It would make me a happy man to see an HD DVD/Blu Ray player cost $100 more while poor people can go to college for virtually free. But I think a lot of people would call me some sort of communist for that and that I'd be stagnating the economy or some such theory that I can't comprehend.
Well, yeah, the way this is normally discussed, the conversation usually turns towards someones irrational communist leanings about how "some people" should pay for "everybody else" to go to college. Nevermind that not everyone ought to go to college at all, much less because others were forced at gunpoint to pay for it.
But that's not what I'm replying to you for..
Regardless, I'd be willing to buy shares in certain universities if I could. Imagine what those portfolios are going to start to bring in in revenue!
This is actually brilliant, and is quite the opposite of communism. And infact this may very well be the answer to the problem you're talking about in the first part of your post.
Universities currently get a fair bit of financing from private donors, from athletics, and from taxes. So much of tuition is subsidized for one reason or another that lots of people go that perhaps ought not to. There's a demand glut, so to speak, and so there is little incentive for a university to do anything other than expand and raise prices.
A very nice thing about what you suggest is that that investment revenue can be re-invested by the university, for the university, to fund scholarships for promising students. Top flight schools like MIT effectively have this arrangement -- if you get into MIT (because of your qualifications), you WILL be able to afford it, because a variety of interested university backers will see that the money appears.
Generalizing this a bit, a university with disposable income from the past results of its research may have an incentive to recruit promising new talent and thus subsidize the education of the best and brightest minds.
And all of this would be done without coercion by the state. Different universities would have entirely different criteria for who they beleive is promising, and how they think their scholarship money ought to be spent.
This is part of a solution of how people go to college without making society at large pay for just anybody to go for any reason. Investors will choose which universities to invest in, based on selection criteria, past performance, etc, and that will tend to cause universities to spend their money a bit more wisely.
There are a variety of other privatized education funding models discussed by Friedman, etc, but this one is one I've not thought about before. Thanks for mentioning it.
Amusingly enough, MS has paid a fair bit into King County municipal infrastructure issues. They bought a bigger fire truck (in exchange for being allowed to build a building taller than 4 stories). They built a bus transit center. I beleive they've had a part in paying to get bridges widened and other traffic improvements near the MSFT campus.
The MSFT employee base does a hell of a lot more for King County than the other way around.
WA politics are horribly corrupt and stupid.
Former Redmond resident, Current MS employee (in Fargo, ND, where the local government is much less stupid)
As an MS employee and shareholder, I hope we continue to diversify away from the Redmond campus. It is extremely expensive and the business climate in WA is unstable and increasingly hostile. The overwhelming majority of MS employees are transplants from elsewhere.
The nice thing about markets is that socio-economic conditions are a market also, and as US cities get stupider and stupider, they'll lose business and "lose" in the market place. Hopefully corrections occur before there is too much uncomfortable displacement for all parties.
There's a lot of dubious posting going on in the summary and in the comments.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can change the fact that "things cost money".
Roads cost money. Dumping CO2 into the air costs money (although it has a indirect cost function making it problematic to measure).
When things cost money, people need to pay for those things.
Someone correctly pointed out that when you don't let the price function work the way its supposed to, you have shortages, gluts, etc.
I think most of us understand supply and demand and accept that it is fundamentally true. But when rich people can do things and poor people cant, that tugs at peoples heart strings and they forget economics.
Well, economics is the study of choice. Putting a per-use-fee on something to provide additional funding, or to more properly relate its funding to its use, is not inherently anti-poor insomuch as "things cost money" is anti-poor.
The nice thing about a direct-pay-for-use model is that SOME poor people will CHOOSE to pay the tolls and perhaps save money in other areas. Others will decide that the cost is too high for the value delivered as a component of their total funds. They'll stop using the road and the road will get less congested. "The System did what it was supposed to".
Note that this whole paragrapoh is true for ANY level of wealth. You need to let people be free to decide how they want to spend their money, and making the cost of things closer to the users and the use of things helps people make better decisions about them.
Without price information, capitalism doesn't work. Society has said that congestion has a cost, and that cost must be paid, and ought to be paid by the people that contribute to it.
This proposal is only anti-egalitarian in the sense that more money always means more choices. Any complaints about it essentially boil down to redistributive socialism.
A common complaints about America's lack of effective transit and ubran sprawl is that roads are massively subsidized and the true costs are hidden from everybody. Well, someone has an idea on how to try and address that and its nothing but jeers from the peanut gallery.
Suppose that we somehow expose the true cost of congestion, roads, etc, and people decide its too high and that they need to spend their money elsewhere? I bet you'll see EFFECTIVE mass transit start cropping up in America more and more.
I'd say "what we need here is some more government meddling, because that always works out well". ANd you'd know i was being sarcastic.
