If I had mod points I'd mod you up - the Internet Explorer 7 interface is atrociously bad. I am not a Microsoft basher (I don't love them, but I find it hard to work up a good hate for them too), but this design will confuse the hell out of people. What's with eliminating the standard menus that every other Windows program uses? This will just confuse the hell out of users, without any countervailing benefit!
The interface for IE 7 was not thought through at all.
So, let me get this straight. In the Middle Ages, many people in Europe believed that the world was flat. The majority of people in Europe at the time were Christian. Therefore, even though Scrameustache has offered no evidence that the Bible says anywhere that the world is flat, people must have believed that because of the Bible.
Sounds like someone thinks that correlation is causation. A little too pat for my tastes.
Hell, I'm an atheist, so I don't care if you don't like the Bible. But it's hardly being rational to make unsupported/unsubstantiated attacks on religion. It's hardly rational to blame something on the Bible that does not appear in it.
Odly enough, it had been scientifically demonstrated that the earth was round at a time when Alexandria was a place with a really cool library, and that got obscured by this religious sect that had a holy book that implied otherwise.
Um, where in the Bible does it say that the earth is flat? Or are you just blaming this on religion because it's an easy target?
I agree. And I think it's interesting to see how many Slashdotters, who normally rise to the defense of hackers, particularly when the hack is a really obvious hole that causes no harm to anyone, like this one, are sitting back and laughing at the people who got rejected because of this. Jesus, all the applicants did was change a URL, it's not like they used some root kit to break into Harvard's servers.
Shit, if I try to change the URL to see if I can view my pay statement one day early at work, should I be fired for that too?
That's like saying the telephone companies should work with copyright holders to ensure no one sings a copyrighted song over the phone.
There's a huge difference between cooperating with law enforcement, and being a form of corporate police for someone elses copyrighted works.
So if Tower Records purchased (wholesale) Eminem CDs that I had pressed with my home CD burner, and then sold them (resale) to consumers, the actual copyright owner (Sony) would have no case against Tower Records? Tower Records could just say, "It's not our responsibility to figure out if we're buying from an authorized copyright holder. We just buy a product and resell it. If you don't like it, talk to the jgalun"?
There will obviously be no perfect existing analogy to P2P software. There are always some differences. But I'd draw the analogy to an event marketer who sells floor space to a weekly event. If the event has 500 exhibits, and 1 sells pirated DVDs, then the owner of the floor space is not liable, because the piracy is neither obvious (the owner may not have recognized what is going on) nor essential to the business plan (499 tables are selling goods legally).
But if 480 tables are selling pirated DVDs, and only 20 are not, then the owner is liable, since it was obvious to him that illegal activities were ongoing, but did not shut down or report these illegal activities because renting to these people is essential to the business.
That's why this is not about P2P itself, but about specific implementations of it. Some P2P implementations are used primarily for legal purposes, and are occassionally used for illegal activities. For example, AOL IM. The primary use of that system is for a legal activity, and AOL's business case exists even if the illegal activity is shut down. Moreover, we have every reason to believe that AOLTW have acted in good faith when confronted with copyright violation issues.
But we cannot say the same about Limewire or Grokster, companies that exist to sell software whose popularity depends - let's be honest here - primarily for their use in copyright infringement.
So you're in favor, then, of holding home builders responsible for building structures that can be used as crack houses?
Because that, in essence, is what this case is about. It's not about the people running the networks, it's about the liability of those creating the technology.
If the builders of the structures had a business plan based on renting the structures to crack dealers, knowingly rented the structures to crack dealers, built their houses to specifically suit crack dealers, and refused to work in good faith to prevent crack dealers from using the structures then yes, I'd say you'd have a pretty good case against the builders.
LOL. You know, the phone companies made absolutely no effort to provide even minimal safeguards against criminals using their equipment and networks to plan nefarious deeds.
Really? Heard of phone tapping? The phone companies work with the government, in good faith, to enable that. By comparison, companies like Grokster have never worked in good faith with the copyright holders to try to prevent copyright infringement - largely because the business model of Grokster (a private company based in the West Indies) is premised on copyright infringement, while the business model of the phone companies is not premised upon criminals using the phone network to plan crimes.
there are a LOT of apps that are peer-2-peer that are used for non-infringing purposes. Any type of instant messenger can be peer-2-peer. Video Conferencing software. Online Games are peer-2-peer.
