out who is willing to pay a bit more, and in the blik of an eye become the middle-man, pocketing the difference. They have that unfair advantage over you, just because they are bigger and have more money. How is that ever going to benifit a just or equitable society? In a fair market your broker could have found the person willing to sell to you for $99. And before you argue that the high frequency trader is just replacing the broker, that broker should have been working for your best interests, if they are keeping the difference you can alwasy find a more moral broker.
Apple was actually a somewhat late adopter of USB. However the original iMac made enough of a splash, and perifieral makers had the decision of not being able to sell to Apple's market and using USB, and they (the perferial makers who were already in the Apple market) decided to go for it. Once they had made the leap, it was just good sense to start selling those same devices to Windows users as well.
For cheese you just need to go to Wisconsin. Cheeses there regularly win international awards, and the cheese isles in the grocery stores are enormous (easily tripple the space that I see in my grocery store in California). As a transplanted Wisconsinite that is one of the things I miss most (followed closely by seasons).