Surprisingly, not really. Public transit involves a great deal of overhead in terms of planning and deployment and development of a reliable schedule. The vehicles themselves are extremely expensive (a single mass transit bus can cost upwards of $300,000), and because of their size, you need a large central garage to store them, along with massive maintenance bays with costly equipment. There are also insurance concerns and the need to build street-side stops (or terminals).
A corporate fleet of vehicles operating a non-fixed route and serving a small and homogenous (everyone using it can be contacted via work email and they are all either going to or coming from the same location) community can be quite affordable in comparison. The daily cost to operate a van divided by the number of riders would probably work out below the daily fare of a public transit system in the end.
Either way, take a typical 30 mile commute in peninsula traffic. That's going to amount to close to 3 gallons of fuel per day, and at $3/gallon, that's approaching $9 per day just to go to work and back. As long as the shuttle service costs less than this, it's cheaper than the equivalent raise, especially when you'd wind up paying taxes on that raise.
Yes, guns will be had by criminals. It's like that everywhere else in the world. Why are their murder rates so much lower? Because it's illegal to have them, and therefore easier to track them and find them. There's less "noise" involved in the search and study. People also are less inclined to acquire a gun illegally and use it as opposed to here, where they already have the gun and are just six shots of whiskey away from being angry enough to use it on their ex-wife.
Your population control comment is also complete nonsense. Population control and hunting for sport are not interrelated. If adjustments need to be made, they're made as they are now by the appropriate groups. I also plainly stated that while I don't agree with the need or desire, I accept that other people do--but you don't hunt with handguns. Personal handgun ownership (and assault rifle ownership) are utterly pointless. Then again, I suppose I can't expect you to be able to read, since you're a gun-toting, rural-dwelling hick who comes to slashdot and makes fun of other people for posting on Slashdot.
Well that's just downright bullshit. His argument had nothing to do with the potential for guns to be used against people. It has everything to do with the fact that a gun has no other use than to harm people or animals.
Owning a gun, other than from an "I collect them" standpoint, is useless. Why does someone need to own a gun? It's not for security--gun deaths and violent crimes are dramatically lower in places where private ownership is banned. There is no civilian need for handguns, period--they're no good for hunting. If you want to go to a shooting range because it's fun, why not just use a gun available on site? If you want to go hunting, you need a hunting license and an appropriate gun. I see no reason to ban those, but there certainly should be higher requirements for owning one. I don't agree with the sport or necessity of hunting, either--but I recognize that other people feel differently and I'm willing to accept that.
You don't need a gun for self-defense if no one else has a gun to shoot you with. You don't need a real gun for target shooting, either. There are plenty of air guns and other facsimiles that could be used for that sport. If you're hunting with a handgun, you're doing it wrong. What is the justification for private ownership of handguns again?
It's good that the market is full of players. That means that even if we lose dozens of them, there will still be someone to carry the torch
For someone so clearly in support of free software, it's a little disingenuous to make a claim that is based on proprietary logic. If there were just ONE distro in the world, anyone could carry the torch because it's all on the table. There's no need for thousands of distros. There just isn't.
When people in the community have good ideas, they package them themselves into their own distro rather than working together to incorporate the improvements into the existing system. That's where Linux fails--it's not a community. It's a bunch of cliques. Someone gets too snobby for RPMs and goes and creates their own format that does the same thing, but better. If it were a real community project, the people with good ideas would work with the original creators to implement them. Why isn't there a unified package architecture--why, for example, can't MythTV distribute a wizard-like installer? All the building of kernel modules and LIRC configurations by hand are a pain to go through, and the packaged options (Knoppmyth, etc.) offer no flexibility. I want to run Kubuntu, and I want to put in a CD and install MythTV onto that computer (with one of the natively supported Hauppauge tuners) just like I install Office on my PC or Photoshop on my Mac.
When Linux can do that, and not just in one obscure distribution for which that feature would generate just as much lock-in as Microsoft, someone come get me. In the mean time, my actual computers will all run something else. And this is all, by the way, the opinion of a former Linux sysadmin.
I speak not of technical ability, but clear and unequivocable usage rights under the law. I am artificially discounting the concept of piracy in order to get a more honest answer. If you're just going to pirate it anyway, there's no real difference what the agreed upon terms are.