Right. But like the rest of Slashdot, you've come to the incorrect conclusion that this case is about P2P as a transmission method, when in fact it's about specific software that is used to enable P2P file sharing. Perhaps you could actually be so good as to read the EFF page linked in the summary. The Ninth Court opined:
"This appeal presents the question of whether distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing computer networking software may be held contributorily or vicariously liable for copyright infringements by users. Under the circumstances presented by this case, we conclude that the defendants are not liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and affirm the district court's partial grant of summary judgment."
Again, it's not about P2P networks per se. It's about the distributors of software that is designed to share files, and what their responsibility is to preventing copyright infringement.
If we found business documents showing that:
The business model of Grokster, Ltd. was based on copyright infringement; and
Grokster, Ltd. had refused to make any good will efforts to work with the copyright owners to restrict copyright infringement
Would you say that the copyright holders would then be allowed to hold Grokster, Ltd. for damages? Or would you still say that this is all about P2P as a transmission method, and no one can ever be held liable for using that method in the wrong way?
Yes, all those methods can be used to transmit files over the Internet. But none of those methods meet the three criteria that make P2P networks unique:
Extremely efficient for disseminating files (e.g., SMTP is not very good if you want to share a 100MB file with thousands of people)
Are widely popular precisely because they enable copyright infringement (the majority of web sites are not for the purpose of copyright infringement, but the majority of traffic on Grokster surely is)
Are difficult to track down and eliminate copyright infringement (if an FTP site at some IP address becomes popular, it's easy to figure out who is hosting the site and who needs to be contacted to have it shut down. P2P networks have provided no such mechanisms - for good reason, because they're either ideologically against copyright, or against copyright because breaking it is how they make money)
This has nothing to do with P2P as a method of communicating data. This has everything to do with the providers of P2P networks providing reasonable safeguards against copyright infringement, which, like it or not, is the law of the land.
Saying that P2P is an important network standard and therefore grokster cannot be held liable for what it enables with its software is the equivalent of saying that, since libraries are essential to the transmission of information, the government cannot request that the book "Practical Guide to Terrorist Attacks" be taken off library shelves.
There is a difference between eliminating a transmission method and policing the items that are actually purveyed. For example, everyone lives in a house. But that doesn't mean that we can't be against crackhouses, or that we can't demand that landlords take precautions to safeguard against their property being used as crackhouses.
If you are against copyright infringement, fine. If you don't think that the safeguards being proposed against copyright infringement over P2P networks are reasonable, fine. But don't pretend that this is an attack on P2P itself. The truth is that P2P networks have made absolutely no effort to provide even minimal safeguards against copyright infringement. The industries have every right to demand that P2P networks be held to the same standards that other transmission methods are held, and to claim that the very Internet is under attack is a red herring.
You're comparing apples to oranges - the retail price of diesel in the UK to the wholesale price of this oil. If the wholesale price of this oil is $80/barrel, you then need to add on the various taxes that are imposed on oil in the UK to find out what the retail price would be in the UK.
The wholesale price of oil is essentially the same in the US as it is in the UK - oil is traded in a global marketplace, after all. The difference in the cost is taxes and surcharges, not production costs.
there is a point to be made here about the state of the internet in general. nearly half of the world's population are indian or chinese. they have cultures and histories longer and deeper than that of western europe and certainly north america.
They have cultures that are in some ways older than America's (America traces much of its culture back to the Bible, which was written quite a bit ago, after all), but America certainly has more books and cultural works to digitize than either India or China, simply because the volume and breadth of works produced by the US between 1789 and today far outstrips the production of India and China for their whole histories. This will change, of course, as India and China catch up to the US in general level of education. But it is the case for now, and it's foolish to judge simply based on number of years of history when the real comparison is number of works produced.
As someone who has studied the Social Security issue in some depth (you don't work at a spin-off of AARP without learning the material), I have a few criticisms of the article. (Some disclaimer: I thought parts of the article were excellent, and I'm still on the fence about private accounts in Social Security.)
