My sig refers to the right to rebel against a bad government.
Actually, I completely agree that it is proper to argue against a test. It's completely proper to argue against anything you so choose. However, equating a test in a sport to government interference shows such a lack of intelligence and sanity that it needed to be pointed out.
And yes, if a corporation tries to silence those that protest against them (as some governments do), then they should be brought down.
And if you poison the groundwater in an area you could be sued by a lot of people you didn't freely associate with, yes. But in that case, the company cannot force you to do anything without obtaining a court order. For instance, if you decide to start selling a Linux distro under the brand "Windows XP" Microsoft will sue you. They can't get a DNA test in that lawsuit, since the court would laugh out any such request. In fact, since anything you do is by court order in that case, you are in fact being controlled by the government, an entity which you do not freely associate.
Who said the government would get the DNA sequence? For that matter, why would they get the results of any medical test? No, the protest is against "oh noes, she has to be tested! The EVIL gubmint must be behind it!".
The inability to tell the difference between a corporation and a government on the part of so many just proves and anarcho-capitalism would never work.
Who said it had to do with health? I thought we were talking about failed or autocratic states. That does some times lead to health problems among citizens.
GWB invaded Iraq for revenge and oil. However, it was a "bad" government, and that was an underlying cause.
In both cases you still have the option not to associate with them, so they're a business, not a government. For myself, I might buy a Volt. I personally don't like it when the government funds sports (including building stadiums).
Unfortunately the "We'll fix it" attitude leads to invading other countries (Iraq). Further, you can't have a welfare state AND have uncontrolled immigration. So, you have a choice. Have a small government, no government services other than defense and lots of immigrants (that describes the U.S. pretty well for the first hundred or so years). Or, you can have roads, social security, medicare, welfare, public schools, etc. but little or no immigration.
Can we help people in other countries? Sure. Federal money (< 1% of our budget) does go to works in other countries. However, if they decide to come here illegally, the most we can provide them with is helpful transportation at gunpoint back to their own country.
This isn't creating a law. If you want to work in certain professions you have to jump through hoops. Sports is one of the big ones these days, with the increasing steroid/drug use. If you want to be a doctor, you have to be certified. I don't see the government certifying people to vote.
There's a difference between business and government, you freely associate with a business, you don't freely associate with a government. You have rights when it comes to the government. Most of those rights don't exist when dealing with a business. I'm not saying business is good and government is bad.
In this case, someone is participating in a sport that is designated for women only. Modern science has found that there can be something between male and female. It seems possible this person is somewhere in between, and thus may not be eligible to participate in women's sports. This person has the option to leave the sport and choose another profession, or be scrutinized. The business involved needs to ensure that qualifications of those participating for the sake of its fans.
By the way, the fact that it's stored in a computer doesn't mean the government can see it. Plenty of tests are on a computer at one point or another, and many medical practices take steps to ensure private test results can never be traced back to the patient. HIV tests are a good example of this, though as a matter of public health those are reported to the government in some jurisdictions.
Technically, yes, it's a subsidy. Power companies (generally) don't make a ton of profit, they're regulated to keep costs down.
This is a zero sum game, there is a certain cost to maintain the lines, the money has to come from somewhere. If you don't want to pay, then don't connect to the system.
Yes, at the moment, the power company can sell your excess power, and overall you might end up being profitable to them without paying a cent.
But imagine if everyone had their own solar. They would still likely be dependent on the grid for power at certain times, and they would need it to transmit their excess power. The amount of power they took from the grid would have nothing to do with the cost to the power company, you're better of with a "network" fee + a tiny amount per kilowatt consumed.
Opera Mini can hardly render pages the same way Opera (Desktop) does. C++ (aside from some strange Microsoft bastardization) is not a managed language.
The point was that there are problems that thus far have only been solved in well in non-managed, not-entirely-portable ways. This means that many real applications written in Java/.NET depend on difficult to port code.
To have managed memory. It takes a lot to track pointers, more than a hack on to existing x86 can manage (libgc tries, quite well, but it isn't perfect).
Yes, I'm being completely serious.
However,.NET is apparently portable across architectures, as Portable.NET supports several.
However, as with Java, your application is only as portable as your libraries. Take web browsers, for instance, I don't know of any rendering engines in real use that are written in a managed language. A lot of good, difficult to replace code is written in languages that aren't easy to port.
