Exactly. The big difference is that in recent years, the Republicans started to drop the pretense and make the money/power grabs right in front of everyone's faces. As expected, half the electorate didn't even notice. On the other hand, the other half still haven't noticed that the Democrats have the same corporate sympathies, even as they pretend to be outraged about excessive compensation and the like.
I just saw the "Windows 7 Happy" commercial on TV with that young asian girl ("more happiness is coming")...simply nauseating. The girl is cute, but it is so manipulated and contrived it is just repulsive. I haven't had such a negative reaction to a TV ad in years. (And I'm not anti-Microsoft particularly - I use Windows almost exclusively both at home and work.)
Plus, now even if the RIAA wins, they lose, as most intelligent people who hear about this will think "WTF???" And with the awards getting larger and the case dragging on for longer, more and more people hear about it. Possibly including Congress, some of whom might start to think "maybe this has gone a little too far".
While I don't know that this is the real reason, I do find this to be a persuasive justification:
The whole point of copyright is to make creative works more widely available to the public. That's its justification in the US Constitution at least. It was never meant to imply any kind of "ownerhsip" over ideas, just provide a limited monopoly for a limited time (perhaps half a lifetime, then) as an incentive to publish, which was really the only way for others to be able to enjoy these new works. Since publication and distribution tended to be expensive (in addition to the time to form the ideas), some form of incentive was felt necessary.
Now that, for most art forms, production and publication can cost little to nothing, there isn't much holding people back from "publishing" a massive array of artworks (as the Internet has CLEARY showed us), and hence little need for incentives such as sales monopolies. (Movies are a notable exception, as many films necessarily cost so much to produce that it's hard to imagine just giving them away.)
This means that logically, copyright probably ought to be re-examined to see if it could be made shorter in duration and more limited in scope (not that doing so would necessarily be wise or a foregone conclusion). Instead, the last 30+ years has seen a massive increase in the duration of copyright and penalties for infringement. This has also conincided with massive PR campaigns to try to convince people that intellectual works are "property", copyright infringement is "stealing", etc. - terminology that lawmakers and courts up through the US Supreme Court took pains to discourage for 200 years.
Sicne in the big bargain that is copyright, the rights holders have not held up their end of the bargain, it's little surprise that "the people" have begun fighting back.
First, are you serious? You think the government bailouts negatively affected your 401k? The market was already doing that, due primarily to a lack of regulation. Such regulation can only come from the government, but government = evil according to you, so I guess there should have been LESS regulation or enforcement, but then your 401k would have lost even more than it did and you'd probably never get any of it back since most of the companies would have gone bankrupt and ceased to exist. And they'd probably foreclose on your home (when you lost your job and savings, having been laid off by one of those bankrupt companies and with your investments worth 0), and without social security and medicare and food stamps and all that, where would you be then?
The other problem is that if you are in the bottom 95% of the population, income-wise, you're probably not going to gain much through increased dividends, etc., certainly not like you would from a modest pay raise. (The top 1% does because most of their income comes from investments, not labor, and they have such high holdings that even a few percent increase can mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of extra income each year.) You even stand to gain a lot more through better government services or lower personal income taxes (less income taxation of the poor is needed if more of the money can come from corporate, investment, or other high-end taxes).
Note also in case you weren't paying attention for the past 50 years: Republicans do not cut government budgets. (I don't know that you're a Republican, just wanted to point this out.) They just spend the money on bombs and spying on people and putting people in jail, instead of spending it on helping people or investing in the future. But since they cut high-end taxes, they do increase deficits, and hence interest payments on the debt. Which means even less services or investment for your tax dollar.
This is the Republican paradox: slash taxes on the rich so that it takes higher taxes on the poor to pay for the very necessary government services that 99% of the population demands (and with good reason, as spreading the cost and risk and centralizing such things is almost always the best and cheapest way to do them, and many government investments result in much greater return to society down the line). Then they complain about how high poor people's taxes are (since, surprise, poor people pay about the same percent of total income to taxes - about 30% - as wealthy people do, regressive sales and payroll and other taxes canceling out slightly progressive income taxes). And they're right: taxes on poor people are too high, when many poor people can barely even pay rent on a crappy apartment or buy food for their family, let alone give 30% of it to the government. People also then complain about how crappy government services are, now that they've been cut due to insufficient funds and spending the money on useless crap and interest payments instead, so that Republicans can then say government = bad, and try to ram through MORE tax cuts for the rich, cut services even more (while still not cutting the overall budget, or taxes for poor people, one bit), complain more, etc.
