Which would be meaningful if you were saying it isn't a "mobile phone", or a "smartphone", or, say, a "(tele)phone", but a non-sequitur when your argument is that it isn't a "mobile device".
Right. Which is why the huge plethora of choices available in DOS-(and later Windows-)based PCs resulted in the DOS/Windows PC offerings failing to succeed in the market against the more focussed offerings from Apple, resulting in DOS/Windows becoming a niche market while there is an Apple computer on almost every desk in most enterprises.
A blog post with an anecdote from one person from one experience being called to jury duty who generalizes from that to a conclusion which doesn't match the proposition you suggested. How is that evidence?
You claim that both prosecution and defense work to remove intelligent jurors. The blog post you point to as evidence has one person, on the basis of their one personal experience with jury duty in one place that "juries for short cases are mainly professionals, juries for long cases are state employees and the idle rich, and homemakers with young children are almost completely unrepresented."
The only thing that even approaches the point you claim are two of the comments, one which simply asserts the same conclusion you assert, again without any support (and is anonymous) and another which again is a singe anecdote based on one person's experience being dismissed, where he guesses that "sounding to smart" was part of the reason.
Even if we assume this guess is correct as to the reason he was dismissed, which is a pretty big assumption, it doesn't support the idea that both sides generally work to remove intelligent jurors, it would, at most, support the idea that there are some circumstances under which one side or the other might do that.
I'm not sure you have even the slightest understanding of the concept of "evidence", so I encourage you -- for the sake of justice -- to do everything you can to continue to avoid jury service.
This does not contradict the US requirement to renounce foreign citizenship as part of the naturalization process. It just recognizes that foreign countries don't automatically give effect to that renunciation and that the citizenship that still exists (under the laws of the country at issue) may have consequences for the traveller.
Note that the State Department is responsible for providing assistance to Americans travelling abroad, and this is travel information about the effects of status as recognized by other countries. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for the process of people becoming US citizens.
That page has nothing to do with citizenship and naturalization, it has to do with travel and entry requirements.
However, you should note that the first thing you swear in the signed oath of allegiance required for naturalization is that "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen" (emphasis added)
Yeah, but smart people are dropped from the jury by lawyers of both sides usually.
This meme gets repeated on Slashdot all the time, but strangely the people I know that are "smart" by every objective measure (IQ test, other standardized tests that correlate well with IQ tests, successful in career, college educated, etc.) don't seem to have gotten "dropped" from juries on peremptory or for-cause challenges. Could you perhaps cite some kind of evidence for this claim?
I read that as the name change from INS to ICE that occurred a few years ago.
More likely, for Torvalds, he is referring to the name change from INS to USCIS, that occurred at the same time (with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security) as the creation of ICE.
Which illustrates that its actually a bit more than a name change, as some of the functions of the old INS are now part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and some of them are part of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). ICE also has some functions that didn't come from the old INS (e.g., the non-immigration related customs enforcement functions), though I think the USCIS mission is essentially a subset of the old INS mission.
As I read the description, the old system wasn't really transactional as the term is normally used, it rebuilt the index (at least, the index for each layer) from scratch each iteration rather than doing transactional updates an existing index.
Processing a batch of data with Colossus is probably slower than using MapReduce under ideal circumstances.
From the description, I'm not sure that the new system is ever faster at processing a (similar) batch of data than the old one, or that the speed with which a batch of data is processed is really the key issue. The most significant change seems to be that they are processing smaller batches of data, reducing the time between crawling a page and updating the index. This delivers value faster (less delay between crawling a page and updating the index) whether or not it reduces the total time it takes to process a given volume of data. It doesn't need to ever (under either ideal or real world conditions) be faster in terms of volume of data processed per unit of time to be a win in terms of providing fresher data, which is what matters here.
Oh I see, you are nitpicking my choice of the word "can".
Again, no, your use of the word "can" is not the central point of my response.