I understand environment variables perfectly. My point is that if you modify your TEXPATH to add non-standard packages, then your documents will not be freely interchangeable (you'll have to include a list of packages to install). That's a problem for collaboration.
It's not the environment variable itself that causes the issue, it's the use of it.
My point was, that yes, it takes knowledge and talent to be able to properly layout a document, a program can't do it for you. The amount of extra configuration involved to set up layouts is better kept in an external stylesheet than muddling the content itself, so you can't make it a single file.
Those who were wondering what styles I've been using: I create my own (usually short) styles that basically just create a few macros, depending on the document set I'm working on (documentation for one program might have different needs than another). My interpretation of the original post was that he wanted just *one* file. I'm sure an old installation would be missing (for instance) svn (for displaying revision info in the document). Anything that changes TEXPATH would inherently make your documents work only on your system. There doesn't seem to be any way to guarantee that your LaTeX document will generate the same PDF (or DVI) on every platform.
As for Dreamweaver to LaTeX: They're both used to layout documents, one does it for a web browser and one does it for a printer. Sure, Dreamweaver is GUI based, but their both at least one level above the actual language of the output. Dreamweaver outputs HTML, but the "language" you are using in Dreamweaver is the GUI. Printers use PostScript, not TeX. There are some who write HTML by hand (myself included) but most people can't be bothered to try to make a serious page without using tools.
I've written few LaTeX documents that will work out of the box on most distributions, let alone all of them. Realistically, I can't send a LaTeX document to someone else and expect them to be able to edit it and read it, even if they have LaTeX installed.
Unfortunately any program able to handle everyone's different styles for document printing is probably going to be too specialized for everyone to have. LaTeX shows that print layouts are a difficult problem. Even on webpages (screen display), to get really good layouts we rely on scripts, styles and templates from other sources, in most cases these are too numerous to make distribution of the document via e-mail trivial. Plus, we use specialized software (e.g. Dreamweaver).
Unfortunately there's no good solution that I know of for this. Simply throwing text and images into a document does not make it readable, and there's no software that can simply take the jumble and make it readable, it takes a human touch to produce a good layout.
Road tax does not apply to electricity. Sure, they are both taxed, but in theory the money is allocated differently.
You narrowed the statement too: it was "electric / hybrid / high mileage vehicles"
Some hybrids are just more-efficient gas vehicles (e.g. the Prius). Some cars might end up using so little fuel that it would be insignificant (the Volt). Some use none at all (Tesla).
Getting a Tesla or Volt will mean less gas use, not more. Those are the types of vehicles (esp. the Volt) which the government is apparently concerned with here. As far as I know big rigs aren't seeing this type of fuel efficiency gain right now.
Yeah, let's just get rid of the public roads, sounds like a great idea. There's been one commercially successful toll road in the world. It's the 407(?) in Ontario, and that only happened because the government sold it for less than they should have.
A GPS based tax *could* be done correctly, tell the GPS in the car which roads to count mileage on, and just have it report the number, with no other information. This could even be done by a simple LCD display which would be inspected regularly by a trusted person. Any network based system allows for someone to hack it anyway (no amount of crypto signing protects the system from me cracking open the transmitter and reprogramming it).
As for being "fair" based on the state, too bad. What state I drive in is not the fed's business. Money to each state should be proportional to the maintenance cost of the roads and some estimate of the level of traffic. You don't care that I drove in PA, you care that some number of people did.
Of course, the GPS (instead of an odometer) approach really just means that you're not taxed for driving in another country or for just driving on private roads. The only information you can get is public/not public (maybe toll/not toll, but that's pushing it). In exchange, you need expensive devices in each car, and you have accuracy issues in cities. Sure, some people have inaccurate odometers. People who live in large cities (with big buildings) will have inaccurate GPS. As for those in other countries or on private roads, you're paying some amount of gas tax already, and international travel is expensive anyway.
However, tax should be based on weight and energy efficiency (especially for gas based cars). I am not paying the same amount as the guy with an Armada.
"Bigger sites ensure that ads served into their sites won't cause this kind of slowdown."
Obviously not, as some major sites were hit by this issue. What it comes down to is that the owners of these new organizations picked the advertising service they thought would give them the most money - not the ones that would ensure the highest reliability or the best user experience. This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
Movie/Music "distribution" uses your bandwidth and time by your own choice. On the other hand, spam takes up your bandwidth and time whether you like it or not. The only way to avoid it is to not have e-mail, which causes you to lose a lot more than just spam.