This results in a continuous increase in concentration of wealth in the richest segment of the population. Which was the whole point.
So why do poor people vote for Republicans when it's not in their interest to do so? Republicans realized that a large subset of the population is stupid, ignorant, uneducated, racist, sexist, nervous, fearful, angry, and generally emotional rather than rational. Many of them happen to also be highly religious or hold to certain hot-button views. So all the Republicans need to do is pander to these people's base emotional "needs" and religious proclivities and hot-button issues to get their vote. Then they (the ones in power, who ACTUALLY represent the top 1% richest Americans) can run away with the money (including from the people that voted for them). And for the most part, the people that voted for them remain ignorant (I wonder why, if they watch Fox news all the time), and vote for the crooks again in the next election.
You're right, people end up paying the taxes. But when corporate taxes a low, the people who benefit are the ones who are already rich. You think a corporation is going to reduce prices or increase wages as a result of lower taxes? Maybe, but only after they RICHLY reward their shareholders and top executives.
Level of lithium found in the water tested in the Japan study: "Levels ranged from 0.7 to 59 micrograms per litre." Level of lithium typically used as a therapeutic drug: 300+ milligrams per day.
Even if your water were at the high end and you drank several litres per day, that's still 1000x lower than the low end of therapeutic use.
"Using data for 27 Texas counties from 1978-1987, it is shown that the incidence rates of suicide, homicide, and rape are significantly higher in counties whose drinking water supplies contain little or no lithium than in counties with water lithium levels ranging from 70-170 micrograms/L......arrests for possession of opium, cocaine, and their derivatives (morphine, heroin, and codeine) from 1981-1986 also produced statistically significant inverse associations"
I don't disagree with you that the whole idea of sex offender registries is horrible, but if anything would get you on the list short of kidnapping and raping someone at knifepoint, I'd think this would be it, and so long as we have such laws, everyone involved in this should DEFINITELY be on it - particuarly considering the "abuse of power" and "in a position of trust" angles.
I'm actually kind of shocked that anyone who encouraged, perpetrated or had knowledge of this at the time wasn't arrested, convicted, thrown in prison for a year or two, and forced to register for life. (And I'd think it would be a slam dunk for the victim to win a few million dollars off the school district, too.)
It makes all the checking to make sure sex offenders don't work at schools COMPLETELY LAUGHABLE. If you already worked at the school and didn't have a previous criminal record, it seems it's OK to sexually abuse and humiliate children all you like, so long as you are actually at school when it happens and you can come up with some sort of flimsy justification.
Oh, plus I might add that with the rising amount of college debt due to rising tuition, not many people want to stay in school forever unless the payoff is very large. Hence the continued interest in professional schools, but less so in other graduate programs.
There are plenty of people to replace you, but kids do cost-benefit analyses (often informally, but they do) of what to major in to prepare for a good career. Enrollment in various majors climbs and drops dramatically in response to the job market. So it's no mistake that not many people want to study CS (for example) these days - the pay seems to be dropping rather than rising for most in IT or software development, it's intellectually tough but also tedious, and many in the field are not treated all that well in terms of hours, appreciation, or work-life balance. ("It seems like a simple task; why isn't it done? Do more with less! Oh, and here's your cell phone for 24-hour on-call in case the server farts...even though you're a programmer, not a sysadmin.") Even fewer get PhDs, because in most fields it's perceived that this only prepares one to be a college professor, and could actually be a liability in hiring. How many people want to spend 5 years working on a degree that won't increase their employability or earnings anyway?
As has been pointed out above, this is not the issue. The issue is that companies have more leverage over H1B employees than they do over American citizens or green card holders, and hence can get away with paying them less and working them harder. It's clear that such abusive practices occur widely despite being illegal.
If H1B workers were truly on a level playing field in reality, not just theory, there would be fewer complaints - and I'm sure fewer calls to raise the H1B caps.