I'm a bit torn in this case, however, because the government has already meddled and in most cases created internet access monopolies for the local market incumbents. Normally market dynamics would sort out this mess and if any company tried anything stupid, they'd get their asses handed to them. But in a landscape of local government-backed monopolies for net access, a market solution is unlikely to foster.
So, i'm against government meddling in general, but in this case, previous meddling has created the mess. They can "unmeddle" but that will never happen, so instead they'll meddle further. Hopefully it won't make things worse, but i'm not optimistic.
Your analysis makes sense for a shortsigted company focused on immediate earnings, or a sales person acting alone focusing on this months numbers.
IMO, Intel could have easily sold charitable OLPC involvement as a long term investment. Intel already has a commendable position in the PC market. If they want to continue to grow their revenues, one way to do that is to...
grow the size of the market.
and a _Great_ way to do that is to introduce children to computers from a very early age.
The OLPC isn't the only computer a child ever uses in their entire life. It's the first computer a child uses, and it shows them the big wide world out there.. and opens their mind to possibilities.
Insert the usual bit about "the first hit is free". _some_ chip maker ought to have been making a strategic investment to make sure that OLPC goes off without a hitch, so that in 10-20 years, there's huge new groups demanding computing power, and intel, amd, apple, or whomever, will be there with all these anxious new customers.
Actually, Intel and AMD should have done some market collusion to help OLPC happen so that neither would feel they were unfairly funding future market growth that the other would steal without maximal investment recoup. A larger market for processors helps both companies.
When I was a single hs/college student, where were all those "threats" in real life my dreams were preparing me for?
For instance, I was never once "threatened" by - friends mom - friends sister - the two short brunette twins - the MILF on the kitchen countertop - 5th grade teacher needing an assistant to help teaching "that"
I suppose it's not all bad.
Luckily, I was _also_ never threatened in real life by: - older black man with greying chest hair and a vagina
This is something everyone should be used to by now... picking the less evil entity.
In this case, we've got Microsoft, universally derided on slashdot and elsewhere...so you might think the choice is clear.
But... against Michael Bay ?
My employment biases aside.. I'm going to have to support MS on this one. Whatever Michael Bay says he doesn't like must be a gem in an otherwise steaming pile.
The "Team America" movie didn't include a song about how awful Microsoft is.. but DID have several Michael Bay sucks references. That's a pretty compelling barometer.
- the "mission accomplished" thing is overused and based on an inaccurate assumption. The "mission accomplished" banner was based on that particular ship completing some specific mission (# of deployments or years at sea or something along those lines), and was not a declaration of victory for the overall conflict.
but that's not what your post is about..
i have no reason to pay much attention to what bill gates says about windows releases, but there's nothing intrinsically false about saying win2k is the most secure windows ever, and then when xp comes out, saying _xp_ is the most secure windows ever. i mean, what's he going to say? we worked really hard for a few years to make xp not as good as w2k already was?
the whole point of iterative development on products is that each iteration is supposed to be "better" than the last, for some definition of better.
there's a large body of people that apparently think vista was a big step backwards, but we're ignoring that for this specific discussion.
in any case, i have not seen evidence of windows becoming less secure with subsequent releases. have you?
My Dell D600 had much better sleep/wake and hibernate reliability and performacne once i upgraded it from Xp to Vista. Early Vista builds had lots of crappiness, but between putting the A12 (or A16?) BIOS on the machine and the final fixes for vista RTM, my sleep/hibernate performance has become fast and rock solid on this machine.
My white-box machines also run Vista and S3 sleep / hibernate as well.. including my 4GB Vista 64 machine.
That's all well and good.. sleep/wake/hibernate/resume should all just work, right?
My wife had a Wallstreet G3. Being a unixy sort, I bought OSX 10.1 when it came out. Man, that never thing slept/woke properly at ALL under OSX on that machine. Fan would turn on during sleep, backlight wouldn't turn back on when you woke, etc. Fair enough -- Apple wasn't really designing OSX for already released machines.. you were supposed to buy a brand new one (this is Apple, after all). So we buy my wife a brand new iBook G4 and what does it do?
Same shit. The first few months we had it, it would refuse to wake up from sleep, or not turn in the backlight. Our "3 year apple care" plan never amounted to any help at all. Magically, it just sort of got better after a few months, but you can bet i was livid after a few days of use when the machine wouldn't wake properly.
On my Dell D600 -- an old, slow laptop never designed to run Vista, i just shut the lid. It figures out what to do. It just works. It works better than my wife's new ibook G4 with OSX did when we bought it.
So, you should ask apple why it took them a few hardware and software releases to figure it out. And why they never figured it out on Wallstreet powerbook G3s.
