Except that, this is not true. The USA experienced a huge surge in population and really only ran into fiscal problems when our population growth rate dropped.
We experienced a surge in population because of a surge in wealth. Having kids you can't afford is a bad idea.
Old people are expensive to take care of, and the cheapest way to do that is have loads of kids so as to share the costs.
Loads of kids growing up in broken homes with inadequate attention, education, and nutrition aren't going to be supporting anyone. They're more likely to be stripping and robbing convenience stores. Don't ignore quality of life in favor of quantity.
BTW, whatever happened to planning for your own retirement? Raising a child costs $125,000 to $250,000. That could go a long way if you invested it instead.
But, at the end of the day, your way of life is doomed, simply because, for better or for worse, our religious culture has been evolved by hundreds of generations of human cultural evolution
What, you think other cultures just fell from the sky one day?
You're focusing on genetic evolution but ignoring memetic evolution. The beliefs you're promoting were the default for centuries; the ones you're denigrating evolved from your beliefs, because people saw how much squalor and human suffering comes from crapping out kids willy-nilly.
So yes--you won't see libertarians support unions just because we're pro choice. People should be able to think for themselves, act responsibly for themselves, and not be forced to toe some line with bullshit "solidarity" where nobody can be reprimanded because of some sort of mythical status symbol. Unions centralize power--they just do it away from the nominal government of "the state".
Um.. wouldn't the libertarian response to that be, "go work somewhere else"? No one is forcing you to toe any line; you're choosing to toe the line by joining the union or applying to work at a place that requires union membership.
If $University wants to enter a voluntary contract with $Union setting the terms under which they'll fire professors, what exactly is the libertarian basis for interfering with that contract? Other universities will offer different terms if the union terms are really that unpopular. Libertarians are always telling dissatisfied customers to take their business elsewhere and let the market sort it out instead of passing more regulations (e.g. net neutrality and health insurance), so why can't competition work here as well?
Here's one I got a few weeks ago from Google Voice:
Hello voice subscriber what. Hey if you few questions for you. They can feel me 6 like a year like 2 years ago to like forever. Go you came over and I was locked out of the password didn't know the password so much and we wanted. Anybody passed it. I don't know how you guys have a good i just took it out for the first time in years and it says your class is expired. I must be changed and I go to that the windows X P professional you went and dollar dishing whatever it is really old addition, windows 85,001 yet and it's give me a change. Faster screen and says, administrative, which is still around. Funny has got hold us for new password. I confirm you got through. I've any idea what the password again, 30, or if you're more than the who knows no idea what it would've been so if you tell me but sister for you know the next week, otherwise, I was gonna go out to confirm for some a long time, so if you should come pick the and a case.
unless of course they come back mentally disturbed
Or dead.
The military doesn't hand out free college educations because they're nice. They do it because most people won't risk life, limb, and sanity without a very bright light at the end of the tunnel.
There won't be any "iPhone-killer" unless some other company can make their product with user experience at least just as good.
This already exists, and it's called Android.
Seriously, there are multiple Android phones available in the US from multiple carriers already. Go play with one for a few minutes, and you'll see that everything you said about the iPhone is equally true of Android. And that means it'll be true of this new Verizon phone.
A group of smart men once signed a document laying out three things a good government should ensure: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Interestingly, food stamps aren't included in this list.
Actually, they are. See the first item in that list? It's kinda hard to live if you can't buy food.
We don't need the government to feed people. There is already a system of non-governmental charities that do a much better job at getting people out of dependency.
What makes you think private charities have enough funding to help every last man, woman, and child who needs their help? And even if they had enough funding this year, what guarantee would we have that they'll still have enough funding next year?
Most people who currently don't have health insurance refused the health insurance offered at work,
You are sorely, sorely misinformed. Go to a shopping mall, theater, restaurant, etc. and ask whether they offer health insurance to their employees. Nine times out of ten the answer will be no.
We are going through all this nonsense for about 10-15 million people. This is overkill.
The restaurant industry alone employs 13 million people in the US. Few of them have the option to get health insurance through their jobs.
Furthermore, even people with insurance are getting screwed under the current system: high premiums, high deductibles, recission, refusal to cover pre-existing conditions, etc. Insurance that won't cover you when you get sick is worse than no insurance at all.