While I agree with your point in general, you used a really bad example, which illustrate the slanderous tactics of Republicans in arbitrarily applying negative-sounding terminology to their opponents without any basis in fact, rather than saying anything truthful about Democrats:
"Tax and spend democrats"? The last democratic president BALANCED THE BUDGET.
The idea is that it's still easy to add more transistors, but no longer easy to make them run faster. That is why they are moving to multiple cores - they can add three (or even 15) cores far more easily (and using much less energy and putting off much less heat) than they can make a single core run at twice the clock rate.
Moore's law still exists in hardware, but it's manifested in a different way than it had been until a few years ago, due to physical limitations that don't appear to be going away any time soon. But software needs to adjust for those changes to benefit us in the real world.
Of course not all individual tasks can be sped up with parallelization, but many tasks, and the overall computing experience, probably can be.
From personal experience (myself and others), I'd like to say that I believe this theory is total bunk.
Due to the money, politics, bureaucracy, and general stupidity of doctors and the FDA involved, most of the messages people are receiving regarding antidepressants and suicide are wrong.
It's been true all along that in the early stages (first 1-2 months but particularly first 1-2 weeks), SSRIs at least (and maybe other classes of antidepressants) tend to INCREASE anxiety, and hence, suicidality. It's how they work - they force the brain to adjust, so that normal anxiety-inducing events then seem less significant by comparison. This early increase in anxiety was covered up and downplayed by the pharma companies, and not picked up by the FDA initially (or if they noticed that symptom, they didn't have the mental capacity to understand that anxiety might be linked to suicide).
After that, though, once the brain's receptors have had a chance to adjust (downregulate) to the new (higher) level of neurotransmitters - sort of turning down the volume on the microphone, if you will, antidepressants tend to dramatically decrease such symptoms. In the long run, they are remarkably effective at controlling anxiety and depression and preventing suicide.
But there is that very dangerous early period where the patient should be watched carefully, and the antidepressant level should be ramped up very slowly (which is not usually done). It could be that other drugs intended to calm them in the short term could be advisable at the start, but this hasn't been tested.
So when people point out this problem with suicide, and the FDA "studies" it (in their ususual way that misses the point and blurs out all the relevant details), they conclude that antidepressants always increase the risk of suicide, but probably only for teens, er, or maybe young adults too. (It's easier to see in teens since they are more susceptible to suicide generally, antidepressant or no antidepressant, but the effects probably extend to all age groups.)
So now there is an exaggerated scare over these drugs, which will lead to MORE suicide as more people (including teens) who could benefit from them make the mistake of avoiding them entirely. This extreme view just replaces the old extreme view that antidepressants never increased anxiety or suicidality. And neither view really helps patients or doctors to view antidepressants as useful drugs, while warning them to tread carefully in the early stages of treatment.
I believe the only thing that is undeveloped about most teenagers' brains is their experience - the knowledge of having gone through terribly difficult situations and survived, the ability to say "I can make it through this, because I have made it through other difficult situations in the past". They lack perspective, not development.
Serious depression, violent behavior, and suicide attempts are not and should not be considered a normal part of growing up. Especially when suicide is the third-leading cause of death among teens.
I am also not sure what you mean by "not tested for depression", when you go on to admit that Zoloft and Paxil were indeed tested for depression (both were approved by the FDA for depression in 1992). Yes, there is endless debate about the point at which depression is severe enough to require treatment, and what treatments to use first, but my guess is that the problem of undertreatment still outweighs the problem of overtreatment by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps. Though maybe not, if they're more concerned with increasing the SEO rank of their clients than themselves. I may have a biased point of view, but my own company is perhaps the best in the business at SEO (at least of companies that "play by the rules" and always try to be ethical), but pays little attention to boosting our own site.
Most of the clients we'd be interested in wouldn't be finding us through random internet searches in any event. We get our clients (mostly Fortune 1000 companies) by demonstrating how the results we can achieve are far superior to their previous agency - that is, how we can save them tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Yes, the UK (and nearly all the rest of the world) are using a different modulation that works quite differently - and reportedly much better (and cheaper) in most circumstances.
Even in technical demonstrations to the US congress, that system (COFDM) worked much better, but they still chose 8-VSB.
Among other things, the US system really can't be used for any kind of mobile or moving reception. And it tends to work poorly in large cities due to poor handling of multipath interference.