First of all, the author's implicit criticism of the actuaries lower immigration numbers:
"Though immigration has been rising, Social Security projects that it will taper off sharply, from 1.2 million a year to 900,000 in 20 years. This forecast is curious, because if the birthrate in America declines as anticipated, the country will need more foreign workers."
There are two problems with the author's argument. First of all, it ignores the very strong argument made by Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli that there will be no such labor shortage. Secondly, it ignores the fact that immigration is not simply a matter of demand (from the US for new workers), but also of supply. And we have two factors that we can expect to choke off immigration in the next few years: The rapidly growing economies of India and China (which means that more Indians and Chinese will choose to remain in their home countries), and the rapidly aging population of Mexico (it is overwhelmingly younger Mexicans who cross the border into the US, so as the birth rate of Mexico continues to decline we can expect fewer and fewer Mexicans to come to the US).
My second objection with the article is that he mentions only one time that the Social Security payroll tax increased (1983), but ignores that many other times that it has increased. It would have put the whole program into a different relief if, rather than saying that we only need to increase the payroll tax another 1.89% to close the deficit, he had explained that the program had started out (in 1937), with a 2% payroll tax, and now is at 12.4%, and will require a 14.29% tax rate in the future. It would have put it into an even starker relief if he had put that side-by-side with Medicare (which is also funded by a payroll tax), which started with a 0.7% tax, is not at a 2.9% tax, and is running a projected deficit 5 times as large as Social Security. Put these two numbers together, and you find us starting with a payroll tax of 2.7%, increasing to 15.3% today, needing to rise to 24 or 25% to close deficits in the future.
I also object to a couple of misleading notions in this section:
The C.B.O. assumes that the typical worker would invest half of his allocation in stocks and the rest in bonds. The C.B.O. projects the average return, after inflation and expenses, at 4.9 percent. This compares with the 6 percent rate (about 3.5 percent after inflation) that the trust fund is earning now.
Proponents hail the plan for forcing savings on the government. But the diversion of money into individual accounts would save the government nothing, since it would have to borrow to offset the loss of the diverted dollars. The individual accounts represent a transfer, not a savings.
The way the author words his comparison of the rate of return (inflation-adjusted with private accounts to nominal with current system, with the inflation-adjusted of the current system only in parentheses), he makes it sound like the current system gets a higher rate of return, when in fact the opposite is true.
Secondly, he totally misses the point when he says that "Proponents hail the plan for forcing savings on the government." Proponents advocate for the plan not because of its impact on the short-term government, but because long-term the higher rate of stock market return make it a much cheaper way to fund people's pensions. Let me put it this way - if you had the choice of getting taxed at 14%, having the government buy treasury bonds, and get back $9500 at the end, or getting taxed at 12.4
Because Bush is more controversial, and his face on the cover will sell more magazineS than somebody who has taken part in something so enormous its consequences can barely be imagined.
With all due respect, I think Bush has had a far greater impact on the world that Rutan will. Bush invaded Afghanistan, instituted massive tax cuts, racked up huge government deficits, added prescription drug benefits to Medicare, invaded Iraq, and made huge changes in US policy towards Israel/Palestine and North Korea. By the time he's done he may also privatize Social Security and preside over the successful completion of another WTO round that could have a huge impact on third world economies. These actions all will have a major impact on social welfare programs, global economics, and geopolitics for years to come - whether they are good or bad, no one can deny their unbelievable impact. Personally, I loved Clinton, but there's no way Clinton had as much impact as Bush has had thus far.
Hell, I haven't even mentioned Bush's coat tails - the man increased his congressional majorities in both 2002 and 2004! That's simply amazing, and may be the start of a long period of Republican dominance in Washington, D.C.
As for Rutan, yes, SpaceShipOne is impressive. But, to my mind, it impacts only one aspect of human existence, and is a breakthrough that would have occurred even without him.
What is amazing about SpaceShipOne is not that it is some unimagined technological marvel, but that it heralds the start of a commercial age in space (or speeds up the commercial age in space, since satellite launching had already been privatized to some extent). But if Rutan had not been around, someone else would have done it. He didn't initiate the X-Prize, he just won it. As we can see by the other competitors for X-Prize and the others who are trying to set up competitors for the next round of space commercialization, if he didn't do it, someone else would have.