Because, the rich person has $1 million dollars in disposable income. He spends half of this on sports cars and such and saves the rest. Thus he pays taxes on half of his income, and his tax as a percent of income is half of the poor person.
The poor person has no money to save and spends everything on essentials, thus their tax rate as a percentage of income is much higher.
The rich person pays more in tax, but 20% of a poor person's income hurts a lot worse than 20% of a rich person's income, and in this case the rich person would only pay 10%, so its even worse.
This is basic economics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax .
<quote> Investor and multi-billionaire Warren Buffett has criticized the U.S. tax code as highly regressive, citing himself as an example: with an income of over $46 million, Buffet pays a tax rate of 17.7 percent, whereas his receptionist pays a tax rate of 30 percent. </quote>
That tax as you describe is incredibly regressive. The poor would end up paying a far higher percentage of their income as tax than a millionaire (because a millionaire has money to save and invest, a poor person must spend everything they get just to survive). The FairTax adds a flat entitlement, which causes the tax to be progressive up until pay reaches beyond anything people are paid today. That fixes the regressive nature of a sales tax.
Didn't you just break your own argument? I can't very well use my cable modem with my DSL connection, but they both get me on the internet. Likewise, my T-Mobile G1 won't work with Verizon any more than my CDMA Nokia would work with T-Mobile, but they both get me on the phone network.
That's how the cell phone companies see it. The only "features" on the phone for them are things that cost you money. E.g. $1/MB mobile web browsing, or text messaging.
This argument from U.S. Cellular is a non-starter, or at least I hope it is. What we really need is to unbundle the phone from the service entirely. Make the plans cheaper because the company isn't paying for the phone, and end these ridiculous contracts. Sure, you'll have to pay more up front, and the phone manufacturers will have to compete on price in a very large market.
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My sig refers to the right to rebel against a bad government.
Actually, I completely agree that it is proper to argue against a test. It's completely proper to argue against anything you so choose. However, equating a test in a sport to government interference shows such a lack of intelligence and sanity that it needed to be pointed out.
And yes, if a corporation tries to silence those that protest against them (as some governments do), then they should be brought down.
And if you poison the groundwater in an area you could be sued by a lot of people you didn't freely associate with, yes. But in that case, the company cannot force you to do anything without obtaining a court order. For instance, if you decide to start selling a Linux distro under the brand "Windows XP" Microsoft will sue you. They can't get a DNA test in that lawsuit, since the court would laugh out any such request. In fact, since anything you do is by court order in that case, you are in fact being controlled by the government, an entity which you do not freely associate.
Who said the government would get the DNA sequence? For that matter, why would they get the results of any medical test? No, the protest is against "oh noes, she has to be tested! The EVIL gubmint must be behind it!".
The inability to tell the difference between a corporation and a government on the part of so many just proves and anarcho-capitalism would never work.
Who said it had to do with health? I thought we were talking about failed or autocratic states. That does some times lead to health problems among citizens.
GWB invaded Iraq for revenge and oil. However, it was a "bad" government, and that was an underlying cause.
In both cases you still have the option not to associate with them, so they're a business, not a government. For myself, I might buy a Volt. I personally don't like it when the government funds sports (including building stadiums).
Unfortunately the "We'll fix it" attitude leads to invading other countries (Iraq). Further, you can't have a welfare state AND have uncontrolled immigration. So, you have a choice. Have a small government, no government services other than defense and lots of immigrants (that describes the U.S. pretty well for the first hundred or so years). Or, you can have roads, social security, medicare, welfare, public schools, etc. but little or no immigration.
Can we help people in other countries? Sure. Federal money (< 1% of our budget) does go to works in other countries. However, if they decide to come here illegally, the most we can provide them with is helpful transportation at gunpoint back to their own country.
This isn't creating a law. If you want to work in certain professions you have to jump through hoops. Sports is one of the big ones these days, with the increasing steroid/drug use. If you want to be a doctor, you have to be certified. I don't see the government certifying people to vote.
There's a difference between business and government, you freely associate with a business, you don't freely associate with a government. You have rights when it comes to the government. Most of those rights don't exist when dealing with a business. I'm not saying business is good and government is bad.
