As soon as you fund it through taxes, you're forcing the citizenry to fund it
My point is that the citizenry as a whole should have the right to direct their taxes wherever they please. If the whole town wants to forego sewer maintenance and running water and put the savings into lottery tickets, well, it's their money. The government is of the people. The people are the government. This is far more true at a local level than any other. Leaving the question of taxation's morality aside, why should the legislature in some far-off state capital be dictating what a town may or may not spend money on?
Talking about public eduction makes my point very well. The public school system sucks. The private school systems are prohibatively expensive because they can't compete fairly.
That's a tremendously broad generalization. I went to a public high school, and it was one of the best schools in New York, maybe even the country.
Private schools aren't made more expensive by the presence of public schools; their tuition rates reflect the actual cost of providing facilities and education and carrying insurance. If anything, having a cheaper option available keeps prices down. You don't see Dell raising their prices in order to compete with Apple or Alienware.
What "forcing?" It's local government. Vote against the resolution. Write a letter to the newspaper. Go to a town meeting and make a scene. Contact your local officials. They should be accessible; it's not like they're U.S. Senators.
Doing that forces people who don't even want broadband to fund it. That's anti-competitive. That's a monopoly.
Is that why there's no such thing as private schools or bottled water or security guards or generators or backyard gardens? Nothing prevents a private provider from offering the same service, or a better version of it.
Why not? If the citizens of a town are willing to allow their local government to allocate tax revenues towards providing broadband access, who are you -- or their state government, more relevantly -- to disallow it?
Sure is. No one is suggesting granting municipalities monopoly rights to provide broadband, munis just want to be able to offer it alongside private telcos/cablecos.
The sky doesn't need pigment to have a color. If a thing is scattering or emitting or reflecting one color of light, then the thing is that color for as long as it does so.
On the other hand, the sky is very often not blue. It's often black or various shades of grey, orange, hell I've seen it look green with bad thunderstorms coming in. Even mauve.
Two, don't get pissed at OOo, talk to Apple. If Apple wants other apps to be able to work natively on its platform, they're going to have to open up. I don't see how anyone expects significant work to be done when everything has to be reversed engineered.
What the hell are you talking about? Apple's IDE is free beer, and the vast majority of its APIs are published. Reverse-engineering is only necessary if you want to, say, change the fundamental behavior of the Finder (examples), or interface with the occasional inexplicably undocumented API (e.g. iSync.) You certainly don't need it to write a native office suite.
You should know better than to parrot Dvorak. "W3schools.com" is not the W3C, and browser ID stats don't reflect market share. Besides, Apple's been profitable with a tiny market share for years now.
"DRMed music" is not the product space, "digital music" is. If the iPod couldn't play regular.mp3s you might have a point, but here in the non-hypothetical world... you don't.
Your assumption that you can appeal to four-year olds or adults but not both is a false dichotomy. From an interview with Pixar's Craig Good:
NRO: The father of five, I'm something of an expert on animated feature films, if I do say so myself -- and Pixar productions are simply and incomparably the best. Your stuff delights my three-year old, my thirteen-year-old, the three kids in between, and their parents and grandparents. How do you guys do it?
Good: Simple. We don't make movies for kids. We make movies for adults, actually ourselves, and then just make sure there's nothing in them that the little ones shouldn't see. The local cineplex is littered with movies made by studios who want to second-guess what the audience wants. We find we get better results by making what we want, and then assuming that there are other people like us out there.
If audiences in general are underestimated, kids really get the patronizing treatment. Two things are often forgotten about kids. One: They have no taste. They will watch just about anything. This is normal and healthy. Taste comes later. Two: They are not stupid! Kids are born intelligent, and there's no good reason to make dumbed-down entertainment for them.
You have a point about the limited resources, but what kind of ass-backwards value system do you live in where putting a check in the mail is the very height of self-sacrificing altruism but helping people rebuild their houses is merely a token feel-good gesture?
This tragedy, which cost thousands upon thousands more lives than 9/11, was not preventable.
Unpreventable tragedies: File under "Shit Happens." It's not that we don't care, it's that there's nothing to be done about it that's not already being done. There's no perpetrator with demands to answer. Maybe it's because I don't watch Fox News, but I've seen plenty of news items on continuing relief efforts and speculation on how to minimize the damage of future tsunamis; what angle would you suggest ongoing coverage take? "Thousands Remain Dead"? "Orphans Are Sad"? That's not news.
