People were borrowing more money than they could afford to pay back. It's as simple as that. Nobody forced them to borrow more than they could afford. They were stupid.
If I may play devil's advocate for a moment...
The banks were lending people more money than they could ever hope to pay back. It's as simple as that. Nobody forced them to lend people money they should have known they would never be able to repay. They were stupid.
There is plenty of blame to go around in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. I'm not saying we need to haul off bankers in orange jumpsuits, but they should shoulder their fair share.
Because apparently banding together to leverage more power than you could individually is seen as "being weak" and "SOCIALIZM!!!"
Only if you're a provider of labor. If you're a provider of capital then it's called a "corporation" and it's considered the best thing since sliced bread;-)
But they don't make half the income; they make 42.7%.
So? Would it make you feel better if instead of paying half the taxes (and I don't know that half is correct, I was just going by what the grandparent said) they only paid 42.7% of the taxes? Would that really make any difference ideologically speaking?
The bottom 20% pay nothing. The bottom 50% pay under 3%
Again so what? The bottom 80% also make 7% of the income (again according to that wikipedia page, which for all I know is inaccurate). It still sounds to me like the numbers are in the ballpark. And even if they're not, if one is going to make the moral argument that people that are better able to afford it should pay more, then you also need to consider that the marginal utility of each extra dollar you take home drops off rather sharply after a certain point. That plays a big part in what "being able to afford it" means.
By the way, the top 50% also pay in each of the lower brackets, so when the left talks about cutting taxes for "the poor", they're cutting it for the middle class and rich, too.
True but potentially a little disingenuous depending on the context. The very rich are going to be paying a vanishingly small percentage of their total tax burden in the bottom couple of brackets.
How do you cut the taxes on the poor, WHEN THEY DO NOT PAY A FUCKING CENT OF TAX?!?
I suppose that depends on how you define "poor". There are lots of people that aren't exactly "rich" that sill pay taxes.
Justify the FACT that less than 1% of Americans pay more than 50% of all tax revenue, somehow?
Well according to wikipedia the top 1% make 42.7% of the income. So if you accept the premise that we should place a heavier tax burden on people that are more able to afford it (rather than say taxing everyone equally, or taxing people based on how much the government spends directly on their interests) then it would make sense that the people that make half the money pay half the taxes.
If you don't accept that premise then there probably is no way to justify the current state of affairs.
Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning.
WTF are you talking about? According to the documentation
"App Engine uses the Java Servlet standard for web applications. You provide your app's servlet classes, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), static files and data files, along with the deployment descriptor (the web.xml file) and other configuration files, in a standard WAR directory structure. App Engine serves requests by invoking servlets according to the deployment descriptor."
"Apps can use the App Engine datastore for reliable, scalable persistent storage of data. The datastore supports two standard Java interfaces: Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.3 and Java Persistence API (JPA) 1.0. These interfaces are implemented using DataNucleus Access Platform, the open source implementation of these standards."
Granted not all features of JDO or JPA are fully supported and there are other services such as URLFetch that you can choose to use which won't be portable, but if you have even half a brain when designing your application you'll hardly have to "code it again from the beginning" if you want to move to a different host.
The advertising business. Or at least that's where they make all their money.
Indexing content or providing content?
Google's stated mission is to "organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful". So indexing existing content that's already available or finding information that isn't currently available and making it available could both plausibly fit.
When it comes to search, competition is always just a click away. We innovate rapidly to make sure people keep choosing Google, and in the end that's great for consumers.
Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but they certainly at least try to make it easy to swtich to a competitor.
that includes allowing people to identify themselves using their chosen expressions of identity...it's consistent with how humans understand communication...And the trend in civil liberties is to place fewer restrictions on expressions of identity, not greater ones
which is why everyone is able to rent a car, fly on a plane, book a hotel, or open a bank account using a fake ID? Don't get me wrong, I don't personally agree with the G+ "Real Names" policy. But there are lots of situations where people (rightly or wrongly) accept identity verification as a cost of doing business.
