Please don't mention Switzerland. Despite living there, you have no clue what "economic freedoms" means. The only economic freedom you care about is the one to reduce the taxes you pay.
Unfortunately, the argument that the current federal government should be cut to 1% of its current size amounts to exactly that - no federal government. Heck, it wouldn't even be able to fund the various military branches at that level. Heck, $40 Billion won't even fund NASA and the Department of Justice. You'll fund a bit of administration, a couple of foreign embassies and a small army that is less than 1/10 of what it is now (just going by budget figures). Furthermore, lack of a central authority will result in exactly what you think won't happen: every faction with its own government and laws and living in a state of nature with the other factions. Or do you really think that Americans from Maine to California will pull together on all topics, just because their American? They won't even care about the same foreign issues.
The only utterly stupid argument is that you can have a unified country that is a super power in the world without a central government that can provide a single direction for business and foreign affairs.
Explain that to the ratings agencies, who will send the US' AAA rating down the shitter at the first hint of anything looking like a default. This isn't high-school debate class, where you can score points based on semantics. People look at your actions, and then decide how to deal with you. You can scream "it's not a default" all you want - the people who matter won't believe you.
Here's the thing: the Xbox is MS' last great hope to expand from the desktop into the living room. Any past costs accrued by the Xbox division are completely irrelevant. The only things that matter are: does MS have an option of not going down that road, and can it pay the costs of establishing the Xbox as the central hub for the living room?
The answers are no, and yes. It's ahead of Nintendo in terms of being an entertainment hub, and Sony completely bungled the current generation. MS has an opportunity to turn a profit in that area - but only if it keeps plugging away. The goal is future profitability and sustainability, not having max revenue for the next quarter.
Because the one-time income generated by a sale could generate more dividends for shareholders than keeping Bing for the next quarter. After all, the only metric that matters is the profit generated next quarter. Quick, MSFT! Sell your XBox division! It's been a net loss so far, too.
For the sarcasm impaired: the above was sarcasm. Please refrain from pointing out the idiocy of the advocated actions, as that is implied.
And it's people like you who make the rest of the world think "WTF is wrong with you people?" If you fail to understand how the post you quoted was nothing more than 1930s style flamebait and racism, you are indeed just a depraved and worthless bigot.
From the journal "Review of Austrian Economics". Do you also read Baptist newsletters on whether Jesus existed, or papers from the Creationist Museum regarding when dinosaurs existed?
Not to mention that there are some egregious errors in the papers: a gas company that was disrupted by an entirely new technology not requiring existing infrastructure or the complete lack of study of actual monopolies that appeared without government intervention. Standard Oil is still the textbook example for this.
And just to be clear: cellular, satellite and cable are not competitors to DSL or Fiber.
You have no idea what anti-trust laws are targeted at, what a monopoly is and you have even less of an idea what you're proposing as solution. Start reading here: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shartman/mba0101/trust.htm.
This is just like in the past where there would be links to Google products without any indication that they weren't paid results causing confusion in the browser.
You're now just flat out lying. Is anyone paying you for this shit?
Is this really any different than Google getting investigated for allegedly boosting results of its products?
People still trot out this canard? for the record, the search results have never been altered. What some idiot blogger complained about is that for specific search terms, Google would use its own stock charting results above the results, instead of, say, Yahoos. That's identical to it providing direct definitions for words, doing calculations from the search bar or any other heuristic that resulted in Google very clearly saying "here's the data we think you were looking for", and then placing below it the standard site search results. For stock tickers, Google Finance wasn't even the top result; that would be Yahoo. And even the Google Finance charts had direct links to the major other charting sites - directly under the mini chart on the search result page.
So give it a rest. Stop spreading what is by now an outright lie.
Let me ask you this - do you play with your computer while you race? Of course not - because it lowers your performance and reaction time. Then why the hell do you do it while in traffic? Because the speeds are lower? A nice rear-ending will still kill you. Because everyone drives in a straight line? All it takes is one idiot to ruin your life... for the rest of your life.
That's the reason why all the crap you're doing is dangerous: you are reducing the safety margin between you and the drivers all around you. The overconfidence everyone is talking about has nothing to do with driving skills, and all with reaction time.
Congress writes the budget and sends it to the White House, the White House approves or rejects. If it is rejected, Congress can overrule the President's veto.