Why does what AMD's attorneys file in court reflect on the company at all? I doubt these are all AMD staff litigators, and even if they are, they're just doing their jobs. It's not like AMD executives are running legal strategy meetings and writing the complaints.
If you have reason to believe that your opponents have (or may have, or potentially will have) lost (whether due to policy, tampering, or accident) data that may potentially be useful, you make a note of it as early as possible. There are specific windows for making claims in cases, especially when there are potential damages involved. As another poster stated, this is becoming a largely standard claim, much like a demurrer is generally the first response to a complaint, even if the demurrer has virtually no chance of success.
This seems to be a popular Slashdot view, but really, going to the movies is a social event. It's the same reason people go out to bars with loud noise levels and dirty bathrooms and tip a bartender for pouring out of a bottle. You do it because it's fun to go out with friends and make an evening out of it. The sticky floors, overpriced concessions, and annoying people are part of the experience of the thing.
Don't people make fun of people with ridiculous hair, fatties with three tubs of popcorn, and have a good time being in the company of strangers anymore? It just feels different when you're doing something with 200 people instead of 5.
Yeah, lots of other people suck, and yes, you can have a far more undisturbed experience at home--but getting out in the world and being among people used to be a fairly basic part of life. Now people complain about having to deal with anyone other than themselves.
Question. This will naturally be highly protected, likely encrypted and loaded with DRM as it goes to the theatre. Would you want in on that? Like say they offered to send you films for $15 each, but they could only play on the single designated device, just like the theatre?
Knowing that the DVD is probably going to be around $15 within a few months and will work in any certified player, would you still be interested in a locked down version with no extras solely for the sake of getting it earlier?
I'd consider it a fair trade, since it's not that much more expensive than a movie ticket, and you could play it as many times as you wanted. On the other hand, it would not be portable (just like a cinema now) and it would not be convertable/copy-able (again, like a real cinema experience generally speaking).
It's not so much for cost reductions for tickets as it is a platform for the release of smaller, indie films that could never hope to be shown at a major theatre before.
The reason they're not shown isn't usually because people wouldn't watch them (that's partly true as a function of the low advertising), but more because putting one of your say, six cinemas out of commission on a gamble for a few weeks is risky business. This way, a local movie theatre could make "Indie Thursdays" where they showcase a few low-budget films one day a week on a screen or two and then switch back to whatever Lohan flick normally shows for the other six days.
The indie films might command a standard ticket price to make up for the less-than-full seating, or they might be cheaper because they'd be offered more cheaply to the theatres, or they could be the same price even though they're perfectly popular because management is greedy. In any case, I'd hand over my $10 for a good indie movie in a real cinema much sooner than the run of the mill crap they show now.
I can't tell if you're an imbecile or if this post is tongue-in-cheek. I'll compromise and proceed simply as though it's ignorant.
Collaborative sites for academic purposes are not banned. Peer-review journals would have to be blocked, as would all wikis, and all sorts of other legitimate services. Myspace and whatnot are not relevant. More to the point, the rating service is not a social networking site. It does not center on individuals, but on patents.
The USPTO employs technical experts already, to the extent that they're willing to work for pathetic government salaries. As a result "experts" are often just people with relevant degrees, and only a limited number of them. There are a few thousand people in the patent office. This system opens up a world of millions of real experts with a free Sunday afternoon to volunteer their time to contribute to patent review, so that a handful of overworked people can get a little bit further into the patent backlog.
That's not actually accurate. His example is plebiscitary democracy, which is used in the United States with high frequency, though largely indirectly. This is the same procedure that produces the post-election honeymoon phenomenon--the elected candidate thinks that he won because the voters liked his ideas. To use his example, if a candidate won and was elected based on a campaign of "revoke the right for black people to vote" that would be a failure of popular judgment.
It's not a failure of democracy, however--it's a perfect working example of the principle of democracy: expression of the popular will. You can't say democracy is flawed in principle because you don't agree with the outcome. If the people want something stupid, and the people are vested with the power to do it, then the stupid thing SHOULD happen in a democracy.
The problem with that scenario isn't democratic principles, but rather that people are stupid. Stupid people can ruin any system of government, break any product, or misapply any idea. Everything that comes into contact with humans is flawed by that standard.
