There was a reason the government was temporarily "shut down" in a showdown between the Republican congress and Clinton - and it wasn't because the Republicans wanted a balanced budget.
Though the balanced budget may not have been completely balanced by some accounting strategies, it was balanced according to the way the budgets were traditionally accounted. Any way you look at it, it was closer to balanced than at any time since Jimmy Carter.
There's no denying that banks played a major role in the collapse, largely due to not properly ensuring that borrowers were capable of repaying the loans
You're thinking of the wrong bankers.
It's the investment bankers who found a way to slice up, repackage, and resell the loans to investors while getting the rating services to say that the obviously bad loans were safe since they were spread out by the repackaging (after all, they said, the odds all the real estate markets would fail at once are miniscule).
And it was Bush's and Greenspan's fears of small recessions that led to artificially low interest rates, tax cuts, deficit spending, and other incentives that helped fuel the demand for investment that outstripped the supply.
It was laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act that encouraged banks to lend to low income consumers who were high credit risks to begin with
Loans made thru the CRA (which was already 30 years old when the banking crisis broke) fared better on average than similar loans made outside the purview of that act. Also, most of the "sub-prime" loans were made outside of the CRA and most of the failed loans were not CRA loans. (There was a reason for the CRA in the first place: banks were notorious at the time for taking
deposits from local residents but refusing to lend to them)
Finally, one shouldn't ignore the huge contribution to the banking collapse stemming from privately held and improperly accounted for credit default swaps (basically taking out insuarance that pays off if someone else fails) and other newly invented risky bets.
But discovery has never been patentable in any other field . ..
Wrong
Read the Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
I only looked at the zdnet example above, but I don't see anything copyrightable in what was allegedly copied. (Functionality is not copyrightable, only expression, and if there are few ways of expressing something, such as the names and types of required interfaces, then the expression is not considered copyrightable)
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
Regardless of API design work, the API is considered functional and there are not many substantially different possible ways to express it, so it is not considered copyrightable. (not to mention that it is required for programming that must interface using it)
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
...Just like the poor example you gave. Do you think those who lived in the 40's and 50's and part of the 60's suddenly woke up when Amendment XIV was ratified thinking "wow, that's great that everything that happened to me back then has suddenly un-happened!"
FYI, Amendment XIV ws ratified in 1868. (That's eighteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty eight)
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws. Internet retailers are no different.
If you are a company with physical retail stores in 50 states, you are a big company with big resources and at least 50 store managers that can keep track of their own local sales tax requirements.
If you are in internet retailer, you may be completely different, like a single entrepeneur selling a few hundred dollars worth of items per week. It may not be worth it to you to do that if you have to keep track of the hundreds of different sales tax rates and regulations across 50 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities across the country, and once again, the little guys get screwed despite the potential for the internet to otherwise empower them.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of.
Since, for a lot of trading, the definition of value is what the market will pay, having "prices at any instant accurately relfect value" is the limit of a feedback loop gone mad, and that can easily lead to disaster. One of the tried and tested ways to prevent feedbackl loops from getting out of control is to slow down the rate of feedback until the damping effects can prevail.
Also, a lack of latency does not equal liquidity, at least not in the real world.
So, it sounds from the article like it had nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with a flimsy system structure.
It may have had nothing to do with MS Windows. But it did have something to do with a flimsy structure that MS helped build, with lots of.Net and C# goodness and integration with MS Ofiice. MS advertised it loud and clear at the time as an example of how MS Windows was chosen over Linux, how MS technology was well worth the small extra costs, and how MS could deliver robustness and speed that Linux couldn't.
A song, a radio station, a musician, or a band can rock. Nothing else can rock, sorry.
So when I sit on that chair on my porch I'm, what, tipping back and forth? But not rocking?
More on point, anything that gets you up and moving can rock, even if it is not music.
Besides, rock and roll originally had a meaning before being applied to music: among other things, it refered to movements associated with sex.
rock (v.1)
"to sway," late O.E. roccian, related to O.N. rykkja "to pull, tear, move," Swed. rycka "to pull, pluck," M.Du. rucken, O.H.G. rucchan, Ger. rücken "to move jerkily." For musical senses, see rock (v.2). Rocking horse is first recorded 1724; rocking chair is from 1766. To rock the boat is attested from 1931. Rock-a-bye first recorded 1805 in nursery rhyme.
rock (v.2)
"to dance to popular music with a strong beat," 1948 (first attested in song title "We're gonna rock"), from rock (v.1), in earlier blues slang sense of "to cause to move with musical rhythm" (1922); often used at first with sexual overtones (cf. 1922 song title "My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)"). Sense developed early 1950s to "play or dance to rock and roll music." Noun sense of "musical rhythm characterized by a strong beat" is from 1946, in blues slang. Rock star attested by 1966. Rocksteady, Jamaican pop music style (precursor of reggae), is attested from 1969.