The real meat of your _very_ long diatribe is the claim that most Europeans prefer a more socialized system than most Americans.
Trying to posit any of these terms as absolutes is kind of silly. When an American talks about how such and such person is socialist, it's assinine of you to correct them based on some universal dipstick of "socialismness". It's sufficient for the assumed context to be "more socialist than I prefer" or "most socialist than the contextually relevant alternative".
Now it's interesting that you go on about what "real" or european socialists are for and how no democrats are for that. As pointed out in some other responses -- you should pay more attention. The 2008 Democratic field have all promised to raise taxes and to further socialize the US healthcare industry. Most democrats are pro-Union, pro minimum wage increase, etc.
Relative to the American center, most democrats _are_ more socialist than our own national history, and ARE more socialist than "the other guys".
I think that both the democans and republicrats are far too socialist _and_ facist for my tastes, but I consider myself a libertarian.. a concept totally unfathomable to much of Europe, apparently.
It's not like Americans are against people being able to support their families, or unemployed people not dying in the streets, or people being able to better educate themselves. It's more like... as individuals we all want some say in to what extent we support those aims or in what manner we implement them. Libertarians especially find that government sucks at pretty much everything worthwhile and exceeds at pretty much everything reprehensible, and so the answer is always some variation of "less government, more individual choice".
I hope you're right about socialism "just not working" in our country, but to many of us, at least half of the politicians are pushing us strongly in that direction, and many citizens are following along. My own personal opinion is that the US is the last stronghold for free thought and individual liberty left in the world, and that it's slipping away more and more each day.
It's not like other places are bad to live.. it's that other societies have already decided to have fewer individual freedoms (at least, theoretically) to "gain" other things. At least in the case of Germany, it looks like the germans got a lot for what they gave up... i really enjoyed my time there and its not like people walked around sulking over their high taxes or lack of firearms ownership:)
According to WP, Project Pluto wasn't about irradiating people but making a nuclear powered ramjet engine -- using the fissive heat to super-heat the air instead of kerosene combustion as in a traditional jet engine.
And would gas-powered power tools (chainsaws, weed-whackers, lawn mowers, etc.) disappear
Hopefully. These 2 stroke engines are some of the noisiest and worst polluting out there, in terms of noise and pollution per minute of operation.
Electric equivalents of all of these exist, but generally don't have the power that their gasoline bretheren have. A 5 horsepower electric motor is quite expensive and quite heavy. If it's producing an honest 5w continuous, it also needs a 230v 20 or 30A supply in the US, AFAIK.
A 5 hp lawnmower is $99 at Wal-Mart.
That said, I'd happily trade my $99 gas mower for a fleet of lawn-roomba's that had onboard batteries and self-docked in their charger after mowing my lawn.
What exactly would all our airplanes be running on?
Museum Admission prices, hopefully. The US airline industry is thankfully heading towards complete collapse. Naively, I'd like it to be replaced by high-speed rail similar to German ICE, French TGV, or JR Shinkansen lines -- all of which are electric.
Yes, air travel is faster than high-speed rail to get you from point A to B, but at both A and B, high-speed rail is so much more convenient. air travel is a complete hassle. I think I'd rather spend a day on a train with wifi, cellphone boosters, and big beautiful windows that let me see the wonderful countryside, than 3 hours at the departing airport, 3 hours in a 22" wide seat, and 3 hours at the destination airport, being treated like cattle the entire time.
Electric cars are kind of a weird deal. No matter how efficient you make the car, you still have the effect described by Christopher Alexander -- cars of any size destroy cities because a person in a car takes 100x as much space as a person who is walking. The awful effect of cars on cities (and thus, humans) doesn't change when you make them electric. Alexander suggests that cars are good for long trips, and human powered or public transit (which is usually electric) should be used for within-neighborhood travel.
One thing we can do even if we don't have great electric vehicles is figure out how to arrange oru lives so that we need the personal automobile less and less.
I'm hardly an anti-car person -- I've got 4 of them, including a dedicated race car. But it's important to separate driving to commute, driving for pleasure, and driving for errands. The negative effects of the automobile on the construction of towns and therefore people is well documented by C. Alexander in "A Pattern Language".
The (former) governments of France and Germany did some things that were openly hostile to the united states. For years and years the Soviet Union was openly hostile to the united states.
I'm glad we never nuked any of those places.
I can't draw the dotted line between the actions of extremeists and the normal everyday citizens of Iran. When we make a bunch of noise about bombing Iran or whatever, it just rallies normal Iranian people behind their quack president. That guy _loves_ how gullible we are because it shores up his support at home by providing a convenient distraction from all of the legitimate domestic issues he's facing.