Some speculate that it had to do with patents: 8-VSB patents were held mainly by Zenith, at the time a US company; those of COFDM were held by Japanese companies. But that's irrelevant now: since that time Zenith has been acquired by LG (Korea).
Other speculation centers around shady attempts to actually kill off free OTA (over the air) broadcast intentionally. Obviously cable and satellite companies would be happy about that, as would many others who'd love to use the bandwidth. Cell-phone companies would love to become the only viable option for mobile TV (for a monthly fee, of course).
Even the TV stations themselves might be happy as they could save a lot of money (no more towers, transmitters, modulators, etc., or the attendant electricity bills) without losing much audience - so long as "must-carry" rules ensured all their channels (multiple standard-definition channels as opposed to one high-definition channel) would be available on all cable and satellite systems.
It's difficult to tell, but it's probably somewhere between $150-200 billion/year. And no, it's not mostly paid for by drivers (through gas taxes, tolls and license/registration fees); it's mostly general-fund taxes, and sometimes stealing from the funds intended for transit, which means that some of that "transit" money is actually going to roads instead. (Similarly, local merchants and taxpayers pay for parking lots, which leads to higher prices and higher taxes.)
In one study in Texas, for instance, it was found that gas taxes paid for only 1/6th the cost of a highway over its lifetime (and that the tax would need to be $2.22/gallon to make up the difference).
Our economy might be "booming" if we concentrated more on our military, but only temporarily, until all the loans came due (loans which are held predominantly by the Chinese, the Saudis, and various others). Spending billions on war is not a sustainable form of "economic development".
Truth be told, if we'd spent as much on, say, solar energy, as we've spent in Iraq in the last 5 years, 100% of the United States' electricity usage could be coming from solar power TODAY. Yes, it's THAT much money.
Ditto for lots of other things.
No, military spending does not prevent us from doing everything we want, but military and "intelligence" spending IS diverting a LOT of money from other things that would dramatically benefit the people of our country, and the health of our economy.
As to arguing that we reduced our spending "too far", I'm not sure how spending as much on our military as the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED (47% of the world's total military spending in 2003, for instance) isn't somehow excessive, when we only have maybe 5% of the world's population...
So how is it that we can manage to build 8-lane highways (complete with cloverleafs and overpasses and feeder roads), but can't manage to build a pair of tracks?
True, when we spend less than perhaps 5% as much on rail infrastructure as we do on highways, it stands to reason that the roads may win in some instances.
But rail is far more cost-effective to build than roads - one pair of tracks can carry the same traffic as a 6-8 lane highway, which is far more costly to construct and maintain, and requires much more land. (Not to mention all the parking lots and feeder roads.)
Trains can also run much faster (nobody is talking about people driving 100-200mph, and trains can run full speed even during commute hours when highways are slowed to a standstill). Trains use much less energy (less rolling resistance and aerodynamic resistance, for starters), emit far less pollution (using less energy, and often electrically powered), cost less to operate and maintain, and are far safer.
The only thing they lack is door-to-door convenience and arbitrary schedules. (But is there really much benefit if you're stuck in traffic and have to pay $20 for parking? On the other hand, how about letting you read or do work or sleep while on the train?) How much are we willing to pay, in dollars, pollution, wasted time, and reliance on foreign oil, for that (sometimes) convenience?
Trains also have similar benefits over airplanes for relatively short trips (anything less than about 2-4 hours, depending on the situation).
Of course, these are all THEORETICAL benefits, which are only realized if we actually make the proper investments. Since we in the USA have spent the last 75 years trying to kill trains rather than investing in them, we only rarely get to experience these benefits.
The trains we have these days are generally slow, go to only a few places, run on very limited schedules, are not particularly clean or comfortable, and have few on-board ameneties. And since they don't benefit from the same level of taxpayer support as roads do, more of their costs are passed on to the passenger, so they don't seem to have as much cost advantage to the end user.
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Exactly. The big difference is that in recent years, the Republicans started to drop the pretense and make the money/power grabs right in front of everyone's faces. As expected, half the electorate didn't even notice. On the other hand, the other half still haven't noticed that the Democrats have the same corporate sympathies, even as they pretend to be outraged about excessive compensation and the like.