By comparison, if Gore had been elected, things would be anything like they are now. Again - good or bad - Bush has heralded in huge changes that would not have happened without him. Rutan has issued in one change that won't impact any of us for years to come, and would inevitably have happened even if he hadn't been around.
When you hear shit like "the terrorists hate our freedom," think of Bhopal. Around 3k people died on 9/11. In Bhopal, the lasting death toll is somewhere around 15,000. I wonder if Anderson would have been allowed to settle if 15,000 Americans had died.
That would make a lot of sense, except:
The terrorist threat the US is facing is from Muslims;
The population of Madhya Pradesh is primarily Hindi, not Muslim; and
I have never once heard a Muslim terrorist organization referring to the deaths at Bhopal. Israel, yes, sanctions on Iraq, yes, US troops in Saudi Arabia, yes. Bhopal? No.
I'm not defending Union Carbide. I'm just opposed to some of the stupid analogies being made in this thread.
If you continue your line of thought, you could say that the terrorists of 11/9 only wanted to do material damage, but human lives was lost by accident.
Except all the evidence points to the fact that the 9/11 terrorists did (and continue to) want to end human lives. So, in fact, this line of thought does not in any way lead to believing that the terrorists only wanted to do material damage.
Back when the RIAA started suing file sharers, the Slashdot party line was that the RIAA should learn from the MPAA. The MPAA, it was argued, wasn't suing its consumers, but was instead producing a higher quality product that was actually worth buying. Unlike CDs, where you paid $14 for only one or two tracks actually worth owning, DVDs came chock full of goodies that made people want to shell out the $20, like alternate endings and director's commentary.
At the time, I called BS, and said that the only reason that the MPAA wasn't suing yet was because video piracy wouldn't take off until Internet connections got a bit faster - given that video files are much bigger than audio files.
Well, guess what, that was exactly the case. I assure you, if FTTH becomes a reality, this will become an even bigger problem. Please, let's stop fooling ourselves that pirates are making a pseudo-moral decision that pirating from certain evil companies is ok, but pirating other products is not ok because those products are actually worth the money.
People pirate what is easy to pirate. That's how I pirate! Audio and video cassettes made pirating copyrighted materials easier, but not particularly easy, because it takes too long to copy and distribute copyrighted materials that way.
Computers and the Internet made this type of piracy an order of magnitude easier. Each time we get faster connections to the Internet and bigger hard drives, it gets easier still.
Stop pretending that the companies can offer you something to stop you from pirating their products. Or next, will you be saying that, actually, while the director's commentaries and alternate endings are great, DVDs are too expensive at $20 and need to come down to $10, otherwise you'll pirate them?
And then, what will stop you from demanding $5?
Listen, either you're ok with pirating copyrighted works, or you're not. But stop pretending that you're only ok with it because the system is rotten. Because there is no evidence that if the threat of lawsuits were lifted and prices dropped, anything would change.
And, also, please stop pretending that it's because the RIAA and MPAA are fighting the Internet or computers or modern technology. Last time I checked, Outkast just went platinum from online mp3 sales. iTunes sells millions of songs per year, online. The RIAA and MPAA have no problem with modern technology. But they need to make sure it works in such a way that it doesn't enable unrestricted piracy.
A) Microsoft didn't buy an old broadcast network. Microsoft doesn't own NBC, they partnered with NBC. Big difference.
B) If Microsoft was really bothered by Slate recommending Firefox, they would have tightened their control over an operation that they wholly owned. Selling it - so that it has even more freedom to criticize you - makes no sense in those circumstances. I thought we were supposed to be afraid of corporations controlling the media - not afraid of corporations selling their control of the media!
I hope you're not right, but I'm not as confident. From what I can tell (although it's not like the evidence I am looking at is definitive), Firefox uptake has stalled after a good period of growth. Technologically literate people have started using it, and they have forced it on some of their friends and family, but how do we get to the other 95% of the population?
Now that IE has pop-up blocking, that takes away the biggest annoyance about using IE. Sure, it doesn't have tabs, the web developer tools, the cool extensions, and isn't as secure, but I don't think most users care about the first three, and I'm not sure that the last is going to mean enough to most users to switch. I mean, how many machines are there out there infested with spyware, that the users don't do a thing about?
