Iterative types of innovation, such as the kind that R&D departments do is one thing.
2 guys in a garage style innovation, is another thing entirely.
I'd bet that second kind - the kind that then to revolutionize, rather than incrementally improve - will be the kind to suffer more (especially in the U.S.) when there simply isn't enough financial stability amongst the working class, which produces kids who become the creative class, to create the kind of free time and optimism that's needed for those people to create revolutionary new things.
No one is discussing the fix either, at least not in the U.S. Maybe they think the iterative kind of innovation (if that's even still going on) is enough to compete with China and the E.U.
I disagree. I think they are incorrectly trained in normal high schools. They either simply lose faith in school altogether (and drop out - I don't believe more people are stupid now than they used to be, that doesn't explain higher drop out rates) or they develop bad habits which make them good for paper pushing jobs (just like high school!), or succeeding only in more school (just like high school!).
The public school system in the U.S. and I suspect in Japan as well, are geared toward making factory workers that can show up on time, learn enough to do their jobs, then turn their brains off and perform.
If we want engineers out of college, we'll need to re-jigger the earlier school systems. Blaming the recipients of a bad training will fix nothing.
In my version there was one slapstick moment at the end, after a lot of tough situations for Indiana that were outside of his control (the Nazi's showing up and constantly interrupting what he was doing, the threat of the stampeding elephant). The inclussion of the loaded weapon that he's struggling to get a hold of, and the fact that the Nazi ends up holding it at the end, if only for a brief moment, adds to the tension.
In the case of Jar Jar he just bumbled around the whole time and shot everything around him randomly. No tension, no real danger, since all he really had to do was screw up over and over (way more than one time) and he would clearly be safe because he would kill the entire apposing army, never really facing an individual or any real group threat.
It's quite different. Compare the tank scene in the third Indiana film with the Jar Jar garbage, and you'll get the picture. Indiana struggles hard, and usually just happens to get lucky in the end. Jar Jar just screws up, end to end. Totally different.
I actually saw that trailer, and if you watch closely, you can see that they have completely changed the formula of Indiana Jones movies, and even in the trailer showed the kind of humor they will have in the movie - completely out of character for Indiana (far too many quips during the operation), and really off the wall in terms of scenario - kinda watered down Jar Jar style slapstick - none of the humorous Indiana stuff.
He basically makes a stupid quip, pulls a rocket launcher out of the back seat of the truck he's in (he's in the back seat) makes another stupid quip, then fires the rocket through the front wind shield at the bad guys - all with bad timing.
If it was old style Indiana, he would have skipped the quips, scrambled frantically for something that would get them out of their predicament, found the rocket laungher, gotten dragged out of the window of the truck, losing the rocket launcher in the process, used the elephant (they were in a jungle) running next to the truck from 3 scenes earlier to help kick himself back onto the roof of the truck, grabbed the rocket launcher, lost the rocket launcher to the nazi, and had the nazi accidentally shoot the rocket at the bad guys after he got knocked off the truck by a tree branch or a vine or something. Then after it was all done, Indiana would have had some kind of one liner to seal the deal.
It is very reasonable to assume that in scope of this very political topic, your references were based on common propaganda, propaganda that has been the justification for most of the lunacy and cowardice of the last few years in this country. I'd bet I could find almost the exact phrasing you used elsewhere, it was so lock step.
I was right to read all of that into what you wrote, but on the fourth day of a aggravating flu, with a fever, at work on a Monday, I probably over reached.
The real problem I have with comments like the one you put forward is they don't help anything. The only real purpose of those kinds of arguments is to silence decent or distract us or make us hesitate when someone comes up with some plan that will eat into your liberties, savings and time, and would not likely work in the end anyway. That's it. It's designed to cow cowards - or to put it more leniently, to take advantage of people's fears.
There is simply no way we can predict every possible way some depraved group or crazed individual will try to attack something in the U.S. - even though in this case we did predict the plane thing, and did identify the guys who ended up doing it, and simply didn't care enough to do something about it. I should also add that we actually do have people who sit around and think of this stuff all day long. Their work is dependent on the other people doing their part - the elected ones.