The central point of my response is that laws don't magically transform behavior, especially where they conflict with widespread ideas about fairness, and laws that outlaw something without actually effectively controlling it not only create lawbreakers in the area they outlaw, but also create opportunities for more general criminal organizations. Besides the examples at issue in GGGP, other prominent and illustrative examples are Prohibition and the War on Drugs.
Does this mean that the copyright regime, the existing immigration regime, the War on Drugs, or Prohibition are categorically wrong? No. I'd say the list there includes somethings that are basically wrong, and some things that are basically right but need reform in (operationally critical, but not necessarily conceptually fundamental) details to work well and best control the unintended adverse consequences and social costs associated with the policy.
The way around this is to first encrypt the message with the sender's private key and then with the receiver's private key.
Minor correction: the sender encrypts with the sender's private key and the receiver's public key. The sender has no reason to have the receiver's private key. (And, in fact, if they do, then there is a serious problem, since the sender can then impersonate the sender.)
No, I'm not. Both copyright violations and illegal presence are generally not criminal in and of themselves, though quite often they become criminal in certain circumstances, or when certain means are used to effect them.
b.) digital files to people
No, I'm not comparing digital files with people.
Other than those bits of silliness, does your post have a point?
Yes.
Cause I'm not seeing nor can I even tell which side you are trying to argue for.
My point is, well, exactly what the post says. If you want a short version that captures the main point without the analogies and examples, read just the second and third paragraphs, excluding the parenthetical in the latter.
If this doesn't fit into neatly your preconceived notions of what the "sides" are on this issue and the preconception that every comment must somehow relate to one of those "sides", perhaps you should reconsider your preconceptions.
Isn't getting 1/10 of that demographic to vote a HUGE improvement over previous years?
1 in 10 would have been much worse than the usual turnout in that age group, but the actual turnout was ~47% in 2004 and ~49% in 2008, which was a significant increase from the ~36% in 2000.
In the last US presidential election only about 60% [gmu.edu] of the people eligible to vote, actually did. However, I bet a much greater number of people complained about the president/candidates. I remember reading somewhere that even though Hollywood (Puff Daddy etc..) started the whole "Vote of Die" campaign to get young people (age 18-24) to vote, approximately 1 in 10 actually did.
I always tell people, if you didn't vote in in the election, don't complain.
The US consistently has very low turnout among advanced democracies, which is well-explained by its electoral system which does not elect governments which are effectively representative of the opinions that motivate voters.
More people would vote if the electoral system produced results that they perceived as being worth the effort of voting.
Of course, most people charged with a crime actually did it, and in those cases, the defense's motivation is to get people on the jury who are even stupider than the defendant.
If the case goes to trial (most cases where people are charged with a crime don't, they usually plead out), the defenses interest is to get people who (aside from biases toward or away from people like the defendant, or law enforcement) are likely to see "reasonable doubt" broadly even within standardized jury instructions, and the prosecutions interest (aside from the saame kind of biases set aside for the defense) is to get jurors who are likely to see it very narrowly within those instructions.
Intelligence isn't really a big factor (more intelligent people, all other things being equal, may more readily see the significance of prosecution evidence, but they may also be more able to see tenable alternative explanations for the evidence presented and recognize reasonable doubt; remember that the question before the jury isn't whether they think the defendant is guilty, but whether the prosecution has proven the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt), though people who have such an inflated sense of their own cleverness that they are unlikely to listen through all the evidence and instead may be inclined to build their own mental story early based on their own biases and the parts of the testimony that confirm their own biases are probably, unless their biases seem to clearly align completely with one side (in which case, they'll certainly be unacceptable to the other) likely to be undesired by both sides.
Does that mean Jose can break the law by living here illegally?
Does the fact that copyright law restricts people's freedom to share more than they think it should make it okay to circumvent DRM and other protections to copy material for personal use and/or distribution? No, it doesn't mean that. If they can do so, its because they have the resources at hand to do so.
