A corporation exists solely because of government regulation (a corporation is a legislated entity which exists to remove accountability from owners&employees). True monopoly can only exist through government intervention. You are showing your ignorance of the situation -- without the massive subsidization and government special interest pandering, we would not have corporations sweeping the floor with us (unhealthy foods in America can be traced largely to the subsidization of corn -- a farmer sells for 1.50 what it costs him 2.50 to make).
Government is a legal and standardized monopoly on violence. Say what you will, but it is founded on poor principles which are unsustainable in the long run.
Seriously, read your post -- what is this fluff "because their corporate overlords have the only freedom that matters for them -- a freedom to oppress the rest of society." bullshit? You are speaking hatefully. A business exists solely because of society in a free market (what else could it be?), in an interventionist market it can exist because of government coercion in the name of special contracts or through subsidies.
No one with fair economic knowledge will dispute that everyone is better off in a society that is growing in wealth (full employment, constantly rising quality of living). That should be our goal, in addition to personal liberty for its importance in innovation and enjoyment of life.
Unfortunately not true. HTML5 isn't even an approved standard and won't be for another year or two. Adobe has said it will have HTML5/Canvas capabilities built into the Flash IDE by then (it already has been demonstrated to do this).
A chief strength (and criticism) of flash is that it is a compiled format, now using an ahead-of-time compiler. Try to do AR in javascript or something similar -- you can't. Flash has tried to be the web's bleeding edge; they do not need to wait for anyone before building in new capabilities.
PS Flash supports C++ libraries as well via the alchemy project, introducing great speed boosts over AS3 as well as interoperability with AS3.
I smell bullshit. The Star Trek Utopia thing bothers me because all Utopia is Dystopia from someone else's perspective (to me, the concept of utopia/dystopia is one inseparable beast).
It's ironic that the article would blame the "free market," when we have not had a free market for 100+ years. In an actually free market the economy describes society pretty closely and wealth grows all around (the distribution of wealth is not even, but that's a poor measure of quality of life just check out the fallacy of the "depression" of the 1870's where we had more people employed at the end than at the beginning of it). It wasn't a coincidence that slavery ended as capitalism emerged.
There's this propagandistic belief most people have about trade -- where one person must be getting the better. What happened to mutually-beneficial exchange? It's true! People can actually both be better off after an exchange. Imagine that.
I think the belief about trade being evil is directly linked to the reality of our corporatist, protectionist world. No one can conceive of money as being a positive thing, because on a daily basis we are collectively being insulted and denigrated with it. That's just not right.
I don't think that's a fair assessment -- there are third party development tools like FDT FlashDevelop, Eclipse can compile SWFs and the entire Flex Framework is open source. Have you tried making a CMYK or lab color image in linux without Adobe suite (or another proprietary program)? Third party open-source software for image and video manipulation on linux tends to suck. It doesn't need to, but it does.
Why? All it does is remove any incentive for ad agencies to switch to HTML 5. Again, you need to think bigger than flash video, for the most part digital ad agencies practically breathe flash and very often develop simultaneous desktop/web deployed applications with it (Zinc, AIR).
What about the fact that these are trained soldiers, who ought to understand what a weapon looks like better than your average citizen (RPG's don't have an outward-tapered nozzle on the front whereas cameras do to prevent lens glare)? What about the way they blew up the van, where the wounded were being carried? What about the fact that they were using restricted weaponry on civilians? What about the chuckling of the soldiers in their act of killing people? What about the fact that the army pretended this never happened, and disavowed any knowledge of the incident?
Does none of this matter, or is aggressive and murderous ignorance okay?
Au contraire: the user is clearly talking about man's natural rights, not American law. Government does not give rights - it restricts certain rights.
This delves into the concept of positive and negative rights -- that you either don't have any rights whatsoever until a government grants them to you, versus that you have the full rights entitled to your naturally-born freedom until they are taken away.
Given that man has been around longer than government, I am inclined to say that governments restrict existing rights and cannot grant anything that does not already exist.
The right in question is essentially the right to self-defense.
Apple has a personal interest in pushing HTML5 (and h264), because they have a stake in the h264 format. You are supporting one proprietary format over another.
That said, any hardware capable of running flash can generally do so, unless it is artificially restricted (Apple).
Think about web designers. There need be no artificial barrier between web design/development -- flash is the perfect way to learn programming from a design background. It is user friendly, accessible, and it's really easy to animate with.
Frankly, a good CS-background web developer is the exception in the industry, because they don't give a shit about transitions or the design being pixel-perfect.
