It has to be a broken system that gives them less than 10% of the seats for almost a quarter of the vote. Especially when you consider that they increased their vote, yet decreased their number of MPs and that Labour got 29% (only 6 per cent more) of the vote somehow giving them 4 times as many seats.
Any system with single-member districts assigned simply by the vote winner (whether by simple majority with a runoff to settle ambiguous results, or plurality, or any other system that just looks at the first-place votes ) from the ballots in that district will have the possibility of doing things like that.
You have to have a more sophisticated voting system that produces proportional results to do that. Straight party list proportional systems are one alternative, but they have the defect that while they produce results that are proportional by party, they reduce the direct accountability of individual elected officials to the general electorate. Systems that produce fairly proportional results from ranked ballots among individual candidates in multimember districts (e.g., Single Transferable Vote) are another tool; with any reasonable district size they are less capable of perfect party proportionality than party list systems, but they can provide reasonable proportionality with the much the same kind of direct accountability to the general electorate that you have in single-member district, first-past-the-post type of elections.
Of course, most of those problems are directly related to the two-party system. In the case of the electoral college, it is the primary means by which the system is enforced,
The electoral college is not the primary means by which the two-party system is enforced. The primary means by which the two-party system is enforced is using majority-runoff or plurality elections for most purpose plus having independently elected executives (both at the state and federal levels) rather than a parliamentary system.
The electoral college on top of that reinforces it a bit in terms of the federal executive, but its a small effect compared to the more basic ones -- switching to a direct election (by either majority-runoff or plurality) for the President and Vice President, either separately or on a single ballot, wouldn't do much to weaken the two-party system.
A parliamentary system (while still retaining majority-runoff and plurality for most elections) would still weakly promote two-party dynamics in most individual elections, but would make it more practical for the dominant parties to vary between regions rather than being two dominant national parties (the combination of that with national media would mean that minor parties would gain more mindshare even where they weren't currently electorally competitive, which would make which parties were competitive in which regions somewhat fluid.)
Using a ranked-preference-based voting system that avoided the structural disincentives to supporting third parties (with or without moving to a parliamentary system) would probably do the most to end duopoly, particularly if, for legislative elections, a system which tended to produce roughly proportional outcomes were adopted (this wouldn't have to ge a party-list system, you could just have Single Transferable Vote with, say, 5 member districts.)
I can't speak for the parent poster but personally I'm working on it [pirate-party.us].
How is that working on it? None of the platform planks listed for your party address any of the features of the US system of government and elections that promote duopoly, which means you aren't actually working on the problem that GP asked about (plus, given that because of those features, voting with a minor party in the US mostly helps the major party most opposed to the positions of your minor party, probably means that the efforts towards the things on your platform will be rather ineffective.)
At least you guys -have- minority parties. Good luck finding a single person in the US congress that isn't a republican or democrat (or an 'independent' who votes 99.999% with one of the 2 parties).
There are several independents in the US Congress, and none of them vote 99.999% with anyone else (its very hard to even find two members of the same party that vote together that often; the same system that produces that solid two-party lock in the US also assures that those parties will be, by the standards of most other modern democracies, very weak parties.)
Synopsis of the candidate: the rule of law is like, the foundation of our society and stuff, and should totally apply to absolutely everyone except for Bad People.
Not, let me grab some popcorn before the shrieking begins from both sides. What a perfect compromise candidate - everyone will hate her.
I'm not so sure of that. I mean, if I were to assume your synopsis of here judicial philosophy were accurate, I'd have to say most politicians and political commentators of both sides would agree with her 100%.
No, GDP is increasing, companies ARE hiring more people, layoffs are decreasing, home sales are going back up (both existing and new homes), etc. That's the economy improving.