I think it's reasonable to have a policy that says "look, if you do not cooperate with us when we investigate or go after extremeist groups that have attacked us, that puts you on the shit list. You don't want to be on that list".
I don't think that's the case with Iraq, Iran, or Syria. Yes, we've been attacked by extremists. The government of Afghanistan was openly supporting those guys and not helping us extradite them. We took (justifiable) military action in Afghanistan.
It's not clear to me what Iran has done to us, either directly or via proxy, that justifies retaliation. Same goes for Iraq.
I'm not willing to save the US "by any means necessary". Some of those means (like universal domestic surveillance, or an aggressive policy of pre-emptive war) indicate that the US has forgotten some of the values that make it worth saving to begin with.
It's a bit odd for us to, at this stage of things, say that there are all these unlikable characters or problematic governments in the middle east. We helped create half of them. I readily admit that the situation is now a clusterf@#k. I don't think glassing entire nations is the most... American route to improving things.
But Iran has rockets that can reach US personnel and allies (like say... Europe, Israel, India, Japan and so on... May I suggest you read up on NATO also).
I see. You know, one way to help keep US troops out of reach of Iranian rockets is to pull back US troops so that they're within the US or its territories. That might have the added affect of lessening the amount of anti-American sentiment seen worldover, when perfectly indiginous countries occasionally wonder why there are US military bases on their soil..
Incidentally, the man who's pledged to bring our troops back not only from Iraq but from everywhere is Ron Paul.
Do we wait until they have nuclear tipped rockets that can reach the US? Do we do nothing until NY glows in the dark?
Let me make a comparison:
bitorrent client: possession of a bittorrent client is not sufficient grounds to accuse someone of piracy and throw them in jail
nuke: possibility of posession of a nuclear weapon is sufficient grounds to pre-emptively attack them.
Once upon a time, this country tried really hard to avoid war. Not because we're a bunch of sissy pacifists (generally), but because war isn't a hobby one should make, either individually or collectively.
I think it's fair to wait until you've been attacked before you go attacking someone else. History has shown that we typically win defensive wars and there's not much arguing about if we were in the right or not. History has shown that we lose offensive wars and that it deeply divisive towards the soliders, citizens, and rest of the world.
I'm hoping that nobody ever nukes Manhattan. But bombing Iran isn't going to lower the chances of that happening.
As much as my employer hates to see Google doing well, I hope that this announcement has the altruistic effect of making cell phone service in the US suck less..
but then, when i read the "pre-story" this weekend I almost posted a comment along the lines of what I'm posting now...... no matter how good google makes something, once you start dealing with the US phone industry...it may be that not even google can make it worthwhile. GPhone changing the world was a much more credible idea when Google was going to own the airwaves. Partnering with existing cell companies means that we're going to get an almost-good, but ultimatly shitty product. However, I expect this will be a historical footnote that is used to trial/solve _some_ of the problems one encounters.. before google ultimately buys up that spectrum they're hoping to get and provides a mobile voice/data platform as a vertical market that they own completely.
I like to check phonescoop and howard forums to get anecdotal comments about the RF performance of a given handset.
Additionally, i don't try to save money on the handset -- it costs what it costs and something that seems like a bargain usually isn't. People that sell thousands of them a month and have 99.99999999999999999 positive feedback probably aren't going to sell defective handsets as a matter of policy.
It's also important to be aware of what GSM bands are in use in your area vs. what the handset (and firmware for that handset!) will support.
Personally I'm using a quad-band Motorola L6 SLVR. I wanted a candy-bar phone, that used a standard connector for recharging, had bluetooth, and had no external antenna of any kind. I had the further requirement that it be on the hardware compat list with the Bluetooth preparation in my car (short list). I've been very pleased with the phone, in all honesty. I ordered the same thing in pink for my wife. Both of our phones are non-US market devices and both work great. Hers has arabic lettering on the keys in addition to the english alphabet.. quite amusing.
- buy a pre-activated T-mobile 2 Go SIM off of ebay - buy an unlocked GSM phone off ebay
No contracts, no fees, no lame choice of stupid phones, nobody knows who you are or how to hassle you. You put minutes on the SIM card and that's that.
This is the "plan" my wife and I have been on since May. Works nicely. Some friends just asked me to set them up with the same deal, since they were sick of paying $90/mo for a set of phones they barely used.
Tomorrow:
Replace handset you bought in "step A" wth an openMoko device. My next handset will hopefully be 100% open-source. I can get partway there with the P2k tools and what not for Motorola, but a truly open device just makes it all that much easier.
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Well, yeah, the way this is normally discussed, the conversation usually turns towards someones irrational communist leanings about how "some people" should pay for "everybody else" to go to college. Nevermind that not everyone ought to go to college at all, much less because others were forced at gunpoint to pay for it.