Interpretation errors ARE grammar errors. A grammar is a set of compositional rules for parsing. If you can't parse a sentence, it's because it's ungrammatical.
Oh, you mean those expansion slots that are collecting dust in everyone's empty case? Or perhaps the $1100 Dells with integrated graphics? 3.5" Hard drives are in every Apple non-notebook computer except the mini (for obvious reasons).
You say Macs have features you don't want to pay for--well your cheap desktop tower has features the market in general is increasingly less willing to consider virtues. End users don't care about expansion slots, and if they don't play games, the only reason they don't like integrated graphics is because they read people whining about it on the internet. I hated them too until I put together a cheap Core Duo machine with a GMA950 onboard. It went into a low-profile case, and so I didn't have a graphics card on hand. I never bought one--I don't game on it, and it handles screensavers and Google Earth perfectly. Most average users have the same experience.
On the other hand, users do care about compact systems, design, and power efficiency. They also care about overall value and ease of use. Yeah, they can find similar specs for cheaper, but they can also find similar specs for HIGHER prices. I have found that no current Apple system is at the top of any specification range. For every "I can match the iMac for $300 less" poster, *I* can match the iMac for $300 more.
Oh me too. My only point was that if they're playing dirty, you can't just wheel in a laptop to unveil the conspiracy. If you can, then it's not really a conspiracy and instead it's just ineptitude as others have suggested.
Like Best Buy will let you on their network, or like bestbuy.com doesn't redirect to their intranet. Hell, if they really wanted to be jackasses, they could remap the IP on the networks to make it REALLY hard to get to the external site.
Ah, but the Linux enthusiasts will bring in a third variable--satisfaction of doing it yourself in spite of obvious, more attractive solutions within arm's reach.
Note that Debian users cannot endorse this wok technique because the wok isn't fully open source.
I keep seeing this "knowledge will not be surpressed" theme, and I can't help but laugh at how arbitrary it is. What if it were your financial records being backed up by someone?
I'm not saying what the MPAA is doing is right, but if information wants to be free, then privacy wants to be zero. But I'd wager that most of the "free information" people will complain about the lamentable lack of privacy tomorrow afternoon.
And I disagree that tax levels in this country can be classified as "high" in any regard except in comparison to no tax. Further, it is historical fallacy to suggest that the end of World War II coincided with a reduction in government costs. Government spending remained high after the war (for good reason and out of necessity to prevent economic collapse in the postwar settlement/adjustment) and whether for good or for ill, military spending did not fall, either. Veterans benefits are tremendously expensive (and occupy a sizeable chunk of government spending), with high costs directly related to World War II involvement. Once you offer something, it is very difficult to take it away--for a variety of political reasons, it's a bad move and understandably one which politicians are hesitant to take.
Social security spending is mandatory and strongly correlated with inflation and population growth. Medicare and Medicaid also suffer from this simple and inevitable constraint. A universal solution cannot be offered privately in a more effective manner. You may have different values and might well be successful in a private program, but society as a whole cannot be served through that course of action. It is spending for these programs that drives the bulk of any increase in taxation. The "other party" you speak of has not realized or acted in any way to reduce the size of government--instead they cut taxes and increase spending, causing far greater long-term damage.
If you don't want withholdings removed from your pay, you can arrange for that to be the case (aside from mandatory contributions to Social Security and Medicare), and pay your actual taxes at year's end. If your employer doesn't offer that particular package, take it up with them. Ultimately, it's a moot point. The government needs revenue to function, and it cannot operate through a single lump payment every year--it would require an annual staffing surge to handle the operation, which would further increase government costs, and it would pose a problem of cash flow in entitlements in the months prior to the "annual deposit." You'd have a great deal of trouble with collections due to people overspending throughout the year, and the problem would compound with time. Putting people in prison for failure to pay taxes would only further increase costs in a constrained revenue situation. The fact of the matter is that the government has created the infrastructure which the economy requires to operate. The government should be entitled to its share of the currency produced.
It's not "your" money that the government is taking from you; it's the money which your employer is transferring to you and which the employer generated in part thanks to government infrastructure. You wouldn't be employed without the government. Yes, private corporations COULD have built the same infrastructure, but they didn't. Reality strikes again.