. . . the jet engines which are obviously turbines not internal combustion.
Though I have never heard of them referred to as internal combustion engines before, jet engines obviously do not have combustion external to the engine. The fuel burns inside the jet engine and is part of the working fluid, i.e. it is internal combustion.
You a optimistically assuming that the "author" of the virus (software or bioware) starts from scratch. More likely they play with an existing virus and unthoughtfully modify it in a way that make it worse for people, even if also worse for the virus' purposes.
This creates a logical inconsistency with omnipotence
Not really.
God is omnipotent, but he's somewhat of an underachiever. (At least that's one way of looking at it.)
A lot of arguments in this thread assume a "religious" position to argue against and then refuse to acknowlege that there may be other theologies with a better case
Your main point is spot on, though. Prescience does not imply lack of free will, even if it does conjure up a lot of potential paradoxes in people's minds..
So you're seriously suggesting that they cannot respond to critism of their own work? Can't one read the original, the ciriticism, and the response and judge for themselves? Well, based on your logic, I guess not.
It would be just as irrational to lower the prices below their costs
However, rationality is uncommon, or, at least, rationality based on reality is rare, even in business.
Even with the price of home-grown energy production going down, demand is not very elastic, so raising electricity prices won't reduce the number of customers much. Also, most customers do not have a realistic choice.
In the state I live in, the electric rate has historically been set by a formula
that takes into account a return on the capital investment of the utility companies.
Anyway, public utilities are for the most part a monopoly, or close to it, so this whole supply and demand free market does not compute, but even if it did, the above would be true.
. . . as fewer people use the publicly owned utilities that will mean that they have a surplus of generating capacity driving the price down . . .
First of all, current generating capacity is not sufficent for projected future demand, so less demand will just keep the status quo.
Secondly, if demand drops so much that they have to turn off a few power plants due to low demand, they will do what they can to pass the cost of those idle plants on to the remaing consumers, or they'll just go bankrupt. Neither way will the costs go down for the consumers.
Some comments on your comments:
Firefighting: The reason government fire departments were created in the first place is because the private fire insurance companies had a bad habit of letting homes and businesses burn unabated if they weren't covered by their particular insuarance; this led to a lot of death, destruction, and spreading of fires that could have been easily contained. And volunteer fire departments (like the one in my town) are typically part of the government (you even mentioned taxes for them), and volunteer forces typically rely on the help of nearby government-run, full-time, paid, professional fire departemtns for larger, more difficult fires.
Roads: If owned by the government, they are government run. The idea of public roads is to allow the public to travel freely (and no, I don't mean no tolls). To me, that's obviously a government function
Water: City water distribution is considered a natural monpoly, so if not directly government run, it is government regulated. And since the environmental impact of water production, use, and disposal affects everyone, it is properly the business of government to regulate it. (I believe that and my house is not even connected to any government-run water or sewer)
Un-Pollution: You know perfectly well that the GP meant government regulation to prevent or reduce pollution. Again, since pollution can affect anyone, it is proper for the government to regulate it.
Safety: UL helps ensure your safety mainly because it and other testing and standards institutions like CSA, ASTM, ANSI, AGA, NFPA, etc. are referenceed into building codes and other rules and regulations. Without the force of law behind them, they would have a lot less influence. Think manufacturers adhere to all those standards when they can get away without doing so? The FDA and the USDA are not perfect, so you think things would be better without them?
Same with Denmark, the "world leader in wind power" (thanks to subsidies by Danish taxpayers) with the highest electricity costs in Europe to show for it.
How do those costs compare to what they before they started off to become the world leader in wind power?
And how do the costs compare to the costs they would have had if they had increased production other ways, burned more fuel, or bought more imported energy?
Also, IIRC, Denmark sells wind-generated electricty to Sweden; can't they make a profit from that?
Suppose your livelihood depended on creating intellectual property . . . Or a musician, and someone else was making money off of your hard work.
I sort of agreed until that one about musicians. Musicians (I'm not including composers here) make music, and their livelihood was not helped by the copyrighting of recorded music (except for a handful that made it to the very top of the recording chain).
Slashdot Mirror
There was a reason the government was temporarily "shut down" in a showdown between the Republican congress and Clinton - and it wasn't because the Republicans wanted a balanced budget.
Though the balanced budget may not have been completely balanced by some accounting strategies, it was balanced according to the way the budgets were traditionally accounted. Any way you look at it, it was closer to balanced than at any time since Jimmy Carter.
There's no denying that banks played a major role in the collapse, largely due to not properly ensuring that borrowers were capable of repaying the loans
You're thinking of the wrong bankers.