Because the fact that/, -, and some other common symbols are hidden in weird places on the keyboard, it took me a bit to get to my own app, even on the soft keyboard.
That's just the reality of a 48-key keyboard. The layout is pretty intuitive considering the limitations they were working with - the common symbols are arranged roughly the same way as on a standard keyboard. It might not be obvious the first time you pick it up, but if you're a G1 owner you'll get the hang of it very quickly.
My G1 has some real problems - the camera sucks, the battery is wimpy, it has no built-in flash, it's bigger than an iPhone but has a smaller screen...
DOS 3.3 also didn't have for/d, which loops through directory names only, so you'd need to use a trick to distinguish between directory and file names. It's been a while, but I think you could do something like this:
if "%1"=="x" goto recursive
for %%i in (*) do if exist %%i\nul call %0 x %1
exit :recursive
copy %2\*.xml.
del %2\*.xml
And can you tell me where I stated that Microsoft has patents, or has any desire to use existing patents on Silverlight right now to slow the uptake of a currently little used system?
You speculated that they "may" have patents now.
Patents are a matter of public record. Either they exist, and someone can find them, or they don't exist. No one has found them yet, right?
So, sure, it's possible that they exist, and every single competitor and detractor has somehow overlooked them. It's also possible that there's a fleet of alien invaders hiding behind the moon. But I'm not going to waste my time worrying about those possibilities until they're supported by more than speculation.
Do you actually understand the strategic use of software patents? Springing the trap now is a waste of time and effort.
Certainly, but it sounds like your understanding could use some work. You see, in order to spring the trap later for a technology that exists now, they must already have the patents. No patents = no potential trap.
By which time it is too late to do anything
No, it isn't. If some new patented features appear in Silverlight, all we have to do is decline to use them. Anyone who wants their applet to be cross-platform will stick to the freely implementable subset, just like anyone who wants their.NET application to be cross-platform already sticks to the subset of features that are also supported by Mono.
So please explain to me.. Why would Microsoft put a technology it wanted to be unique to Microsoft under a no sue pledge?
The same reason they've collaborated with other companies to create an open-source implementation of that technology: they don't want it to be "unique to Microsoft". Microsoft benefits from Silverlight development the same way they benefit from.NET development, no matter what OS the code eventually runs on.
Good for customers, bad for Microsoft. If the code can run on any OS, then you don't need Microsoft to run it.
And yet Microsoft submitted C# and the CLR as ECMA standards, and they made a "no sue pledge" protecting third party implementations of.NET that do, in fact, allow code to "run on any OS".
Yeah, we all remember the Java debacle. That was quite some time ago, and other things have happened in the intervening years. A rational observer would conclude that Microsoft's strategy has changed, but it seems you'd rather ignore the facts than give up your paranoia.
Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network.
HSPA is based on the same principles as CDMA (whereas GSM is a TDMA system). The CDMA technology is fine.
CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America.
And Asia, but fair enough.
Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology.
If so, you haven't mentioned any of them.
People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.
Of course not, and that's one thing that sucks about Verizon and the Canadian CDMA providers. (Although I was a Verizon customer for years and never paid for any of my custom ringtones. All you need is a data cable and some free software.)
But that's a complaint about the carriers' policies, not the technology.
Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.
Nope - look at the business plans. Unlimited data plans start at $50/mo.
Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.
Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.
Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.
We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth? I get all my TV from torrents, but I still barely push 75 GB (upload + download combined) in a typical month. My heaviest month ever was only about 120 GB.
I don't claim that Microsoft has patents right now, although they may have
There's no evidence that they do, so we can safely disregard this little fantasy until this evidence is discovered.
but that there will be patented features of Silverlight that will come to light at the most opportune time.
So, in other words, any Silverlight implementation written today is safe, and we don't need to spend another minute worrying about this patent FUD until those patented features actually appear.
Naturally, Microsoft could be entering into a new era of cooperation with others in the computer industry, and are in fact going to announce that they are turning themselves into a non profit organisation any day now, and handing all their patents over to the OIN..
Or, more likely, they'll come out with yet another legally binding public pledge not to sue anyone for implementing.NET... and zealots like yourself will ignore it yet again.