But that's not what I'm replying to you for..
This is actually brilliant, and is quite the opposite of communism. And infact this may very well be the answer to the problem you're talking about in the first part of your post.
Universities currently get a fair bit of financing from private donors, from athletics, and from taxes. So much of tuition is subsidized for one reason or another that lots of people go that perhaps ought not to. There's a demand glut, so to speak, and so there is little incentive for a university to do anything other than expand and raise prices.
A very nice thing about what you suggest is that that investment revenue can be re-invested by the university, for the university, to fund scholarships for promising students. Top flight schools like MIT effectively have this arrangement -- if you get into MIT (because of your qualifications), you WILL be able to afford it, because a variety of interested university backers will see that the money appears.
Generalizing this a bit, a university with disposable income from the past results of its research may have an incentive to recruit promising new talent and thus subsidize the education of the best and brightest minds.
And all of this would be done without coercion by the state. Different universities would have entirely different criteria for who they beleive is promising, and how they think their scholarship money ought to be spent.
This is part of a solution of how people go to college without making society at large pay for just anybody to go for any reason. Investors will choose which universities to invest in, based on selection criteria, past performance, etc, and that will tend to cause universities to spend their money a bit more wisely.
There are a variety of other privatized education funding models discussed by Friedman, etc, but this one is one I've not thought about before. Thanks for mentioning it.
Amusingly enough, MS has paid a fair bit into King County municipal infrastructure issues. They bought a bigger fire truck (in exchange for being allowed to build a building taller than 4 stories). They built a bus transit center. I beleive they've had a part in paying to get bridges widened and other traffic improvements near the MSFT campus.
The MSFT employee base does a hell of a lot more for King County than the other way around.
WA politics are horribly corrupt and stupid.
Former Redmond resident, Current MS employee (in Fargo, ND, where the local government is much less stupid)
As an MS employee and shareholder, I hope we continue to diversify away from the Redmond campus. It is extremely expensive and the business climate in WA is unstable and increasingly hostile. The overwhelming majority of MS employees are transplants from elsewhere.
The nice thing about markets is that socio-economic conditions are a market also, and as US cities get stupider and stupider, they'll lose business and "lose" in the market place. Hopefully corrections occur before there is too much uncomfortable displacement for all parties.
There's a lot of dubious posting going on in the summary and in the comments.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can change the fact that "things cost money".
Roads cost money. Dumping CO2 into the air costs money (although it has a indirect cost function making it problematic to measure).
When things cost money, people need to pay for those things.
Someone correctly pointed out that when you don't let the price function work the way its supposed to, you have shortages, gluts, etc.
I think most of us understand supply and demand and accept that it is fundamentally true. But when rich people can do things and poor people cant, that tugs at peoples heart strings and they forget economics.
Well, economics is the study of choice. Putting a per-use-fee on something to provide additional funding, or to more properly relate its funding to its use, is not inherently anti-poor insomuch as "things cost money" is anti-poor.
The nice thing about a direct-pay-for-use model is that SOME poor people will CHOOSE to pay the tolls and perhaps save money in other areas. Others will decide that the cost is too high for the value delivered as a component of their total funds. They'll stop using the road and the road will get less congested. "The System did what it was supposed to".
Note that this whole paragrapoh is true for ANY level of wealth. You need to let people be free to decide how they want to spend their money, and making the cost of things closer to the users and the use of things helps people make better decisions about them.
Without price information, capitalism doesn't work. Society has said that congestion has a cost, and that cost must be paid, and ought to be paid by the people that contribute to it.
This proposal is only anti-egalitarian in the sense that more money always means more choices. Any complaints about it essentially boil down to redistributive socialism.
A common complaints about America's lack of effective transit and ubran sprawl is that roads are massively subsidized and the true costs are hidden from everybody. Well, someone has an idea on how to try and address that and its nothing but jeers from the peanut gallery.
Suppose that we somehow expose the true cost of congestion, roads, etc, and people decide its too high and that they need to spend their money elsewhere? I bet you'll see EFFECTIVE mass transit start cropping up in America more and more.
I'd say "what we need here is some more government meddling, because that always works out well". ANd you'd know i was being sarcastic.
I'm a bit torn in this case, however, because the government has already meddled and in most cases created internet access monopolies for the local market incumbents. Normally market dynamics would sort out this mess and if any company tried anything stupid, they'd get their asses handed to them. But in a landscape of local government-backed monopolies for net access, a market solution is unlikely to foster.
So, i'm against government meddling in general, but in this case, previous meddling has created the mess. They can "unmeddle" but that will never happen, so instead they'll meddle further. Hopefully it won't make things worse, but i'm not optimistic.
jonny was a data courier who could hold 40 gigs.. ... 80 if he was willing to play risky.
to not be this guy right now.
