Your system fails in the same way the current system fails. What you don't realize is that the candidates and their campaign funds have nothing to do with this issue.
Corporations, wealthy groups, and to a lesser extent wealthy individuals buy TV time, radio time, or print ads endorsing their candidate of choice or trashing the opponent of their candidate of choice.
Now, here's the kicker: a corporation, group, or individual can hide behind a dummy entity when purchasing the advertisements. And, because the entity is designed to shield the individual from liability, even if the opposing candidate sues the dummy entity, it would just fold and the financial backer would create a second dummy entity.
The limited-liability concept is at fault here. People should be held accountable for the deeds of their companies. If capital punishment or life imprisonment of the key decision makers were to be the punishment for the destructive actions of a corporation, most of the problems plaguing our society would be solved.
Unfortunately, we can only punish the acts of an individual rather than the acts of the corporation.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."
This is blatantly untrue, and your assumption otherwise is incredibly telling.
The money in a corporation is not yours explicitly. It belongs to the corporation, and the majority shareholders of the corporation. But it isn't yours. The differences are huge: When you use your corporation's money, you can potentially write off the expense. When you use your money, you cannot write it off. Corporate income is taxed differently from personal income. Corporations are separate entities from its shareholders; if your corporation goes bankrupt, your personal affects cannot be used to pay off the corporation's debt.
A consulting "company" or some other one-person corporation is arguably synonymous with the individual owner for all practical purposes. But they are by no means equal legally, nor are they entitled to the same legal privileges and protections.
That having been said, I agree that unions should not be any more powerful than a corporation. But just because a union has been granted a certain privilege doesn't mean that corporations should be granted the same privilege to "balance the playing field." There's been a continual power grab since the 50's from both sides, and it is all done at the expense of the individual.
To be honest, the anti-cheating stuff completely turned me off from not just Blizzard's games, but PC gaming in general.
There are a few publishers who don't require anything more than a key and maybe the CD in the drive to play (which I can then spoof with Daemon Tools so I don't have to keep popping the CD in and out). But it's too hard trying to figure out who's not trying to root my machine at every opportunity, and which games they publish (yes, looking up Stardock is a large pain in the ass, because gaming is supposed to be fun, and doing research even before buying the game just for this purpose is anything but fun), so I just don't bother anymore.
Console and handheld games, are all I now play when I have the time.
Speaking form the gut, I think people who use encryption to hide their activities that could be criminal should beaten to death, preferably more than once*, so where does that put us?
There's a reason why we don't act from our gut except in the more critical situations when there's no time for thought and reason. There's a reason why there exists a codified body of laws, and justice is not whatever some judge, jury, or even law enforcement decides at some particular moment.
Acting out of irrationality isn't necessarily wrong, but it's often not as good as acting rationally. In this case, there's probably a rationality behind the decision. Possibly, it has to do with the fact that he violated probation, that he's a repeat offender, and something to do with the situation in which those occurred. Just because it doesn't make sense from a very narrow, limited view of the situation (a summary based on a blog based on god-knows-what) doesn't mean it doesn't make sense with a much broader view. And I'm more inclined to think that the judge, via the judicial process, has a better view of the situation than any 3rd or 4th party.
AFAIK, they can't make political contributions. Those need to be done through individual members of the corporation.* But somehow, they have free speech rights that allow them to buy advertisements.
*There's a lot of backroom dealing to the effect of, I donate $25K to each of the candidates X, Y, and Z that you're buddies with, and you do A, B, and C for me. Now the guy who does A, B, and C is owed a big favor from X, Y, and Z, which he'll collect sooner or later either as a politican or a lobbiest.
Which is why people almost exclusively buy Chevy or Ford or (insert your brand of choice here) to the point where a family will only drive Fords or Toyotas or Hyundais.
It's not nearly as noticeable though, because buying a new car happens only slightly more often than buying a new house. It's nowhere near as commonplace as a piece of consumer electronic like the PC, but the concepts of familiarity and level of comfort remain the same. People are uncomfortable with a lot of choices, to the point where they may just walk away and not choose when presented with too many. So for those choices that absolutely need to be made (like getting a car when living in a suburb), people will choose by honing in on one aspect, resulting in a sometimes seemingly illogical decision. But for choices that aren't absolutely necessary (like which OS to use on the new PC), people will more likely walk away, i.e. choose between Windows and Mac.