How the government operated in the distant past has no bearing on how it should operate in the present. Again, as a percentage of GDP, the US government is THE lowest overhead in the world. It has not grown dramatically over time. It has in the past been far higher an economic burden than it currently is. So you could argue that the federal government is smaller than it was in the 19th century. It all depends entirely on your point of view. Theoretically, it could be done better and more cheaply, absolutely. But like all other things human, theory doesn't define reality. No other nation has successfully survived with less in our time, so there is no factual basis for your "smaller government" hypothesis.
Well that's just nonsense. Of course a lower collection rate is going to be problematic. The tug of war with taxation in the US (and most other Western-style democracies) is the real weakness. Consider Program X. It will cost $80 billion to do it competently and completely. It gets whittled down to $60 billion in the legislative process, but $12 billion in riders are attached. In the end, that $72 billion program is toothless, inefficient, and only marginally successful. Only $8 billion was saved, but you don't get a 90% effective program for 90% of the funding; you get, say, 35% of the intended success for 90% of the money. If people would simply pay for the program in sufficient amounts to complete its mission and not try to cut corners, the amount of waste and haggling in the government would decline dramatically.
Historically, the federal government had a great deal less to contend with and needed a far lesser budget. Not all of this is government-generated. The people have come to expect a much more involved and accountable government, with a TV celebrity-style president (rather than the traditional presidency which involved a fairly private office). Case in point: until the 20th century the US president had just one secretary, and often s/he was paid out of the president's pocket. The president now has five secretaries and the White House staff is over 1100 people. Presidents didn't necessarily seek this colossal growth of the office, but rather the people wanted to see more.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing. Coupled with the introduction of interstate highways, information management, space travel, a global economy, powerful socialist movements of the 19th century (for retirement benefits and other labor concessions which required government oversight and spending), and other from-the-people initiatives, government has grown. As a percentage of GDP and looking and percentage of the workforce employed or relative tax rates, the US government is just about THE most classically liberal government in the world.
It's utterly unrealistic to think that government could be accomplished for substantially less--you know that's the case because it isn't happening anywhere. Out of 193 nations, you'd think at least one of them would be a successful libertarian state if the theory could work. There isn't, and it can't.
Agreed, except that regardless of the oath, the realities of the job are that regular people fill the spots. Police officers put their lives at risk for substandard pay and an uncomfortable stereotype, and most of them are good ones. I would expect that the overall rate of law breaking would be no higher than the general population, and perhaps even slightly lower. But to expect a significantly lower rate of infractions than in the population would be unrealistic. It's just like public school teachers--many places are forced to take whatever they can get and can't afford to be selective without leaving classrooms empty. There's probably enough tax money and other revenue for it, but if so, it's tied up elsewhere.
If you're a deposit specialist at a bank, and you do 4000 deposits a day, but the world generates 4500 deposits a day, are you also negligently failing to do your job?
I understand your sentiment, but the fact is that speed limits are set to the 85% rule, so 15% of drivers are expected to exceed the speed limit, and the police aren't going to pull over every single one of them. Almost everyone speeds, and police officers are people like anyone else, so they also speed. They're not failing to do their job because they don't stop all speeders. A speed limit is an indication that exceeding the speed MAY (not *SHALL*) result in a citation. Contrary to your assumption, it is not a fixed standard, not least of which due to the inaccuracy of measurement. People are stopped for speeding for exceeding the speed limit egregiously (unless your friendly local officer is just being an asshole, which does happen, because they are indeed human), not simply because of number on a sign.
No legal system is meant to be black and white, and none can function as such. If there is no allowance for extenuating circumstances or for prevailing conditions, there is no justice and no need at all for courts--only mechanical bureaucracy. The officer speeding didn't abuse his lawful power any more so than you abuse yours when driving to work every day.
Unless it bumps into something else in the intervening SEVEN years and gets knocked into a collision course (which it wouldn't have done had we not rendezvoused with it). That'll show us silly humans trying to tempt fate and reorder the universe.
The point is that we don't observe enough of the sky to be absolutely certain about anything much beyond our own orbit, and while we have very good predictive models, the error rate in our projection is far greater than the calculated chance of hitting the earth. So in other words, there's a 1:45,000 chance of impact, but more like a 1:1000 that the first probability is wrong.