What they're figuring is that for what they're planning, they need people to have lots of access to data stored in a datacenter. Does it really matter who administrates that data center? Forget about "moving to the cloud" for a second, that's just marketing speak. What they're actually saying is that they're outsourcing the maintenance of their hardware and primary application stack to someone else. Whether the NHS owns the data center or not is completely irrelevant in this scenario.
To some extent, this might actually be a security move. Who do you trust to have more experience with providing secure hosting: the NHS or Amazon? Exactly.
What you fail to realize is that these people don't care that they're not standards compliant. Standard compliant just means that it is easy for others to interface with you. Telstra really doesn't care about that - it only cares that it provides enough Internet access to enough people to give a nice, fat bonus to its execs. And that doesn't require that it implements DNS in a standards-compliant way. I mean, you're not supporting child pornographers, right? So be quiet and accept the new and improved standard.
I would like to point out that the people on Flight 93 all died on 9/11, and that the shoe and underwear bomber were pretty incompetent buffons. There's a job that can be done by security forces, and can be done well by security forces: prevent civilians from getting into a situation where they need more than daily tools to survive.
If one branch of the government can completely revoke a portion of its Constitution, without any input from the people, what's the point of even having a Constitution?
Correction: You just don't like the way that the constitution is being interpreted by the SCOTUS. There's a way to fix that: vote for people who will select SCOTUS judges who are more in line with your thinking, or become one yourself.
Let's do it then. Draft an amendment to modify the First Amendment.
Go for it. The process starts with writing your congress critter. Next step: start a grass-roots campaign. I'll check back at that point.
This is an absolutely crystal clear case of activist judges legislating from the bench.
... with the full support of the legislation and the public. Don't kid yourself - if the Miller test wouldn't exist, laws would have been put into place to mimic it. As a matter of fact, your activist judges legislating from the bench are the ones currently preventing worse laws from being written by legislators.
Finally, this entire idea of legislating from the bench being illegal is complete nonsense: with the way that the US legal system works, every time a judge or a jury makes a decision, it sets a legal precedent - i.e., it becomes part of the legal landscape. If you're tired of judges legalizing from the bench, scrap the way that the court works.
Judging from what works during the election cycle, I'd say that most Americans want some form of airport security. How much security is up for debate - and what kind of security is a question of education. Which, unfortunately, has nothing to do with intelligence or what shows up on TV and in papers.
A first post AC who has something insightful to say? Color me shocked. The gist of the editorial isn't that the security theater is ineffective, it is that the government shouldn't be groping grandmas when the free market could provide security without having to grope grandmas. This is nothing but the standard trope of "government is evil" mixed with taking advantage of people not understanding security.
But that's a sham.
#1 Physical profiling doesn't work. Terrorists would just do dry-runs until they find a combination of people and materials that is outside the profile. #2 Behavioral profiling is somewhat better, but requires much more expensive training. It is unlikely to be implemented in all airports. #3 This leaves random sampling. In order for random sampling to work, grandmas and babies have to be groped. Otherwise, we're right back at #1.
Do people have to be groped? Honestly, I'm not up-to-date enough on the latest explosives to know what kind of damage a fake boob or a full diaper's worth of C4 can do to a plane. I'll leave that decision to the experts.
What I can guarantee you though is that the free market doesn't have a better solution for this? Why? Money.
There are two ways to pay for it: airports and airlines pay for it, or travelers pay for it.
If airlines and airports pay for it, the motivation is to keep bringing as many people in as possible - which, since everybody thinks they're innocent and shouldn't be hassled, means a reduction in safety. If individuals pay for it, they'll want to pay for it only when they travel, which is a huge individual expense. The only people able to afford proper security are the wealthy, and at that point, they might as well rent a private jet.
If the American people want airport security, the only way to do it right is through a government agency that takes a little bit from everybody to provide some expensive security to a small subgroup of people.
Re:Google was great because of the lack of Google+
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 1
In other news, competition is good? I'm not particularly vetted to Google. Right now, they provide services that I like with an attitude I can accept. If something better comes along, sign me up. Just make sure it's actually *better* and not just different.
Re:Looks like time to find a new search engine
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 2
Use quotation marks around the problematic words? I find that I mistype things more often than I use abbreviations that are close to a real word. As a result, it's a net win.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't mention Switzerland. Despite living there, you have no clue what "economic freedoms" means. The only economic freedom you care about is the one to reduce the taxes you pay.
