OLPC declined Steve's offer of a custom OSX because it was "proprietary".
They declined both Apple and Microsoft offers of a free-of-cost customized-but-not-open-source variant of each company's commercial operating system as the principal operating system for the project—having an F/OSS standard software stack was central to the ideals of the project.
I'm sure if Apple wants to make an OSX variant that can be installed on the XO, that supports the XO security model including rollback to the factory-installed Linux OS, OLPC will extend them the same cooperation that is being extended to Microsoft.
As I understand it, for a particular machine, yes. But centrally-distributed software can't perform those functions on arbitrary XO laptops; the user has to have a developer key tied to the machine and choose to allow the operation.
Despite legislation passed in various states and objections by groups such as ACLU, this appears to be a done deal. You won't be able to board a plane after 2014 if you're under 50 without one.
An executive action (a set of regulations) that doesn't have its first deadline until near the end of the next presidential term, doesn't have its main effect until a year into the following term, and doesn't have its full effect until the end of that term is hardly a fait accompli.
There is plenty of time to push for executive modification of the regulations or legislative modification (or outright repeal) of the underlying law, and elections in between to focus that pressure around.
I kind of doubt that, if you're using something which formats automatically. Even vim can autoindent, which reduces them back to useless redundancy.
I think that really depends on the degree of automatic formatting applied; I think at the default levels in most editors, there remains some utility. But, ultimately, a lot of this is a matter of taste, not right and wrong. What's useless or even bothersome to one person is a big readability aid to another, and just neither good nor bad to yet another.
Personally, it's a moot point for me -- there are too many other big things wrong with Python (the GIL comes to mind) for the whitespace to make much difference.
While I don't necessarily think the GIL is "wrong" in some kind of universal sense (its clearly a compromise, though), I agree that whitespace is a minor issues compared to most of the differences between Python and almost any other language, even generally similar dynamic scripting languages like Perl and Ruby.
The idea that this can be appealed because of "one man one vote" is goofy - it's in the Constitution itself, not a separate statute.
No, the Constitution does not specify the mechanism for allocation of fractional seats. "One man one vote" misstates the basis for any legal challenge, what would have to be the basis is that the present system, by not being the closest approximation (given that representatives are indivisible quantum units) of representation in proportion to population does not implement, and in fact violates, the Constitutional rule on how seats are to be apportioned.
Certainly election reform could deal with what term limits are thought to fix but I think that a lack of term limits encourages a career mentality regarding politics which isn't what our founders conceived of.
Our founders essentially viewed political office as a spare-time hobby for a narrow elite of the enfranchised population (e.g., white male property holders). This was, of course, quite a bit of progress from domination by a formal, titled aristocracy. We've continued to make progress (in fits and starts, with some reverses, not continuously and smoothly) toward a more democratic view of both of political participation at the lowest levels and political office-holding.
That something is "not what our founders conceived of" is not a good argument against it. That's just converting the founders into quasi-religious figures whose notions are too be followed without question about their merits and applicability to our present circumstance, which is not only irrational, but self-contradictory, since the many of the founders themselves expressed that they believed that the fundamentals of government needed regular, comprehensive reconsideration by succeeding generations.
Politics wasn't conceived of to be the way a person made their living and term limits helps get away from the notion of career politician.
Why should we want to get in the way of the notion of a career politician? Isn't a term-limited politician more likely to become decreasingly concerned with "serving the public", or even appearing to do so, and more concerned with building the connections with the elites that will enable them to move into high-powered positions outside of politics?
Is experience something we really want to select against in our leaders?
There is one, and some states used it until (I think) the Supremes ruled it out: members are elected "at large," instead of representing specific districts and share the responsibility for representing the entire population of the state among them.
The problem with at-large elections as practiced formerly in the U.S. is that, instead of using multimember elections with a method which produces roughly proportional results like S.T.V., at-large members were still elected in statewide winner-take-all elections, which made them an effective method of denying minorities within the state a voice in government, even if the geographic distribution of those minorities would make it difficult or impossible to gerrymander districts so that they wouldn't dominate at least a few of them. That's why at-large districts for the House of Representatives are currently prohibited by federal statute -- I'm not sure off the top of my head if particular implementations were struck down by the courts prior the statute.
Wow, really? That's curious. How did they manage to avoid it? The Constitution give the power to regulate interstate commerce to the Congress.
The UCC isn't focussed on interstate commerce, and isn't adopted by Congress. It is a product of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the American Law Institute, and then adopted (if at all), either as written or with modifications by state legislatures. All US states (and, IIRC, all or most other US jurisdictions) have adopted the UCC in whole or in large part, Louisiana is notable because they didn't adopt Article 2 (covering sales of goods). All this and more is covered in the fairly good wikipedia article on the UCC.