Just to add to the water thing, it's also not very easy to put enough poison into that water system to have any kind of desired impact - no way that would go unnoticed - if the people in charge are paying attention.
So to get past your ridiculous juxtaposition - ""It hasn't happened yet" is a damned weak argument." is the weak argument. There is a near infinite number of extremely unlikely things that have not happened yet, and there is simply no way to predict them all - or to worry about them all - and is certainly no way to prepare for every one of them. It would be a huge wast of liberty, time and cash to even attempt it - especially in the face of all the more mundane common routes to our own peril (bridges collapsing, levies breaking, you take your pick). The last 6 years have surely taught us that much.
That tired argument needs to die a sudden quick death.
Those men were able to fly the plain into the towers because the people who were supposed to be keeping a watchful eye were asleep at their posts (to be clear, the top level people were asleep - the FBI and others were able to clearly identify most of the hijackers well before they were able to carry out their plans).
Please spare me that ridiculous bullshit. I'm so tired of it, and it does nothing - absolutely nothing - to move anyone in a direction that would prevent it from happening again. Fear will not lead to a solution.
Grow up. Sniveling cowards should keep their opinions of their own weakness to themselves. That goes double to the coward that modded you up.
1) The potential for abuse regarding government's ability to keep information secret is well documented, and a much larger problem for the security of the people than access to the details of a well designed security system.
2) The OP made no references to free speech, which is a whole different ball of wax. Encouraging others to commit a crime already puts somebody at a multitude of legal risks (inciting a riot, accessory to murder, etc.).
There's really no need to be afraid anyway, it would be incredibly easy to poison the NYC water supply for example (there are places where the century old wooden water pipes that carry the water to that huge city can be seen by the side of the highway), and it hasn't happened yet.
It's important that we not to let our fears of bogeymen lead us to sacrifice our freedoms.
I say it's more a response to the hassle from the attempt, and an attempt to ward off stupid lawsuits.
It's expensive and time consuming to fight the government, and relatively easy to agree to put up the appearance of self regulation (like what lawyers and doctors do).
To add to that, there also seems to be a lot more resistance to Microsoft attempts to embrace and extend, most of us having lived through the stagnant IE6 for far too long - and the java thing, etc. We all know what they are about, and are skeptical of anything that looks like that strategy (this includes their recent renewed interest in IE and standards, which is all about the mobile market to compete with iPhone and WebKit - we'll see how long they keep up their standards push).
Case in point - MS recently started contributing patches to PHP, and even released their own version of a fastcgi module (and seem to have broken the old fastcgi module with a security update or something). Sure enough, Wordpress currently will not install on PHP running on IIS with the official MS fastcgi due to an http header error (not that you can tell that from the gobbledygook error message you get from IIS).
They just will never learn, but the rest of us have. We'll be switching to LAMP soon.
I think you have that slightly backwards. Geeks are curious people that require a lot of information before they are comfortable making a decision (this includes social decisions - and the human stuff is the hardest stuff for geeks to wrap their heads around).
What's changed is that those geeks have more access to research and data on human social behavior, and are therefor more likely to figure out how to act "normal" earlier in life, where in previous generations, those same people may never have had the opportunity to learn quite as much on the same topic, since they were so alienated.
So I think the geeks look more normal. Average people are therefor more likely to take their opinions on a variety of topics, and that makes them seem more intelligent. It's more the geeks getting normal, less the masses getting smarter.
When are we going to give up on these stupid over priced, badly performing, and impossible to trust machines.
I mean come on, some people have suggested (NAACP) that they even reduce voter intimidation. That is in itself proof that these machines are not to be trusted. There is only one reason any political party that has in the past engaged in voter intimidation would stop - because they no longer need to because another avenue to cheat has opened up.
That and a dozen other reasons - we should just give up, and spend less on the better solutions. Hand counted, paper ballots - cheapest most accurate way to vote - why bother with these damn machines.