Sure, the GDP increased at a healthy pace two quarters back, and at a slower pace last quarter. Whether that's the beginning of a real recovery or a dead-cat bounce (a short-term rebound driven by inventory exhaustion and other factors that produces to a non-sustained spike in activity) is less clear. Distributional factors will be a big determinant there, and the while income distribution statistics take a while to assemble, the jobs data don't provide a real good sign there. Particularly, while companies are "hiring more people" and "layoffs are decreasing", that's only gotten to the point where unemployment has been high and essentially flat over the past 9 months, not to the point where it is decreasing.
First, who would select these advisers?
Well we could always use the government officials to select the initial group, based on votes and with some other safeties built in to prevent one party rigging the deck.
That's a rather vague idea, and is the theory behind many of the existing and historical standing and ad hoc "independent" agencies, which are, of course, all heavily politicized. The fact is that while this sounds nice, it doesn't actually work: either one party can, if it controls the legislative and executive branches, "stack the deck", or the "independent" body is effectively immune to oversight by the Constitutional, elected bodies of government. You've proposed in different parts of parent post a body that would feature neither of these, which is just an incoherent idea.
Second, who is going to listen to advisers that aren't chosen by the people they are advising?
Did you choose your professors? No?
I choose which colleges and universities to attend based, among other things, on the faculties in the fields I was interested in studying, chose, within broad requirements, which classes to take based, among other things, on the set of professors that taught each class, and choose which of several instances of the particular class to take based, among other things, on which professor was teaching which instance. So, in short, yes.
So that means you didn't listen to anything they had to say, right?
Ignoring the fact that your assumption was wrong, a professor is not analogous to a policy advisor.
Could it be because they had proven that they were knowledgeable in their field?
Yes, that's a major reason why competent leaders choose their policy advisors, because they have proven to the person choosing them that they are knowledgeable in their field. And they tend to listen to them for that reason. You are proposing a system in which the choice of policy advisors would be more distant than in the status quo from the individual policymakers that they are advising, and therefore in which it would be less likely that each individual policymaker would see the advice coming to them from the advisors as being from a reliable source.
Also, if a President and Congress ignores their recommendation and then things go to shit, then the American people will know that the politicians who were against listening to the experts were arrogant and incompetent who put their own agenda over doing what's best for the country - those politicians could then be voted out.
No, they won't. That the chosen course of action was followed by bad outcomes doesn't imply that the particular recommendation made by the council of advisers would have produced better results.
Even if it did support that conclusion, that's a pretty weak basis for any action at the ballot box unless on
Likely what Comcast is saying is that someone is going to be paying for increasing capacity. They would much rather send a bill to Google than all their customers,
Wrong. They already bill all of their customers for their download capacity. They also already get compensated by whoever is sending the data, who is either (a) one of their customers, and thus paying for upload capacity, or (b) someone whose data enters Comcast's network from someone else's via a peering agreement, and therefore for which Comcast is paid in-kind.
So, having already been paid by both sides of any transmission that crosses their network, they want to be paid a third time for each transmission to or from people who are offering content services (like VoIP, or video-on-demand, etc.) which compete with Comcast services. IOW, they want to leverage their market position (often a local monopoly) on high-speed internet access to dominate internet content.
The FCC has never proposed limiting the ability of access providers to charge and be compensated for capacity used. What they have sought to do, through "net neutrality" principles, is to prevent access providers from discriminating between different legal content types and different content providers when charging for capacity.
No, there is a recovery going on, it just takes time
That's what kept getting said during the whole so-called recovery of the 00's (the period between the brief 2001 recession and the current recession, which saw declining incomes in the bottom 3 quintiles with flat incomes in second-to-top quintile, with improvement in incomes confined largely in the top 5%. It was not, in any meaningful sense, a "recovery". (Which made the current recession that much worse, since -- but for inflated paper value of homes -- large numbers of people had been essentially wiped out during the preceding "recovery" before the official recession even hit.)
I also think that we need to cut economists from the list of presidential advisers who get appointed as favors for supporting a candidate and create and independent panel of Economists (3-5) to advise the president and congress and if members repeatedly support bad economic policies, they will be replaced.