It's not that better security isn't appealing to people. It's that a lot of users still don't know about Firefox, and, if Microsoft does a reasonable job of tightening up security with IE, Firefox won't have a big enough advantage in that regards to actually get people to switch. Let's say that before WinXP SP 2, Firefox was 100% better at pop-up blocking and 90% better at security. If, thanks to SP 2, the lead has been dropped to 10% and 60% respectively, and all the early adopters have already switched to Firefox, will we still reach the tipping point?
I work for the National Older Worker Career Center - a spinoff of AARP - and can verify that this is the case for our web site. I keep hoping, but I haven't seen the browser stats budge away from IE at all in the last year.
Slashdot Mirror
umm...would Nintendo have a choice? It's a public company, isn't it? If Apple offered a good enough price, I assume the stockholders would sell.
Right. Someone from 'Igor international' who created 'Urge' shouldn't criticise anything
No, it's pronounced "eye-gor"
If I had mod points I'd mod you up - the Internet Explorer 7 interface is atrociously bad. I am not a Microsoft basher (I don't love them, but I find it hard to work up a good hate for them too), but this design will confuse the hell out of people. What's with eliminating the standard menus that every other Windows program uses? This will just confuse the hell out of users, without any countervailing benefit!
The interface for IE 7 was not thought through at all.
Freedom and Individual Rights in Education
They haven't taken up this case yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
So, let me get this straight. In the Middle Ages, many people in Europe believed that the world was flat. The majority of people in Europe at the time were Christian. Therefore, even though Scrameustache has offered no evidence that the Bible says anywhere that the world is flat, people must have believed that because of the Bible.
Sounds like someone thinks that correlation is causation. A little too pat for my tastes.
Hell, I'm an atheist, so I don't care if you don't like the Bible. But it's hardly being rational to make unsupported/unsubstantiated attacks on religion. It's hardly rational to blame something on the Bible that does not appear in it.
"In between the covers," indeed.
Oh please, stop nitpicking Scrameustache. Show me, instead, where the Bible implies that the earth is flat.
Odly enough, it had been scientifically demonstrated that the earth was round at a time when Alexandria was a place with a really cool library, and that got obscured by this religious sect that had a holy book that implied otherwise.
Um, where in the Bible does it say that the earth is flat? Or are you just blaming this on religion because it's an easy target?
I agree. And I think it's interesting to see how many Slashdotters, who normally rise to the defense of hackers, particularly when the hack is a really obvious hole that causes no harm to anyone, like this one, are sitting back and laughing at the people who got rejected because of this. Jesus, all the applicants did was change a URL, it's not like they used some root kit to break into Harvard's servers.
Shit, if I try to change the URL to see if I can view my pay statement one day early at work, should I be fired for that too?
That's like saying the telephone companies should work with copyright holders to ensure no one sings a copyrighted song over the phone.
There's a huge difference between cooperating with law enforcement, and being a form of corporate police for someone elses copyrighted works.
So if Tower Records purchased (wholesale) Eminem CDs that I had pressed with my home CD burner, and then sold them (resale) to consumers, the actual copyright owner (Sony) would have no case against Tower Records? Tower Records could just say, "It's not our responsibility to figure out if we're buying from an authorized copyright holder. We just buy a product and resell it. If you don't like it, talk to the jgalun"?
There will obviously be no perfect existing analogy to P2P software. There are always some differences. But I'd draw the analogy to an event marketer who sells floor space to a weekly event. If the event has 500 exhibits, and 1 sells pirated DVDs, then the owner of the floor space is not liable, because the piracy is neither obvious (the owner may not have recognized what is going on) nor essential to the business plan (499 tables are selling goods legally).
But if 480 tables are selling pirated DVDs, and only 20 are not, then the owner is liable, since it was obvious to him that illegal activities were ongoing, but did not shut down or report these illegal activities because renting to these people is essential to the business.
That's why this is not about P2P itself, but about specific implementations of it. Some P2P implementations are used primarily for legal purposes, and are occassionally used for illegal activities. For example, AOL IM. The primary use of that system is for a legal activity, and AOL's business case exists even if the illegal activity is shut down. Moreover, we have every reason to believe that AOLTW have acted in good faith when confronted with copyright violation issues.
But we cannot say the same about Limewire or Grokster, companies that exist to sell software whose popularity depends - let's be honest here - primarily for their use in copyright infringement.