The fact that the law conflicts with their expectation of what they should be permitted to do doesn't cause them to be able to do it, it just makes them more likely to break the law than they would be to if the law comported with their ideas of fairness, and the fact that the law, in certain of its effects and applications, conflicts with lots of people's ideas of what should or should not be allowed means that there is quite a wide availability of tools and assistance in doing so.
The high demand plus illegality also means that criminal gangs involved in activities that are far more universally condemned can leverage the demand and the fact of illegality to use people's desire to circumvent the law to further existing criminal enterprises (e.g., in the copyright case, by distributing software that purports to crack DRM or other protections -- or which purports to contain content liberated from existing protections -- and which, whether or not it does what is advertised, also turns the computers its used on into botnet slaves or otherwise subverts them; in the immigration case, the analogous practices involve using prospective immigrants as labor for illegal sweatshops, in sexual trafficking, and using the fact of their illegal status as leverage to get them directly involved in criminal activity.)
I would imagine the process of getting a green card was a lot easier for Linus Torvalds than it would be for some random Jose Gonzales with not so much as a high school degree.
Well, yeah. For instance, while the US Embassy in Mexico City (a full 20% of the population of Mexico lives in the Mexico City metropolitan area, and much of the rest lives in the surrounding states) issues non-immigrant visas, the only place in Mexico that issues immigrant visas is the US Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, which is pretty much ground zero for the drug violence in Mexico. Quoting from the US Department of State's 10 September 2010 travel advisory: "The situation in the state of Chihuahua, specifically Ciudad Juarez, is of special concern. Mexican authorities report that more than 2,600 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez in 2009. Three persons associated with the Consulate General were murdered in March, 2010."
And that's even before considering the fact that irrespective of proximity of the country, population of the country, or number of qualified visa applicants in legal categories, the US has a per-country cap (in 2010, this was 15,820 for family based, and 10,440 for employment-based) on the number of immigrants admitted from any one country, and that the number of applicants in the family-based categories on the waiting list from Mexico is over 1 million.
I don't find it hard to blame those who just sneak across.
We'd probably do a better job of dealing with the problem if people spent more time focussing on defining what the problem really was and thinking about whether proposed solutions would work than about who they can feel good about blaming.
Weird isn't it how some people can actually navigate the Byzantine immigration process instead of just sneaking across the boarder?
First, "boarder" is a word, but its not the word you probably mean to use here.
Second, because of a by-country quota system that isn't aligned proportionately to the number of qualified applicants in legal immigration categories, its a lot easier to immigrate legally to the US from, say, Finland in most of the legal immigration categories, than it is from, say, Mexico.
Simply stated, next to the power of a real laptop, or the elegance of a tablet, the net-book seems a little, well, irrelevant.
Next to the power of a real laptop, a netbook is irrelevant -- for tasks that require the power of a real laptop. The thing is, very few tasks do.
And netbooks, generally weighing under 3lbs and having much longer battery life than most "real" laptops, are much more convenient to carry about and whip out when needed.
And, yes, tablets are even better at portability then netbooks, but whereas a netbook (compared to a laptop) sacrifices processing power and optical disk storage that most tasks that a laptop can be used for don't need and aren't particularly enhanced by, the tablet sacrifices the ability to sit on a flat surface with the screen at comfortable viewing angle -- requiring it to be held up to be used -- and sacrifices a physical keyboard (which means that it sacrifices even more of its limited screen real estate when doing tasks that require any text input, and that its far less comfortable for such tasks, screen real estate aside.) This makes it mostly a devices with a larger screen that's good at essentially the same set of tasks that smartphones are good for -- a smartphones are far more portable than tablets. At the expense of portability, they are somewhat better than smartphones at some of those tasks where the additional screen real estate makes a real difference. So if those tasks are your main need, it makes sense to have one. But I have a smartphone for tasks that smartphones are good for, and I've got a netbook for things that having a keyboard makes a big difference for. And I've got a real laptop that I used to carry around everywhere, but has mostly turned into a second desktop at home since I've gotten the netbook, because the netbook handles all the on-the-go things I used the laptop for quite well.