Your analysis makes sense for a shortsigted company focused on immediate earnings, or a sales person acting alone focusing on this months numbers.
IMO, Intel could have easily sold charitable OLPC involvement as a long term investment. Intel already has a commendable position in the PC market. If they want to continue to grow their revenues, one way to do that is to...
grow the size of the market.
and a _Great_ way to do that is to introduce children to computers from a very early age.
The OLPC isn't the only computer a child ever uses in their entire life. It's the first computer a child uses, and it shows them the big wide world out there.. and opens their mind to possibilities.
Insert the usual bit about "the first hit is free". _some_ chip maker ought to have been making a strategic investment to make sure that OLPC goes off without a hitch, so that in 10-20 years, there's huge new groups demanding computing power, and intel, amd, apple, or whomever, will be there with all these anxious new customers.
Actually, Intel and AMD should have done some market collusion to help OLPC happen so that neither would feel they were unfairly funding future market growth that the other would steal without maximal investment recoup. A larger market for processors helps both companies.
Hrmm.
When I was a single hs/college student, where were all those "threats" in real life my dreams were preparing me for?
For instance, I was never once "threatened" by
- friends mom
- friends sister
- the two short brunette twins
- the MILF on the kitchen countertop
- 5th grade teacher needing an assistant to help teaching "that"
I suppose it's not all bad.
Luckily, I was _also_ never threatened in real life by:
- older black man with greying chest hair and a vagina
please see that he gets my name.
_somewhere_ there has to be a society for responsible, sane people.
The laws aren't there to protect the people or entities that never piss off the masses.
It is the dissenting point of views, the unpopular ones... those are the ones that need legal protections, and why ths US isn't a democracy.
This is something everyone should be used to by now... picking the less evil entity.
In this case, we've got Microsoft, universally derided on slashdot and elsewhere...so you might think the choice is clear.
But... against Michael Bay ?
My employment biases aside.. I'm going to have to support MS on this one. Whatever Michael Bay says he doesn't like must be a gem in an otherwise steaming pile.
The "Team America" movie didn't include a song about how awful Microsoft is.. but DID have several Michael Bay sucks references. That's a pretty compelling barometer.
Ok, I suppose. I wasn't there. Were you?
a few points
- the "mission accomplished" thing is overused and based on an inaccurate assumption. The "mission accomplished" banner was based on that particular ship completing some specific mission (# of deployments or years at sea or something along those lines), and was not a declaration of victory for the overall conflict.
but that's not what your post is about..
i have no reason to pay much attention to what bill gates says about windows releases, but there's nothing intrinsically false about saying win2k is the most secure windows ever, and then when xp comes out, saying _xp_ is the most secure windows ever. i mean, what's he going to say? we worked really hard for a few years to make xp not as good as w2k already was?
the whole point of iterative development on products is that each iteration is supposed to be "better" than the last, for some definition of better.
there's a large body of people that apparently think vista was a big step backwards, but we're ignoring that for this specific discussion.
in any case, i have not seen evidence of windows becoming less secure with subsequent releases. have you?
You're telling me scorpions, which are scary enough at 2 inches in length, used to run around here at 2.5 meters in length ?
I'll tell you what happened..
Whatever sentinent life showed up here a long time ago basically said "return to the ship and nuke the site from orbit"
And you know what? They were right.
My Dell D600 had much better sleep/wake and hibernate reliability and performacne once i upgraded it from Xp to Vista. Early Vista builds had lots of crappiness, but between putting the A12 (or A16?) BIOS on the machine and the final fixes for vista RTM, my sleep/hibernate performance has become fast and rock solid on this machine.
My white-box machines also run Vista and S3 sleep / hibernate as well.. including my 4GB Vista 64 machine.
That's all well and good.. sleep/wake/hibernate/resume should all just work, right?
My wife had a Wallstreet G3. Being a unixy sort, I bought OSX 10.1 when it came out. Man, that never thing slept/woke properly at ALL under OSX on that machine. Fan would turn on during sleep, backlight wouldn't turn back on when you woke, etc. Fair enough -- Apple wasn't really designing OSX for already released machines.. you were supposed to buy a brand new one (this is Apple, after all). So we buy my wife a brand new iBook G4 and what does it do?
Same shit. The first few months we had it, it would refuse to wake up from sleep, or not turn in the backlight. Our "3 year apple care" plan never amounted to any help at all. Magically, it just sort of got better after a few months, but you can bet i was livid after a few days of use when the machine wouldn't wake properly.
On my Dell D600 -- an old, slow laptop never designed to run Vista, i just shut the lid. It figures out what to do. It just works. It works better than my wife's new ibook G4 with OSX did when we bought it.
