He probably expected that you would be smart enough to extrapolate as follows:
Cost of handset = cost of hardware + cost of bundled software
Cost of iPhone = expensive + expensive
Cost of Android phone = expensive + free
Therefore, cost of Android handset< cost of iPhone.
If you think it's impossible to get a few private minutes with one of these voting machines you are crazy. I am not sure how you have been an election worker and still managed to come to that conclusion. In fact, you can easily get a few private HOURS with them. Ed Felten (one of the writers of this paper) annually takes photos of himself with unattended voting machines the night before Election Day.
The difference being that on Android phones you are allowed to install apps that don't come from the App Market (including tethering apps), while on iPhone you aren't.
It's better because if someone gives away your public email address to spammers, one of two things will be true:
(a) you know who did it and have the ability to block it, because spam comes to the address with the offender's unique tag, or
(b) the spam is automatically sent to the trash and you never see it, because it goes to the base email address.
Personally I only use one email account, but none of these setups is very hard to effect. It really depends how much of a problem spam is for you. With Gmail's excellent spam filtering, it isn't much of one for me, but the +tags can act as a second line of defense.
Sure I guess that would work, but I prefer not to annoy my friends and family with extra tags and funky punctuation. So its simpler to just have a separate gmail account, or a hotmail account... or whatever.
It's not like it's particularly complicated to work around that. You could blacklist email sent to you@gmail.com, except for those emails sent from whitelisted family members. Or you could combine the two: have my-private-email@gmail.com unfiltered to use for your friends and family, and only use the tag-filtering method for my-public-email@gmail.com. Mainly I just wanted to point out that Gmail +tags are not useless and "trivial to get around."
If by beautiful you mean trivial for spammers or anyone else who knows the first thing about google to get around, then yes.
It's not trivial to get around if you use it properly. Set Gmail to filter anything sent to you@gmail.com to your trash. Then, every time you give out your email address, add a tag (as in you+tag@gmail.com) and allow whitelisted tags through the filter. Voila -- spam-blocking email address tags that are not trivial to get around.
Just taking the opportunity to give a little economics lesson as it arose, as the concept of opportunity cost is not very widely understood. I wasn't being sarcastic or suggesting that we should farm more food and lay less fiber.
I'm mostly persuaded by your argument that demanding a person's time is the way to go. I was playing devil's advocate before to some degree, as I haven't devoted much energy to thinking about the merits of flat time vs. flat amount taxation. However, at the very least I think we can both agree that a flat percentage income tax would be vastly superior to and more desirable than a progressive income tax.
As far as the possibility of increased transparency through the use of fees for government services rather than lump sum taxation, I see your point that fees may not correlate well with costs. I'd be interested to see actual data about the extent to which fees do correlate with costs for things like passports, vehicle registrations, etc., if you know of a place where such data can be found.
I don't see an intrinsic reason why it would be fairer for government to demand a flat chunk of my time than a flat sum of my money. What business is it of government's if my skills are deemed by the market to be more or less valuable than another's?
That being said, I do appreciate your point about fees' making legislators feel like they are not really increasing the size of government, when they actually are. Anything that makes the gigantic-government status quo more insurmountable should certainly be looked at critically. On the other hand, there would seem to be an advantage to fees over aggregated taxes in terms of increased transparency. When the government hands me a free passport, I don't know how much it really costs, so I would not be inclined to object if they spent too much money producing it. If I have to pay what it costs, then it's easier for me to get a sense of whether I am getting a fair deal or not (in terms of how much I am paying for the passport).
Only if we lower the price by making new broadband lines out of their food.
Well-done! You've just beautifully illustrated the economic concept of opportunity cost. In fact, in a sense, we are making broadband lines out of food! This is because when some people work to make broadband lines, they give up the opportunity to be farmers, and thus the total food supply is smaller as a result. We're not making broadband lines out of Africans' food, but we are making them out of food of ours that could conceivably be sent to Africa.
Let's be clear. NOTHING is given out "for free with citizenship." You can't make social security cards appear out of thin air and distribute themselves for free. Sorry.