The point is, too many choices is not necessarily a good thing.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls.
Sure, but if the immediate problem isn't solved, said countries would be in for at least five years of even more hurt (as if the current global recession wasn't bad enough). I'm not sure the populace would put up with that.
Unfortunately, solving the short-term problem will only serve to put off the long-term solution.
Well, to put it simply, the command line requires people to read through instructions like man pages to understand. A GUI, on the other hand, has all of the options splayed out in one (mostly neat) screen.
It's sequential access vs. random access. Random access is much faster if you hit the same subset of options every time. Sequential access is faster in the long run if you'll end up using all of the options eventually.
Part of it is the education system, and part of it is just how people learn. Children learn through mimicry. They learn out how to abstract certain situations in school, and then they figure out how to apply the abstraction process to other things, and abstractions itself.
But most people barely make it to the first abstraction step, much less be able to abstract their abstractions.
HD adoption only really happened because of the FCC mandate for broadcasters to move to HD. Widescreen wasn't a choice. It was forced upon us by LCD manufacturers, who realized that they could get a better yield, and the upper had in marketing with 16:10/16:9. 4:3 just disappeared off the market. One day, you could get them. The next, you couldn't. And widescreen was good (and cheap) enough for people to not complain.
I doubt it. Apple's not big on consumer electronics. With the polish on their products, it is easy to forget that almost everything Apple puts out are one form of general computing device or another, accessories notwithstanding.
If they did do 3D, it'd be their monitors and handhelds that will see the technology first. Just like Nintendo is doing 3D with their 3DS, Apple would integrate it into the iPhone/iPod Touch.
What is spying if not one entity trying to obtain information that the counterparty does not want shared with it?
But you're posting it online on Facebook for everybody to see.
It's not spying. It's data mining and due diligence. I expect them to do these things. They'll get a lot of false positives, but they may get leads too.
Just like if you go out there and announce to everybody within hearing distance that you're a terrorist, you don't have the expectation for any law enforcement to turn the other cheek if they hear you. Nor, for that matter, anybody who ends up alerting law enforcement after hearing you. Now, if you get jailed for just saying something, then your freedom of speech is being violated. But I don't see this here.
The only difference is that online, "hearing" distance is basically the whole internet-connected world.
It's a very 21st century American viewpoint, reflective of the general dumbing-down of the population. Eastern Europeans, Western Europeans (hell, just Europeans), Native Americans, Muslim, Jew...
In reality, there are major differences between each individual culture, and large differences even between the related subcultures. But Americans don't really care. As long as they can put a nice, short, easy-to-remember label on everything, accuracy be damned, they're happy.
The first two links of the summary are pretty useless. The one for the TI-Nspire goes to a page that doesn't even have a picture of it, much less any other information.
And people wonder why nobody RTFA's. It's because half the time, the FA sucks.
Most publishing companies are dinosaurs. Even if they seem to not be, internally, they're still very old fashioned.
The discord appears when they move to new technology for the sake of moving to new technology. Management's only experience is with the mainstream and business-oriented products like Office, so that's the kind of people they hire to do their work. Something as obscure (in the business world) as TeX won't even hit the radar without very, very technically capable managers. And as I said, publishing companies are dinosaurs.
I suggest a fix-sized font, e.g. Courier/Courier New. It's actually easier to read due to the serif and the wide spacing, and it gives a feeling that you're using a non-graphical text editor, both reducing the temptation of doing something else (like formatting or surfing the internet) and it makes consuming each line faster. That way, you're not distracted by the text you've already written and can focus on the current line you're writing.
It's whatever works best though. If writing upside down with feather and quill is best, than by all means...
Much of it has to do with mood and comfort. It's about the environment (comfortable or uncomfortable) that's most conducive for writing. It's about getting the state of mind in which the words just jump from brain to paper in one long, unbreaking train, and maintaining it for the duration necessary.
Because for all of our collective brilliance, our incredible progress, our sophistication and civilization, the majority of us are still stuck in the dark ages with the exact same dark age mentality. After all, we haven't actually evolved significantly within the past 10,000 years in any sense of the word "evolved." If anything, localized inbreeding has resulted in the exact opposite.
There are some aspects that textures can simulate, e.g. the slope bricks' rough surface.