So, you should ask apple why it took them a few hardware and software releases to figure it out. And why they never figured it out on Wallstreet powerbook G3s.
The real meat of your _very_ long diatribe is the claim that most Europeans prefer a more socialized system than most Americans.
:)
Trying to posit any of these terms as absolutes is kind of silly. When an American talks about how such and such person is socialist, it's assinine of you to correct them based on some universal dipstick of "socialismness". It's sufficient for the assumed context to be "more socialist than I prefer" or "most socialist than the contextually relevant alternative".
Now it's interesting that you go on about what "real" or european socialists are for and how no democrats are for that. As pointed out in some other responses -- you should pay more attention. The 2008 Democratic field have all promised to raise taxes and to further socialize the US healthcare industry. Most democrats are pro-Union, pro minimum wage increase, etc.
Relative to the American center, most democrats _are_ more socialist than our own national history, and ARE more socialist than "the other guys".
I think that both the democans and republicrats are far too socialist _and_ facist for my tastes, but I consider myself a libertarian.. a concept totally unfathomable to much of Europe, apparently.
It's not like Americans are against people being able to support their families, or unemployed people not dying in the streets, or people being able to better educate themselves. It's more like... as individuals we all want some say in to what extent we support those aims or in what manner we implement them. Libertarians especially find that government sucks at pretty much everything worthwhile and exceeds at pretty much everything reprehensible, and so the answer is always some variation of "less government, more individual choice".
I hope you're right about socialism "just not working" in our country, but to many of us, at least half of the politicians are pushing us strongly in that direction, and many citizens are following along. My own personal opinion is that the US is the last stronghold for free thought and individual liberty left in the world, and that it's slipping away more and more each day.
It's not like other places are bad to live.. it's that other societies have already decided to have fewer individual freedoms (at least, theoretically) to "gain" other things. At least in the case of Germany, it looks like the germans got a lot for what they gave up... i really enjoyed my time there and its not like people walked around sulking over their high taxes or lack of firearms ownership
Actually a B-36 peacemaker was test fitted with a reactor already as part of the ANP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-36
According to WP, Project Pluto wasn't about irradiating people but making a nuclear powered ramjet engine -- using the fissive heat to super-heat the air instead of kerosene combustion as in a traditional jet engine.
Hopefully. These 2 stroke engines are some of the noisiest and worst polluting out there, in terms of noise and pollution per minute of operation.
Electric equivalents of all of these exist, but generally don't have the power that their gasoline bretheren have. A 5 horsepower electric motor is quite expensive and quite heavy. If it's producing an honest 5w continuous, it also needs a 230v 20 or 30A supply in the US, AFAIK.
A 5 hp lawnmower is $99 at Wal-Mart.
That said, I'd happily trade my $99 gas mower for a fleet of lawn-roomba's that had onboard batteries and self-docked in their charger after mowing my lawn.
Museum Admission prices, hopefully. The US airline industry is thankfully heading towards complete collapse. Naively, I'd like it to be replaced by high-speed rail similar to German ICE, French TGV, or JR Shinkansen lines -- all of which are electric.
Yes, air travel is faster than high-speed rail to get you from point A to B, but at both A and B, high-speed rail is so much more convenient. air travel is a complete hassle. I think I'd rather spend a day on a train with wifi, cellphone boosters, and big beautiful windows that let me see the wonderful countryside, than 3 hours at the departing airport, 3 hours in a 22" wide seat, and 3 hours at the destination airport, being treated like cattle the entire time.
Electric cars are kind of a weird deal. No matter how efficient you make the car, you still have the effect described by Christopher Alexander -- cars of any size destroy cities because a person in a car takes 100x as much space as a person who is walking. The awful effect of cars on cities (and thus, humans) doesn't change when you make them electric. Alexander suggests that cars are good for long trips, and human powered or public transit (which is usually electric) should be used for within-neighborhood travel.
One thing we can do even if we don't have great electric vehicles is figure out how to arrange oru lives so that we need the personal automobile less and less.
I'm hardly an anti-car person -- I've got 4 of them, including a dedicated race car. But it's important to separate driving to commute, driving for pleasure, and driving for errands. The negative effects of the automobile on the construction of towns and therefore people is well documented by C. Alexander in "A Pattern Language".
The (former) governments of France and Germany did some things that were openly hostile to the united states. For years and years the Soviet Union was openly hostile to the united states.
I'm glad we never nuked any of those places.
I can't draw the dotted line between the actions of extremeists and the normal everyday citizens of Iran. When we make a bunch of noise about bombing Iran or whatever, it just rallies normal Iranian people behind their quack president. That guy _loves_ how gullible we are because it shores up his support at home by providing a convenient distraction from all of the legitimate domestic issues he's facing.