So you're in favor, then, of holding home builders responsible for building structures that can be used as crack houses?
Because that, in essence, is what this case is about. It's not about the people running the networks, it's about the liability of those creating the technology.
If the builders of the structures had a business plan based on renting the structures to crack dealers, knowingly rented the structures to crack dealers, built their houses to specifically suit crack dealers, and refused to work in good faith to prevent crack dealers from using the structures then yes, I'd say you'd have a pretty good case against the builders.
LOL. You know, the phone companies made absolutely no effort to provide even minimal safeguards against criminals using their equipment and networks to plan nefarious deeds.
Really? Heard of phone tapping? The phone companies work with the government, in good faith, to enable that. By comparison, companies like Grokster have never worked in good faith with the copyright holders to try to prevent copyright infringement - largely because the business model of Grokster (a private company based in the West Indies) is premised on copyright infringement, while the business model of the phone companies is not premised upon criminals using the phone network to plan crimes.
Right. But like the rest of Slashdot, you've come to the incorrect conclusion that this case is about P2P as a transmission method, when in fact it's about specific software that is used to enable P2P file sharing. Perhaps you could actually be so good as to read the EFF page linked in the summary. The Ninth Court opined:
"This appeal presents the question of whether distributors of peer-to-peer file-sharing computer networking software may be held contributorily or vicariously liable for copyright infringements by users. Under the circumstances presented by this case, we conclude that the defendants are not liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and affirm the district court's partial grant of summary judgment."
Again, it's not about P2P networks per se. It's about the distributors of software that is designed to share files, and what their responsibility is to preventing copyright infringement.
If we found business documents showing that:
The business model of Grokster, Ltd. was based on copyright infringement; and
Grokster, Ltd. had refused to make any good will efforts to work with the copyright owners to restrict copyright infringement
Would you say that the copyright holders would then be allowed to hold Grokster, Ltd. for damages? Or would you still say that this is all about P2P as a transmission method, and no one can ever be held liable for using that method in the wrong way?
Extremely efficient for disseminating files (e.g., SMTP is not very good if you want to share a 100MB file with thousands of people)
Are widely popular precisely because they enable copyright infringement (the majority of web sites are not for the purpose of copyright infringement, but the majority of traffic on Grokster surely is)
Are difficult to track down and eliminate copyright infringement (if an FTP site at some IP address becomes popular, it's easy to figure out who is hosting the site and who needs to be contacted to have it shut down. P2P networks have provided no such mechanisms - for good reason, because they're either ideologically against copyright, or against copyright because breaking it is how they make money)
This has nothing to do with P2P as a method of communicating data. This has everything to do with the providers of P2P networks providing reasonable safeguards against copyright infringement, which, like it or not, is the law of the land.
Saying that P2P is an important network standard and therefore grokster cannot be held liable for what it enables with its software is the equivalent of saying that, since libraries are essential to the transmission of information, the government cannot request that the book "Practical Guide to Terrorist Attacks" be taken off library shelves.
There is a difference between eliminating a transmission method and policing the items that are actually purveyed. For example, everyone lives in a house. But that doesn't mean that we can't be against crackhouses, or that we can't demand that landlords take precautions to safeguard against their property being used as crackhouses.
If you are against copyright infringement, fine. If you don't think that the safeguards being proposed against copyright infringement over P2P networks are reasonable, fine. But don't pretend that this is an attack on P2P itself. The truth is that P2P networks have made absolutely no effort to provide even minimal safeguards against copyright infringement. The industries have every right to demand that P2P networks be held to the same standards that other transmission methods are held, and to claim that the very Internet is under attack is a red herring.
You're comparing apples to oranges - the retail price of diesel in the UK to the wholesale price of this oil. If the wholesale price of this oil is $80/barrel, you then need to add on the various taxes that are imposed on oil in the UK to find out what the retail price would be in the UK.
The wholesale price of oil is essentially the same in the US as it is in the UK - oil is traded in a global marketplace, after all. The difference in the cost is taxes and surcharges, not production costs.
there is a point to be made here about the state of the internet in general. nearly half of the world's population are indian or chinese. they have cultures and histories longer and deeper than that of western europe and certainly north america.