For me, tablets are mostly irrelevant -- I'll probably get one, eventually (I've got a couple ideas for stationary use in the house for them, and I'm a pretty big gadget freak anyway), but its a fairly low priority. Other people, of course, may want do a lot more of the things that tablets are really good at, and less things where a keyboard makes a big difference, and tablets may be great for them.
In the manufacture of physical things it's very hard to compete with companies operating in other countries that have less worker protections, less environmental protections, and non-existent employee benefits.
This is not a problem with free trade or markets.
Its a problem with systems of trade which allow movement of capital and goods but restrict the movement of people, which are not free.
Trade between US states -- which features relatively free movement of capital, goods, and people -- is essentially free. Trade between the US and any other country is not free, and calling it so is misleading.
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price?
They probably could, if you ignore the startup costs of the plant. But if you've already got a US-based plant, the startup costs of that plant are sunk and don't figure into a comparison with foreign plants. OTOH, when you would either need to convert the local plant or start a foreign plant, the conversion costs of the local plant do need to be considered.
These bulbs are far from environmentally friendly or “so called green” and is another example of how foolish laws attempting to “manage” people’s behavior create more long term problems. Each bulb contains about 5 milligrams (mg) of mercury, a toxic heavy metal that can interfere with the development of children and unborn fetuses and may cause a wide range of health issues in adults, including brain, kidney and liver damage.
The mercury released from a CFLs deposited in a landfill if they aren't recycled is, with the current electricity generating mix in the US, less than the average quantity of mercury released into the environment from electricity generation (burning coal) to supply the additional energy consumed to power incandescent bulbs over CFLs. (Source)
I personally would rather live with the consequences of the incandescent lamp for a while longer.
Why? Because you want more mercury released into the environment?
If they really cared about energy security, they'd be going after oil usage, e.g. by raising the gas tax or mandating better fuel standards.
Both Congress via legislation and the Executive Branch via use of regulatory authority have taken steps raise fuel efficiency standards over the last several years. Government is capable of undertaking multiple policies directed at the same goal.
Sure, I buy the last part, I just don't get why light bulbs are unique.
Lightbulbs aren't unique. This isn't the only government policy that is directed at residential energy usage; there are many others, at both the federal and state levels.
So do absurdly large televisions. But nobody that I know of is proposing to mandate thermostats that won't heat/cool above/below certain government-prescribed threshholds, or force people to buy more reasonably sized TVs.
But that wouldn't be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs, anyway.
What would be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs would be, e.g., heating and cooling efficiency standards for heating and cooling units installed in new homes. Which Congress, in fact, established in 1992, long before the standards at issue on lightbulbs.
Or efficiency standards for televisions, which Congress authorized DOE to establish in 1989, and DOE has announced this year that they intend to establish and which would be effective in 2016.
Just because lightbulbs get talked about on Slashdot a lot doesn't mean they are somehow being treated different than everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is.
Which would be meaningful if you were saying it isn't a "mobile phone", or a "smartphone", or, say, a "(tele)phone", but a non-sequitur when your argument is that it isn't a "mobile device".
Right. Which is why the huge plethora of choices available in DOS-(and later Windows-)based PCs resulted in the DOS/Windows PC offerings failing to succeed in the market against the more focussed offerings from Apple, resulting in DOS/Windows becoming a niche market while there is an Apple computer on almost every desk in most enterprises.
A blog post with an anecdote from one person from one experience being called to jury duty who generalizes from that to a conclusion which doesn't match the proposition you suggested. How is that evidence?
You claim that both prosecution and defense work to remove intelligent jurors. The blog post you point to as evidence has one person, on the basis of their one personal experience with jury duty in one place that "juries for short cases are mainly professionals, juries for long cases are state employees and the idle rich, and homemakers with young children are almost completely unrepresented."