I don't think you have any experience working with Apple -- they do not offer any insight into their OS APIs, do not consult with regards to their platforms, and they do not like to be open in any sense (they are also really bad to have to work with on the design front).
Adobe has tried to reach out to Apple many times, but have been turned away (and certainly not just Adobe). There are performance and access issues with their guarded OS/X API. Flash sucks on Macs simply because Apple will not offer support in regards to memory usage issues. Adobe still has had success hacking away on their own.
With the upcoming release of CS5, publishing flash as an iPad/iPhone app will be trivial. There are also rumors that Adobe started, where it has figured a way out to bring flash websites on to the iPad.
Adobe has put a majority of their effort towards making their platform more accessible, more efficient and more open -- Apple has been a major hurdle. Anyone with experience as a third-party working with Apple (or trying to work with it) has their own horror story.
There are distinct differences between any objective accomplishment, personal accomplishment or socially-accepted accomplishment. In some sense, status is utility -- but money, power and status are all ephemeral and inconsequential because they are removed from reality (they are all socially-defined and maintained).
Meh, it has a near total penetration rate and building a site in flash 10 is completely acceptable within the agency web development community. It's unfounded speculation to say all web development is moving away from flash. If anything, all web development is moving toward accessibility -- a very different thing to say.
Flash can not only be accessible, but also merged within a CMS seamlessly to allow straight content presentation vs the flash-powered version (for animation and seamless access to any other part of the site).
So, are you against all versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE? Against all licenses that are not totally free? Against mp3s, pdfs, aacs, movs, avis, rtf, wmv, GIFs?
Where do you draw the line. I should think the public ought to be given the choice whether they want to use something that has a basis in a proprietary technology.
I didn't mean to imply that the people going into politics don't have ideals, but politics is the art of control. It's not about helping people, it's about controlling people with force.
Modern day politics also gets to be about preparing and tagging on lots of frivolous legislature on to any act or bill.
:sigh:
There are also going to be significant taxes to "cadillac" insurance plans, which are plans with luxuries like a dentist plan. I make 75k/year (below average in manhattan -- where i work) and am going to be expecting to pay 10% more next year AND pay higher premiums (which is in reality a form of taxation), and probably more every month as I can guarantee you insurance plans will go up in price but cannot say exactly when (they have much more liability under this "reform" so prices simply cannot go down).
Also, health insurance only makes an average of around 3% profit margin!! That is below standard corporate profit. I cannot stress enough that this is NOT a greedy, profitable industry (if you want that -- just look at pharma). If you want record gains -- again, just look at pharma. Last year was a very good year for them (BMS, Merck, Pfizer,Gilead Sciences, BI).
" now something has finally been done about it"
I can get so frustrated with the naivety of this kind of statement. Insurance rates are going up, this is a fact of basic arithmetic. If you don't believe me and don't want to go through the process of figuring out how cost will increase for the health insurance industry, just wait a year or two and witness how the government again blames private greed rather than its own poor reform, and passes even worse regulation (next time, it will probably be the introduction of national single-payer, and after that only the single-payer will be legal).
This bill is not only not "perfect," it is also compounding on the source of the problem. If you want true reform, please consider completely reformulating or starting over with health insurance regulations, so that competition is a given and it is not difficult to start a health insurance company. Then, there's the pharma industry to tackle (which is in high favor right now, for making recent steps toward "regulating itself" which resulted in the government giving them a break).
To conclude, just look at last year's most profitable industries. Pharma is near the top along with banking and oil, health insurance is the 86th most profitable industry coming in at about 3% profit margin. Government regulations are giving unfair advantage to pharma and crippling the health insurance industry (did you know it takes at least $400 million for a manufacturer to bring a new drug to market? It also takes twice as long as it used to. And guess what! We still get dangerous drugs.)
I think you may be confusing pharmaceutical industry with health care insurance industry... i quickly googled, and the first result linked to a blog about economic data: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/health-insurance-industry-ranks-86-by.html which is slightly above my previously-referenced figure (3.3) but nowhere near 20-30.
In contrast, the 3 main groups of the most profitable business are oil, banking and pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, my figures were fairly off (actually.. I think I confused it with how much we have been expanding our monetary base). The only solid source I could find was whitehouse.gov, according to them government spending was 3 trillion in 2007, but that's only everything on-budget, there are additional costs. The government is about 1/3 of our 12-trillion odd economy, so 4 trillion is likely.
There are two parts to your statement: who is spending and how its being spent.
Ideologically, the government is not spending on the people, it is spending on specific things in the name of the people who may or may not support this spending -- many individuals disagree with how funds are allocated and would want to do so differently (if it were up to the people, they could spend it on what they want to).