I would wager it's the guys with the biggest guns and the willingness to use them who would get off planet [...] how would you get the ground crew to cooperate?
I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one willing to volunteer to get those assholes off the planet. Of course, it'd have to be a one-way trip...
"Mt. St. Edelite?" You sure it isn't "mountains stayin' in a line?" This is the problem with lyrics sites -- one person does a transcription and they all just copy it from each other, propagating mondegreens.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that the citizenry as a whole should have the right to direct their taxes wherever they please. If the whole town wants to forego sewer maintenance and running water and put the savings into lottery tickets, well, it's their money. The government is of the people. The people are the government. This is far more true at a local level than any other. Leaving the question of taxation's morality aside, why should the legislature in some far-off state capital be dictating what a town may or may not spend money on?
Talking about public eduction makes my point very well. The public school system sucks. The private school systems are prohibatively expensive because they can't compete fairly.
That's a tremendously broad generalization. I went to a public high school, and it was one of the best schools in New York, maybe even the country.
Private schools aren't made more expensive by the presence of public schools; their tuition rates reflect the actual cost of providing facilities and education and carrying insurance. If anything, having a cheaper option available keeps prices down. You don't see Dell raising their prices in order to compete with Apple or Alienware.
What "forcing?" It's local government. Vote against the resolution. Write a letter to the newspaper. Go to a town meeting and make a scene. Contact your local officials. They should be accessible; it's not like they're U.S. Senators.
Doing that forces people who don't even want broadband to fund it. That's anti-competitive. That's a monopoly.
Is that why there's no such thing as private schools or bottled water or security guards or generators or backyard gardens? Nothing prevents a private provider from offering the same service, or a better version of it.
Why not? If the citizens of a town are willing to allow their local government to allocate tax revenues towards providing broadband access, who are you -- or their state government, more relevantly -- to disallow it?
Sure is. No one is suggesting granting municipalities monopoly rights to provide broadband, munis just want to be able to offer it alongside private telcos/cablecos.
To what end? Why would a municipality object to private enterprise offering services to its citizens?
On the other hand, the sky is very often not blue. It's often black or various shades of grey, orange, hell I've seen it look green with bad thunderstorms coming in. Even mauve.
You'd think they'd know about the Duke Blue Devils or the Arizona State Sun Devils. Neither one in Texas, but surely they've played football against Texas schools.
In the New Yorker?
Please tell us you don't really think Giger is kid-friendly. Or that you don't have children.
You had to do a search? Was that before or after you read the article, which mentions, y'know who he is?
What the hell are you talking about? Apple's IDE is free beer, and the vast majority of its APIs are published. Reverse-engineering is only necessary if you want to, say, change the fundamental behavior of the Finder (examples), or interface with the occasional inexplicably undocumented API (e.g. iSync.) You certainly don't need it to write a native office suite.
You should know better than to parrot Dvorak. "W3schools.com" is not the W3C, and browser ID stats don't reflect market share. Besides, Apple's been profitable with a tiny market share for years now.
They didn't do a live webcast this year.
My CD collection begs to differ.
"DRMed music" is not the product space, "digital music" is. If the iPod couldn't play regular .mp3s you might have a point, but here in the non-hypothetical world... you don't.
You have a point about the limited resources, but what kind of ass-backwards value system do you live in where putting a check in the mail is the very height of self-sacrificing altruism but helping people rebuild their houses is merely a token feel-good gesture?
Unpreventable tragedies: File under "Shit Happens." It's not that we don't care, it's that there's nothing to be done about it that's not already being done. There's no perpetrator with demands to answer. Maybe it's because I don't watch Fox News, but I've seen plenty of news items on continuing relief efforts and speculation on how to minimize the damage of future tsunamis; what angle would you suggest ongoing coverage take? "Thousands Remain Dead"? "Orphans Are Sad"? That's not news.
I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one willing to volunteer to get those assholes off the planet. Of course, it'd have to be a one-way trip...
"Mt. St. Edelite?" You sure it isn't "mountains stayin' in a line?" This is the problem with lyrics sites -- one person does a transcription and they all just copy it from each other, propagating mondegreens.
Just in case you don't know, the whole "I'm crushing your head" thing is from Kids In The Hall.
A link to the .torrent?
I wish more writers understood that a "two-way mirror" would be a mirror on both sides of the glass.
Could you cite a source for that illegal-to-volunteer info please?
That Masamune Shirow mouse is nifty too, but not ninety bucks' worth.