The problem with voting machine has never been the robustness of them. The problem is one of incentives, and worse, political incentives.
Banks have a great deal to lose if their ATMs fowl up and someone loses some money.
Voting machines do not have the same incentive to be accurate - in fact, the incentives are the opposite for the politicians who must pay for these. Politicians have always, and will always try to steal votes. It's that simple. If you make it easier to do, by making stupid machines that are set up at a central location, you are inviting that kind of theft. It's simply too easy for a small number (or even just one) of people to manipulate these things - and there can be no check and balance on them, since you can't look inside them while they are running to be sure they haven't been tampered with (unless you have the ability to look at the running source code - which you don't).
Voting machines can never, ever be made trust worthy - ever.
We really should stop spending all this money on a system that will simply never ever work. If you can't look in the machine and see what it's doing (like with a electronic machine) then you simply can't trust it, unless the incentives are in the right place. And they are most assuredly not in the right place with voting machines.
I guess as we like to do in the United States of America, we will figure this out, and do the right thing in the end - after we have exhausted all other options.
This is the wrong solution to our current energy problem. We need to switch off of fuels that dump green house gasses into the atmosphere, not create cheaper ways to make more. Those technologies are also further along as has been pointed out by other comments in this thread.
The user who prefers tall monitors for coding, to short (like myself) could always stand the laptop on it's side, and use a USB keyboard!:-)
In all seriousness, I use my monitor at work in portrait mode for this very reason. It's surprising how well IDEs work in portrait mode, almost like they were designed to be run that way. I find it odd that so few people run their monitors that way for work involving large amounts of text, like writing and programming. It's even great for the net, which also utilizes very large amounts of text.
Criminals are often at least revered as heroes during times when the government feels hopelessly out of touch with the will of the people.
In the US during the great depression, and during prohibition, it was often the bootleggers and the outlaws that were the heroes to the common man. Today you see the same thing with the glorification of gang leaders, and gang life. Jack Bower - same thing, the guy that's willing to break the dumb law, because it's the right thing to do.
The fact that you (and me frankly) see these "criminals" at the pirate bay, as standing on the "moral high ground" is the exact same kind of thing. The government is simply out of touch, here in the U.S. and apparently so is the Swedish government too.
Lawyers operate in a self regulated industry - which really means not regulated at all. This is what you get in that situation, a group of knuckle heads all covering each other butts to make sure the party doesn't end.
(I rambled here an there, but I don't have time to edit it. It's still fun though.:-) )
I do realize that local roads tend to be built by private contractors. Most things that are built are built by private contractors, even when government funded.
They turn the maintenance over the government for very good reason though, and that's the part that people don't like to admit.
When it comes to economic issues, there are two primary areas that the government has responsibility for. One is providing a service in which there is no profit - like road maintenance. The other is providing access to services that the population has deemed a human right. Today the debate has turn over whether or not access to medical care is a human right - I believe it is, and we can't cover everyone if we don't have a government program to do it. The same goes for schools - basic education is a right, and a necessity.
If we are going to have a vibrant functional market system, then we need to have fair access to that system, and we need to maximize the opportunity for as many people as we can (ideally for everyone, but I'll settle for as many as possible). This means making sure that people are prepared enough (education) and healthy enough (healthcare) to be able to participate. And the same logic can be applied to most other public services, they are all essential to proper market function.
It also does mean making sure we don't over regulate, but also that we don't under-regulate - we don't need these mortgage problems, and we don't need individual or small groups of abusive companies stifling whole markets. Over dominate companies can stifle a market just as effectively as an over regulating government.
About that usage tax idea (the road toll idea) - usage taxes are extremely regressive. More working people use roads to commute to work every day, but you can't tell me that the bosses that own the place those guys work at aren't reaping huge benefits from that system. Taxes should be levied based on who gets the most benefit from a system, and not against the individuals that may use them the most. The same thing goes for healthcare - people who have cancer will use the healthcare system more than healthy people. They should not be required to pay more for that service. We all get the benefit of that system, bosses more than workers, and we should pay for that system accordingly.