Secondly, there is still a large government operating cost... I can't find the exact figure right now, but it was recently estimated at around 35 billion a day..
There is also the implied factor that the government is self-preserving because it is made of individuals who treat it as if it were a business though it is not.
Right now, our government is an organization allocating less than a majority of all people's money (only 47% of people pay income tax) according to a small elite class in the name of all people, which wants to expand its power with no regard for budget, and is slowly increasing tax on all productive people. What could go wrong?
Unbacked? I'm just focusing on the fact of principle -- All the money of government comes from people. There is a huge overhead to government. When government gives a tiny amount back, everyone cheers at how kind the government is. Replace "government" with "monarchy" and you have an accurate description of how people acted under monarchy.
Republicans and Democrats are the same kind of bullshit, and I in no way was supporting Republicans. I read a good explanation, in that the Social Democratic left-wing has been pushing all reform since the late 50's -- conservatives really only "conserve" the beautiful works of these people. It's true -- modern Republicans are just modern Democrats 10-15 years behind, and are meant to support the structure where it is, while liberals go off building these beautiful social constructs which are to be adored.
Here are a number of points: Social Security, Medicare, and home owners (CLASS act) will have increased taxes through this bill (increased taxes amount to 480 billion of the bill). The remaining 500 billion of it is supposed to come from Medicare savings. This ought to be considered non-existent based on the track record of Medicare and the political inviability of cutting down 500 billion of Medicare.
Let's talk about the previous government attempts with healthcare: The original Medicare bill passed in 1965 was supposed to cost 12 billion in 1990, in reality it cost 111 billion (you can argue this is only 25% off if you adjust for inflation, but at that scale of debt it's unfeasible because the inflation rate was partially defined by the tragic costs of Medicare). In 1987 it was projected that Medicade would cost less than one billion in 1992, in reality it was 17 billion. In 1988, changes in the Medicare home benefit were project to cost 4 billion in 1993, in reality it was 10 billion.
As for insinuating about my reading habits, I would not consider economic theory, 16th century to modern political and legal writing, and the same time frame for philosophy to be either "radical literature" or "nothing at all."
I love evidence but you cannot base political theory on anecdote or interpretations of statistics, you must work off of some foundational principles to be successful. In today's world, legislation which will forever remain law is passed constantly and for frivolous, ephemeral reasons.
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A corporation exists solely because of government regulation (a corporation is a legislated entity which exists to remove accountability from owners&employees). True monopoly can only exist through government intervention. You are showing your ignorance of the situation -- without the massive subsidization and government special interest pandering, we would not have corporations sweeping the floor with us (unhealthy foods in America can be traced largely to the subsidization of corn -- a farmer sells for 1.50 what it costs him 2.50 to make).
Government is a legal and standardized monopoly on violence. Say what you will, but it is founded on poor principles which are unsustainable in the long run.
Seriously, read your post -- what is this fluff "because their corporate overlords have the only freedom that matters for them -- a freedom to oppress the rest of society." bullshit? You are speaking hatefully. A business exists solely because of society in a free market (what else could it be?), in an interventionist market it can exist because of government coercion in the name of special contracts or through subsidies.
No one with fair economic knowledge will dispute that everyone is better off in a society that is growing in wealth (full employment, constantly rising quality of living). That should be our goal, in addition to personal liberty for its importance in innovation and enjoyment of life.
Unfortunately not true. HTML5 isn't even an approved standard and won't be for another year or two. Adobe has said it will have HTML5/Canvas capabilities built into the Flash IDE by then (it already has been demonstrated to do this).
A chief strength (and criticism) of flash is that it is a compiled format, now using an ahead-of-time compiler. Try to do AR in javascript or something similar -- you can't. Flash has tried to be the web's bleeding edge; they do not need to wait for anyone before building in new capabilities.
PS Flash supports C++ libraries as well via the alchemy project, introducing great speed boosts over AS3 as well as interoperability with AS3.
I smell bullshit. The Star Trek Utopia thing bothers me because all Utopia is Dystopia from someone else's perspective (to me, the concept of utopia/dystopia is one inseparable beast). It's ironic that the article would blame the "free market," when we have not had a free market for 100+ years. In an actually free market the economy describes society pretty closely and wealth grows all around (the distribution of wealth is not even, but that's a poor measure of quality of life just check out the fallacy of the "depression" of the 1870's where we had more people employed at the end than at the beginning of it). It wasn't a coincidence that slavery ended as capitalism emerged. There's this propagandistic belief most people have about trade -- where one person must be getting the better. What happened to mutually-beneficial exchange? It's true! People can actually both be better off after an exchange. Imagine that. I think the belief about trade being evil is directly linked to the reality of our corporatist, protectionist world. No one can conceive of money as being a positive thing, because on a daily basis we are collectively being insulted and denigrated with it. That's just not right.