It's the investment bankers who found a way to slice up, repackage, and resell the loans to investors while getting the rating services to say that the obviously bad loans were safe since they were spread out by the repackaging (after all, they said, the odds all the real estate markets would fail at once are miniscule).
And it was Bush's and Greenspan's fears of small recessions that led to artificially low interest rates, tax cuts, deficit spending, and other incentives that helped fuel the demand for investment that outstripped the supply.
It was laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act that encouraged banks to lend to low income consumers who were high credit risks to begin with
Loans made thru the CRA (which was already 30 years old when the banking crisis broke) fared better on average than similar loans made outside the purview of that act. Also, most of the "sub-prime" loans were made outside of the CRA and most of the failed loans were not CRA loans.
(There was a reason for the CRA in the first place: banks were notorious at the time for taking deposits from local residents but refusing to lend to them)
Finally, one shouldn't ignore the huge contribution to the banking collapse stemming from privately held and improperly accounted for credit default swaps (basically taking out insuarance that pays off if someone else fails) and other newly invented risky bets.
Don't forget that stereoscopic 3D has been around since the 50s
More like since the 1850s/1860s "stereoopticon" for still pictures and the late 1800s/early 1900s for similar moving pictures.
But discovery has never been patentable in any other field . . .
Wrong
Read the Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
Copying is not necessarily infringement. The devil is in the details.
I only looked at the zdnet example above, but I don't see anything copyrightable in what was allegedly copied. (Functionality is not copyrightable, only expression, and if there are few ways of expressing something, such as the names and types of required interfaces, then the expression is not considered copyrightable)
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
Regardless of API design work, the API is considered functional and there are not many substantially different possible ways to express it, so it is not considered copyrightable. (not to mention that it is required for programming that must interface using it)
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
...Just like the poor example you gave. Do you think those who lived in the 40's and 50's and part of the 60's suddenly woke up when Amendment XIV was ratified thinking "wow, that's great that everything that happened to me back then has suddenly un-happened!"
FYI, Amendment XIV ws ratified in 1868. (That's eighteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty eight)
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws. Internet retailers are no different.
If you are a company with physical retail stores in 50 states, you are a big company with big resources and at least 50 store managers that can keep track of their own local sales tax requirements.
If you are in internet retailer, you may be completely different, like a single entrepeneur selling a few hundred dollars worth of items per week. It may not be worth it to you to do that if you have to keep track of the hundreds of different sales tax rates and regulations across 50 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities across the country, and once again, the little guys get screwed despite the potential for the internet to otherwise empower them.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value. Latency contributes to the very inefficiencies that you blame these "large investment firms" from profiting off of.
Since, for a lot of trading, the definition of value is what the market will pay, having "prices at any instant accurately relfect value" is the limit of a feedback loop gone mad, and that can easily lead to disaster. One of the tried and tested ways to prevent feedbackl loops from getting out of control is to slow down the rate of feedback until the damping effects can prevail.
Also, a lack of latency does not equal liquidity, at least not in the real world.
So, it sounds from the article like it had nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with a flimsy system structure.
It may have had nothing to do with MS Windows. But it did have something to do with a flimsy structure that MS helped build, with lots of .Net and C# goodness and integration with MS Ofiice. MS advertised it loud and clear at the time as an example of how MS Windows was chosen over Linux, how MS technology was well worth the small extra costs, and how MS could deliver robustness and speed that Linux couldn't.
You know, not all pre-fab modular structures are concrete. They come in steel or wood, too.
A song, a radio station, a musician, or a band can rock. Nothing else can rock, sorry.
So when I sit on that chair on my porch I'm, what, tipping back and forth? But not rocking?
More on point, anything that gets you up and moving can rock, even if it is not music.
Besides, rock and roll originally had a meaning before being applied to music: among other things, it refered to movements associated with sex.
rock (v.1)
"to sway," late O.E. roccian, related to O.N. rykkja "to pull, tear, move," Swed. rycka "to pull, pluck," M.Du. rucken, O.H.G. rucchan, Ger. rücken "to move jerkily." For musical senses, see rock (v.2). Rocking horse is first recorded 1724; rocking chair is from 1766. To rock the boat is attested from 1931. Rock-a-bye first recorded 1805 in nursery rhyme. rock (v.2)
"to dance to popular music with a strong beat," 1948 (first attested in song title "We're gonna rock"), from rock (v.1), in earlier blues slang sense of "to cause to move with musical rhythm" (1922); often used at first with sexual overtones (cf. 1922 song title "My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)"). Sense developed early 1950s to "play or dance to rock and roll music." Noun sense of "musical rhythm characterized by a strong beat" is from 1946, in blues slang. Rock star attested by 1966. Rocksteady, Jamaican pop music style (precursor of reggae), is attested from 1969.
. . . the jet engines which are obviously turbines not internal combustion.