"Um... by definition [corporations] are unthinking by their very nature... people who are either unwilling or unable to represent themselves (ie [shareholders]) band together and let others ([CEOs]) think and negotiate for them.
I have never been a [corporate stock holder], nor will I ever... because I am competent enough to represent myself.
Not that I have a particular opinion on the Verizon strike specifically, but why is collective action of capital holders the pinnacle of the modern economic system, but the collective action of laborers is destroying society as we know it?
The S &l P people have always said their concern was the excessive spending
I don't know. From most of what I've heard that's exactly what they're not saying. From TFA
The agency said that policymaking and political institutions had weakened in the past few months "to a degree more than we envisioned." This has major implications for the nation's budget and debt problems.
For example, S&P now assumes that tax cuts brought in under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 would not, as planned, expire by 2012 because of staunch Republican opposition to any measure that would raise revenues
Sure overspending is absolutely a problem. But the US government has been overspending for a long time. The proximal causes for the downgrade seem to have been partisan sniping in Washington and an ideological refusal to even talk about revenue increases.
Of course this is the same rating agency that, not so long ago, rated all those mortgage backed CDO's as AAA, so I'm perfectly willing to conceded that they may not know what the f&@%^ they're talking about.
who thinks he should be allowed to do this, and who thinks it was wrong. Because I think what he's done is wrong
What he did may have been morally wrong (or maybe not, that's a bit of a subjective judgement), but the more important questions in my opinion are
1. Was it illegal?
2. Was it a sufficiently serious crime to justify the law enforcement response? Having the secret service raid his house seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.
If he was secretly taking pictures of girls to keep them and jerk off with them, would you be okay with that? Oh, sure, it's fine if he's an "artist", making an "art" project is it?
And what if he was camped out in front of Angelina Jolie's house waiting for her to take out the garbage? Would that be okay? Because as I understand it that happens all the freaking time Is it only a problem if he keeps the photos for himself, but it's fine if he sells it some some tabloid so that millions of other people can jerk off to it?
You may not have said that that there was no police corruption in the 1950s/1900s but you did kind of suggest that this type of behavior was directly related to government growth
It's what happens when government grows too big and powerful. It's happened every single time throughout the history of national governments whenever they grow too big.
Is anyone willing to *personally* take a good working-over by government thugs in exchange for another social program?
Or am I misunderstanding you in some way?
Additionally, having a smaller government doesn't mean everybody gets a lobotomy and immediately starts swilling moonshine, ruining perfectly good sheets, and burning crosses.
Similarly shrinking the government doesn't necessarily mean everyone suddenly becomes reasonable and cooperative. Today a sociopath that wants to go on a power trip maybe becomes a cop. Shrink the government, and you think that person will suddenly become kindhearted and caring?
How about giving guns to idiots that don't know how to safely handle them will result in far more people dieing of accidental shootings than have ever died due to terrorist hijackings?
but how frequently do employers bargain collectively with the unions?
All the time. Ever heard of a public corporation? That's just an embodiment of a group of partial owners (aka stock holders) joining together to gain, among other things, the benefits of collective bargaining power.
Okay, write the instructions for making your paper double spaced in office 2007.
On the "Home" tab, in the "Paragraph" group click on the "Line spacing" button (which is the one with the lines and the little up and down arrows on it) and select "2.0" from the drop-down menu.
Most things have tradeoffs. The question isn't "is an RDBMS the perfect way to store a tree?" (of course it isn't, in real life things are rarely perfect), but rather "is there a better way than an RDBMS for storing a tree?"
The original point was that RDBMSs were bad at storing trees.
The GP pointed out one way to store trees in an RDBMS.
You (and several other posters) correctly point out that this structure has limitations and trade-offs associated with it.
Fair enough. But to suggest that RDBMSs are bad at storing trees, don't we need to suggest a system that's better?