I just saw the "Windows 7 Happy" commercial on TV with that young asian girl ("more happiness is coming") ...simply nauseating. The girl is cute, but it is so manipulated and contrived it is just repulsive. I haven't had such a negative reaction to a TV ad in years. (And I'm not anti-Microsoft particularly - I use Windows almost exclusively both at home and work.)
Plus, now even if the RIAA wins, they lose, as most intelligent people who hear about this will think "WTF???" And with the awards getting larger and the case dragging on for longer, more and more people hear about it. Possibly including Congress, some of whom might start to think "maybe this has gone a little too far".
While I don't know that this is the real reason, I do find this to be a persuasive justification:
The whole point of copyright is to make creative works more widely available to the public. That's its justification in the US Constitution at least. It was never meant to imply any kind of "ownerhsip" over ideas, just provide a limited monopoly for a limited time (perhaps half a lifetime, then) as an incentive to publish, which was really the only way for others to be able to enjoy these new works. Since publication and distribution tended to be expensive (in addition to the time to form the ideas), some form of incentive was felt necessary.
Now that, for most art forms, production and publication can cost little to nothing, there isn't much holding people back from "publishing" a massive array of artworks (as the Internet has CLEARY showed us), and hence little need for incentives such as sales monopolies. (Movies are a notable exception, as many films necessarily cost so much to produce that it's hard to imagine just giving them away.)
This means that logically, copyright probably ought to be re-examined to see if it could be made shorter in duration and more limited in scope (not that doing so would necessarily be wise or a foregone conclusion). Instead, the last 30+ years has seen a massive increase in the duration of copyright and penalties for infringement. This has also conincided with massive PR campaigns to try to convince people that intellectual works are "property", copyright infringement is "stealing", etc. - terminology that lawmakers and courts up through the US Supreme Court took pains to discourage for 200 years.
Sicne in the big bargain that is copyright, the rights holders have not held up their end of the bargain, it's little surprise that "the people" have begun fighting back.
First, are you serious? You think the government bailouts negatively affected your 401k? The market was already doing that, due primarily to a lack of regulation. Such regulation can only come from the government, but government = evil according to you, so I guess there should have been LESS regulation or enforcement, but then your 401k would have lost even more than it did and you'd probably never get any of it back since most of the companies would have gone bankrupt and ceased to exist. And they'd probably foreclose on your home (when you lost your job and savings, having been laid off by one of those bankrupt companies and with your investments worth 0), and without social security and medicare and food stamps and all that, where would you be then?
The other problem is that if you are in the bottom 95% of the population, income-wise, you're probably not going to gain much through increased dividends, etc., certainly not like you would from a modest pay raise. (The top 1% does because most of their income comes from investments, not labor, and they have such high holdings that even a few percent increase can mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of extra income each year.) You even stand to gain a lot more through better government services or lower personal income taxes (less income taxation of the poor is needed if more of the money can come from corporate, investment, or other high-end taxes).
Note also in case you weren't paying attention for the past 50 years: Republicans do not cut government budgets. (I don't know that you're a Republican, just wanted to point this out.) They just spend the money on bombs and spying on people and putting people in jail, instead of spending it on helping people or investing in the future. But since they cut high-end taxes, they do increase deficits, and hence interest payments on the debt. Which means even less services or investment for your tax dollar.
This is the Republican paradox: slash taxes on the rich so that it takes higher taxes on the poor to pay for the very necessary government services that 99% of the population demands (and with good reason, as spreading the cost and risk and centralizing such things is almost always the best and cheapest way to do them, and many government investments result in much greater return to society down the line). Then they complain about how high poor people's taxes are (since, surprise, poor people pay about the same percent of total income to taxes - about 30% - as wealthy people do, regressive sales and payroll and other taxes canceling out slightly progressive income taxes). And they're right: taxes on poor people are too high, when many poor people can barely even pay rent on a crappy apartment or buy food for their family, let alone give 30% of it to the government. People also then complain about how crappy government services are, now that they've been cut due to insufficient funds and spending the money on useless crap and interest payments instead, so that Republicans can then say government = bad, and try to ram through MORE tax cuts for the rich, cut services even more (while still not cutting the overall budget, or taxes for poor people, one bit), complain more, etc.
This results in a continuous increase in concentration of wealth in the richest segment of the population. Which was the whole point.