They have cultures that are in some ways older than America's (America traces much of its culture back to the Bible, which was written quite a bit ago, after all), but America certainly has more books and cultural works to digitize than either India or China, simply because the volume and breadth of works produced by the US between 1789 and today far outstrips the production of India and China for their whole histories. This will change, of course, as India and China catch up to the US in general level of education. But it is the case for now, and it's foolish to judge simply based on number of years of history when the real comparison is number of works produced.
The inhabitants of Saudi Arabia
First of all, the author's implicit criticism of the actuaries lower immigration numbers:
There are two problems with the author's argument. First of all, it ignores the very strong argument made by Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli that there will be no such labor shortage. Secondly, it ignores the fact that immigration is not simply a matter of demand (from the US for new workers), but also of supply. And we have two factors that we can expect to choke off immigration in the next few years: The rapidly growing economies of India and China (which means that more Indians and Chinese will choose to remain in their home countries), and the rapidly aging population of Mexico (it is overwhelmingly younger Mexicans who cross the border into the US, so as the birth rate of Mexico continues to decline we can expect fewer and fewer Mexicans to come to the US).
My second objection with the article is that he mentions only one time that the Social Security payroll tax increased (1983), but ignores that many other times that it has increased. It would have put the whole program into a different relief if, rather than saying that we only need to increase the payroll tax another 1.89% to close the deficit, he had explained that the program had started out (in 1937), with a 2% payroll tax, and now is at 12.4%, and will require a 14.29% tax rate in the future. It would have put it into an even starker relief if he had put that side-by-side with Medicare (which is also funded by a payroll tax), which started with a 0.7% tax, is not at a 2.9% tax, and is running a projected deficit 5 times as large as Social Security. Put these two numbers together, and you find us starting with a payroll tax of 2.7%, increasing to 15.3% today, needing to rise to 24 or 25% to close deficits in the future.
I also object to a couple of misleading notions in this section:
The way the author words his comparison of the rate of return (inflation-adjusted with private accounts to nominal with current system, with the inflation-adjusted of the current system only in parentheses), he makes it sound like the current system gets a higher rate of return, when in fact the opposite is true.
Secondly, he totally misses the point when he says that "Proponents hail the plan for forcing savings on the government." Proponents advocate for the plan not because of its impact on the short-term government, but because long-term the higher rate of stock market return make it a much cheaper way to fund people's pensions. Let me put it this way - if you had the choice of getting taxed at 14%, having the government buy treasury bonds, and get back $9500 at the end, or getting taxed at 12.4
Serious question:
Why exactly is it good if the suppliers get power back? How does it help me, the consumer, for the suppliers to gain power against Walmart?
Because Bush is more controversial, and his face on the cover will sell more magazineS than somebody who has taken part in something so enormous its consequences can barely be imagined.
With all due respect, I think Bush has had a far greater impact on the world that Rutan will. Bush invaded Afghanistan, instituted massive tax cuts, racked up huge government deficits, added prescription drug benefits to Medicare, invaded Iraq, and made huge changes in US policy towards Israel/Palestine and North Korea. By the time he's done he may also privatize Social Security and preside over the successful completion of another WTO round that could have a huge impact on third world economies. These actions all will have a major impact on social welfare programs, global economics, and geopolitics for years to come - whether they are good or bad, no one can deny their unbelievable impact. Personally, I loved Clinton, but there's no way Clinton had as much impact as Bush has had thus far.
Hell, I haven't even mentioned Bush's coat tails - the man increased his congressional majorities in both 2002 and 2004! That's simply amazing, and may be the start of a long period of Republican dominance in Washington, D.C.
As for Rutan, yes, SpaceShipOne is impressive. But, to my mind, it impacts only one aspect of human existence, and is a breakthrough that would have occurred even without him.
What is amazing about SpaceShipOne is not that it is some unimagined technological marvel, but that it heralds the start of a commercial age in space (or speeds up the commercial age in space, since satellite launching had already been privatized to some extent). But if Rutan had not been around, someone else would have done it. He didn't initiate the X-Prize, he just won it. As we can see by the other competitors for X-Prize and the others who are trying to set up competitors for the next round of space commercialization, if he didn't do it, someone else would have.