So my question is, without using an RDBMS how would you design persistent storage for a tree structure that meet s all the conditions that have been raised
1. Efficiently finds all ancestors/descendents
2. Efficiently finds only the immediate parent/children
3. Inexpensive to update the structure of the tree (insert nodes, delete nodes, move nodes around, etc)
4. Deals with arbitrarily sized trees (no storing the whole tree in memory, that's cheating).
And for bonus points it should really also deal with all the other fringe benefits we get from using a RDBMS that have nothing to do with this particular data structure
1. Automated backup/recovery
2. Transactional integrity across multiple concurrent users
3. Easily accessible from a wide variety of programming platforms/languages
4. Etc.
When it comes to tree data RDBMSs may not be perfect, but I'm not sure they're any worse than anything else.
Yeah, trees in RDBMs can be a PITA. The best way I've seen for handling them is Nested Set Trees, but even that can be a pain if your tree structure gets updated frequently.
If a citizen of a country can stand in what amounts to the town square and criticize his/her government without fear of reprisal, it's a freedom-based society. If not, it's fear-based.
That depends, is the town square a duly designated free speech zone?
I appreciate your sentiment but I'm not convinced that these issues are always so black and white.
Besides, wasn't the whole premise of the UN originally to give countries an open forum to work out their problems without resorting to murdering each other? If there's anyone that the world's liberal democracies are going to disagree with it's probably going to be oppressive police states.
Unfortunately, the opinion is vague about whether AOL's initial contract with Douglas had a provision whereby he agreed that AOL could amend the user agreement simply by posting changes to its website...even if the court was willing to accept this method as a valid amendment process, there would be strict limits on the substantive changes that a website can make unilaterally...I expect courts will aggressively police these unilateral amendments using unconscionability and other limiting doctrines.
So from the sounds of it, it's probably not a slam dunk, but particularly egregious changes would most likely get struck down.
The market share argument is old and tired. People try to hack servers all the time, most servers run linux.
Except I think the GP's point was that the weakest link in the security chain (and therefore the one that is most likely to be targeted for attack) is not the OS but the stupid user.
If I may extend your metaphor a bit, it doesn't matter how many doors a house has if the idiot owner is willing to unlock them for anyone that knocks.
Because Windows is an OS, Linux isn't. Linux is a kernel, around which hundreds of OS's, commonly called "Distributions" have been built.
So we have hundreds of different OS's, all built around the Linux kernel with different bells and whistles and user land applications packaged on top, and that's a Good Thing (TM) because people like choice.
But we have six different OS's, all built around the windows 7 kernel with different bells and whistles and user land applications packaged on top and that's a Bad Thing (TM) because it's too confusing and MS is just trying to rip people off!
the main difference is that there are no features being "turned off" or "turned on" with any of them, just repackaging of which front-end apps you desire upon initial install.
How is "repackaging of which front-end apps you desire upon initial install" any different than "turning off" the features of those applications that are not installed and "turning on" the features of those apps that are installed?
If they went Pindows vs Hindows, instant recognition that something is different.
So you would find PWindows and HWindows more informative than Windows Basic and Windows Ultimate? At least with Basic vs Ultimate I get the immediate sense that Ultimate probably has more features than Basic. PWindows vs HWindows tells me absolutely nothing about the relative feature sets of the two products.
There are other ways to recap the invested resources than to charge for each single copy, which are more direct. Charge for your time, that's what costs
Yes but who am I charging for my time? The first person to get the software?
Who wants to be the sucker who foots the entire development cost, just so everyone else can get infinite copies for free? Ok, so there are some individuals/companies that are magnanimous enough to do that, and bless them for it, but I don't think you can rely on that in general.
Doesn't it make more sense to spread the development cost more evenly over everyone who benefits from the software? Can you suggest a better way of accomplishing that than charging per copy?
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People were borrowing more money than they could afford to pay back. It's as simple as that. Nobody forced them to borrow more than they could afford. They were stupid.
If I may play devil's advocate for a moment...
The banks were lending people more money than they could ever hope to pay back. It's as simple as that. Nobody forced them to lend people money they should have known they would never be able to repay. They were stupid.
There is plenty of blame to go around in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. I'm not saying we need to haul off bankers in orange jumpsuits, but they should shoulder their fair share.