Finally, just to answer the public school problem - yeah, public schools are in decline, but I believe it's not a problem that is currently being addressed by anyone, although the home schoolers are definitely reacting to a problem that most of them probably haven't understood, but can all identify.
Public schools need a new mission statement. I hinted at what that would be above, but they were originally set up to convert farmers to factory workers, and they still function the same way as they did over a hundred years ago, when they were created. That's the problem, it's the reason they are seen as ineffective, and why no one wants to pay for them.
The fix is to refocus them on preparing kids to take advantage of our economic system, by teaching them how it really works, and by providing actual useful skills to take advantage of the opportunities that an open market provides.
You really do believe that everyone starts at the same starting line. Are you really so misinformed?
People send their kids to private schools for prestige, and for access to specific social and economic class groups, and because they can - and not usually because they "pulled themselves up by their boot straps" - and they know it. That work is usually done by previous generations.
They are not stupid, but they are not any brighter either than every else, and the education, the a secondary consideration of that access they pay for, is demonstrably less effective. Of course it makes sense that they would achieve less, when you consider how much smaller the talent pools is for them to draw from.
I'm really not sure how your world view allows you to believe that simply because these people are born with large sums of money, that they have somehow earned what they have, through any kid of merit. It's just weird.
> Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
You call it a "voucher program" I call it immediately inflated prices to cash in on government handouts. No one knows how to cash in on government money like private business.
> Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
Public schools, even when woefully underfunded as they are now, have always outperformed private schools.
Additionally, most of the 37 countries that rank higher than the US in terms of quality of service with regards to the healthcare industries, are public systems (socialized medicine). Many of them are privately run, and government funded (like single payer systems), and can rank near the top - despite most of them costing far less per capita, than the US's completely private system.
To again attempt to build some common ground, I have no problem with government hiring private companies to provide public services (single payer healthcare for example). That's just effective governance - when used appropriately - one type fix doesn't work for every situation - privately contracted bridge maintenance contracts, like they did with the Brooklyn bridge recently, don't work out well.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative (schools, roads and the like) that also provide for access that is as fair and public as the services you say are inadequate.
For what it's worth, I agree that the US government isn't doing what it needs to. I can't say I agree that that failure means that government can't work, it just means that the US government isn't working.
I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean, that at some future date, there will be drivers and maybe a patch for UT3 that will let me run the UT3 PhysX demos on my 8800GT - without PhysX hardware?
Governments have the right and the duty to protect the relatively free market from abusive monopolies.
That's exactly right. If we want freedom in the market, we need rules and oversight to make sure freedom remains, and companies and cartels don't dominate. Of course that means the end of Freeman's "free-lunch for the already dominant players market" which is what he seems to have meant by that term. Humans are such symbol shifters, and it's great to see the meaning of that particular symbol shift.
Does that mean Microsoft and Adobe (are they big enough to count here) are a small minority in the proprietary software? I find it easier to list successful Open Source companies vs. successful proprietary ones. Also, from this guy's comments, it sounds like he simply misunderstood his opportunities to make a profit on this invention - that has nothing to do with proprietary vs. open source software. That's just plain business savvy.
If inflation is 7.5% (don't know what is actually is, but for the sake of argument, I'll use 7.5%), and you only increase your spending on a particular program 5%, then you have actually cut spending against what is needed to cover costs. You could run the comparison against the natural growth of that market too if that makes it easier to understand, or a combination of things (maybe even the simple rising cost of healthcare). It takes nuance to understand this stuff. It's not as black and white as most would like it to be.
Additionally, it's ludicrous to cut social programs in the name of tight budgets, and then increase spending on spy satellites and fruitless military spending - neither help with security, both are way too expensive, and both of which are ready to be easily abused for various purposes - including political.
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Iterative types of innovation, such as the kind that R&D departments do is one thing.
2 guys in a garage style innovation, is another thing entirely.