Though I have never heard of them referred to as internal combustion engines before, jet engines obviously do not have combustion external to the engine.
The fuel burns inside the jet engine and is part of the working fluid, i.e. it is internal combustion.
An axe can be used to chop down a tree and it can just as easily be a murder weapon.
Well, to be pedantic, it is somewhat harder to use an axe as a murder weapon than to chop down a tree, as trees tend to not fight back as much.
You a optimistically assuming that the "author" of the virus (software or bioware) starts from scratch. More likely they play with an existing virus and unthoughtfully modify it in a way that make it worse for people, even if also worse for the virus' purposes.
And that's the core of the problem. The concept of "free will" is incredibly fuzzy.
True.
If it exists, it's certainly not absolute, because no matter how much I decide to, I still won't be able to walk through a concrete wall.
The concept of free will is not quite so fuzzy that you should confuse it with omnipotence.
will does not equal ability
This creates a logical inconsistency with omnipotence
Not really.
God is omnipotent, but he's somewhat of an underachiever. (At least that's one way of looking at it.)
A lot of arguments in this thread assume a "religious" position to argue against and then refuse to acknowlege that there may be other theologies with a better case
Your main point is spot on, though. Prescience does not imply lack of free will, even if it does conjure up a lot of potential paradoxes in people's minds..
So you're seriously suggesting that they cannot respond to critism of their own work? Can't one read the original, the ciriticism, and the response and judge for themselves? Well, based on your logic, I guess not.
Can you explain how "prescient" and "science" got into that list of 'exceptions'?
Are they right-to-left exceptions in a left-to-right world?
More seriously, most of the i's before e's are pronounced like "bee" and most of the exceptions are pronounced like "bye" or "bay".
It would be just as irrational to lower the prices below their costs
However, rationality is uncommon, or, at least, rationality based on reality is rare, even in business.
Even with the price of home-grown energy production going down, demand is not very elastic, so raising electricity prices won't reduce the number of customers much. Also, most customers do not have a realistic choice.
In the state I live in, the electric rate has historically been set by a formula that takes into account a return on the capital investment of the utility companies.
Anyway, public utilities are for the most part a monopoly, or close to it, so this whole supply and demand free market does not compute, but even if it did, the above would be true.
. . . as fewer people use the publicly owned utilities that will mean that they have a surplus of generating capacity driving the price down . . .
First of all, current generating capacity is not sufficent for projected future demand, so less demand will just keep the status quo.
Secondly, if demand drops so much that they have to turn off a few power plants due to low demand, they will do what they can to pass the cost of those idle plants on to the remaing consumers, or they'll just go bankrupt. Neither way will the costs go down for the consumers.
Some comments on your comments:
Firefighting: The reason government fire departments were created in the first place is because the private fire insurance companies had a bad habit of letting homes and businesses burn unabated if they weren't covered by their particular insuarance; this led to a lot of death, destruction, and spreading of fires that could have been easily contained. And volunteer fire departments (like the one in my town) are typically part of the government (you even mentioned taxes for them), and volunteer forces typically rely on the help of nearby government-run, full-time, paid, professional fire departemtns for larger, more difficult fires.
Roads: If owned by the government, they are government run. The idea of public roads is to allow the public to travel freely (and no, I don't mean no tolls). To me, that's obviously a government function
Water: City water distribution is considered a natural monpoly, so if not directly government run, it is government regulated. And since the environmental impact of water production, use, and disposal affects everyone, it is properly the business of government to regulate it. (I believe that and my house is not even connected to any government-run water or sewer)
Un-Pollution: You know perfectly well that the GP meant government regulation to prevent or reduce pollution. Again, since pollution can affect anyone, it is proper for the government to regulate it.
Safety: UL helps ensure your safety mainly because it and other testing and standards institutions like CSA, ASTM, ANSI, AGA, NFPA, etc. are referenceed into building codes and other rules and regulations. Without the force of law behind them, they would have a lot less influence. Think manufacturers adhere to all those standards when they can get away without doing so? The FDA and the USDA are not perfect, so you think things would be better without them?
Same with Denmark, the "world leader in wind power" (thanks to subsidies by Danish taxpayers) with the highest electricity costs in Europe to show for it.
How do those costs compare to what they before they started off to become the world leader in wind power?
And how do the costs compare to the costs they would have had if they had increased production other ways, burned more fuel, or bought more imported energy?
Also, IIRC, Denmark sells wind-generated electricty to Sweden; can't they make a profit from that?
Suppose your livelihood depended on creating intellectual property . . . Or a musician, and someone else was making money off of your hard work.
I sort of agreed until that one about musicians. Musicians (I'm not including composers here) make music, and their livelihood was not helped by the copyrighting of recorded music (except for a handful that made it to the very top of the recording chain).