This idea is insane. First, who would select these advisers? Second, who is going to listen to advisers that aren't chosen by the people they are advising? Third, now that you've given your little cabal of economists the power to remove elected officials for not following the program the economists prefer, what stops them from using that power to act as unchecked dictators?
If the American people want a government that acts smart on economic matters, there is only one way to achieve that without sacrificing the idea of representative democracy: the American people -- or enough of them, anyway -- are going to have to learn enough about economics to effectively judge politicians platforms and actions for economic sense, and are going to have to use that information when they vote.
I'm not sure exactly how you protect against that. The software is meant to detect a certain trigger and complete certain actions based on that trigger.
Which the software does fine.
The problem is the underlying assumptions about what the meaning of the event defined as the trigger. Computers are very good at calculating results using rules that are given to them, they are fairly bad (even when they use the most advanced AI techniques available) at discerning meaning from events.
Trusting decisions about money (rather than just calculations on which humans can make decisions) is very much like trusting those decisions to a person with great math skills but no judgement whatsoever.
But are those in constant dollars? (adjusted for inflation)
No, and I've never seen worldwide inflation-adjusted box office numbers or rankings.
The best I can find is domestic box office adjusted for ticket-price inflation, where, Avatar is #12 and Titanic #6 of all time, and neither Aliens nor Terminator rate anywhere of interest (the only film from either franchise that makes the top 100 is Terminator 2 -- at #96.)
Heck, Aliens was #7 and Terminator #21 in domestic box office -- each among movies released in the same year. Totally not the same league as Avatar and Titanic.
But then how do you get that Internet access? If you cut your cable, you can't easily get cable Internet, and if you switch to a cell phone, you can't easily get DSL.
GP didn't advocate switching from a landline to a cell phone, only replacing cable with OTA + Internet + Netflix.
Speaking of James Cameron and publicity, it's bizarre that the summary mentions him as the director of Avatar and Titanic, but neglects to mention his seminal works; Aliens and Terminator.
Well, Avatar is relevant due to the subject (3D).
Also, consider: Avatar -- worldwide box office, $2.7 billion (#1 all time) Titanic -- worldwide box office, $1.8 billion (#2 all time) Aliens -- worldwide box office, $131 million The Terminator -- worldwide box office, $78 million
There might be a reason that the latter two aren't viewed as being as significant.
I don't see why James Cameron's involvement is necessary. Stereoscopic imaging is pretty simple technology, and it's not like James Cameron invented it. What's so hard about turning a fixed-focal-length stereo camera into one that has zoom lenses? And why would you employ a film director, rather than an optical engineer to do it?
Its not entirely uncommon for the crew on films that do things that haven't been done a lot in film to actually develop new techniques in the process, so its not entirely unlikely that while Cameron didn't invent stereoscoping imaging, he (or people working for him) did invent useful practical approaches to it, and have useful and recent practical experience with it, that could be beneficial to this application.
As a small restaurant/club owner, I spent a lot of time creating a Flash-based website so that it would be more appealing to customers than an HTML site. Is Mr Jobs really suggesting that I should now create an app for my business instead?
So, let me get this straight: instead of doing the rational thing to maximize the number of users who could benefit from the content of your site by first presenting the content with the most broadly supported subset of HTML before building a "premium" presentation of the content that would be accessible to a smaller set of users using a technology that is less universal like Flash, you excluded many potential customers by building a flash-only site that they could not use from the many web-enabled devices (including the iPhone) that don't have Flash, and you blame Steve Jobs for limiting the reach of your app by not correcting your decision by bringing Flash to the iPhone?
Maybe you need to consider that the problem here isn't with Steve Jobs.
The reason being, business is going to use the cloud but it's going to augment existing practices, not replace them. No sane business is going to trust all of their valuable IP with a 3rd party, there isn't a third party out there you can really trust.