The only thing that even approaches the point you claim are two of the comments, one which simply asserts the same conclusion you assert, again without any support (and is anonymous) and another which again is a singe anecdote based on one person's experience being dismissed, where he guesses that "sounding to smart" was part of the reason.
Even if we assume this guess is correct as to the reason he was dismissed, which is a pretty big assumption, it doesn't support the idea that both sides generally work to remove intelligent jurors, it would, at most, support the idea that there are some circumstances under which one side or the other might do that.
I'm not sure you have even the slightest understanding of the concept of "evidence", so I encourage you -- for the sake of justice -- to do everything you can to continue to avoid jury service.
Yes, it does. See, e.g, p.28 of the Guide to Naturalization produced by US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
This does not contradict the US requirement to renounce foreign citizenship as part of the naturalization process. It just recognizes that foreign countries don't automatically give effect to that renunciation and that the citizenship that still exists (under the laws of the country at issue) may have consequences for the traveller.
Note that the State Department is responsible for providing assistance to Americans travelling abroad, and this is travel information about the effects of status as recognized by other countries. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for the process of people becoming US citizens.
That page has nothing to do with citizenship and naturalization, it has to do with travel and entry requirements.
However, you should note that the first thing you swear in the signed oath of allegiance required for naturalization is that "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen" (emphasis added)
This meme gets repeated on Slashdot all the time, but strangely the people I know that are "smart" by every objective measure (IQ test, other standardized tests that correlate well with IQ tests, successful in career, college educated, etc.) don't seem to have gotten "dropped" from juries on peremptory or for-cause challenges. Could you perhaps cite some kind of evidence for this claim?
More likely, for Torvalds, he is referring to the name change from INS to USCIS, that occurred at the same time (with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security) as the creation of ICE.
Which illustrates that its actually a bit more than a name change, as some of the functions of the old INS are now part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and some of them are part of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). ICE also has some functions that didn't come from the old INS (e.g., the non-immigration related customs enforcement functions), though I think the USCIS mission is essentially a subset of the old INS mission.
Lots of people like gradual rewards.
Lots of people like not having to learn too much new.
So, "repetitive with gradual rewards" is fun for lots of people.
Maybe not fun for you, but that's not really the issue.
As I read the description, the old system wasn't really transactional as the term is normally used, it rebuilt the index (at least, the index for each layer) from scratch each iteration rather than doing transactional updates an existing index.
From the description, I'm not sure that the new system is ever faster at processing a (similar) batch of data than the old one, or that the speed with which a batch of data is processed is really the key issue. The most significant change seems to be that they are processing smaller batches of data, reducing the time between crawling a page and updating the index. This delivers value faster (less delay between crawling a page and updating the index) whether or not it reduces the total time it takes to process a given volume of data. It doesn't need to ever (under either ideal or real world conditions) be faster in terms of volume of data processed per unit of time to be a win in terms of providing fresher data, which is what matters here.
Again, no, your use of the word "can" is not the central point of my response.
The central point of my response is that laws don't magically transform behavior, especially where they conflict with widespread ideas about fairness, and laws that outlaw something without actually effectively controlling it not only create lawbreakers in the area they outlaw, but also create opportunities for more general criminal organizations. Besides the examples at issue in GGGP, other prominent and illustrative examples are Prohibition and the War on Drugs.
Does this mean that the copyright regime, the existing immigration regime, the War on Drugs, or Prohibition are categorically wrong? No. I'd say the list there includes somethings that are basically wrong, and some things that are basically right but need reform in (operationally critical, but not necessarily conceptually fundamental) details to work well and best control the unintended adverse consequences and social costs associated with the policy.
Minor correction: the sender encrypts with the sender's private key and the receiver's public key. The sender has no reason to have the receiver's private key. (And, in fact, if they do, then there is a serious problem, since the sender can then impersonate the sender.)
No, I'm not. Both copyright violations and illegal presence are generally not criminal in and of themselves, though quite often they become criminal in certain circumstances, or when certain means are used to effect them.
No, I'm not comparing digital files with people.
Yes.