Natural cycles of inflation in deflation in hard currency are at least fair because they affect everyone equally.
Inflation or deflation in any currency has differential effects on people based on whether they are creditors and/or hold cash (on the one hand) or are debtors (on the other).
Whether the currency is commodity, representational, or fiat currency does not change that.
When a certain group of people can control the money supply, those who benefit the most are the ones that get to spend the new money first, namely the mega corporations that profit from wars.
Even if that were the case (I think you misjudge who was particular influence over the money supply and how they've used it, and how the corporations that benefit from war influence policy, which isn't mostly through the money supply), it's not like those same corporations don't have the assets to very quickly acquire control of gold mining if a gold standard was adopted.
And if a strict gold standard is adopted (i.e., either gold commodity currency or a strictly-managed, freely-convertible representative gold currency, or a combination; rather than the fuzzy, only-certain-parties-can-redeem, loosely representative currency of the Breton woods-era "gold standard"), controlling the gold supply is exactly the same as controlling the currency supply. Even if, optimistically, its a different narrow group, with a gold-based currency, a narrow group has even tighter control of the money supply than any group of corporations has over the present money supply.
Inflation is a hidden tax on the middle class and the poor because they never get access to this fresh money before the value drops.
Goldbugs trot this line out a lot, but it doesn't even begin to make sense. Any drop in value before they get the money is already factored into their economic behavior, and thus can't be considered a "tax" on them. The gradual decline in the value of money might more fairly be described as a "hidden tax" on people with large cash stockpiles and who extend large amounts of credit, and conversely a "hidden tax credit" for those with large debts compared to their cash stockpiles
All your arguments for supporting the claim that a check creates a promise are based on presupposition that a liability has already existed at the time of the writing of the check.
First, I never made the claim that a check "creates" a promise, especially not a generally legally-binding one (I haven't said it doesn't, either claim is irrelevant to my point.) I have said that a check acts as a promise and is accepted, as is an IOU, on trust. Whether there is legal enforcement and under what circumstances is largely irrelevant.
You've gone off on a bizarre (and inaccurate) tangent arguing that a check isn't a legally-enforceable promise to pay in the way that an IOU is, and claiming that this position is supported by Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code. I've pointed to the precise provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code which make any check to which the UCC applies just as enforceable as an IOU.
A check does not comit the writer to a contract.
Neither does a gratuitously-given promissory note (IOU). A one-sided offer of something that isn't in exchange for return consideration can't form a contract. OTOH, a check given in exchange for something creates just as much of an obligation as an IOU given in such an exchange.
And without a contract, no promise is made.
Incorrect. A promise is required for a contract, a contract is not required for a promise.
Everything we've said so far does not change the fact that a check is an order to pay -- not a promise (in the sense of "a contract") to be able to pay.
A merchant's acceptance of a check is based on trust in the implied promise that the check-writer has the funds on deposit, and the merchant's trust in the banks ability and willingness to fulfill its obligation to pay, whether or not such a promise is enforceable in law (in fact, the promises are enforceable in law, as the provisions of the UCC article you waved vaguely at to defend the contrary position show, as the specific sections of that article I cited in the prior post show. I invited you to point to the specific provisions you felt supported your position, an invitation which you have ignored.)
Since trust in a representational or fiat currency requires only trust in the institution standing behind it (either to redeem representational currency or manage fiat currency until you have a chance to exchange it for goods of intrinsic value for fiat currency), rather than such an institution plus the person drawing a draft, there really is nothing, in terms of reliance on trust or promise, to recommend a system based on commodity currency where most practical transactions require some trust-based alternative medium to one in which you just use a representational or fiat currency. Indeed, there is little practical distinction between a check drawn on a gold-denominated account and a gold-denominated representational currency, except that you have trust at least two different people/institutions to accept the former, and only one for the latter.
So resorting to checks in the cases of transfering large amounts of gold instead of physically carrying the stuff would be a perfectly acceptable and reasonable alternative.
Sure, if you were forced to operate in a commodity-currency system, that's pretty much a necessary course of action. But if you are going to be forced to resort to that, you are better off with a representational currency if you are wedded to the idea of some tight chain to a commodity: at least that way, you only have to trust the issuing/redeeming institution, not a bank plus a check-writer. And once you do that, you realize you are even better off with a fiat currency, where you are mostly insulated (once you purchase it) from short-term fluctuations in the supply or demand for a particular commodity that may be unrelated to your interests, yo
The small congressional districts where only one candidate gets chosen should be scrapped. Each state should become one voting district and all the congressional seats of the state should be allocated using the proportional D'Hondt method.
That's a really bad idea. If all the states were equal sizes, this would be arguably a good idea (I think candidate-centered elections are better than party-list, so I'd oppose it even then, but it would at least make some sense.)