The Bluetooth stack is somewhat flaky, and A2DP is very poor - reception and streaming cutout problems. Interested? I may start a blog dedicated to this. I'm understanding the hardware limitations.
I had a lot of A2DP cutouts with 1.5, but 1.6 seems to have cleared it up.
On the other hand, that could be because 1.6 got my phone stuck in a reboot loop and I had to do a factory reset. Maybe the cutouts were caused by some app that I haven't reinstalled.
I do still occasionally have cutouts for a few seconds, where StreamFurious says it's "playing" even though I'm not hearing anything, but the frequent clicks I heard under 1.5 are gone now.
I don't get this multitasking argument. What sort of multitasking are you expecting?
Here's some multitasking I've actually done with my Android phone:
Listening to Last.fm while doing something else in the foreground. (There's a Last.fm app for iPhone, but since it's not made by Apple, it can't play in the background.)
Running a background service that automatically changes settings like WiFi, 3G, ringer volume, and screen brightness based on things like GPS location and battery state.
Sure, having an MSN app in the background might be useful when browsing the web, but all of the IM applications use the push notification service so you get notification when the IM application isn't running.
Push notifications are a substitute for some forms of multitasking, but not all.
Ah yes.. the old accusation of bias dodge.. Never gets old.
Cute but wrong. I didn't accuse you of bias, I accused you of spreading FUD, which is exactly what you're doing. You're making vague insinuations to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about potential legal threats to a third-party Silverlight application, and so far you've provided no evidence; you've only invoked the patent bogeyman.
But I'll happily comply, as soon as you furnish me with a complete list of current and future patents and other IP property related to the current and any future implementations of Silverlight.
Sorry, the burden of proof is on you here. You're the one making the claim that Microsoft has patents to use against Moonlight developers. So, let's see them! Surely you have some evidence, right? The only alternative would be that you're making shit up.
Like I said, if you're that paranoid, you can get the same security on XBL by buying membership cards once every 13 months. Pay cash and wear a Nixon mask so even the store clerk won't be able to trace you.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that, this is not true. The USA experienced a huge surge in population and really only ran into fiscal problems when our population growth rate dropped.
We experienced a surge in population because of a surge in wealth. Having kids you can't afford is a bad idea.
Old people are expensive to take care of, and the cheapest way to do that is have loads of kids so as to share the costs.
Loads of kids growing up in broken homes with inadequate attention, education, and nutrition aren't going to be supporting anyone. They're more likely to be stripping and robbing convenience stores. Don't ignore quality of life in favor of quantity.
BTW, whatever happened to planning for your own retirement? Raising a child costs $125,000 to $250,000. That could go a long way if you invested it instead.
But, at the end of the day, your way of life is doomed, simply because, for better or for worse, our religious culture has been evolved by hundreds of generations of human cultural evolution
What, you think other cultures just fell from the sky one day?
You're focusing on genetic evolution but ignoring memetic evolution. The beliefs you're promoting were the default for centuries; the ones you're denigrating evolved from your beliefs, because people saw how much squalor and human suffering comes from crapping out kids willy-nilly.
Emergency contraception is only 75-89% effective. That still leaves a lot of unwanted pregnancies.
So yes--you won't see libertarians support unions just because we're pro choice. People should be able to think for themselves, act responsibly for themselves, and not be forced to toe some line with bullshit "solidarity" where nobody can be reprimanded because of some sort of mythical status symbol. Unions centralize power--they just do it away from the nominal government of "the state".
Um.. wouldn't the libertarian response to that be, "go work somewhere else"? No one is forcing you to toe any line; you're choosing to toe the line by joining the union or applying to work at a place that requires union membership.
If $University wants to enter a voluntary contract with $Union setting the terms under which they'll fire professors, what exactly is the libertarian basis for interfering with that contract? Other universities will offer different terms if the union terms are really that unpopular. Libertarians are always telling dissatisfied customers to take their business elsewhere and let the market sort it out instead of passing more regulations (e.g. net neutrality and health insurance), so why can't competition work here as well?