Which is completely irrelevant for the prospects of the cloud turning PCs into, essentially, the commodity terminals with the real work being done in cloud apps. Cloud computing is a set of techniques for abstracting and dynamically provisioning server resources, and can be used just as easily in a businesses own datacenters as in a third-party datacenter. In fact, as there is a widely-available open source implementation of the Amazon cloud APIs (and which is bundled now with Ubuntu Server), and I believe there are also production-ready open source implementations of the Google AppEngine APIs, in many cases, it can be done with the same code base.
Now now, they haven't sued anybody about this yet...
Just like Microsoft hasn't sued anybody over the supposed patent violations in Linux.
Possibly for similar reasons. FUD is cheaper and easier to generate than a lawsuit that won't get thrown out of court, and maybe even get you sanctioned.
Sounds to me like Apple and/or Amazon are your publishers.
The role Apple and Amazon have with regard to ebooks sold through their respective roles is a combination of the role of retailer (in terms of being the person who sells directly to the customer) and distributor (in terms of being the person who buys directly from the publisher.)
The role of the publisher continues to be played by the existing publishers.
The nice thing about the iPad, as opposed to the Kindle or the Nook, is that there are many ways to buy a book.
There are, in fact, many ways to buy a book for the Kindle and (even moreso) the Nook; both, in addition to supporting DRM-laden purchases from the device vendors own e-bookstore, support content in a variety of DRM-free formats (a slightly wider variety on the Nook) acquired outside the vendors e-bookstore.
And plenty of publishers with their own online bookstores make ebooks available DRM-free in PDF (usable directly on the Nook, and usable, as I understand, after jumping through some hoops on the Kindle), epub (usable directly on the Nook), and/or mobi (usable directly on the Kindle) formats. (The Pragmatic Programmers, for instance, do all three -- and you don't have to pay for them separately.)
The only "advantage" the iPad has in terms of more ways to buy books is that, since it can run different vendors e-bookstore apps, you have more ways to buy DRM-laden books from competing vendors.
I would not be surprised if McNealy's appointment is stuck in confirmation hell. He probably requires confirmation by the Senate
Since McNealy was never nominated or appointed to any official position by Obama, much less one which requires Senate confirmation, that would be difficult.
He was asked to provide a paper on an issue. He did, and even engaged in follow-up discussions with the administration on the issue after presenting the paper. That was the sum total of the advice he was asked for.
I would be extremely interested to see a real-world example of a functioning production network used by a major business or government institution that was not vulnerable to security threats introduced by the use of devices which migrate between that environment and a less-restrictive one (e.g. employees' homes).
Every real world network is vulnerable both to things within the local network (whether they migrate or not) and to things outside (if it has any connection to the outside). This can be mitigated by security features on the particular target systems, security features on gateways between target systems and other systems, and security on other systems from which attacks might originate. The "firewall access to foreign networks plus control every system that attaches to the local network" approach essentially is about focussing on securing the peripheries.
The expense -- for the same benefit -- of controlling every device on the local network scales with the number of devices that might connect to the local network.
So, its a sensible approach -- if you either don't have the capability to protect the critical systems and infrastructure directly, or if you don't have any reason to want to have a lot of devices attached to your local network. As ubiquitous, cheap, personalized computing technology becomes more common, and people get more effective using it, that approach, though, has greater and greater costs in terms of operational efficiency.
Both parties have gotten to the point where they don't have a coherent platform anymore.
This implies, falsely, that there was a time when either major party had a coherent, uniform, national platform to which candidates and members of the party in government generally adhered. There have been occasional points in time when one party or the other was momentarily unified on one issue, but that's been pretty rare, and even more rare if you onky count the times when the issue on which one party was unified was one that significantly distinguished them from the other party, rather than merely the subject of a broad national consensus.
Back in January of 2009, various news articles announced that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was to become the Obama administration's Open Source Technology adviser.