In this case, someone is participating in a sport that is designated for women only. Modern science has found that there can be something between male and female. It seems possible this person is somewhere in between, and thus may not be eligible to participate in women's sports. This person has the option to leave the sport and choose another profession, or be scrutinized. The business involved needs to ensure that qualifications of those participating for the sake of its fans.
By the way, the fact that it's stored in a computer doesn't mean the government can see it. Plenty of tests are on a computer at one point or another, and many medical practices take steps to ensure private test results can never be traced back to the patient. HIV tests are a good example of this, though as a matter of public health those are reported to the government in some jurisdictions.
Who said it's the government? It amazes me how many "libertarians" equate business with government.
Technically, yes, it's a subsidy. Power companies (generally) don't make a ton of profit, they're regulated to keep costs down.
This is a zero sum game, there is a certain cost to maintain the lines, the money has to come from somewhere. If you don't want to pay, then don't connect to the system.
Yes, at the moment, the power company can sell your excess power, and overall you might end up being profitable to them without paying a cent.
But imagine if everyone had their own solar. They would still likely be dependent on the grid for power at certain times, and they would need it to transmit their excess power. The amount of power they took from the grid would have nothing to do with the cost to the power company, you're better of with a "network" fee + a tiny amount per kilowatt consumed.
Opera Mini can hardly render pages the same way Opera (Desktop) does. C++ (aside from some strange Microsoft bastardization) is not a managed language.
The point was that there are problems that thus far have only been solved in well in non-managed, not-entirely-portable ways. This means that many real applications written in Java/.NET depend on difficult to port code.
To have managed memory. It takes a lot to track pointers, more than a hack on to existing x86 can manage (libgc tries, quite well, but it isn't perfect).
.NET is apparently portable across architectures, as Portable.NET supports several.
Yes, I'm being completely serious.
However,
However, as with Java, your application is only as portable as your libraries. Take web browsers, for instance, I don't know of any rendering engines in real use that are written in a managed language. A lot of good, difficult to replace code is written in languages that aren't easy to port.
Nope, instead they have fires, clerical errors, people spilling coffee on documents, etc.
I understand environment variables perfectly. My point is that if you modify your TEXPATH to add non-standard packages, then your documents will not be freely interchangeable (you'll have to include a list of packages to install). That's a problem for collaboration.
It's not the environment variable itself that causes the issue, it's the use of it.
My point was, that yes, it takes knowledge and talent to be able to properly layout a document, a program can't do it for you. The amount of extra configuration involved to set up layouts is better kept in an external stylesheet than muddling the content itself, so you can't make it a single file.
Those who were wondering what styles I've been using: I create my own (usually short) styles that basically just create a few macros, depending on the document set I'm working on (documentation for one program might have different needs than another). My interpretation of the original post was that he wanted just *one* file. I'm sure an old installation would be missing (for instance) svn (for displaying revision info in the document). Anything that changes TEXPATH would inherently make your documents work only on your system. There doesn't seem to be any way to guarantee that your LaTeX document will generate the same PDF (or DVI) on every platform.
As for Dreamweaver to LaTeX: They're both used to layout documents, one does it for a web browser and one does it for a printer. Sure, Dreamweaver is GUI based, but their both at least one level above the actual language of the output. Dreamweaver outputs HTML, but the "language" you are using in Dreamweaver is the GUI. Printers use PostScript, not TeX. There are some who write HTML by hand (myself included) but most people can't be bothered to try to make a serious page without using tools.
I've written few LaTeX documents that will work out of the box on most distributions, let alone all of them. Realistically, I can't send a LaTeX document to someone else and expect them to be able to edit it and read it, even if they have LaTeX installed.
Unfortunately any program able to handle everyone's different styles for document printing is probably going to be too specialized for everyone to have. LaTeX shows that print layouts are a difficult problem. Even on webpages (screen display), to get really good layouts we rely on scripts, styles and templates from other sources, in most cases these are too numerous to make distribution of the document via e-mail trivial. Plus, we use specialized software (e.g. Dreamweaver).
Unfortunately there's no good solution that I know of for this. Simply throwing text and images into a document does not make it readable, and there's no software that can simply take the jumble and make it readable, it takes a human touch to produce a good layout.
Road tax does not apply to electricity. Sure, they are both taxed, but in theory the money is allocated differently.