So why do poor people vote for Republicans when it's not in their interest to do so? Republicans realized that a large subset of the population is stupid, ignorant, uneducated, racist, sexist, nervous, fearful, angry, and generally emotional rather than rational. Many of them happen to also be highly religious or hold to certain hot-button views. So all the Republicans need to do is pander to these people's base emotional "needs" and religious proclivities and hot-button issues to get their vote. Then they (the ones in power, who ACTUALLY represent the top 1% richest Americans) can run away with the money (including from the people that voted for them). And for the most part, the people that voted for them remain ignorant (I wonder why, if they watch Fox news all the time), and vote for the crooks again in the next election.
You're right, people end up paying the taxes. But when corporate taxes a low, the people who benefit are the ones who are already rich. You think a corporation is going to reduce prices or increase wages as a result of lower taxes? Maybe, but only after they RICHLY reward their shareholders and top executives.
Level of lithium found in the water tested in the Japan study: "Levels ranged from 0.7 to 59 micrograms per litre."
Level of lithium typically used as a therapeutic drug: 300+ milligrams per day.
Even if your water were at the high end and you drank several litres per day, that's still 1000x lower than the low end of therapeutic use.
See also: http://grande.nal.usda.gov/ibids/index.php?mode2=detail&origin=ibids_references&therow=207599
"Using data for 27 Texas counties from 1978-1987, it is shown that the incidence rates of suicide, homicide, and rape are significantly higher in counties whose drinking water supplies contain little or no lithium than in counties with water lithium levels ranging from 70-170 micrograms/L... ...arrests for possession of opium, cocaine, and their derivatives (morphine, heroin, and codeine) from 1981-1986 also produced statistically significant inverse associations"
I don't disagree with you that the whole idea of sex offender registries is horrible, but if anything would get you on the list short of kidnapping and raping someone at knifepoint, I'd think this would be it, and so long as we have such laws, everyone involved in this should DEFINITELY be on it - particuarly considering the "abuse of power" and "in a position of trust" angles.
I'm actually kind of shocked that anyone who encouraged, perpetrated or had knowledge of this at the time wasn't arrested, convicted, thrown in prison for a year or two, and forced to register for life. (And I'd think it would be a slam dunk for the victim to win a few million dollars off the school district, too.)
It makes all the checking to make sure sex offenders don't work at schools COMPLETELY LAUGHABLE. If you already worked at the school and didn't have a previous criminal record, it seems it's OK to sexually abuse and humiliate children all you like, so long as you are actually at school when it happens and you can come up with some sort of flimsy justification.
n Code: A Mathematical Adventure
by Sarah Flannery
Autobiographical book by an Irish girl about how she learned cryptography, number theory, etc. and won competitions in high school for her work.
http://www.amazon.com/Code-Mathematical-Adventure-Sarah-Flannery/dp/1861972717/ref=ed_oe_p
And you BELIEVE these resumes from India?
Oh, plus I might add that with the rising amount of college debt due to rising tuition, not many people want to stay in school forever unless the payoff is very large. Hence the continued interest in professional schools, but less so in other graduate programs.
There are plenty of people to replace you, but kids do cost-benefit analyses (often informally, but they do) of what to major in to prepare for a good career. Enrollment in various majors climbs and drops dramatically in response to the job market. So it's no mistake that not many people want to study CS (for example) these days - the pay seems to be dropping rather than rising for most in IT or software development, it's intellectually tough but also tedious, and many in the field are not treated all that well in terms of hours, appreciation, or work-life balance. ("It seems like a simple task; why isn't it done? Do more with less! Oh, and here's your cell phone for 24-hour on-call in case the server farts...even though you're a programmer, not a sysadmin.") Even fewer get PhDs, because in most fields it's perceived that this only prepares one to be a college professor, and could actually be a liability in hiring. How many people want to spend 5 years working on a degree that won't increase their employability or earnings anyway?
As has been pointed out above, this is not the issue. The issue is that companies have more leverage over H1B employees than they do over American citizens or green card holders, and hence can get away with paying them less and working them harder. It's clear that such abusive practices occur widely despite being illegal.
If H1B workers were truly on a level playing field in reality, not just theory, there would be fewer complaints - and I'm sure fewer calls to raise the H1B caps.