My point is, well, exactly what the post says. If you want a short version that captures the main point without the analogies and examples, read just the second and third paragraphs, excluding the parenthetical in the latter.
If this doesn't fit into neatly your preconceived notions of what the "sides" are on this issue and the preconception that every comment must somehow relate to one of those "sides", perhaps you should reconsider your preconceptions.
1 in 10 would have been much worse than the usual turnout in that age group, but the actual turnout was ~47% in 2004 and ~49% in 2008, which was a significant increase from the ~36% in 2000.
Sources: (2004/2008, 2000)
Wherever you read that is wrong. 18-24 turnout was 49% in 2008, and 47% in 2004. This is (to say the least) quite a bit more than "1 in 10".
The US consistently has very low turnout among advanced democracies, which is well-explained by its electoral system which does not elect governments which are effectively representative of the opinions that motivate voters.
More people would vote if the electoral system produced results that they perceived as being worth the effort of voting.
If the case goes to trial (most cases where people are charged with a crime don't, they usually plead out), the defenses interest is to get people who (aside from biases toward or away from people like the defendant, or law enforcement) are likely to see "reasonable doubt" broadly even within standardized jury instructions, and the prosecutions interest (aside from the saame kind of biases set aside for the defense) is to get jurors who are likely to see it very narrowly within those instructions.
Intelligence isn't really a big factor (more intelligent people, all other things being equal, may more readily see the significance of prosecution evidence, but they may also be more able to see tenable alternative explanations for the evidence presented and recognize reasonable doubt; remember that the question before the jury isn't whether they think the defendant is guilty, but whether the prosecution has proven the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt), though people who have such an inflated sense of their own cleverness that they are unlikely to listen through all the evidence and instead may be inclined to build their own mental story early based on their own biases and the parts of the testimony that confirm their own biases are probably, unless their biases seem to clearly align completely with one side (in which case, they'll certainly be unacceptable to the other) likely to be undesired by both sides.
Does the fact that copyright law restricts people's freedom to share more than they think it should make it okay to circumvent DRM and other protections to copy material for personal use and/or distribution? No, it doesn't mean that. If they can do so, its because they have the resources at hand to do so.
The fact that the law conflicts with their expectation of what they should be permitted to do doesn't cause them to be able to do it, it just makes them more likely to break the law than they would be to if the law comported with their ideas of fairness, and the fact that the law, in certain of its effects and applications, conflicts with lots of people's ideas of what should or should not be allowed means that there is quite a wide availability of tools and assistance in doing so.
The high demand plus illegality also means that criminal gangs involved in activities that are far more universally condemned can leverage the demand and the fact of illegality to use people's desire to circumvent the law to further existing criminal enterprises (e.g., in the copyright case, by distributing software that purports to crack DRM or other protections -- or which purports to contain content liberated from existing protections -- and which, whether or not it does what is advertised, also turns the computers its used on into botnet slaves or otherwise subverts them; in the immigration case, the analogous practices involve using prospective immigrants as labor for illegal sweatshops, in sexual trafficking, and using the fact of their illegal status as leverage to get them directly involved in criminal activity.)
Well, yeah. For instance, while the US Embassy in Mexico City (a full 20% of the population of Mexico lives in the Mexico City metropolitan area, and much of the rest lives in the surrounding states) issues non-immigrant visas, the only place in Mexico that issues immigrant visas is the US Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, which is pretty much ground zero for the drug violence in Mexico. Quoting from the US Department of State's 10 September 2010 travel advisory: "The situation in the state of Chihuahua, specifically Ciudad Juarez, is of special concern. Mexican authorities report that more than 2,600 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez in 2009. Three persons associated with the Consulate General were murdered in March, 2010."
And that's even before considering the fact that irrespective of proximity of the country, population of the country, or number of qualified visa applicants in legal categories, the US has a per-country cap (in 2010, this was 15,820 for family based, and 10,440 for employment-based) on the number of immigrants admitted from any one country, and that the number of applicants in the family-based categories on the waiting list from Mexico is over 1 million.