I'd bet that second kind - the kind that then to revolutionize, rather than incrementally improve - will be the kind to suffer more (especially in the U.S.) when there simply isn't enough financial stability amongst the working class, which produces kids who become the creative class, to create the kind of free time and optimism that's needed for those people to create revolutionary new things.
No one is discussing the fix either, at least not in the U.S. Maybe they think the iterative kind of innovation (if that's even still going on) is enough to compete with China and the E.U.
I disagree. I think they are incorrectly trained in normal high schools. They either simply lose faith in school altogether (and drop out - I don't believe more people are stupid now than they used to be, that doesn't explain higher drop out rates) or they develop bad habits which make them good for paper pushing jobs (just like high school!), or succeeding only in more school (just like high school!).
The public school system in the U.S. and I suspect in Japan as well, are geared toward making factory workers that can show up on time, learn enough to do their jobs, then turn their brains off and perform.
If we want engineers out of college, we'll need to re-jigger the earlier school systems. Blaming the recipients of a bad training will fix nothing.
In my version there was one slapstick moment at the end, after a lot of tough situations for Indiana that were outside of his control (the Nazi's showing up and constantly interrupting what he was doing, the threat of the stampeding elephant). The inclussion of the loaded weapon that he's struggling to get a hold of, and the fact that the Nazi ends up holding it at the end, if only for a brief moment, adds to the tension.
In the case of Jar Jar he just bumbled around the whole time and shot everything around him randomly. No tension, no real danger, since all he really had to do was screw up over and over (way more than one time) and he would clearly be safe because he would kill the entire apposing army, never really facing an individual or any real group threat.
It's quite different. Compare the tank scene in the third Indiana film with the Jar Jar garbage, and you'll get the picture. Indiana struggles hard, and usually just happens to get lucky in the end. Jar Jar just screws up, end to end. Totally different.
I actually saw that trailer, and if you watch closely, you can see that they have completely changed the formula of Indiana Jones movies, and even in the trailer showed the kind of humor they will have in the movie - completely out of character for Indiana (far too many quips during the operation), and really off the wall in terms of scenario - kinda watered down Jar Jar style slapstick - none of the humorous Indiana stuff.
He basically makes a stupid quip, pulls a rocket launcher out of the back seat of the truck he's in (he's in the back seat) makes another stupid quip, then fires the rocket through the front wind shield at the bad guys - all with bad timing.
If it was old style Indiana, he would have skipped the quips, scrambled frantically for something that would get them out of their predicament, found the rocket laungher, gotten dragged out of the window of the truck, losing the rocket launcher in the process, used the elephant (they were in a jungle) running next to the truck from 3 scenes earlier to help kick himself back onto the roof of the truck, grabbed the rocket launcher, lost the rocket launcher to the nazi, and had the nazi accidentally shoot the rocket at the bad guys after he got knocked off the truck by a tree branch or a vine or something. Then after it was all done, Indiana would have had some kind of one liner to seal the deal.
This movie is going to be bad.
It is very reasonable to assume that in scope of this very political topic, your references were based on common propaganda, propaganda that has been the justification for most of the lunacy and cowardice of the last few years in this country. I'd bet I could find almost the exact phrasing you used elsewhere, it was so lock step.
I was right to read all of that into what you wrote, but on the fourth day of a aggravating flu, with a fever, at work on a Monday, I probably over reached.
The real problem I have with comments like the one you put forward is they don't help anything. The only real purpose of those kinds of arguments is to silence decent or distract us or make us hesitate when someone comes up with some plan that will eat into your liberties, savings and time, and would not likely work in the end anyway. That's it. It's designed to cow cowards - or to put it more leniently, to take advantage of people's fears.
There is simply no way we can predict every possible way some depraved group or crazed individual will try to attack something in the U.S. - even though in this case we did predict the plane thing, and did identify the guys who ended up doing it, and simply didn't care enough to do something about it. I should also add that we actually do have people who sit around and think of this stuff all day long. Their work is dependent on the other people doing their part - the elected ones.
Just to add to the water thing, it's also not very easy to put enough poison into that water system to have any kind of desired impact - no way that would go unnoticed - if the people in charge are paying attention.