You narrowed the statement too: it was "electric / hybrid / high mileage vehicles"
Some hybrids are just more-efficient gas vehicles (e.g. the Prius). Some cars might end up using so little fuel that it would be insignificant (the Volt). Some use none at all (Tesla).
Getting a Tesla or Volt will mean less gas use, not more. Those are the types of vehicles (esp. the Volt) which the government is apparently concerned with here. As far as I know big rigs aren't seeing this type of fuel efficiency gain right now.
Yeah, let's just get rid of the public roads, sounds like a great idea. There's been one commercially successful toll road in the world. It's the 407(?) in Ontario, and that only happened because the government sold it for less than they should have.
A GPS based tax *could* be done correctly, tell the GPS in the car which roads to count mileage on, and just have it report the number, with no other information. This could even be done by a simple LCD display which would be inspected regularly by a trusted person. Any network based system allows for someone to hack it anyway (no amount of crypto signing protects the system from me cracking open the transmitter and reprogramming it).
As for being "fair" based on the state, too bad. What state I drive in is not the fed's business. Money to each state should be proportional to the maintenance cost of the roads and some estimate of the level of traffic. You don't care that I drove in PA, you care that some number of people did.
Of course, the GPS (instead of an odometer) approach really just means that you're not taxed for driving in another country or for just driving on private roads. The only information you can get is public/not public (maybe toll/not toll, but that's pushing it). In exchange, you need expensive devices in each car, and you have accuracy issues in cities. Sure, some people have inaccurate odometers. People who live in large cities (with big buildings) will have inaccurate GPS. As for those in other countries or on private roads, you're paying some amount of gas tax already, and international travel is expensive anyway.
However, tax should be based on weight and energy efficiency (especially for gas based cars). I am not paying the same amount as the guy with an Armada.
Jevons doesn't apply. Electric cars do not use gas more efficiently, they don't use it at all.
"Bigger sites ensure that ads served into their sites won't cause this kind of slowdown."
Obviously not, as some major sites were hit by this issue. What it comes down to is that the owners of these new organizations picked the advertising service they thought would give them the most money - not the ones that would ensure the highest reliability or the best user experience. This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
Movie/Music "distribution" uses your bandwidth and time by your own choice. On the other hand, spam takes up your bandwidth and time whether you like it or not. The only way to avoid it is to not have e-mail, which causes you to lose a lot more than just spam.
Because, the rich person has $1 million dollars in disposable income. He spends half of this on sports cars and such and saves the rest. Thus he pays taxes on half of his income, and his tax as a percent of income is half of the poor person.
The poor person has no money to save and spends everything on essentials, thus their tax rate as a percentage of income is much higher.
The rich person pays more in tax, but 20% of a poor person's income hurts a lot worse than 20% of a rich person's income, and in this case the rich person would only pay 10%, so its even worse.
This is basic economics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax .
<quote>
Investor and multi-billionaire Warren Buffett has criticized the U.S. tax code as highly regressive, citing himself as an example: with an income of over $46 million, Buffet pays a tax rate of 17.7 percent, whereas his receptionist pays a tax rate of 30 percent.
</quote>
That tax as you describe is incredibly regressive. The poor would end up paying a far higher percentage of their income as tax than a millionaire (because a millionaire has money to save and invest, a poor person must spend everything they get just to survive). The FairTax adds a flat entitlement, which causes the tax to be progressive up until pay reaches beyond anything people are paid today. That fixes the regressive nature of a sales tax.
Didn't you just break your own argument? I can't very well use my cable modem with my DSL connection, but they both get me on the internet. Likewise, my T-Mobile G1 won't work with Verizon any more than my CDMA Nokia would work with T-Mobile, but they both get me on the phone network.
That's how the cell phone companies see it. The only "features" on the phone for them are things that cost you money. E.g. $1/MB mobile web browsing, or text messaging.
This argument from U.S. Cellular is a non-starter, or at least I hope it is. What we really need is to unbundle the phone from the service entirely. Make the plans cheaper because the company isn't paying for the phone, and end these ridiculous contracts. Sure, you'll have to pay more up front, and the phone manufacturers will have to compete on price in a very large market.
Same here! 'Course I'd rather make money off them by enforcing $1000 fines for violation of noise ordinances.
Only the first time. So if I move from Ohio to New York I get a new license, but NY basically accepts that Ohio's test was good enough.
The same would actually apply if you moved from (for instance) France to New York, I don't think they require another road test.