Actually, the one news article linked from the text "various news articles" in the summary, as well as every other web source I can find, indicates McNealy was asked to write one position paper on the use of open source software by the administration, and that was apparently presented to the Administration shortly after the request was made (this article from late February discusses some actions that occurred after the paper was presented.)
The issue was never about McNealy being hired as for the position of "Open Source Adviser", it was about McNealy providing one-time advice on the use of open source software.
Many companies/governmental institutions require the consultants to provide their own hardware since they think it's cheaper.
Many also do it because whether or not someone you pay to do work uses tools you provide or brings their own tools is one of 20 factors specifically identified by the IRS as being used to determine whether a person paid to do work for you is an "employee" for whom you are required to withhold income taxes, pay the employer's share and withhold the employee's share of payroll taxes, etc., or an "independent contractor" to which none of those rules apply. Using the employers tools is a factor that specifically weighs in favor of finding that the worker is an employee, not an independent contractor.
Merely calling someone a "consultant" or "contractor" doesn't make the government see them that way, and employers who want someone to legally have "contractor" status generally want to do everything possible to assure that if that status is ever challenged, either by the worker or the government, the employers position that the worker is a "contractor" is upheld.
Disallowing private machines on the network is good IT practice.
From everything I've seen, except where HIPAA and similar compliance issues are particularly prominent in a firm because of the industry they are in, its an increasingly uncommon policy because businesses find that you actually reduce productivity when you prevent people from using personal computing devices (not just laptops, but mobile devices, etc., as well) and freely connecting to the network and using the tools that they personally work best with. And because there is only a security problem with this if the security on the systems and applications on the network is broken in the first place.
If you need it for your job, your employer should supply and support it.
Most jobs require you to wear clothes, have knowledge of the time of day even when you aren't at work (e.g., to get to work on time), and do a number of other things that they don't provide you with the equipment to do. And even for things they do provide you with equipment to do (e.g., paper, writing implements, sometimes personal organizers, etc.) they rarely prohibit you from using your own.
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Any system with single-member districts assigned simply by the vote winner (whether by simple majority with a runoff to settle ambiguous results, or plurality, or any other system that just looks at the first-place votes ) from the ballots in that district will have the possibility of doing things like that.
You have to have a more sophisticated voting system that produces proportional results to do that. Straight party list proportional systems are one alternative, but they have the defect that while they produce results that are proportional by party, they reduce the direct accountability of individual elected officials to the general electorate. Systems that produce fairly proportional results from ranked ballots among individual candidates in multimember districts (e.g., Single Transferable Vote) are another tool; with any reasonable district size they are less capable of perfect party proportionality than party list systems, but they can provide reasonable proportionality with the much the same kind of direct accountability to the general electorate that you have in single-member district, first-past-the-post type of elections.
The electoral college is not the primary means by which the two-party system is enforced. The primary means by which the two-party system is enforced is using majority-runoff or plurality elections for most purpose plus having independently elected executives (both at the state and federal levels) rather than a parliamentary system.
The electoral college on top of that reinforces it a bit in terms of the federal executive, but its a small effect compared to the more basic ones -- switching to a direct election (by either majority-runoff or plurality) for the President and Vice President, either separately or on a single ballot, wouldn't do much to weaken the two-party system.
A parliamentary system (while still retaining majority-runoff and plurality for most elections) would still weakly promote two-party dynamics in most individual elections, but would make it more practical for the dominant parties to vary between regions rather than being two dominant national parties (the combination of that with national media would mean that minor parties would gain more mindshare even where they weren't currently electorally competitive, which would make which parties were competitive in which regions somewhat fluid.)
Using a ranked-preference-based voting system that avoided the structural disincentives to supporting third parties (with or without moving to a parliamentary system) would probably do the most to end duopoly, particularly if, for legislative elections, a system which tended to produce roughly proportional outcomes were adopted (this wouldn't have to ge a party-list system, you could just have Single Transferable Vote with, say, 5 member districts.)