While I agree with your point in general, you used a really bad example, which illustrate the slanderous tactics of Republicans in arbitrarily applying negative-sounding terminology to their opponents without any basis in fact, rather than saying anything truthful about Democrats:
"Tax and spend democrats"? The last democratic president BALANCED THE BUDGET.
This reminds me of things people did with Marathon 10 years ago, for example:
http://webwonks.org/Marathon/Forge/Harper/Clock.html
The idea is that it's still easy to add more transistors, but no longer easy to make them run faster. That is why they are moving to multiple cores - they can add three (or even 15) cores far more easily (and using much less energy and putting off much less heat) than they can make a single core run at twice the clock rate.
Moore's law still exists in hardware, but it's manifested in a different way than it had been until a few years ago, due to physical limitations that don't appear to be going away any time soon. But software needs to adjust for those changes to benefit us in the real world.
Of course not all individual tasks can be sped up with parallelization, but many tasks, and the overall computing experience, probably can be.
From personal experience (myself and others), I'd like to say that I believe this theory is total bunk.
Due to the money, politics, bureaucracy, and general stupidity of doctors and the FDA involved, most of the messages people are receiving regarding antidepressants and suicide are wrong.
It's been true all along that in the early stages (first 1-2 months but particularly first 1-2 weeks), SSRIs at least (and maybe other classes of antidepressants) tend to INCREASE anxiety, and hence, suicidality. It's how they work - they force the brain to adjust, so that normal anxiety-inducing events then seem less significant by comparison. This early increase in anxiety was covered up and downplayed by the pharma companies, and not picked up by the FDA initially (or if they noticed that symptom, they didn't have the mental capacity to understand that anxiety might be linked to suicide).
After that, though, once the brain's receptors have had a chance to adjust (downregulate) to the new (higher) level of neurotransmitters - sort of turning down the volume on the microphone, if you will, antidepressants tend to dramatically decrease such symptoms. In the long run, they are remarkably effective at controlling anxiety and depression and preventing suicide.
But there is that very dangerous early period where the patient should be watched carefully, and the antidepressant level should be ramped up very slowly (which is not usually done). It could be that other drugs intended to calm them in the short term could be advisable at the start, but this hasn't been tested.
So when people point out this problem with suicide, and the FDA "studies" it (in their ususual way that misses the point and blurs out all the relevant details), they conclude that antidepressants always increase the risk of suicide, but probably only for teens, er, or maybe young adults too. (It's easier to see in teens since they are more susceptible to suicide generally, antidepressant or no antidepressant, but the effects probably extend to all age groups.)
So now there is an exaggerated scare over these drugs, which will lead to MORE suicide as more people (including teens) who could benefit from them make the mistake of avoiding them entirely. This extreme view just replaces the old extreme view that antidepressants never increased anxiety or suicidality. And neither view really helps patients or doctors to view antidepressants as useful drugs, while warning them to tread carefully in the early stages of treatment.
I believe the only thing that is undeveloped about most teenagers' brains is their experience - the knowledge of having gone through terribly difficult situations and survived, the ability to say "I can make it through this, because I have made it through other difficult situations in the past". They lack perspective, not development.
Serious depression, violent behavior, and suicide attempts are not and should not be considered a normal part of growing up. Especially when suicide is the third-leading cause of death among teens.
I am also not sure what you mean by "not tested for depression", when you go on to admit that Zoloft and Paxil were indeed tested for depression (both were approved by the FDA for depression in 1992). Yes, there is endless debate about the point at which depression is severe enough to require treatment, and what treatments to use first, but my guess is that the problem of undertreatment still outweighs the problem of overtreatment by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps. Though maybe not, if they're more concerned with increasing the SEO rank of their clients than themselves. I may have a biased point of view, but my own company is perhaps the best in the business at SEO (at least of companies that "play by the rules" and always try to be ethical), but pays little attention to boosting our own site. Most of the clients we'd be interested in wouldn't be finding us through random internet searches in any event. We get our clients (mostly Fortune 1000 companies) by demonstrating how the results we can achieve are far superior to their previous agency - that is, how we can save them tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Yes, the UK (and nearly all the rest of the world) are using a different modulation that works quite differently - and reportedly much better (and cheaper) in most circumstances.
Even in technical demonstrations to the US congress, that system (COFDM) worked much better, but they still chose 8-VSB.