But the initial assumption of 16 sides to a circle (both on top and on bottom) is probably on the low side. Most 3D engines get away with it because they use fancy texturing to simulate the smoothness of the circle. But with so many studs and bottom tubes on the screen at one time , I have to wonder if this trick is feasible.
In LDraw, the low-resolution circles are 16-sided, and they're not great. The high-resolution circles are 48-sided, and look far better. I'll bet the real number is somewhere in between.
My dollar is on them starting to enforce environmental controls once their economy has become self-sustaining. Their long-term strategy is to rapidly industrialize now to raise the general standard of living to be on par with or even surpass first-world countries, and figure out what to do with the nasty side effects afterwards.
As far as the government's concerned, losing a few million or a few hundred million people to those side effects is just an added population control bonus. As long as nobody's too worked up about it, they'll continue as they were. The populace is both kept ignorant of the issues by the government, and too busy making money to care. By the time the populace does get around to caring, that in and of itself is the signal for when the government won't need to push for growth and can start pushing for stronger environmental (and other types) of control.
The one thnig which makes this an actually feasible long-term plan, unlike the idea of deficit spending in the 30's, is that the Chinese government is totalitarian, which means it is actually able to turn on a dime. So while in a democracy, it might take fifty years to go from a fossil-fuel-based economy to entirely renewable-energy-based, it'll take China five, perhaps even less.
Furthermore, it's not like these things come out of nowhere. I'm sure there's a huge body of internal research from customer surveys and the like that point to a demand for such a product.
Now, one can say that their customers are stupid, and Oracle is milking them by offering a product of little or no additional value. Or one can say that Oracle is trying to milk the Linux cash cow by attaching their name to what's effectively a rebranded existing Linux distro. One can also say that their execution is incomplete or poor. But by no means would such a product be useless.
Maybe RedHat needs to get smart and start offering different pre-configured software packages for different purposes, instead of letting Oracle take the market away from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Your system fails in the same way the current system fails. What you don't realize is that the candidates and their campaign funds have nothing to do with this issue.
Corporations, wealthy groups, and to a lesser extent wealthy individuals buy TV time, radio time, or print ads endorsing their candidate of choice or trashing the opponent of their candidate of choice.
Now, here's the kicker: a corporation, group, or individual can hide behind a dummy entity when purchasing the advertisements. And, because the entity is designed to shield the individual from liability, even if the opposing candidate sues the dummy entity, it would just fold and the financial backer would create a second dummy entity.
The limited-liability concept is at fault here. People should be held accountable for the deeds of their companies. If capital punishment or life imprisonment of the key decision makers were to be the punishment for the destructive actions of a corporation, most of the problems plaguing our society would be solved.
Unfortunately, we can only punish the acts of an individual rather than the acts of the corporation.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit. And for the potential pedant, I'll add "that is legal for any other citizen to spend his money."
This is blatantly untrue, and your assumption otherwise is incredibly telling.
The money in a corporation is not yours explicitly. It belongs to the corporation, and the majority shareholders of the corporation. But it isn't yours. The differences are huge: When you use your corporation's money, you can potentially write off the expense. When you use your money, you cannot write it off. Corporate income is taxed differently from personal income. Corporations are separate entities from its shareholders; if your corporation goes bankrupt, your personal affects cannot be used to pay off the corporation's debt.
A consulting "company" or some other one-person corporation is arguably synonymous with the individual owner for all practical purposes. But they are by no means equal legally, nor are they entitled to the same legal privileges and protections.
That having been said, I agree that unions should not be any more powerful than a corporation. But just because a union has been granted a certain privilege doesn't mean that corporations should be granted the same privilege to "balance the playing field." There's been a continual power grab since the 50's from both sides, and it is all done at the expense of the individual.
To be honest, the anti-cheating stuff completely turned me off from not just Blizzard's games, but PC gaming in general.
There are a few publishers who don't require anything more than a key and maybe the CD in the drive to play (which I can then spoof with Daemon Tools so I don't have to keep popping the CD in and out). But it's too hard trying to figure out who's not trying to root my machine at every opportunity, and which games they publish (yes, looking up Stardock is a large pain in the ass, because gaming is supposed to be fun, and doing research even before buying the game just for this purpose is anything but fun), so I just don't bother anymore.