How is that working on it? None of the platform planks listed for your party address any of the features of the US system of government and elections that promote duopoly, which means you aren't actually working on the problem that GP asked about (plus, given that because of those features, voting with a minor party in the US mostly helps the major party most opposed to the positions of your minor party, probably means that the efforts towards the things on your platform will be rather ineffective.)
There are several independents in the US Congress, and none of them vote 99.999% with anyone else (its very hard to even find two members of the same party that vote together that often; the same system that produces that solid two-party lock in the US also assures that those parties will be, by the standards of most other modern democracies, very weak parties.)
I'm not so sure of that. I mean, if I were to assume your synopsis of here judicial philosophy were accurate, I'd have to say most politicians and political commentators of both sides would agree with her 100%.
Sure, the GDP increased at a healthy pace two quarters back, and at a slower pace last quarter. Whether that's the beginning of a real recovery or a dead-cat bounce (a short-term rebound driven by inventory exhaustion and other factors that produces to a non-sustained spike in activity) is less clear. Distributional factors will be a big determinant there, and the while income distribution statistics take a while to assemble, the jobs data don't provide a real good sign there. Particularly, while companies are "hiring more people" and "layoffs are decreasing", that's only gotten to the point where unemployment has been high and essentially flat over the past 9 months, not to the point where it is decreasing.
That's a rather vague idea, and is the theory behind many of the existing and historical standing and ad hoc "independent" agencies, which are, of course, all heavily politicized. The fact is that while this sounds nice, it doesn't actually work: either one party can, if it controls the legislative and executive branches, "stack the deck", or the "independent" body is effectively immune to oversight by the Constitutional, elected bodies of government. You've proposed in different parts of parent post a body that would feature neither of these, which is just an incoherent idea.
I choose which colleges and universities to attend based, among other things, on the faculties in the fields I was interested in studying, chose, within broad requirements, which classes to take based, among other things, on the set of professors that taught each class, and choose which of several instances of the particular class to take based, among other things, on which professor was teaching which instance. So, in short, yes.
Ignoring the fact that your assumption was wrong, a professor is not analogous to a policy advisor.
Yes, that's a major reason why competent leaders choose their policy advisors, because they have proven to the person choosing them that they are knowledgeable in their field. And they tend to listen to them for that reason. You are proposing a system in which the choice of policy advisors would be more distant than in the status quo from the individual policymakers that they are advising, and therefore in which it would be less likely that each individual policymaker would see the advice coming to them from the advisors as being from a reliable source.
No, they won't. That the chosen course of action was followed by bad outcomes doesn't imply that the particular recommendation made by the council of advisers would have produced better results.
Even if it did support that conclusion, that's a pretty weak basis for any action at the ballot box unless on
Wrong. They already bill all of their customers for their download capacity. They also already get compensated by whoever is sending the data, who is either (a) one of their customers, and thus paying for upload capacity, or (b) someone whose data enters Comcast's network from someone else's via a peering agreement, and therefore for which Comcast is paid in-kind.
So, having already been paid by both sides of any transmission that crosses their network, they want to be paid a third time for each transmission to or from people who are offering content services (like VoIP, or video-on-demand, etc.) which compete with Comcast services. IOW, they want to leverage their market position (often a local monopoly) on high-speed internet access to dominate internet content.
The FCC has never proposed limiting the ability of access providers to charge and be compensated for capacity used. What they have sought to do, through "net neutrality" principles, is to prevent access providers from discriminating between different legal content types and different content providers when charging for capacity.
That's what kept getting said during the whole so-called recovery of the 00's (the period between the brief 2001 recession and the current recession, which saw declining incomes in the bottom 3 quintiles with flat incomes in second-to-top quintile, with improvement in incomes confined largely in the top 5%. It was not, in any meaningful sense, a "recovery". (Which made the current recession that much worse, since -- but for inflated paper value of homes -- large numbers of people had been essentially wiped out during the preceding "recovery" before the official recession even hit.)