Because apparently banding together to leverage more power than you could individually is seen as "being weak" and "SOCIALIZM!!!"
Only if you're a provider of labor. If you're a provider of capital then it's called a "corporation" and it's considered the best thing since sliced bread ;-)
But they don't make half the income; they make 42.7%.
So? Would it make you feel better if instead of paying half the taxes (and I don't know that half is correct, I was just going by what the grandparent said) they only paid 42.7% of the taxes? Would that really make any difference ideologically speaking?
The bottom 20% pay nothing. The bottom 50% pay under 3%
Again so what? The bottom 80% also make 7% of the income (again according to that wikipedia page, which for all I know is inaccurate). It still sounds to me like the numbers are in the ballpark. And even if they're not, if one is going to make the moral argument that people that are better able to afford it should pay more, then you also need to consider that the marginal utility of each extra dollar you take home drops off rather sharply after a certain point. That plays a big part in what "being able to afford it" means.
By the way, the top 50% also pay in each of the lower brackets, so when the left talks about cutting taxes for "the poor", they're cutting it for the middle class and rich, too.
True but potentially a little disingenuous depending on the context. The very rich are going to be paying a vanishingly small percentage of their total tax burden in the bottom couple of brackets.
How do you cut the taxes on the poor, WHEN THEY DO NOT PAY A FUCKING CENT OF TAX?!?
I suppose that depends on how you define "poor". There are lots of people that aren't exactly "rich" that sill pay taxes.
Justify the FACT that less than 1% of Americans pay more than 50% of all tax revenue, somehow?
Well according to wikipedia the top 1% make 42.7% of the income. So if you accept the premise that we should place a heavier tax burden on people that are more able to afford it (rather than say taxing everyone equally, or taxing people based on how much the government spends directly on their interests) then it would make sense that the people that make half the money pay half the taxes.
If you don't accept that premise then there probably is no way to justify the current state of affairs.
Oh, and since it's unique platform and the backend is closed, you either have to accept whatever price Google is asking or abandon the project and code it again from the beginning.
WTF are you talking about? According to the documentation
"App Engine uses the Java Servlet standard for web applications. You provide your app's servlet classes, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), static files and data files, along with the deployment descriptor (the web.xml file) and other configuration files, in a standard WAR directory structure. App Engine serves requests by invoking servlets according to the deployment descriptor."
"Apps can use the App Engine datastore for reliable, scalable persistent storage of data. The datastore supports two standard Java interfaces: Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.3 and Java Persistence API (JPA) 1.0. These interfaces are implemented using DataNucleus Access Platform, the open source implementation of these standards."
Granted not all features of JDO or JPA are fully supported and there are other services such as URLFetch that you can choose to use which won't be portable, but if you have even half a brain when designing your application you'll hardly have to "code it again from the beginning" if you want to move to a different host.
What business is Google in?
The advertising business. Or at least that's where they make all their money.
Indexing content or providing content?
Google's stated mission is to "organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful". So indexing existing content that's already available or finding information that isn't currently available and making it available could both plausibly fit.
But if they want to be the only channel you can use, then they have to accept that they are at least a de facto common carrier
Whoa, who said Google wants to be the only option you can use?
Google's stated philosophy has always been about promoting a competitive marketplace
When it comes to search, competition is always just a click away. We innovate rapidly to make sure people keep choosing Google, and in the end that's great for consumers.
Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but they certainly at least try to make it easy to swtich to a competitor.
that includes allowing people to identify themselves using their chosen expressions of identity...it's consistent with how humans understand communication...And the trend in civil liberties is to place fewer restrictions on expressions of identity, not greater ones
which is why everyone is able to rent a car, fly on a plane, book a hotel, or open a bank account using a fake ID? Don't get me wrong, I don't personally agree with the G+ "Real Names" policy. But there are lots of situations where people (rightly or wrongly) accept identity verification as a cost of doing business.