Among other things, the US system really can't be used for any kind of mobile or moving reception. And it tends to work poorly in large cities due to poor handling of multipath interference.
Some speculate that it had to do with patents: 8-VSB patents were held mainly by Zenith, at the time a US company; those of COFDM were held by Japanese companies. But that's irrelevant now: since that time Zenith has been acquired by LG (Korea).
Other speculation centers around shady attempts to actually kill off free OTA (over the air) broadcast intentionally. Obviously cable and satellite companies would be happy about that, as would many others who'd love to use the bandwidth. Cell-phone companies would love to become the only viable option for mobile TV (for a monthly fee, of course).
Even the TV stations themselves might be happy as they could save a lot of money (no more towers, transmitters, modulators, etc., or the attendant electricity bills) without losing much audience - so long as "must-carry" rules ensured all their channels (multiple standard-definition channels as opposed to one high-definition channel) would be available on all cable and satellite systems.
It's difficult to tell, but it's probably somewhere between $150-200 billion/year. And no, it's not mostly paid for by drivers (through gas taxes, tolls and license/registration fees); it's mostly general-fund taxes, and sometimes stealing from the funds intended for transit, which means that some of that "transit" money is actually going to roads instead. (Similarly, local merchants and taxpayers pay for parking lots, which leads to higher prices and higher taxes.)
In one study in Texas, for instance, it was found that gas taxes paid for only 1/6th the cost of a highway over its lifetime (and that the tax would need to be $2.22/gallon to make up the difference).
Our economy might be "booming" if we concentrated more on our military, but only temporarily, until all the loans came due (loans which are held predominantly by the Chinese, the Saudis, and various others). Spending billions on war is not a sustainable form of "economic development".
Truth be told, if we'd spent as much on, say, solar energy, as we've spent in Iraq in the last 5 years, 100% of the United States' electricity usage could be coming from solar power TODAY. Yes, it's THAT much money.
Ditto for lots of other things.
No, military spending does not prevent us from doing everything we want, but military and "intelligence" spending IS diverting a LOT of money from other things that would dramatically benefit the people of our country, and the health of our economy.
As to arguing that we reduced our spending "too far", I'm not sure how spending as much on our military as the REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED (47% of the world's total military spending in 2003, for instance) isn't somehow excessive, when we only have maybe 5% of the world's population...
So how is it that we can manage to build 8-lane highways (complete with cloverleafs and overpasses and feeder roads), but can't manage to build a pair of tracks?
True, when we spend less than perhaps 5% as much on rail infrastructure as we do on highways, it stands to reason that the roads may win in some instances.
But rail is far more cost-effective to build than roads - one pair of tracks can carry the same traffic as a 6-8 lane highway, which is far more costly to construct and maintain, and requires much more land. (Not to mention all the parking lots and feeder roads.)
Trains can also run much faster (nobody is talking about people driving 100-200mph, and trains can run full speed even during commute hours when highways are slowed to a standstill). Trains use much less energy (less rolling resistance and aerodynamic resistance, for starters), emit far less pollution (using less energy, and often electrically powered), cost less to operate and maintain, and are far safer.
The only thing they lack is door-to-door convenience and arbitrary schedules. (But is there really much benefit if you're stuck in traffic and have to pay $20 for parking? On the other hand, how about letting you read or do work or sleep while on the train?) How much are we willing to pay, in dollars, pollution, wasted time, and reliance on foreign oil, for that (sometimes) convenience?
Trains also have similar benefits over airplanes for relatively short trips (anything less than about 2-4 hours, depending on the situation).
Of course, these are all THEORETICAL benefits, which are only realized if we actually make the proper investments. Since we in the USA have spent the last 75 years trying to kill trains rather than investing in them, we only rarely get to experience these benefits.
The trains we have these days are generally slow, go to only a few places, run on very limited schedules, are not particularly clean or comfortable, and have few on-board ameneties. And since they don't benefit from the same level of taxpayer support as roads do, more of their costs are passed on to the passenger, so they don't seem to have as much cost advantage to the end user.
Amtrak may not be (but how could they, with the derision with which Congress tends to treat them, and their budgets?), but see, for instance:
http://www.sehsr.org/
http://www.midwesthsr.org/
http://www.thsrtc.com/
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/