So to get past your ridiculous juxtaposition - ""It hasn't happened yet" is a damned weak argument." is the weak argument. There is a near infinite number of extremely unlikely things that have not happened yet, and there is simply no way to predict them all - or to worry about them all - and is certainly no way to prepare for every one of them. It would be a huge wast of liberty, time and cash to even attempt it - especially in the face of all the more mundane common routes to our own peril (bridges collapsing, levies breaking, you take your pick). The last 6 years have surely taught us that much.
That tired argument needs to die a sudden quick death.
Those men were able to fly the plain into the towers because the people who were supposed to be keeping a watchful eye were asleep at their posts (to be clear, the top level people were asleep - the FBI and others were able to clearly identify most of the hijackers well before they were able to carry out their plans).
Please spare me that ridiculous bullshit. I'm so tired of it, and it does nothing - absolutely nothing - to move anyone in a direction that would prevent it from happening again. Fear will not lead to a solution.
Grow up. Sniveling cowards should keep their opinions of their own weakness to themselves. That goes double to the coward that modded you up.
1) The potential for abuse regarding government's ability to keep information secret is well documented, and a much larger problem for the security of the people than access to the details of a well designed security system.
2) The OP made no references to free speech, which is a whole different ball of wax. Encouraging others to commit a crime already puts somebody at a multitude of legal risks (inciting a riot, accessory to murder, etc.).
There's really no need to be afraid anyway, it would be incredibly easy to poison the NYC water supply for example (there are places where the century old wooden water pipes that carry the water to that huge city can be seen by the side of the highway), and it hasn't happened yet.
It's important that we not to let our fears of bogeymen lead us to sacrifice our freedoms.
I say it's more a response to the hassle from the attempt, and an attempt to ward off stupid lawsuits.
It's expensive and time consuming to fight the government, and relatively easy to agree to put up the appearance of self regulation (like what lawyers and doctors do).
To add to that, there also seems to be a lot more resistance to Microsoft attempts to embrace and extend, most of us having lived through the stagnant IE6 for far too long - and the java thing, etc. We all know what they are about, and are skeptical of anything that looks like that strategy (this includes their recent renewed interest in IE and standards, which is all about the mobile market to compete with iPhone and WebKit - we'll see how long they keep up their standards push).
Case in point - MS recently started contributing patches to PHP, and even released their own version of a fastcgi module (and seem to have broken the old fastcgi module with a security update or something). Sure enough, Wordpress currently will not install on PHP running on IIS with the official MS fastcgi due to an http header error (not that you can tell that from the gobbledygook error message you get from IIS).
They just will never learn, but the rest of us have. We'll be switching to LAMP soon.
I think you have that slightly backwards. Geeks are curious people that require a lot of information before they are comfortable making a decision (this includes social decisions - and the human stuff is the hardest stuff for geeks to wrap their heads around).
What's changed is that those geeks have more access to research and data on human social behavior, and are therefor more likely to figure out how to act "normal" earlier in life, where in previous generations, those same people may never have had the opportunity to learn quite as much on the same topic, since they were so alienated.
So I think the geeks look more normal. Average people are therefor more likely to take their opinions on a variety of topics, and that makes them seem more intelligent. It's more the geeks getting normal, less the masses getting smarter.
When are we going to give up on these stupid over priced, badly performing, and impossible to trust machines.
I mean come on, some people have suggested (NAACP) that they even reduce voter intimidation. That is in itself proof that these machines are not to be trusted. There is only one reason any political party that has in the past engaged in voter intimidation would stop - because they no longer need to because another avenue to cheat has opened up.
That and a dozen other reasons - we should just give up, and spend less on the better solutions. Hand counted, paper ballots - cheapest most accurate way to vote - why bother with these damn machines.
Oh here we go.
The problem with voting machine has never been the robustness of them. The problem is one of incentives, and worse, political incentives.
Banks have a great deal to lose if their ATMs fowl up and someone loses some money.