I wonder what the long-term expenses of that would be. Maybe making the bridge is ultimately cheaper than paying for all that gasoline, thus ultimately benefiting the economy?
You'd need some actual figures to determine that.
I'm going to make up some actual figures (but will attempt to be conservative about it) in order to determine which is ultimately cheaper.
1) Present value of $300 million additional spent now to build a bridge that will save cruise ships a 30 mile trip: $300,000,000
2) Mileage of a cruise ship: 100 gallons per mile (this is totally made up but I can't imagine it being higher)
Gallons used to go an extra 30 miles: 3000 gallons
Cost per gallon: $3
Cost each time the less expensive bridge is navigated around: $9000
Now, say one cruise ship passes the bridge each day.
Cost per year: $9000 * 365 = $3,285,000
Let's pick a relatively low discount (interest) rate, say: 4%
Present value of $3,285,000 extra spent on gas every year for the rest of time (that is, if the bridge lasts FOREVER):
$3,285,000 / 0.04 = $82,125,000
So, there you have it. Even using ridiculously conservative figures regarding the fuel efficiency of small Alaskan cruise ships, building a bridge they can go under rather than around is well over three times more expensive (and we're the ones footing the bill rather than the cruise companies)!
You mean that if Spiderman had fallen into the public domain, then the highly successful Spiderman movies would never have been made? Like those highly successful Lord of the Rings movies that were never made because LOTR had fallen into the public domain?
A relationship where both organisms benefit is a symbiosis.
Actually, this is also incorrect. Any intimate association between two organisms constitutes symbiosis, including both parasitism and mutualism (which is, I think, the word you were looking for). Check the Wikipedia article.
The most succesfull parasites are those who stop being parasites and become symbiotes.
This statement logically makes no sense.
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Did anyone else notice that if you click on your Spam folder it displays recipes for SPAM, and if you click on the Trash it shows you recycling tips.:-)
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He probably expected that you would be smart enough to extrapolate as follows:
Cost of handset = cost of hardware + cost of bundled software
Cost of iPhone = expensive + expensive
Cost of Android phone = expensive + free
Therefore, cost of Android handset< cost of iPhone.
For the iPhone, you can develop in assembly if you want to. You can certainly use C or C++. You aren't tied to the horrible monstrosity that is Java
You can also code in C or C++ on Android. But I wouldn't have expected you to check on that before spreading this misinfomration.
If you think it's impossible to get a few private minutes with one of these voting machines you are crazy. I am not sure how you have been an election worker and still managed to come to that conclusion. In fact, you can easily get a few private HOURS with them. Ed Felten (one of the writers of this paper) annually takes photos of himself with unattended voting machines the night before Election Day.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/unattended-voting-machines-usual
The difference being that on Android phones you are allowed to install apps that don't come from the App Market (including tethering apps), while on iPhone you aren't.
Oblig.
I was replying to Higaran, not Twinbee.
I think you underestimate the difference between "free" and "not free." Making it cost even $0.01 would probably reduce the submissions significantly.
Lowercase "m" means "milli," as in "milli-gigahertz." Which is the same as one megahertz. So actually, he is inadvertently correct. :)
It's better because if someone gives away your public email address to spammers, one of two things will be true:
(a) you know who did it and have the ability to block it, because spam comes to the address with the offender's unique tag, or
(b) the spam is automatically sent to the trash and you never see it, because it goes to the base email address.
Personally I only use one email account, but none of these setups is very hard to effect. It really depends how much of a problem spam is for you. With Gmail's excellent spam filtering, it isn't much of one for me, but the +tags can act as a second line of defense.
It's not like it's particularly complicated to work around that. You could blacklist email sent to you@gmail.com, except for those emails sent from whitelisted family members. Or you could combine the two: have my-private-email@gmail.com unfiltered to use for your friends and family, and only use the tag-filtering method for my-public-email@gmail.com. Mainly I just wanted to point out that Gmail +tags are not useless and "trivial to get around."
If by beautiful you mean trivial for spammers or anyone else who knows the first thing about google to get around, then yes.