Console and handheld games, are all I now play when I have the time.
Speaking form the gut, I think people who use encryption to hide their activities that could be criminal should beaten to death, preferably more than once*, so where does that put us?
There's a reason why we don't act from our gut except in the more critical situations when there's no time for thought and reason. There's a reason why there exists a codified body of laws, and justice is not whatever some judge, jury, or even law enforcement decides at some particular moment.
Acting out of irrationality isn't necessarily wrong, but it's often not as good as acting rationally. In this case, there's probably a rationality behind the decision. Possibly, it has to do with the fact that he violated probation, that he's a repeat offender, and something to do with the situation in which those occurred. Just because it doesn't make sense from a very narrow, limited view of the situation (a summary based on a blog based on god-knows-what) doesn't mean it doesn't make sense with a much broader view. And I'm more inclined to think that the judge, via the judicial process, has a better view of the situation than any 3rd or 4th party.
*Not really, but just saying.
AFAIK, they can't make political contributions. Those need to be done through individual members of the corporation.* But somehow, they have free speech rights that allow them to buy advertisements.
*There's a lot of backroom dealing to the effect of, I donate $25K to each of the candidates X, Y, and Z that you're buddies with, and you do A, B, and C for me. Now the guy who does A, B, and C is owed a big favor from X, Y, and Z, which he'll collect sooner or later either as a politican or a lobbiest.
Which is why people almost exclusively buy Chevy or Ford or (insert your brand of choice here) to the point where a family will only drive Fords or Toyotas or Hyundais.
It's not nearly as noticeable though, because buying a new car happens only slightly more often than buying a new house. It's nowhere near as commonplace as a piece of consumer electronic like the PC, but the concepts of familiarity and level of comfort remain the same. People are uncomfortable with a lot of choices, to the point where they may just walk away and not choose when presented with too many. So for those choices that absolutely need to be made (like getting a car when living in a suburb), people will choose by honing in on one aspect, resulting in a sometimes seemingly illogical decision. But for choices that aren't absolutely necessary (like which OS to use on the new PC), people will more likely walk away, i.e. choose between Windows and Mac.
The point is, too many choices is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah, should've worded it as 200 new features.
and cars that can drive themselves.
I know I've been living under a rock for the past few months, but when did they sell DARPA to Google?
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls.
Sure, but if the immediate problem isn't solved, said countries would be in for at least five years of even more hurt (as if the current global recession wasn't bad enough). I'm not sure the populace would put up with that.
Unfortunately, solving the short-term problem will only serve to put off the long-term solution.
Well, to put it simply, the command line requires people to read through instructions like man pages to understand. A GUI, on the other hand, has all of the options splayed out in one (mostly neat) screen.
It's sequential access vs. random access. Random access is much faster if you hit the same subset of options every time. Sequential access is faster in the long run if you'll end up using all of the options eventually.
Guess which pattern most computer users follow?
The scientist is never in want of a job to perform. Alas, the scientist may not always be paid.
Part of it is the education system, and part of it is just how people learn. Children learn through mimicry. They learn out how to abstract certain situations in school, and then they figure out how to apply the abstraction process to other things, and abstractions itself.
But most people barely make it to the first abstraction step, much less be able to abstract their abstractions.
HD adoption only really happened because of the FCC mandate for broadcasters to move to HD. Widescreen wasn't a choice. It was forced upon us by LCD manufacturers, who realized that they could get a better yield, and the upper had in marketing with 16:10/16:9. 4:3 just disappeared off the market. One day, you could get them. The next, you couldn't. And widescreen was good (and cheap) enough for people to not complain.
I doubt it. Apple's not big on consumer electronics. With the polish on their products, it is easy to forget that almost everything Apple puts out are one form of general computing device or another, accessories notwithstanding.
If they did do 3D, it'd be their monitors and handhelds that will see the technology first. Just like Nintendo is doing 3D with their 3DS, Apple would integrate it into the iPhone/iPod Touch.
What is spying if not one entity trying to obtain information that the counterparty does not want shared with it?
But you're posting it online on Facebook for everybody to see.
It's not spying. It's data mining and due diligence. I expect them to do these things. They'll get a lot of false positives, but they may get leads too.