Unfortunately, the argument that the current federal government should be cut to 1% of its current size amounts to exactly that - no federal government. Heck, it wouldn't even be able to fund the various military branches at that level. Heck, $40 Billion won't even fund NASA and the Department of Justice. You'll fund a bit of administration, a couple of foreign embassies and a small army that is less than 1/10 of what it is now (just going by budget figures). Furthermore, lack of a central authority will result in exactly what you think won't happen: every faction with its own government and laws and living in a state of nature with the other factions. Or do you really think that Americans from Maine to California will pull together on all topics, just because their American? They won't even care about the same foreign issues.
The only utterly stupid argument is that you can have a unified country that is a super power in the world without a central government that can provide a single direction for business and foreign affairs.
Explain that to the ratings agencies, who will send the US' AAA rating down the shitter at the first hint of anything looking like a default. This isn't high-school debate class, where you can score points based on semantics. People look at your actions, and then decide how to deal with you. You can scream "it's not a default" all you want - the people who matter won't believe you.
Here's the thing: the Xbox is MS' last great hope to expand from the desktop into the living room. Any past costs accrued by the Xbox division are completely irrelevant. The only things that matter are: does MS have an option of not going down that road, and can it pay the costs of establishing the Xbox as the central hub for the living room?
The answers are no, and yes. It's ahead of Nintendo in terms of being an entertainment hub, and Sony completely bungled the current generation. MS has an opportunity to turn a profit in that area - but only if it keeps plugging away. The goal is future profitability and sustainability, not having max revenue for the next quarter.
Somebody else who doesn't understand the concept of sunk cost or long-term planning. Keep trolling, AC.
Because the one-time income generated by a sale could generate more dividends for shareholders than keeping Bing for the next quarter. After all, the only metric that matters is the profit generated next quarter. Quick, MSFT! Sell your XBox division! It's been a net loss so far, too.
For the sarcasm impaired: the above was sarcasm. Please refrain from pointing out the idiocy of the advocated actions, as that is implied.
Brand new account, copy-paste of some barely supported claims that are a little out there, to say the least.... my shill-o-meter is ringing.
Who is this "Slashdot" you are referring to?
Your comment is particularly ironic given your sig.
And it's people like you who make the rest of the world think "WTF is wrong with you people?" If you fail to understand how the post you quoted was nothing more than 1930s style flamebait and racism, you are indeed just a depraved and worthless bigot.
You get modded down as flamebait and troll because there is no mod for illogical and ignorant hypocrite.
From the journal "Review of Austrian Economics". Do you also read Baptist newsletters on whether Jesus existed, or papers from the Creationist Museum regarding when dinosaurs existed?
Not to mention that there are some egregious errors in the papers: a gas company that was disrupted by an entirely new technology not requiring existing infrastructure or the complete lack of study of actual monopolies that appeared without government intervention. Standard Oil is still the textbook example for this.
And just to be clear: cellular, satellite and cable are not competitors to DSL or Fiber.
This coming from the guy who lives in his utopia of Switzerland is fucking rich. Please don't vote, I like Switzerland. You'll just fuck it up.
You have no idea what anti-trust laws are targeted at, what a monopoly is and you have even less of an idea what you're proposing as solution. Start reading here: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shartman/mba0101/trust.htm.
This is just like in the past where there would be links to Google products without any indication that they weren't paid results causing confusion in the browser.
You're now just flat out lying. Is anyone paying you for this shit?
Is this really any different than Google getting investigated for allegedly boosting results of its products?
People still trot out this canard? for the record, the search results have never been altered. What some idiot blogger complained about is that for specific search terms, Google would use its own stock charting results above the results, instead of, say, Yahoos. That's identical to it providing direct definitions for words, doing calculations from the search bar or any other heuristic that resulted in Google very clearly saying "here's the data we think you were looking for", and then placing below it the standard site search results. For stock tickers, Google Finance wasn't even the top result; that would be Yahoo. And even the Google Finance charts had direct links to the major other charting sites - directly under the mini chart on the search result page.
So give it a rest. Stop spreading what is by now an outright lie.
Let me ask you this - do you play with your computer while you race? Of course not - because it lowers your performance and reaction time. Then why the hell do you do it while in traffic? Because the speeds are lower? A nice rear-ending will still kill you. Because everyone drives in a straight line? All it takes is one idiot to ruin your life... for the rest of your life.
That's the reason why all the crap you're doing is dangerous: you are reducing the safety margin between you and the drivers all around you. The overconfidence everyone is talking about has nothing to do with driving skills, and all with reaction time.