Voting machines do not have the same incentive to be accurate - in fact, the incentives are the opposite for the politicians who must pay for these. Politicians have always, and will always try to steal votes. It's that simple. If you make it easier to do, by making stupid machines that are set up at a central location, you are inviting that kind of theft. It's simply too easy for a small number (or even just one) of people to manipulate these things - and there can be no check and balance on them, since you can't look inside them while they are running to be sure they haven't been tampered with (unless you have the ability to look at the running source code - which you don't).
Voting machines can never, ever be made trust worthy - ever.
We really should stop spending all this money on a system that will simply never ever work. If you can't look in the machine and see what it's doing (like with a electronic machine) then you simply can't trust it, unless the incentives are in the right place. And they are most assuredly not in the right place with voting machines.
I guess as we like to do in the United States of America, we will figure this out, and do the right thing in the end - after we have exhausted all other options.
Sheesh.
This is the wrong solution to our current energy problem. We need to switch off of fuels that dump green house gasses into the atmosphere, not create cheaper ways to make more. Those technologies are also further along as has been pointed out by other comments in this thread.
The user who prefers tall monitors for coding, to short (like myself) could always stand the laptop on it's side, and use a USB keyboard! :-)
In all seriousness, I use my monitor at work in portrait mode for this very reason. It's surprising how well IDEs work in portrait mode, almost like they were designed to be run that way. I find it odd that so few people run their monitors that way for work involving large amounts of text, like writing and programming. It's even great for the net, which also utilizes very large amounts of text.
Criminals are often at least revered as heroes during times when the government feels hopelessly out of touch with the will of the people.
In the US during the great depression, and during prohibition, it was often the bootleggers and the outlaws that were the heroes to the common man. Today you see the same thing with the glorification of gang leaders, and gang life. Jack Bower - same thing, the guy that's willing to break the dumb law, because it's the right thing to do.
The fact that you (and me frankly) see these "criminals" at the pirate bay, as standing on the "moral high ground" is the exact same kind of thing. The government is simply out of touch, here in the U.S. and apparently so is the Swedish government too.
Lawyers operate in a self regulated industry - which really means not regulated at all. This is what you get in that situation, a group of knuckle heads all covering each other butts to make sure the party doesn't end.
(I rambled here an there, but I don't have time to edit it. It's still fun though. :-) )
I do realize that local roads tend to be built by private contractors. Most things that are built are built by private contractors, even when government funded.
They turn the maintenance over the government for very good reason though, and that's the part that people don't like to admit.
When it comes to economic issues, there are two primary areas that the government has responsibility for. One is providing a service in which there is no profit - like road maintenance. The other is providing access to services that the population has deemed a human right. Today the debate has turn over whether or not access to medical care is a human right - I believe it is, and we can't cover everyone if we don't have a government program to do it. The same goes for schools - basic education is a right, and a necessity.
If we are going to have a vibrant functional market system, then we need to have fair access to that system, and we need to maximize the opportunity for as many people as we can (ideally for everyone, but I'll settle for as many as possible). This means making sure that people are prepared enough (education) and healthy enough (healthcare) to be able to participate. And the same logic can be applied to most other public services, they are all essential to proper market function.
It also does mean making sure we don't over regulate, but also that we don't under-regulate - we don't need these mortgage problems, and we don't need individual or small groups of abusive companies stifling whole markets. Over dominate companies can stifle a market just as effectively as an over regulating government.
About that usage tax idea (the road toll idea) - usage taxes are extremely regressive. More working people use roads to commute to work every day, but you can't tell me that the bosses that own the place those guys work at aren't reaping huge benefits from that system. Taxes should be levied based on who gets the most benefit from a system, and not against the individuals that may use them the most. The same thing goes for healthcare - people who have cancer will use the healthcare system more than healthy people. They should not be required to pay more for that service. We all get the benefit of that system, bosses more than workers, and we should pay for that system accordingly.
Finally, just to answer the public school problem - yeah, public schools are in decline, but I believe it's not a problem that is currently being addressed by anyone, although the home schoolers are definitely reacting to a problem that most of them probably haven't understood, but can all identify.