It's not trivial to get around if you use it properly. Set Gmail to filter anything sent to you@gmail.com to your trash. Then, every time you give out your email address, add a tag (as in you+tag@gmail.com) and allow whitelisted tags through the filter. Voila -- spam-blocking email address tags that are not trivial to get around.
Really? You wish it didn't have to be voluntary? You would prefer that they be forced to do it unwillingly?
Uh, V8 was not "done by others." That was all Google.
Just taking the opportunity to give a little economics lesson as it arose, as the concept of opportunity cost is not very widely understood. I wasn't being sarcastic or suggesting that we should farm more food and lay less fiber.
I'm mostly persuaded by your argument that demanding a person's time is the way to go. I was playing devil's advocate before to some degree, as I haven't devoted much energy to thinking about the merits of flat time vs. flat amount taxation. However, at the very least I think we can both agree that a flat percentage income tax would be vastly superior to and more desirable than a progressive income tax.
As far as the possibility of increased transparency through the use of fees for government services rather than lump sum taxation, I see your point that fees may not correlate well with costs. I'd be interested to see actual data about the extent to which fees do correlate with costs for things like passports, vehicle registrations, etc., if you know of a place where such data can be found.
Anyway, thanks for the enlightening discussion. :)
I don't see an intrinsic reason why it would be fairer for government to demand a flat chunk of my time than a flat sum of my money. What business is it of government's if my skills are deemed by the market to be more or less valuable than another's?
That being said, I do appreciate your point about fees' making legislators feel like they are not really increasing the size of government, when they actually are. Anything that makes the gigantic-government status quo more insurmountable should certainly be looked at critically. On the other hand, there would seem to be an advantage to fees over aggregated taxes in terms of increased transparency. When the government hands me a free passport, I don't know how much it really costs, so I would not be inclined to object if they spent too much money producing it. If I have to pay what it costs, then it's easier for me to get a sense of whether I am getting a fair deal or not (in terms of how much I am paying for the passport).
I don't really see a difference. You're paying the same fee, whether it's lumped in with the rest of your taxes or assessed separately.
Let's be clear. NOTHING is given out "for free with citizenship." You can't make social security cards appear out of thin air and distribute themselves for free. Sorry.
I'm going to make up some actual figures (but will attempt to be conservative about it) in order to determine which is ultimately cheaper.
1) Present value of $300 million additional spent now to build a bridge that will save cruise ships a 30 mile trip: $300,000,000
2) Mileage of a cruise ship: 100 gallons per mile (this is totally made up but I can't imagine it being higher)
Gallons used to go an extra 30 miles: 3000 gallons
Cost per gallon: $3
Cost each time the less expensive bridge is navigated around: $9000
Now, say one cruise ship passes the bridge each day.
Cost per year: $9000 * 365 = $3,285,000
Let's pick a relatively low discount (interest) rate, say: 4%
Present value of $3,285,000 extra spent on gas every year for the rest of time (that is, if the bridge lasts FOREVER):
$3,285,000 / 0.04 = $82,125,000
So, there you have it. Even using ridiculously conservative figures regarding the fuel efficiency of small Alaskan cruise ships, building a bridge they can go under rather than around is well over three times more expensive (and we're the ones footing the bill rather than the cruise companies)!
You mean that if Spiderman had fallen into the public domain, then the highly successful Spiderman movies would never have been made? Like those highly successful Lord of the Rings movies that were never made because LOTR had fallen into the public domain?
A relationship where both organisms benefit is a symbiosis.
Actually, this is also incorrect. Any intimate association between two organisms constitutes symbiosis, including both parasitism and mutualism (which is, I think, the word you were looking for). Check the Wikipedia article.
The most succesfull parasites are those who stop being parasites and become symbiotes.
This statement logically makes no sense.
Did anyone else notice that if you click on your Spam folder it displays recipes for SPAM, and if you click on the Trash it shows you recycling tips. :-)
Sounds a lot more like the plot of Jurassic Park to me... extract spider DNA from preserved blood in amber, and... Arachnid Park?
...that after that whole fiasco with the G4 cube Apple would just get it right when it comes to cracking cases!