We'd probably do a better job of dealing with the problem if people spent more time focussing on defining what the problem really was and thinking about whether proposed solutions would work than about who they can feel good about blaming.
First, "boarder" is a word, but its not the word you probably mean to use here.
Second, because of a by-country quota system that isn't aligned proportionately to the number of qualified applicants in legal immigration categories, its a lot easier to immigrate legally to the US from, say, Finland in most of the legal immigration categories, than it is from, say, Mexico.
Next to the power of a real laptop, a netbook is irrelevant -- for tasks that require the power of a real laptop. The thing is, very few tasks do.
And netbooks, generally weighing under 3lbs and having much longer battery life than most "real" laptops, are much more convenient to carry about and whip out when needed.
And, yes, tablets are even better at portability then netbooks, but whereas a netbook (compared to a laptop) sacrifices processing power and optical disk storage that most tasks that a laptop can be used for don't need and aren't particularly enhanced by, the tablet sacrifices the ability to sit on a flat surface with the screen at comfortable viewing angle -- requiring it to be held up to be used -- and sacrifices a physical keyboard (which means that it sacrifices even more of its limited screen real estate when doing tasks that require any text input, and that its far less comfortable for such tasks, screen real estate aside.) This makes it mostly a devices with a larger screen that's good at essentially the same set of tasks that smartphones are good for -- a smartphones are far more portable than tablets. At the expense of portability, they are somewhat better than smartphones at some of those tasks where the additional screen real estate makes a real difference. So if those tasks are your main need, it makes sense to have one. But I have a smartphone for tasks that smartphones are good for, and I've got a netbook for things that having a keyboard makes a big difference for. And I've got a real laptop that I used to carry around everywhere, but has mostly turned into a second desktop at home since I've gotten the netbook, because the netbook handles all the on-the-go things I used the laptop for quite well.
For me, tablets are mostly irrelevant -- I'll probably get one, eventually (I've got a couple ideas for stationary use in the house for them, and I'm a pretty big gadget freak anyway), but its a fairly low priority. Other people, of course, may want do a lot more of the things that tablets are really good at, and less things where a keyboard makes a big difference, and tablets may be great for them.
This is not a problem with free trade or markets.
Its a problem with systems of trade which allow movement of capital and goods but restrict the movement of people, which are not free.
Trade between US states -- which features relatively free movement of capital, goods, and people -- is essentially free. Trade between the US and any other country is not free, and calling it so is misleading.
They probably could, if you ignore the startup costs of the plant. But if you've already got a US-based plant, the startup costs of that plant are sunk and don't figure into a comparison with foreign plants. OTOH, when you would either need to convert the local plant or start a foreign plant, the conversion costs of the local plant do need to be considered.
The mercury released from a CFLs deposited in a landfill if they aren't recycled is, with the current electricity generating mix in the US, less than the average quantity of mercury released into the environment from electricity generation (burning coal) to supply the additional energy consumed to power incandescent bulbs over CFLs. (Source)
Why? Because you want more mercury released into the environment?
Both Congress via legislation and the Executive Branch via use of regulatory authority have taken steps raise fuel efficiency standards over the last several years. Government is capable of undertaking multiple policies directed at the same goal.
Lightbulbs aren't unique. This isn't the only government policy that is directed at residential energy usage; there are many others, at both the federal and state levels.
But that wouldn't be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs, anyway.
What would be analogous to the efficiency standards for lightbulbs would be, e.g., heating and cooling efficiency standards for heating and cooling units installed in new homes. Which Congress, in fact, established in 1992, long before the standards at issue on lightbulbs.
Or efficiency standards for televisions, which Congress authorized DOE to establish in 1989, and DOE has announced this year that they intend to establish and which would be effective in 2016.
Just because lightbulbs get talked about on Slashdot a lot doesn't mean they are somehow being treated different than everything else.
Sources:
Heating/cooling
TV