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Surprisingly, not really. Public transit involves a great deal of overhead in terms of planning and deployment and development of a reliable schedule. The vehicles themselves are extremely expensive (a single mass transit bus can cost upwards of $300,000), and because of their size, you need a large central garage to store them, along with massive maintenance bays with costly equipment. There are also insurance concerns and the need to build street-side stops (or terminals).
A corporate fleet of vehicles operating a non-fixed route and serving a small and homogenous (everyone using it can be contacted via work email and they are all either going to or coming from the same location) community can be quite affordable in comparison. The daily cost to operate a van divided by the number of riders would probably work out below the daily fare of a public transit system in the end.
Either way, take a typical 30 mile commute in peninsula traffic. That's going to amount to close to 3 gallons of fuel per day, and at $3/gallon, that's approaching $9 per day just to go to work and back. As long as the shuttle service costs less than this, it's cheaper than the equivalent raise, especially when you'd wind up paying taxes on that raise.
Yes, guns will be had by criminals. It's like that everywhere else in the world. Why are their murder rates so much lower? Because it's illegal to have them, and therefore easier to track them and find them. There's less "noise" involved in the search and study. People also are less inclined to acquire a gun illegally and use it as opposed to here, where they already have the gun and are just six shots of whiskey away from being angry enough to use it on their ex-wife.
Your population control comment is also complete nonsense. Population control and hunting for sport are not interrelated. If adjustments need to be made, they're made as they are now by the appropriate groups. I also plainly stated that while I don't agree with the need or desire, I accept that other people do--but you don't hunt with handguns. Personal handgun ownership (and assault rifle ownership) are utterly pointless. Then again, I suppose I can't expect you to be able to read, since you're a gun-toting, rural-dwelling hick who comes to slashdot and makes fun of other people for posting on Slashdot.
Well that's just downright bullshit. His argument had nothing to do with the potential for guns to be used against people. It has everything to do with the fact that a gun has no other use than to harm people or animals.
Owning a gun, other than from an "I collect them" standpoint, is useless. Why does someone need to own a gun? It's not for security--gun deaths and violent crimes are dramatically lower in places where private ownership is banned. There is no civilian need for handguns, period--they're no good for hunting. If you want to go to a shooting range because it's fun, why not just use a gun available on site? If you want to go hunting, you need a hunting license and an appropriate gun. I see no reason to ban those, but there certainly should be higher requirements for owning one. I don't agree with the sport or necessity of hunting, either--but I recognize that other people feel differently and I'm willing to accept that.
You don't need a gun for self-defense if no one else has a gun to shoot you with. You don't need a real gun for target shooting, either. There are plenty of air guns and other facsimiles that could be used for that sport. If you're hunting with a handgun, you're doing it wrong. What is the justification for private ownership of handguns again?
For someone so clearly in support of free software, it's a little disingenuous to make a claim that is based on proprietary logic. If there were just ONE distro in the world, anyone could carry the torch because it's all on the table. There's no need for thousands of distros. There just isn't.
When people in the community have good ideas, they package them themselves into their own distro rather than working together to incorporate the improvements into the existing system. That's where Linux fails--it's not a community. It's a bunch of cliques. Someone gets too snobby for RPMs and goes and creates their own format that does the same thing, but better. If it were a real community project, the people with good ideas would work with the original creators to implement them. Why isn't there a unified package architecture--why, for example, can't MythTV distribute a wizard-like installer? All the building of kernel modules and LIRC configurations by hand are a pain to go through, and the packaged options (Knoppmyth, etc.) offer no flexibility. I want to run Kubuntu, and I want to put in a CD and install MythTV onto that computer (with one of the natively supported Hauppauge tuners) just like I install Office on my PC or Photoshop on my Mac.
When Linux can do that, and not just in one obscure distribution for which that feature would generate just as much lock-in as Microsoft, someone come get me. In the mean time, my actual computers will all run something else. And this is all, by the way, the opinion of a former Linux sysadmin.
Hate to burst your bubble, but "effect" is a noun in TFA, not a verb. It is used properly.
That doesn't make the attorneys a suitable analogue for business strategies. The legal process is not comparable to the science of pragmatics.
I speak not of technical ability, but clear and unequivocable usage rights under the law. I am artificially discounting the concept of piracy in order to get a more honest answer. If you're just going to pirate it anyway, there's no real difference what the agreed upon terms are.