The language is messy.
lol :)
It's useful, but it's a pain in the butt for compatibility issues.
I don't think that's a fair assessment -- there are third party development tools like FDT FlashDevelop, Eclipse can compile SWFs and the entire Flex Framework is open source. Have you tried making a CMYK or lab color image in linux without Adobe suite (or another proprietary program)? Third party open-source software for image and video manipulation on linux tends to suck. It doesn't need to, but it does.
This is hypocritical, especially considering that the SWF format is totally open and people have written their own interpretters.
Why? All it does is remove any incentive for ad agencies to switch to HTML 5. Again, you need to think bigger than flash video, for the most part digital ad agencies practically breathe flash and very often develop simultaneous desktop/web deployed applications with it (Zinc, AIR).
What about the fact that these are trained soldiers, who ought to understand what a weapon looks like better than your average citizen (RPG's don't have an outward-tapered nozzle on the front whereas cameras do to prevent lens glare)? What about the way they blew up the van, where the wounded were being carried? What about the fact that they were using restricted weaponry on civilians? What about the chuckling of the soldiers in their act of killing people? What about the fact that the army pretended this never happened, and disavowed any knowledge of the incident?
Does none of this matter, or is aggressive and murderous ignorance okay?
Au contraire: the user is clearly talking about man's natural rights, not American law. Government does not give rights - it restricts certain rights.
This delves into the concept of positive and negative rights -- that you either don't have any rights whatsoever until a government grants them to you, versus that you have the full rights entitled to your naturally-born freedom until they are taken away.
Given that man has been around longer than government, I am inclined to say that governments restrict existing rights and cannot grant anything that does not already exist.
The right in question is essentially the right to self-defense.
Apple has a personal interest in pushing HTML5 (and h264), because they have a stake in the h264 format. You are supporting one proprietary format over another. That said, any hardware capable of running flash can generally do so, unless it is artificially restricted (Apple).
Think about web designers. There need be no artificial barrier between web design/development -- flash is the perfect way to learn programming from a design background. It is user friendly, accessible, and it's really easy to animate with. Frankly, a good CS-background web developer is the exception in the industry, because they don't give a shit about transitions or the design being pixel-perfect.
?????
I don't think you have any experience working with Apple -- they do not offer any insight into their OS APIs, do not consult with regards to their platforms, and they do not like to be open in any sense (they are also really bad to have to work with on the design front).
Adobe has tried to reach out to Apple many times, but have been turned away (and certainly not just Adobe). There are performance and access issues with their guarded OS/X API. Flash sucks on Macs simply because Apple will not offer support in regards to memory usage issues. Adobe still has had success hacking away on their own.
With the upcoming release of CS5, publishing flash as an iPad/iPhone app will be trivial. There are also rumors that Adobe started, where it has figured a way out to bring flash websites on to the iPad.
Adobe has put a majority of their effort towards making their platform more accessible, more efficient and more open -- Apple has been a major hurdle. Anyone with experience as a third-party working with Apple (or trying to work with it) has their own horror story.
There are distinct differences between any objective accomplishment, personal accomplishment or socially-accepted accomplishment. In some sense, status is utility -- but money, power and status are all ephemeral and inconsequential because they are removed from reality (they are all socially-defined and maintained).
why the hatred toward flash?
Not seamlessly, but yes.
Meh, it has a near total penetration rate and building a site in flash 10 is completely acceptable within the agency web development community. It's unfounded speculation to say all web development is moving away from flash. If anything, all web development is moving toward accessibility -- a very different thing to say.
Flash can not only be accessible, but also merged within a CMS seamlessly to allow straight content presentation vs the flash-powered version (for animation and seamless access to any other part of the site).
So, are you against all versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE? Against all licenses that are not totally free? Against mp3s, pdfs, aacs, movs, avis, rtf, wmv, GIFs? Where do you draw the line. I should think the public ought to be given the choice whether they want to use something that has a basis in a proprietary technology.
Nice! Are you commander of the OSS-R army? I want to sign up and kick some of that bourgeoisie Adobe Flash butt!
I didn't mean to imply that the people going into politics don't have ideals, but politics is the art of control. It's not about helping people, it's about controlling people with force.
Modern day politics also gets to be about preparing and tagging on lots of frivolous legislature on to any act or bill.