"Um... by definition [corporations] are unthinking by their very nature... people who are either unwilling or unable to represent themselves (ie [shareholders]) band together and let others ([CEOs]) think and negotiate for them.
I have never been a [corporate stock holder], nor will I ever... because I am competent enough to represent myself.
Not that I have a particular opinion on the Verizon strike specifically, but why is collective action of capital holders the pinnacle of the modern economic system, but the collective action of laborers is destroying society as we know it?
The S &l P people have always said their concern was the excessive spending
I don't know. From most of what I've heard that's exactly what they're not saying. From TFA
The agency said that policymaking and political institutions had weakened in the past few months "to a degree more than we envisioned." This has major implications for the nation's budget and debt problems.
For example, S&P now assumes that tax cuts brought in under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 would not, as planned, expire by 2012 because of staunch Republican opposition to any measure that would raise revenues
Sure overspending is absolutely a problem. But the US government has been overspending for a long time. The proximal causes for the downgrade seem to have been partisan sniping in Washington and an ideological refusal to even talk about revenue increases.
Of course this is the same rating agency that, not so long ago, rated all those mortgage backed CDO's as AAA, so I'm perfectly willing to conceded that they may not know what the f&@%^ they're talking about.
who thinks he should be allowed to do this, and who thinks it was wrong. Because I think what he's done is wrong
What he did may have been morally wrong (or maybe not, that's a bit of a subjective judgement), but the more important questions in my opinion are
1. Was it illegal?
2. Was it a sufficiently serious crime to justify the law enforcement response? Having the secret service raid his house seems like a bit of an over reaction to me.
If he was secretly taking pictures of girls to keep them and jerk off with them, would you be okay with that? Oh, sure, it's fine if he's an "artist", making an "art" project is it?
And what if he was camped out in front of Angelina Jolie's house waiting for her to take out the garbage? Would that be okay? Because as I understand it that happens all the freaking time Is it only a problem if he keeps the photos for himself, but it's fine if he sells it some some tabloid so that millions of other people can jerk off to it?
I see your modeling release and raise you a Paparazzi ;-)
Strawman and false dichotomy. I never said that
You may not have said that that there was no police corruption in the 1950s/1900s but you did kind of suggest that this type of behavior was directly related to government growth
It's what happens when government grows too big and powerful. It's happened every single time throughout the history of national governments whenever they grow too big.
Is anyone willing to *personally* take a good working-over by government thugs in exchange for another social program?
Or am I misunderstanding you in some way?
Additionally, having a smaller government doesn't mean everybody gets a lobotomy and immediately starts swilling moonshine, ruining perfectly good sheets, and burning crosses.
Similarly shrinking the government doesn't necessarily mean everyone suddenly becomes reasonable and cooperative. Today a sociopath that wants to go on a power trip maybe becomes a cop. Shrink the government, and you think that person will suddenly become kindhearted and caring?
Yes it's such a shame you can only install apps that come from the Android Market.....oh wait
Aaaannd?? What would be wrong with this?
How about giving guns to idiots that don't know how to safely handle them will result in far more people dieing of accidental shootings than have ever died due to terrorist hijackings?
but how frequently do employers bargain collectively with the unions?
All the time. Ever heard of a public corporation? That's just an embodiment of a group of partial owners (aka stock holders) joining together to gain, among other things, the benefits of collective bargaining power.
You're very clever, young man. But it's turtles all the way down! ;-)
Okay, write the instructions for making your paper double spaced in office 2007.
On the "Home" tab, in the "Paragraph" group click on the "Line spacing" button (which is the one with the lines and the little up and down arrows on it) and select "2.0" from the drop-down menu.
Foot meet mouth.
Huh?
The original point was that RDBMSs were bad at storing trees.
The GP pointed out one way to store trees in an RDBMS.
You (and several other posters) correctly point out that this structure has limitations and trade-offs associated with it.
Fair enough. But to suggest that RDBMSs are bad at storing trees, don't we need to suggest a system that's better?