Why does what AMD's attorneys file in court reflect on the company at all? I doubt these are all AMD staff litigators, and even if they are, they're just doing their jobs. It's not like AMD executives are running legal strategy meetings and writing the complaints.
If you have reason to believe that your opponents have (or may have, or potentially will have) lost (whether due to policy, tampering, or accident) data that may potentially be useful, you make a note of it as early as possible. There are specific windows for making claims in cases, especially when there are potential damages involved. As another poster stated, this is becoming a largely standard claim, much like a demurrer is generally the first response to a complaint, even if the demurrer has virtually no chance of success.
This seems to be a popular Slashdot view, but really, going to the movies is a social event. It's the same reason people go out to bars with loud noise levels and dirty bathrooms and tip a bartender for pouring out of a bottle. You do it because it's fun to go out with friends and make an evening out of it. The sticky floors, overpriced concessions, and annoying people are part of the experience of the thing.
Don't people make fun of people with ridiculous hair, fatties with three tubs of popcorn, and have a good time being in the company of strangers anymore? It just feels different when you're doing something with 200 people instead of 5.
Yeah, lots of other people suck, and yes, you can have a far more undisturbed experience at home--but getting out in the world and being among people used to be a fairly basic part of life. Now people complain about having to deal with anyone other than themselves.
Question. This will naturally be highly protected, likely encrypted and loaded with DRM as it goes to the theatre. Would you want in on that? Like say they offered to send you films for $15 each, but they could only play on the single designated device, just like the theatre?
Knowing that the DVD is probably going to be around $15 within a few months and will work in any certified player, would you still be interested in a locked down version with no extras solely for the sake of getting it earlier?
I'd consider it a fair trade, since it's not that much more expensive than a movie ticket, and you could play it as many times as you wanted. On the other hand, it would not be portable (just like a cinema now) and it would not be convertable/copy-able (again, like a real cinema experience generally speaking).
It's not so much for cost reductions for tickets as it is a platform for the release of smaller, indie films that could never hope to be shown at a major theatre before.
The reason they're not shown isn't usually because people wouldn't watch them (that's partly true as a function of the low advertising), but more because putting one of your say, six cinemas out of commission on a gamble for a few weeks is risky business. This way, a local movie theatre could make "Indie Thursdays" where they showcase a few low-budget films one day a week on a screen or two and then switch back to whatever Lohan flick normally shows for the other six days.
The indie films might command a standard ticket price to make up for the less-than-full seating, or they might be cheaper because they'd be offered more cheaply to the theatres, or they could be the same price even though they're perfectly popular because management is greedy. In any case, I'd hand over my $10 for a good indie movie in a real cinema much sooner than the run of the mill crap they show now.
I can't tell if you're an imbecile or if this post is tongue-in-cheek. I'll compromise and proceed simply as though it's ignorant.
Collaborative sites for academic purposes are not banned. Peer-review journals would have to be blocked, as would all wikis, and all sorts of other legitimate services. Myspace and whatnot are not relevant. More to the point, the rating service is not a social networking site. It does not center on individuals, but on patents.
The USPTO employs technical experts already, to the extent that they're willing to work for pathetic government salaries. As a result "experts" are often just people with relevant degrees, and only a limited number of them. There are a few thousand people in the patent office. This system opens up a world of millions of real experts with a free Sunday afternoon to volunteer their time to contribute to patent review, so that a handful of overworked people can get a little bit further into the patent backlog.
That's not actually accurate. His example is plebiscitary democracy, which is used in the United States with high frequency, though largely indirectly. This is the same procedure that produces the post-election honeymoon phenomenon--the elected candidate thinks that he won because the voters liked his ideas. To use his example, if a candidate won and was elected based on a campaign of "revoke the right for black people to vote" that would be a failure of popular judgment. It's not a failure of democracy, however--it's a perfect working example of the principle of democracy: expression of the popular will. You can't say democracy is flawed in principle because you don't agree with the outcome. If the people want something stupid, and the people are vested with the power to do it, then the stupid thing SHOULD happen in a democracy. The problem with that scenario isn't democratic principles, but rather that people are stupid. Stupid people can ruin any system of government, break any product, or misapply any idea. Everything that comes into contact with humans is flawed by that standard.