This idea is insane. First, who would select these advisers? Second, who is going to listen to advisers that aren't chosen by the people they are advising? Third, now that you've given your little cabal of economists the power to remove elected officials for not following the program the economists prefer, what stops them from using that power to act as unchecked dictators?
If the American people want a government that acts smart on economic matters, there is only one way to achieve that without sacrificing the idea of representative democracy: the American people -- or enough of them, anyway -- are going to have to learn enough about economics to effectively judge politicians platforms and actions for economic sense, and are going to have to use that information when they vote.
Which the software does fine.
The problem is the underlying assumptions about what the meaning of the event defined as the trigger. Computers are very good at calculating results using rules that are given to them, they are fairly bad (even when they use the most advanced AI techniques available) at discerning meaning from events.
Trusting decisions about money (rather than just calculations on which humans can make decisions) is very much like trusting those decisions to a person with great math skills but no judgement whatsoever.
No, and I've never seen worldwide inflation-adjusted box office numbers or rankings.
The best I can find is domestic box office adjusted for ticket-price inflation, where, Avatar is #12 and Titanic #6 of all time, and neither Aliens nor Terminator rate anywhere of interest (the only film from either franchise that makes the top 100 is Terminator 2 -- at #96.)
Heck, Aliens was #7 and Terminator #21 in domestic box office -- each among movies released in the same year. Totally not the same league as Avatar and Titanic.
GP didn't advocate switching from a landline to a cell phone, only replacing cable with OTA + Internet + Netflix.
I'm pretty sure that Silverlight is the Web standard of .NET.
Well, Avatar is relevant due to the subject (3D).
Also, consider:
Avatar -- worldwide box office, $2.7 billion (#1 all time)
Titanic -- worldwide box office, $1.8 billion (#2 all time)
Aliens -- worldwide box office, $131 million
The Terminator -- worldwide box office, $78 million
There might be a reason that the latter two aren't viewed as being as significant.
Its not entirely uncommon for the crew on films that do things that haven't been done a lot in film to actually develop new techniques in the process, so its not entirely unlikely that while Cameron didn't invent stereoscoping imaging, he (or people working for him) did invent useful practical approaches to it, and have useful and recent practical experience with it, that could be beneficial to this application.
So, let me get this straight: instead of doing the rational thing to maximize the number of users who could benefit from the content of your site by first presenting the content with the most broadly supported subset of HTML before building a "premium" presentation of the content that would be accessible to a smaller set of users using a technology that is less universal like Flash, you excluded many potential customers by building a flash-only site that they could not use from the many web-enabled devices (including the iPhone) that don't have Flash, and you blame Steve Jobs for limiting the reach of your app by not correcting your decision by bringing Flash to the iPhone?
Maybe you need to consider that the problem here isn't with Steve Jobs.
Which is completely irrelevant for the prospects of the cloud turning PCs into, essentially, the commodity terminals with the real work being done in cloud apps. Cloud computing is a set of techniques for abstracting and dynamically provisioning server resources, and can be used just as easily in a businesses own datacenters as in a third-party datacenter. In fact, as there is a widely-available open source implementation of the Amazon cloud APIs (and which is bundled now with Ubuntu Server), and I believe there are also production-ready open source implementations of the Google AppEngine APIs, in many cases, it can be done with the same code base.
Just like Microsoft hasn't sued anybody over the supposed patent violations in Linux.
Possibly for similar reasons. FUD is cheaper and easier to generate than a lawsuit that won't get thrown out of court, and maybe even get you sanctioned.
The role Apple and Amazon have with regard to ebooks sold through their respective roles is a combination of the role of retailer (in terms of being the person who sells directly to the customer) and distributor (in terms of being the person who buys directly from the publisher.)
The role of the publisher continues to be played by the existing publishers.