Congress writes the budget and sends it to the White House, the White House approves or rejects. If it is rejected, Congress can overrule the President's veto.
Sucks when life is complicated, isn't it?
What they're figuring is that for what they're planning, they need people to have lots of access to data stored in a datacenter. Does it really matter who administrates that data center? Forget about "moving to the cloud" for a second, that's just marketing speak. What they're actually saying is that they're outsourcing the maintenance of their hardware and primary application stack to someone else. Whether the NHS owns the data center or not is completely irrelevant in this scenario.
To some extent, this might actually be a security move. Who do you trust to have more experience with providing secure hosting: the NHS or Amazon? Exactly.
What you fail to realize is that these people don't care that they're not standards compliant. Standard compliant just means that it is easy for others to interface with you. Telstra really doesn't care about that - it only cares that it provides enough Internet access to enough people to give a nice, fat bonus to its execs. And that doesn't require that it implements DNS in a standards-compliant way. I mean, you're not supporting child pornographers, right? So be quiet and accept the new and improved standard.
Yes, the last bit was sarcasm.
I would like to point out that the people on Flight 93 all died on 9/11, and that the shoe and underwear bomber were pretty incompetent buffons. There's a job that can be done by security forces, and can be done well by security forces: prevent civilians from getting into a situation where they need more than daily tools to survive.
If one branch of the government can completely revoke a portion of its Constitution, without any input from the people, what's the point of even having a Constitution?
Correction: You just don't like the way that the constitution is being interpreted by the SCOTUS. There's a way to fix that: vote for people who will select SCOTUS judges who are more in line with your thinking, or become one yourself.
Let's do it then. Draft an amendment to modify the First Amendment.
Go for it. The process starts with writing your congress critter. Next step: start a grass-roots campaign. I'll check back at that point.
This is an absolutely crystal clear case of activist judges legislating from the bench.
... with the full support of the legislation and the public. Don't kid yourself - if the Miller test wouldn't exist, laws would have been put into place to mimic it. As a matter of fact, your activist judges legislating from the bench are the ones currently preventing worse laws from being written by legislators.
Finally, this entire idea of legislating from the bench being illegal is complete nonsense: with the way that the US legal system works, every time a judge or a jury makes a decision, it sets a legal precedent - i.e., it becomes part of the legal landscape. If you're tired of judges legalizing from the bench, scrap the way that the court works.
If the American people want airport security
Who says we do?
Judging from what works during the election cycle, I'd say that most Americans want some form of airport security. How much security is up for debate - and what kind of security is a question of education. Which, unfortunately, has nothing to do with intelligence or what shows up on TV and in papers.
A first post AC who has something insightful to say? Color me shocked. The gist of the editorial isn't that the security theater is ineffective, it is that the government shouldn't be groping grandmas when the free market could provide security without having to grope grandmas. This is nothing but the standard trope of "government is evil" mixed with taking advantage of people not understanding security.
But that's a sham.
#1 Physical profiling doesn't work. Terrorists would just do dry-runs until they find a combination of people and materials that is outside the profile.
#2 Behavioral profiling is somewhat better, but requires much more expensive training. It is unlikely to be implemented in all airports.
#3 This leaves random sampling. In order for random sampling to work, grandmas and babies have to be groped. Otherwise, we're right back at #1.
Do people have to be groped? Honestly, I'm not up-to-date enough on the latest explosives to know what kind of damage a fake boob or a full diaper's worth of C4 can do to a plane. I'll leave that decision to the experts.
What I can guarantee you though is that the free market doesn't have a better solution for this? Why? Money.
There are two ways to pay for it: airports and airlines pay for it, or travelers pay for it.
If airlines and airports pay for it, the motivation is to keep bringing as many people in as possible - which, since everybody thinks they're innocent and shouldn't be hassled, means a reduction in safety. If individuals pay for it, they'll want to pay for it only when they travel, which is a huge individual expense. The only people able to afford proper security are the wealthy, and at that point, they might as well rent a private jet.
If the American people want airport security, the only way to do it right is through a government agency that takes a little bit from everybody to provide some expensive security to a small subgroup of people.
In other news, competition is good? I'm not particularly vetted to Google. Right now, they provide services that I like with an attitude I can accept. If something better comes along, sign me up. Just make sure it's actually *better* and not just different.
Use quotation marks around the problematic words? I find that I mistype things more often than I use abbreviations that are close to a real word. As a result, it's a net win.