Public schools need a new mission statement. I hinted at what that would be above, but they were originally set up to convert farmers to factory workers, and they still function the same way as they did over a hundred years ago, when they were created. That's the problem, it's the reason they are seen as ineffective, and why no one wants to pay for them.
The fix is to refocus them on preparing kids to take advantage of our economic system, by teaching them how it really works, and by providing actual useful skills to take advantage of the opportunities that an open market provides.
You really do believe that everyone starts at the same starting line. Are you really so misinformed?
People send their kids to private schools for prestige, and for access to specific social and economic class groups, and because they can - and not usually because they "pulled themselves up by their boot straps" - and they know it. That work is usually done by previous generations.
They are not stupid, but they are not any brighter either than every else, and the education, the a secondary consideration of that access they pay for, is demonstrably less effective. Of course it makes sense that they would achieve less, when you consider how much smaller the talent pools is for them to draw from.
I'm really not sure how your world view allows you to believe that simply because these people are born with large sums of money, that they have somehow earned what they have, through any kid of merit. It's just weird.
> Private schools can easily provide access that is "as fair and public" as public school. Just give them the same tax dollars public schools are given - it's called a "voucher program."
You call it a "voucher program" I call it immediately inflated prices to cash in on government handouts. No one knows how to cash in on government money like private business.
> Now, I'd like you to cite an example where government services anywhere have outperformed any competitive, private-sector service. Amtrak would be a "great" place to start.
Public schools, even when woefully underfunded as they are now, have always outperformed private schools.
Additionally, most of the 37 countries that rank higher than the US in terms of quality of service with regards to the healthcare industries, are public systems (socialized medicine). Many of them are privately run, and government funded (like single payer systems), and can rank near the top - despite most of them costing far less per capita, than the US's completely private system.
To again attempt to build some common ground, I have no problem with government hiring private companies to provide public services (single payer healthcare for example). That's just effective governance - when used appropriately - one type fix doesn't work for every situation - privately contracted bridge maintenance contracts, like they did with the Brooklyn bridge recently, don't work out well.
For each example you have given on how the US government has not provided adaquit service (schools, roads and the like), please provide an alternative private sector alternative (schools, roads and the like) that also provide for access that is as fair and public as the services you say are inadequate.
For what it's worth, I agree that the US government isn't doing what it needs to. I can't say I agree that that failure means that government can't work, it just means that the US government isn't working.
I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean, that at some future date, there will be drivers and maybe a patch for UT3 that will let me run the UT3 PhysX demos on my 8800GT - without PhysX hardware?
Can't tell form the info posted.
AFAIK, only Chuck Norris is capable of doing an infinite loop that fast.
That's exactly right. If we want freedom in the market, we need rules and oversight to make sure freedom remains, and companies and cartels don't dominate. Of course that means the end of Freeman's "free-lunch for the already dominant players market" which is what he seems to have meant by that term. Humans are such symbol shifters, and it's great to see the meaning of that particular symbol shift.
Does that mean Microsoft and Adobe (are they big enough to count here) are a small minority in the proprietary software? I find it easier to list successful Open Source companies vs. successful proprietary ones. Also, from this guy's comments, it sounds like he simply misunderstood his opportunities to make a profit on this invention - that has nothing to do with proprietary vs. open source software. That's just plain business savvy.
If inflation is 7.5% (don't know what is actually is, but for the sake of argument, I'll use 7.5%), and you only increase your spending on a particular program 5%, then you have actually cut spending against what is needed to cover costs. You could run the comparison against the natural growth of that market too if that makes it easier to understand, or a combination of things (maybe even the simple rising cost of healthcare). It takes nuance to understand this stuff. It's not as black and white as most would like it to be.
Additionally, it's ludicrous to cut social programs in the name of tight budgets, and then increase spending on spy satellites and fruitless military spending - neither help with security, both are way too expensive, and both of which are ready to be easily abused for various purposes - including political.