And I'll admit that the VA system sucks
I wouldn't say that.
unless of course they come back mentally disturbed
Or dead. The military doesn't hand out free college educations because they're nice. They do it because most people won't risk life, limb, and sanity without a very bright light at the end of the tunnel.
And iPhone has something that the android doesn't -- a lot of software apps that people love.
I hate to burst your bubble, but Android has those too.
I've personally been hopeful for a good Android phone for a long time but so far it has failed to manifest.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure where you're looking, but I see three good Android phones on the US market right now.
There won't be any "iPhone-killer" unless some other company can make their product with user experience at least just as good.
This already exists, and it's called Android. Seriously, there are multiple Android phones available in the US from multiple carriers already. Go play with one for a few minutes, and you'll see that everything you said about the iPhone is equally true of Android. And that means it'll be true of this new Verizon phone.
No more absurd than the "universal service" requirement we have right here in the United States for telephone lines.
A group of smart men once signed a document laying out three things a good government should ensure: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Interestingly, food stamps aren't included in this list.
Actually, they are. See the first item in that list? It's kinda hard to live if you can't buy food.
We don't need the government to feed people. There is already a system of non-governmental charities that do a much better job at getting people out of dependency.
What makes you think private charities have enough funding to help every last man, woman, and child who needs their help? And even if they had enough funding this year, what guarantee would we have that they'll still have enough funding next year?
Most people who currently don't have health insurance refused the health insurance offered at work,
You are sorely, sorely misinformed. Go to a shopping mall, theater, restaurant, etc. and ask whether they offer health insurance to their employees. Nine times out of ten the answer will be no.
We are going through all this nonsense for about 10-15 million people. This is overkill.
The restaurant industry alone employs 13 million people in the US. Few of them have the option to get health insurance through their jobs. Furthermore, even people with insurance are getting screwed under the current system: high premiums, high deductibles, recission, refusal to cover pre-existing conditions, etc. Insurance that won't cover you when you get sick is worse than no insurance at all.
Because the fact that /, -, and some other common symbols are hidden in weird places on the keyboard, it took me a bit to get to my own app, even on the soft keyboard.
That's just the reality of a 48-key keyboard. The layout is pretty intuitive considering the limitations they were working with - the common symbols are arranged roughly the same way as on a standard keyboard. It might not be obvious the first time you pick it up, but if you're a G1 owner you'll get the hang of it very quickly.
My G1 has some real problems - the camera sucks, the battery is wimpy, it has no built-in flash, it's bigger than an iPhone but has a smaller screen...
Thicker, but not bigger. The iPhone 3G is wider, taller, and has a greater volume.
Make a beautiful Android phone, and I will switch carriers, fork over $400, and sign a two year contract!
But you just called the Cliq "crap". Is it not beautiful enough for you?
Without writing a batch file? No.
DOS 3.3 also didn't have for /d, which loops through directory names only, so you'd need to use a trick to distinguish between directory and file names. It's been a while, but I think you could do something like this:
if "%1"=="x" goto recursive
:recursive .
for %%i in (*) do if exist %%i\nul call %0 x %1
exit
copy %2\*.xml
del %2\*.xml
And can you tell me where I stated that Microsoft has patents, or has any desire to use existing patents on Silverlight right now to slow the uptake of a currently little used system?
You speculated that they "may" have patents now.
Patents are a matter of public record. Either they exist, and someone can find them, or they don't exist. No one has found them yet, right?
So, sure, it's possible that they exist, and every single competitor and detractor has somehow overlooked them. It's also possible that there's a fleet of alien invaders hiding behind the moon. But I'm not going to waste my time worrying about those possibilities until they're supported by more than speculation.
Do you actually understand the strategic use of software patents? Springing the trap now is a waste of time and effort.
Certainly, but it sounds like your understanding could use some work. You see, in order to spring the trap later for a technology that exists now, they must already have the patents. No patents = no potential trap.
By which time it is too late to do anything
No, it isn't. If some new patented features appear in Silverlight, all we have to do is decline to use them. Anyone who wants their applet to be cross-platform will stick to the freely implementable subset, just like anyone who wants their .NET application to be cross-platform already sticks to the subset of features that are also supported by Mono.
So please explain to me.. Why would Microsoft put a technology it wanted to be unique to Microsoft under a no sue pledge?