Also, health insurance only makes an average of around 3% profit margin!! That is below standard corporate profit. I cannot stress enough that this is NOT a greedy, profitable industry (if you want that -- just look at pharma). If you want record gains -- again, just look at pharma. Last year was a very good year for them (BMS, Merck, Pfizer,Gilead Sciences, BI).
" now something has finally been done about it"
I can get so frustrated with the naivety of this kind of statement. Insurance rates are going up, this is a fact of basic arithmetic. If you don't believe me and don't want to go through the process of figuring out how cost will increase for the health insurance industry, just wait a year or two and witness how the government again blames private greed rather than its own poor reform, and passes even worse regulation (next time, it will probably be the introduction of national single-payer, and after that only the single-payer will be legal).
This bill is not only not "perfect," it is also compounding on the source of the problem. If you want true reform, please consider completely reformulating or starting over with health insurance regulations, so that competition is a given and it is not difficult to start a health insurance company. Then, there's the pharma industry to tackle (which is in high favor right now, for making recent steps toward "regulating itself" which resulted in the government giving them a break).
To conclude, just look at last year's most profitable industries. Pharma is near the top along with banking and oil, health insurance is the 86th most profitable industry coming in at about 3% profit margin. Government regulations are giving unfair advantage to pharma and crippling the health insurance industry (did you know it takes at least $400 million for a manufacturer to bring a new drug to market? It also takes twice as long as it used to. And guess what! We still get dangerous drugs.)
I think you may be confusing pharmaceutical industry with health care insurance industry... i quickly googled, and the first result linked to a blog about economic data: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/health-insurance-industry-ranks-86-by.html which is slightly above my previously-referenced figure (3.3) but nowhere near 20-30.
In contrast, the 3 main groups of the most profitable business are oil, banking and pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, my figures were fairly off (actually.. I think I confused it with how much we have been expanding our monetary base). The only solid source I could find was whitehouse.gov, according to them government spending was 3 trillion in 2007, but that's only everything on-budget, there are additional costs. The government is about 1/3 of our 12-trillion odd economy, so 4 trillion is likely.
There are two parts to your statement: who is spending and how its being spent.
Ideologically, the government is not spending on the people, it is spending on specific things in the name of the people who may or may not support this spending -- many individuals disagree with how funds are allocated and would want to do so differently (if it were up to the people, they could spend it on what they want to).
Secondly, there is still a large government operating cost... I can't find the exact figure right now, but it was recently estimated at around 35 billion a day..
There is also the implied factor that the government is self-preserving because it is made of individuals who treat it as if it were a business though it is not.
Right now, our government is an organization allocating less than a majority of all people's money (only 47% of people pay income tax) according to a small elite class in the name of all people, which wants to expand its power with no regard for budget, and is slowly increasing tax on all productive people. What could go wrong?
Unbacked? I'm just focusing on the fact of principle -- All the money of government comes from people. There is a huge overhead to government. When government gives a tiny amount back, everyone cheers at how kind the government is. Replace "government" with "monarchy" and you have an accurate description of how people acted under monarchy.
Republicans and Democrats are the same kind of bullshit, and I in no way was supporting Republicans. I read a good explanation, in that the Social Democratic left-wing has been pushing all reform since the late 50's -- conservatives really only "conserve" the beautiful works of these people. It's true -- modern Republicans are just modern Democrats 10-15 years behind, and are meant to support the structure where it is, while liberals go off building these beautiful social constructs which are to be adored.
Here are a number of points: Social Security, Medicare, and home owners (CLASS act) will have increased taxes through this bill (increased taxes amount to 480 billion of the bill). The remaining 500 billion of it is supposed to come from Medicare savings. This ought to be considered non-existent based on the track record of Medicare and the political inviability of cutting down 500 billion of Medicare.
Let's talk about the previous government attempts with healthcare: The original Medicare bill passed in 1965 was supposed to cost 12 billion in 1990, in reality it cost 111 billion (you can argue this is only 25% off if you adjust for inflation, but at that scale of debt it's unfeasible because the inflation rate was partially defined by the tragic costs of Medicare). In 1987 it was projected that Medicade would cost less than one billion in 1992, in reality it was 17 billion. In 1988, changes in the Medicare home benefit were project to cost 4 billion in 1993, in reality it was 10 billion.
As for insinuating about my reading habits, I would not consider economic theory, 16th century to modern political and legal writing, and the same time frame for philosophy to be either "radical literature" or "nothing at all."
I love evidence but you cannot base political theory on anecdote or interpretations of statistics, you must work off of some foundational principles to be successful. In today's world, legislation which will forever remain law is passed constantly and for frivolous, ephemeral reasons.