By comparison, if Gore had been elected, things would be anything like they are now. Again - good or bad - Bush has heralded in huge changes that would not have happened without him. Rutan has issued in one change that won't impact any of us for years to come, and would inevitably have happened even if he hadn't been around.
That would make a lot of sense, except:
I'm not defending Union Carbide. I'm just opposed to some of the stupid analogies being made in this thread.
If you continue your line of thought, you could say that the terrorists of 11/9 only wanted to do material damage, but human lives was lost by accident.
Except all the evidence points to the fact that the 9/11 terrorists did (and continue to) want to end human lives. So, in fact, this line of thought does not in any way lead to believing that the terrorists only wanted to do material damage.
Back when the RIAA started suing file sharers, the Slashdot party line was that the RIAA should learn from the MPAA. The MPAA, it was argued, wasn't suing its consumers, but was instead producing a higher quality product that was actually worth buying. Unlike CDs, where you paid $14 for only one or two tracks actually worth owning, DVDs came chock full of goodies that made people want to shell out the $20, like alternate endings and director's commentary.
At the time, I called BS, and said that the only reason that the MPAA wasn't suing yet was because video piracy wouldn't take off until Internet connections got a bit faster - given that video files are much bigger than audio files.
Well, guess what, that was exactly the case. I assure you, if FTTH becomes a reality, this will become an even bigger problem. Please, let's stop fooling ourselves that pirates are making a pseudo-moral decision that pirating from certain evil companies is ok, but pirating other products is not ok because those products are actually worth the money.
People pirate what is easy to pirate. That's how I pirate! Audio and video cassettes made pirating copyrighted materials easier, but not particularly easy, because it takes too long to copy and distribute copyrighted materials that way.
Computers and the Internet made this type of piracy an order of magnitude easier. Each time we get faster connections to the Internet and bigger hard drives, it gets easier still.
Stop pretending that the companies can offer you something to stop you from pirating their products. Or next, will you be saying that, actually, while the director's commentaries and alternate endings are great, DVDs are too expensive at $20 and need to come down to $10, otherwise you'll pirate them?
And then, what will stop you from demanding $5?
Listen, either you're ok with pirating copyrighted works, or you're not. But stop pretending that you're only ok with it because the system is rotten. Because there is no evidence that if the threat of lawsuits were lifted and prices dropped, anything would change.
And, also, please stop pretending that it's because the RIAA and MPAA are fighting the Internet or computers or modern technology. Last time I checked, Outkast just went platinum from online mp3 sales. iTunes sells millions of songs per year, online. The RIAA and MPAA have no problem with modern technology. But they need to make sure it works in such a way that it doesn't enable unrestricted piracy.
You're a moron:
A) Microsoft didn't buy an old broadcast network. Microsoft doesn't own NBC, they partnered with NBC. Big difference.
B) If Microsoft was really bothered by Slate recommending Firefox, they would have tightened their control over an operation that they wholly owned. Selling it - so that it has even more freedom to criticize you - makes no sense in those circumstances. I thought we were supposed to be afraid of corporations controlling the media - not afraid of corporations selling their control of the media!
I hope you're not right, but I'm not as confident. From what I can tell (although it's not like the evidence I am looking at is definitive), Firefox uptake has stalled after a good period of growth. Technologically literate people have started using it, and they have forced it on some of their friends and family, but how do we get to the other 95% of the population?
Now that IE has pop-up blocking, that takes away the biggest annoyance about using IE. Sure, it doesn't have tabs, the web developer tools, the cool extensions, and isn't as secure, but I don't think most users care about the first three, and I'm not sure that the last is going to mean enough to most users to switch. I mean, how many machines are there out there infested with spyware, that the users don't do a thing about?
It's not that better security isn't appealing to people. It's that a lot of users still don't know about Firefox, and, if Microsoft does a reasonable job of tightening up security with IE, Firefox won't have a big enough advantage in that regards to actually get people to switch. Let's say that before WinXP SP 2, Firefox was 100% better at pop-up blocking and 90% better at security. If, thanks to SP 2, the lead has been dropped to 10% and 60% respectively, and all the early adopters have already switched to Firefox, will we still reach the tipping point?
I work for the National Older Worker Career Center - a spinoff of AARP - and can verify that this is the case for our web site. I keep hoping, but I haven't seen the browser stats budge away from IE at all in the last year.