Interpretation errors ARE grammar errors. A grammar is a set of compositional rules for parsing. If you can't parse a sentence, it's because it's ungrammatical.
Oh, you mean those expansion slots that are collecting dust in everyone's empty case? Or perhaps the $1100 Dells with integrated graphics? 3.5" Hard drives are in every Apple non-notebook computer except the mini (for obvious reasons).
You say Macs have features you don't want to pay for--well your cheap desktop tower has features the market in general is increasingly less willing to consider virtues. End users don't care about expansion slots, and if they don't play games, the only reason they don't like integrated graphics is because they read people whining about it on the internet. I hated them too until I put together a cheap Core Duo machine with a GMA950 onboard. It went into a low-profile case, and so I didn't have a graphics card on hand. I never bought one--I don't game on it, and it handles screensavers and Google Earth perfectly. Most average users have the same experience.
On the other hand, users do care about compact systems, design, and power efficiency. They also care about overall value and ease of use. Yeah, they can find similar specs for cheaper, but they can also find similar specs for HIGHER prices. I have found that no current Apple system is at the top of any specification range. For every "I can match the iMac for $300 less" poster, *I* can match the iMac for $300 more.
Oh me too. My only point was that if they're playing dirty, you can't just wheel in a laptop to unveil the conspiracy. If you can, then it's not really a conspiracy and instead it's just ineptitude as others have suggested.
Like Best Buy will let you on their network, or like bestbuy.com doesn't redirect to their intranet. Hell, if they really wanted to be jackasses, they could remap the IP on the networks to make it REALLY hard to get to the external site.
Ah, but the Linux enthusiasts will bring in a third variable--satisfaction of doing it yourself in spite of obvious, more attractive solutions within arm's reach.
Note that Debian users cannot endorse this wok technique because the wok isn't fully open source.
I keep seeing this "knowledge will not be surpressed" theme, and I can't help but laugh at how arbitrary it is. What if it were your financial records being backed up by someone?
I'm not saying what the MPAA is doing is right, but if information wants to be free, then privacy wants to be zero. But I'd wager that most of the "free information" people will complain about the lamentable lack of privacy tomorrow afternoon.
And I disagree that tax levels in this country can be classified as "high" in any regard except in comparison to no tax. Further, it is historical fallacy to suggest that the end of World War II coincided with a reduction in government costs. Government spending remained high after the war (for good reason and out of necessity to prevent economic collapse in the postwar settlement/adjustment) and whether for good or for ill, military spending did not fall, either. Veterans benefits are tremendously expensive (and occupy a sizeable chunk of government spending), with high costs directly related to World War II involvement. Once you offer something, it is very difficult to take it away--for a variety of political reasons, it's a bad move and understandably one which politicians are hesitant to take.
Social security spending is mandatory and strongly correlated with inflation and population growth. Medicare and Medicaid also suffer from this simple and inevitable constraint. A universal solution cannot be offered privately in a more effective manner. You may have different values and might well be successful in a private program, but society as a whole cannot be served through that course of action. It is spending for these programs that drives the bulk of any increase in taxation. The "other party" you speak of has not realized or acted in any way to reduce the size of government--instead they cut taxes and increase spending, causing far greater long-term damage.
If you don't want withholdings removed from your pay, you can arrange for that to be the case (aside from mandatory contributions to Social Security and Medicare), and pay your actual taxes at year's end. If your employer doesn't offer that particular package, take it up with them. Ultimately, it's a moot point. The government needs revenue to function, and it cannot operate through a single lump payment every year--it would require an annual staffing surge to handle the operation, which would further increase government costs, and it would pose a problem of cash flow in entitlements in the months prior to the "annual deposit." You'd have a great deal of trouble with collections due to people overspending throughout the year, and the problem would compound with time. Putting people in prison for failure to pay taxes would only further increase costs in a constrained revenue situation. The fact of the matter is that the government has created the infrastructure which the economy requires to operate. The government should be entitled to its share of the currency produced.
It's not "your" money that the government is taking from you; it's the money which your employer is transferring to you and which the employer generated in part thanks to government infrastructure. You wouldn't be employed without the government. Yes, private corporations COULD have built the same infrastructure, but they didn't. Reality strikes again.