So my question is, without using an RDBMS how would you design persistent storage for a tree structure that meet s all the conditions that have been raised
1. Efficiently finds all ancestors/descendents
2. Efficiently finds only the immediate parent/children
3. Inexpensive to update the structure of the tree (insert nodes, delete nodes, move nodes around, etc)
4. Deals with arbitrarily sized trees (no storing the whole tree in memory, that's cheating).
And for bonus points it should really also deal with all the other fringe benefits we get from using a RDBMS that have nothing to do with this particular data structure
1. Automated backup/recovery
2. Transactional integrity across multiple concurrent users
3. Easily accessible from a wide variety of programming platforms/languages
4. Etc.
When it comes to tree data RDBMSs may not be perfect, but I'm not sure they're any worse than anything else.
Yeah, trees in RDBMs can be a PITA. The best way I've seen for handling them is Nested Set Trees, but even that can be a pain if your tree structure gets updated frequently.
If a citizen of a country can stand in what amounts to the town square and criticize his/her government without fear of reprisal, it's a freedom-based society. If not, it's fear-based.
That depends, is the town square a duly designated free speech zone?
I appreciate your sentiment but I'm not convinced that these issues are always so black and white.
Besides, wasn't the whole premise of the UN originally to give countries an open forum to work out their problems without resorting to murdering each other? If there's anyone that the world's liberal democracies are going to disagree with it's probably going to be oppressive police states.
Douglas v. US District Court ex rel Talk America, No. 06-75424 (9th Cir. July 18, 2007)
Unfortunately, the opinion is vague about whether AOL's initial contract with Douglas had a provision whereby he agreed that AOL could amend the user agreement simply by posting changes to its website...even if the court was willing to accept this method as a valid amendment process, there would be strict limits on the substantive changes that a website can make unilaterally...I expect courts will aggressively police these unilateral amendments using unconscionability and other limiting doctrines.
So from the sounds of it, it's probably not a slam dunk, but particularly egregious changes would most likely get struck down.
The market share argument is old and tired. People try to hack servers all the time, most servers run linux.
Except I think the GP's point was that the weakest link in the security chain (and therefore the one that is most likely to be targeted for attack) is not the OS but the stupid user.
If I may extend your metaphor a bit, it doesn't matter how many doors a house has if the idiot owner is willing to unlock them for anyone that knocks.
Because Windows is an OS, Linux isn't. Linux is a kernel, around which hundreds of OS's, commonly called "Distributions" have been built.
So we have hundreds of different OS's, all built around the Linux kernel with different bells and whistles and user land applications packaged on top, and that's a Good Thing (TM) because people like choice. But we have six different OS's, all built around the windows 7 kernel with different bells and whistles and user land applications packaged on top and that's a Bad Thing (TM) because it's too confusing and MS is just trying to rip people off!
the main difference is that there are no features being "turned off" or "turned on" with any of them, just repackaging of which front-end apps you desire upon initial install.
How is "repackaging of which front-end apps you desire upon initial install" any different than "turning off" the features of those applications that are not installed and "turning on" the features of those apps that are installed?
If they went Pindows vs Hindows, instant recognition that something is different.
So you would find PWindows and HWindows more informative than Windows Basic and Windows Ultimate? At least with Basic vs Ultimate I get the immediate sense that Ultimate probably has more features than Basic. PWindows vs HWindows tells me absolutely nothing about the relative feature sets of the two products.
I bet you just buy clothes because you like them. You can't be bothered with all that stuff about child labour being used to produce them.
So just to be clear here, you're seriously drawing a moral equivalence between closed source software and sweatshop labor?
There are other ways to recap the invested resources than to charge for each single copy, which are more direct. Charge for your time, that's what costs
Yes but who am I charging for my time? The first person to get the software?
Who wants to be the sucker who foots the entire development cost, just so everyone else can get infinite copies for free? Ok, so there are some individuals/companies that are magnanimous enough to do that, and bless them for it, but I don't think you can rely on that in general.
Doesn't it make more sense to spread the development cost more evenly over everyone who benefits from the software? Can you suggest a better way of accomplishing that than charging per copy?