There are, in fact, many ways to buy a book for the Kindle and (even moreso) the Nook; both, in addition to supporting DRM-laden purchases from the device vendors own e-bookstore, support content in a variety of DRM-free formats (a slightly wider variety on the Nook) acquired outside the vendors e-bookstore.
And plenty of publishers with their own online bookstores make ebooks available DRM-free in PDF (usable directly on the Nook, and usable, as I understand, after jumping through some hoops on the Kindle), epub (usable directly on the Nook), and/or mobi (usable directly on the Kindle) formats. (The Pragmatic Programmers, for instance, do all three -- and you don't have to pay for them separately.)
The only "advantage" the iPad has in terms of more ways to buy books is that, since it can run different vendors e-bookstore apps, you have more ways to buy DRM-laden books from competing vendors.
Since McNealy was never nominated or appointed to any official position by Obama, much less one which requires Senate confirmation, that would be difficult.
He was asked to provide a paper on an issue. He did, and even engaged in follow-up discussions with the administration on the issue after presenting the paper. That was the sum total of the advice he was asked for.
Every real world network is vulnerable both to things within the local network (whether they migrate or not) and to things outside (if it has any connection to the outside). This can be mitigated by security features on the particular target systems, security features on gateways between target systems and other systems, and security on other systems from which attacks might originate. The "firewall access to foreign networks plus control every system that attaches to the local network" approach essentially is about focussing on securing the peripheries.
The expense -- for the same benefit -- of controlling every device on the local network scales with the number of devices that might connect to the local network.
So, its a sensible approach -- if you either don't have the capability to protect the critical systems and infrastructure directly, or if you don't have any reason to want to have a lot of devices attached to your local network. As ubiquitous, cheap, personalized computing technology becomes more common, and people get more effective using it, that approach, though, has greater and greater costs in terms of operational efficiency.
This implies, falsely, that there was a time when either major party had a coherent, uniform, national platform to which candidates and members of the party in government generally adhered. There have been occasional points in time when one party or the other was momentarily unified on one issue, but that's been pretty rare, and even more rare if you onky count the times when the issue on which one party was unified was one that significantly distinguished them from the other party, rather than merely the subject of a broad national consensus.
Actually, the one news article linked from the text "various news articles" in the summary, as well as every other web source I can find, indicates McNealy was asked to write one position paper on the use of open source software by the administration, and that was apparently presented to the Administration shortly after the request was made (this article from late February discusses some actions that occurred after the paper was presented.)
The issue was never about McNealy being hired as for the position of "Open Source Adviser", it was about McNealy providing one-time advice on the use of open source software.
Many also do it because whether or not someone you pay to do work uses tools you provide or brings their own tools is one of 20 factors specifically identified by the IRS as being used to determine whether a person paid to do work for you is an "employee" for whom you are required to withhold income taxes, pay the employer's share and withhold the employee's share of payroll taxes, etc., or an "independent contractor" to which none of those rules apply. Using the employers tools is a factor that specifically weighs in favor of finding that the worker is an employee, not an independent contractor.
Merely calling someone a "consultant" or "contractor" doesn't make the government see them that way, and employers who want someone to legally have "contractor" status generally want to do everything possible to assure that if that status is ever challenged, either by the worker or the government, the employers position that the worker is a "contractor" is upheld.
From everything I've seen, except where HIPAA and similar compliance issues are particularly prominent in a firm because of the industry they are in, its an increasingly uncommon policy because businesses find that you actually reduce productivity when you prevent people from using personal computing devices (not just laptops, but mobile devices, etc., as well) and freely connecting to the network and using the tools that they personally work best with. And because there is only a security problem with this if the security on the systems and applications on the network is broken in the first place.
Most jobs require you to wear clothes, have knowledge of the time of day even when you aren't at work (e.g., to get to work on time), and do a number of other things that they don't provide you with the equipment to do. And even for things they do provide you with equipment to do (e.g., paper, writing implements, sometimes personal organizers, etc.) they rarely prohibit you from using your own.