How the government operated in the distant past has no bearing on how it should operate in the present. Again, as a percentage of GDP, the US government is THE lowest overhead in the world. It has not grown dramatically over time. It has in the past been far higher an economic burden than it currently is. So you could argue that the federal government is smaller than it was in the 19th century. It all depends entirely on your point of view. Theoretically, it could be done better and more cheaply, absolutely. But like all other things human, theory doesn't define reality. No other nation has successfully survived with less in our time, so there is no factual basis for your "smaller government" hypothesis.
Well that's just nonsense. Of course a lower collection rate is going to be problematic. The tug of war with taxation in the US (and most other Western-style democracies) is the real weakness. Consider Program X. It will cost $80 billion to do it competently and completely. It gets whittled down to $60 billion in the legislative process, but $12 billion in riders are attached. In the end, that $72 billion program is toothless, inefficient, and only marginally successful. Only $8 billion was saved, but you don't get a 90% effective program for 90% of the funding; you get, say, 35% of the intended success for 90% of the money. If people would simply pay for the program in sufficient amounts to complete its mission and not try to cut corners, the amount of waste and haggling in the government would decline dramatically.
Historically, the federal government had a great deal less to contend with and needed a far lesser budget. Not all of this is government-generated. The people have come to expect a much more involved and accountable government, with a TV celebrity-style president (rather than the traditional presidency which involved a fairly private office). Case in point: until the 20th century the US president had just one secretary, and often s/he was paid out of the president's pocket. The president now has five secretaries and the White House staff is over 1100 people. Presidents didn't necessarily seek this colossal growth of the office, but rather the people wanted to see more.
None of that is necessarily a bad thing. Coupled with the introduction of interstate highways, information management, space travel, a global economy, powerful socialist movements of the 19th century (for retirement benefits and other labor concessions which required government oversight and spending), and other from-the-people initiatives, government has grown. As a percentage of GDP and looking and percentage of the workforce employed or relative tax rates, the US government is just about THE most classically liberal government in the world.
It's utterly unrealistic to think that government could be accomplished for substantially less--you know that's the case because it isn't happening anywhere. Out of 193 nations, you'd think at least one of them would be a successful libertarian state if the theory could work. There isn't, and it can't.
It doesn't reduce gross profits, but it does reduce net profit. Sellers aren't making less money; they're just not keeping all of it.
Agreed, except that regardless of the oath, the realities of the job are that regular people fill the spots. Police officers put their lives at risk for substandard pay and an uncomfortable stereotype, and most of them are good ones. I would expect that the overall rate of law breaking would be no higher than the general population, and perhaps even slightly lower. But to expect a significantly lower rate of infractions than in the population would be unrealistic. It's just like public school teachers--many places are forced to take whatever they can get and can't afford to be selective without leaving classrooms empty. There's probably enough tax money and other revenue for it, but if so, it's tied up elsewhere.
If you're a deposit specialist at a bank, and you do 4000 deposits a day, but the world generates 4500 deposits a day, are you also negligently failing to do your job?
I understand your sentiment, but the fact is that speed limits are set to the 85% rule, so 15% of drivers are expected to exceed the speed limit, and the police aren't going to pull over every single one of them. Almost everyone speeds, and police officers are people like anyone else, so they also speed. They're not failing to do their job because they don't stop all speeders. A speed limit is an indication that exceeding the speed MAY (not *SHALL*) result in a citation. Contrary to your assumption, it is not a fixed standard, not least of which due to the inaccuracy of measurement. People are stopped for speeding for exceeding the speed limit egregiously (unless your friendly local officer is just being an asshole, which does happen, because they are indeed human), not simply because of number on a sign.
No legal system is meant to be black and white, and none can function as such. If there is no allowance for extenuating circumstances or for prevailing conditions, there is no justice and no need at all for courts--only mechanical bureaucracy. The officer speeding didn't abuse his lawful power any more so than you abuse yours when driving to work every day.
Unless it bumps into something else in the intervening SEVEN years and gets knocked into a collision course (which it wouldn't have done had we not rendezvoused with it). That'll show us silly humans trying to tempt fate and reorder the universe. The point is that we don't observe enough of the sky to be absolutely certain about anything much beyond our own orbit, and while we have very good predictive models, the error rate in our projection is far greater than the calculated chance of hitting the earth. So in other words, there's a 1:45,000 chance of impact, but more like a 1:1000 that the first probability is wrong.