I think it's reasonable to have a policy that says "look, if you do not cooperate with us when we investigate or go after extremeist groups that have attacked us, that puts you on the shit list. You don't want to be on that list".
I don't think that's the case with Iraq, Iran, or Syria. Yes, we've been attacked by extremists. The government of Afghanistan was openly supporting those guys and not helping us extradite them. We took (justifiable) military action in Afghanistan.
It's not clear to me what Iran has done to us, either directly or via proxy, that justifies retaliation. Same goes for Iraq.
I'm not willing to save the US "by any means necessary". Some of those means (like universal domestic surveillance, or an aggressive policy of pre-emptive war) indicate that the US has forgotten some of the values that make it worth saving to begin with.
It's a bit odd for us to, at this stage of things, say that there are all these unlikable characters or problematic governments in the middle east. We helped create half of them. I readily admit that the situation is now a clusterf@#k. I don't think glassing entire nations is the most... American route to improving things.
I see. You know, one way to help keep US troops out of reach of Iranian rockets is to pull back US troops so that they're within the US or its territories. That might have the added affect of lessening the amount of anti-American sentiment seen worldover, when perfectly indiginous countries occasionally wonder why there are US military bases on their soil..
Incidentally, the man who's pledged to bring our troops back not only from Iraq but from everywhere is Ron Paul.
Let me make a comparison:
bitorrent client: possession of a bittorrent client is not sufficient grounds to accuse someone of piracy and throw them in jail
nuke: possibility of posession of a nuclear weapon is sufficient grounds to pre-emptively attack them.
Once upon a time, this country tried really hard to avoid war. Not because we're a bunch of sissy pacifists (generally), but because war isn't a hobby one should make, either individually or collectively.
I think it's fair to wait until you've been attacked before you go attacking someone else. History has shown that we typically win defensive wars and there's not much arguing about if we were in the right or not. History has shown that we lose offensive wars and that it deeply divisive towards the soliders, citizens, and rest of the world.
I'm hoping that nobody ever nukes Manhattan. But bombing Iran isn't going to lower the chances of that happening.
As much as my employer hates to see Google doing well, I hope that this announcement has the altruistic effect of making cell phone service in the US suck less..
... no matter how good google makes something, once you start dealing with the US phone industry...it may be that not even google can make it worthwhile. GPhone changing the world was a much more credible idea when Google was going to own the airwaves. Partnering with existing cell companies means that we're going to get an almost-good, but ultimatly shitty product. However, I expect this will be a historical footnote that is used to trial/solve _some_ of the problems one encounters.. before google ultimately buys up that spectrum they're hoping to get and provides a mobile voice/data platform as a vertical market that they own completely.
but then, when i read the "pre-story" this weekend I almost posted a comment along the lines of what I'm posting now...
I like to check phonescoop and howard forums to get anecdotal comments about the RF performance of a given handset.
Additionally, i don't try to save money on the handset -- it costs what it costs and something that seems like a bargain usually isn't. People that sell thousands of them a month and have 99.99999999999999999 positive feedback probably aren't going to sell defective handsets as a matter of policy.
It's also important to be aware of what GSM bands are in use in your area vs. what the handset (and firmware for that handset!) will support.
Personally I'm using a quad-band Motorola L6 SLVR. I wanted a candy-bar phone, that used a standard connector for recharging, had bluetooth, and had no external antenna of any kind. I had the further requirement that it be on the hardware compat list with the Bluetooth preparation in my car (short list). I've been very pleased with the phone, in all honesty. I ordered the same thing in pink for my wife. Both of our phones are non-US market devices and both work great. Hers has arabic lettering on the keys in addition to the english alphabet.. quite amusing.
What would compel me to put up with all of the nonsense associated with the iphone?
The company works overtime to try and brick my phone; on a limited-data plan like what i've described, an iphone doesn't sound very useful anyway.
OpenMoko has no features explicitly designed to piss me off. That puts it head and shoulders above the iphone. When it's done, I'll buy one.
Today: Anonymous prepaid
- buy a pre-activated T-mobile 2 Go SIM off of ebay
- buy an unlocked GSM phone off ebay
No contracts, no fees, no lame choice of stupid phones, nobody knows who you are or how to hassle you. You put minutes on the SIM card and that's that.
This is the "plan" my wife and I have been on since May. Works nicely. Some friends just asked me to set them up with the same deal, since they were sick of paying $90/mo for a set of phones they barely used.
Tomorrow:
Replace handset you bought in "step A" wth an openMoko device. My next handset will hopefully be 100% open-source. I can get partway there with the P2k tools and what not for Motorola, but a truly open device just makes it all that much easier.