Just like if you go out there and announce to everybody within hearing distance that you're a terrorist, you don't have the expectation for any law enforcement to turn the other cheek if they hear you. Nor, for that matter, anybody who ends up alerting law enforcement after hearing you. Now, if you get jailed for just saying something, then your freedom of speech is being violated. But I don't see this here.
The only difference is that online, "hearing" distance is basically the whole internet-connected world.
It's a very 21st century American viewpoint, reflective of the general dumbing-down of the population. Eastern Europeans, Western Europeans (hell, just Europeans), Native Americans, Muslim, Jew...
In reality, there are major differences between each individual culture, and large differences even between the related subcultures. But Americans don't really care. As long as they can put a nice, short, easy-to-remember label on everything, accuracy be damned, they're happy.
The first two links of the summary are pretty useless. The one for the TI-Nspire goes to a page that doesn't even have a picture of it, much less any other information.
And people wonder why nobody RTFA's. It's because half the time, the FA sucks.
Most publishing companies are dinosaurs. Even if they seem to not be, internally, they're still very old fashioned.
The discord appears when they move to new technology for the sake of moving to new technology. Management's only experience is with the mainstream and business-oriented products like Office, so that's the kind of people they hire to do their work. Something as obscure (in the business world) as TeX won't even hit the radar without very, very technically capable managers. And as I said, publishing companies are dinosaurs.
I suggest a fix-sized font, e.g. Courier/Courier New. It's actually easier to read due to the serif and the wide spacing, and it gives a feeling that you're using a non-graphical text editor, both reducing the temptation of doing something else (like formatting or surfing the internet) and it makes consuming each line faster. That way, you're not distracted by the text you've already written and can focus on the current line you're writing.
It's whatever works best though. If writing upside down with feather and quill is best, than by all means...
Much of it has to do with mood and comfort. It's about the environment (comfortable or uncomfortable) that's most conducive for writing. It's about getting the state of mind in which the words just jump from brain to paper in one long, unbreaking train, and maintaining it for the duration necessary.
Why are we repeating the same mistake in 2010?
Because for all of our collective brilliance, our incredible progress, our sophistication and civilization, the majority of us are still stuck in the dark ages with the exact same dark age mentality. After all, we haven't actually evolved significantly within the past 10,000 years in any sense of the word "evolved." If anything, localized inbreeding has resulted in the exact opposite.
There are some aspects that textures can simulate, e.g. the slope bricks' rough surface.
But the initial assumption of 16 sides to a circle (both on top and on bottom) is probably on the low side. Most 3D engines get away with it because they use fancy texturing to simulate the smoothness of the circle. But with so many studs and bottom tubes on the screen at one time , I have to wonder if this trick is feasible.
In LDraw, the low-resolution circles are 16-sided, and they're not great. The high-resolution circles are 48-sided, and look far better. I'll bet the real number is somewhere in between.
My dollar is on them starting to enforce environmental controls once their economy has become self-sustaining. Their long-term strategy is to rapidly industrialize now to raise the general standard of living to be on par with or even surpass first-world countries, and figure out what to do with the nasty side effects afterwards.
As far as the government's concerned, losing a few million or a few hundred million people to those side effects is just an added population control bonus. As long as nobody's too worked up about it, they'll continue as they were. The populace is both kept ignorant of the issues by the government, and too busy making money to care. By the time the populace does get around to caring, that in and of itself is the signal for when the government won't need to push for growth and can start pushing for stronger environmental (and other types) of control.
The one thnig which makes this an actually feasible long-term plan, unlike the idea of deficit spending in the 30's, is that the Chinese government is totalitarian, which means it is actually able to turn on a dime. So while in a democracy, it might take fifty years to go from a fossil-fuel-based economy to entirely renewable-energy-based, it'll take China five, perhaps even less.
Furthermore, it's not like these things come out of nowhere. I'm sure there's a huge body of internal research from customer surveys and the like that point to a demand for such a product.
Now, one can say that their customers are stupid, and Oracle is milking them by offering a product of little or no additional value. Or one can say that Oracle is trying to milk the Linux cash cow by attaching their name to what's effectively a rebranded existing Linux distro. One can also say that their execution is incomplete or poor. But by no means would such a product be useless.
Maybe RedHat needs to get smart and start offering different pre-configured software packages for different purposes, instead of letting Oracle take the market away from them.
It does exist. It belongs to John Travolta.