The same reason they've collaborated with other companies to create an open-source implementation of that technology: they don't want it to be "unique to Microsoft". Microsoft benefits from Silverlight development the same way they benefit from .NET development, no matter what OS the code eventually runs on.
Good for customers, bad for Microsoft. If the code can run on any OS, then you don't need Microsoft to run it.
And yet Microsoft submitted C# and the CLR as ECMA standards, and they made a "no sue pledge" protecting third party implementations of .NET that do, in fact, allow code to "run on any OS".
Yeah, we all remember the Java debacle. That was quite some time ago, and other things have happened in the intervening years. A rational observer would conclude that Microsoft's strategy has changed, but it seems you'd rather ignore the facts than give up your paranoia.
Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network.
HSPA is based on the same principles as CDMA (whereas GSM is a TDMA system). The CDMA technology is fine.
CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America.
And Asia, but fair enough.
Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology.
If so, you haven't mentioned any of them.
People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.
Of course not, and that's one thing that sucks about Verizon and the Canadian CDMA providers. (Although I was a Verizon customer for years and never paid for any of my custom ringtones. All you need is a data cable and some free software.)
But that's a complaint about the carriers' policies, not the technology.
Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.
Nope - look at the business plans. Unlimited data plans start at $50/mo.
Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.
Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.
Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.
We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Wow. What are you running to suck up so much bandwidth? I get all my TV from torrents, but I still barely push 75 GB (upload + download combined) in a typical month. My heaviest month ever was only about 120 GB.
I don't claim that Microsoft has patents right now, although they may have
There's no evidence that they do, so we can safely disregard this little fantasy until this evidence is discovered.
but that there will be patented features of Silverlight that will come to light at the most opportune time.
So, in other words, any Silverlight implementation written today is safe, and we don't need to spend another minute worrying about this patent FUD until those patented features actually appear.
Naturally, Microsoft could be entering into a new era of cooperation with others in the computer industry, and are in fact going to announce that they are turning themselves into a non profit organisation any day now, and handing all their patents over to the OIN..
Or, more likely, they'll come out with yet another legally binding public pledge not to sue anyone for implementing .NET... and zealots like yourself will ignore it yet again.
The Bluetooth stack is somewhat flaky, and A2DP is very poor - reception and streaming cutout problems. Interested? I may start a blog dedicated to this. I'm understanding the hardware limitations.
I had a lot of A2DP cutouts with 1.5, but 1.6 seems to have cleared it up.
On the other hand, that could be because 1.6 got my phone stuck in a reboot loop and I had to do a factory reset. Maybe the cutouts were caused by some app that I haven't reinstalled.
I do still occasionally have cutouts for a few seconds, where StreamFurious says it's "playing" even though I'm not hearing anything, but the frequent clicks I heard under 1.5 are gone now.
I don't get this multitasking argument. What sort of multitasking are you expecting?
Here's some multitasking I've actually done with my Android phone:
Listening to Last.fm while doing something else in the foreground. (There's a Last.fm app for iPhone, but since it's not made by Apple, it can't play in the background.)
Running a background service that automatically changes settings like WiFi, 3G, ringer volume, and screen brightness based on things like GPS location and battery state.
Sure, having an MSN app in the background might be useful when browsing the web, but all of the IM applications use the push notification service so you get notification when the IM application isn't running.
Push notifications are a substitute for some forms of multitasking, but not all.
Ah yes.. the old accusation of bias dodge.. Never gets old.
Cute but wrong. I didn't accuse you of bias, I accused you of spreading FUD, which is exactly what you're doing. You're making vague insinuations to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about potential legal threats to a third-party Silverlight application, and so far you've provided no evidence; you've only invoked the patent bogeyman.
But I'll happily comply, as soon as you furnish me with a complete list of current and future patents and other IP property related to the current and any future implementations of Silverlight.
Sorry, the burden of proof is on you here. You're the one making the claim that Microsoft has patents to use against Moonlight developers. So, let's see them! Surely you have some evidence, right? The only alternative would be that you're making shit up.
Like I said, if you're that paranoid, you can get the same security on XBL by buying membership cards once every 13 months. Pay cash and wear a Nixon mask so even the store clerk won't be able to trace you.