As it is, states have between 1 and 53 representatives, so you get single member districts in several states, and huge party-list systems where most candidates are relatively unknown to the electorate in large states.
A better idea would be to expand the size of the House (may it, say, 5 times its current size), require districts to be of 4-7 members (set a floor of 4 or 5 members per state), and use a candidate-centered method that produces proportional results, like Single Transferrable Vote. You get the desirable features of proportional systems while at the same time keeping individual candidates directly accountable to the electorate.
I never realized that electoral votes are different than the number of representatives. With a minimum of 3 per state, some states have 1 vote per 200k +/- while populous states have 1 vote per 600k+/-. THAT is a system I'd like to see overhauled. Give each state one electoral vote per seat, or abolish it all together.
Each state has one electoral vote per seat it has in the Congress.
The Congress is not just the House of Representatives.
Its been a month or so since I finished the book, but I don't remember any that were actually good. Still, he's right that the broad issues are ones that need to be discussed, and the Constitution shouldn't be viewed as some kind of unchangeable divine ordinance.
His desire to make the Senate more representative is just stupid.
Its also is the only thing that is still expressly prohibited to be done by amendment in the Constitution, so you can't actually do it.
It would be better, if you want to make the legislative branch more effectively democratic while retaining the same basic structure, to simply reduce the power of the Senate.
What we need to do with the Senate is go back to the original constitutional understanding that Senators represent the state legislatures, not the people of the state directly.
This is Constitutionally easier than Sabato's idea; its even less of a good idea, though.
We need to repeal the 17th amendment, it undermines the idea of our federal government as a blending of democratic and republican ideals.
Republican (in the general and not partisan sense) ideals don't conflict with democratic ones and don't need to be "blended" with them. Insofar as republican ideals exist, they consist of having elected leaders rather than direct popular rule; a popularly elected Senate is not less "republican" than one appointed by state governments.
Now, the elected Senate may conflict with the ideal of the US as a loose confederation of states, but that's an idea that has become less useful with advancing technology and typical geographical scope of trade, travel, and rapid information interchange. The most reasonable arrangement of responsibility in the 21st century isn't what it was in the 18th century.
His idea of having Presidents continue in any formal capacity is really dumb, that's an institutionalized American nobility
Since its not heritable, and Presidents are elected and not appointed, its not much like a "nobility". That's not to say that I'm sold on the idea, either in outline or Sabato's particular proposal, though.
His idea to synchronize elections is also silly, the point of the offset terms was continuity.
So what? The whole point of the book is questioning decisions, not quasi-religious devotion to centuries-old decisions as if they were divine revelations rather than fallible human decisions.
That being said, while some tinkering with electoral terms might make sense, and synchronization might even be a good idea if done in the right context, his whole arrangement of terms (the President gets a basic term with a possibility of a short extension, etc.) is ill-considered, overcomplicated, and doesn't seem to have any clear benefit. Like many of his proposals, the setup is clever, but not much else.
His idea of mandatory national service sounds nice but the principle of an all volunteer armed forces has served us well so I fail to see the point of this kind of forced military service.
National service, as he describes it, is not necessarily military service, and I'm not really sure there is a whole lot of evidence that the all-volunteer force has "served us well". Its only existed since the end of the Vietnam-era draft, and its hardly as if the US military's performance after Vietnam has been any better than it would have been expected to be based on its performance prior to and through Vietnam.
If you want to fix a problem, come up with a better algorithm for drawing district boundaries.
If you want to fix a problem, design a system where the drawing of district boundaries doesn't matter much instead of one where it does. Its easier to do, for one thing: simply increase the number of seats per district, and adopt a preference voting system that generates proportional results, like STV. This makes it difficult to do much to ensure "safe" seats or enhance partisan advantage by messing with district boundaries.
Right now the party in charge DOES use an algorithm, one designed to create the pessimal boundaries that ensure its maximum advantage.
Actually, there are two different things that are frequently done in redistricting: one is carving safe seats to protect incumbents, the other is maximizing seats in which one party has a majority. These are, to an extent, conflicting goals.
The constitution says with the exception of the original 13 colonies, that there will be one representative for thirty thousand people and that each state will have at least one representative.
No, it doesn't. It says that (except for the period prior to the first Census, for which it spells out exact by-state representation) each state will have a number of representatives assigned in proportion to population based on a census count, except that each state will have at least one representative. It further states that the total number of representatives shall not be greater than 1 for every 30,000 people (that's not that the number will be 1/30,000: if that was the rule, the House would have, based on the 2000 census, 9,381 members — which would certainly reduce the voting-power impact of rounding problems from fractional seats.)
somewhere like Wyoming with a population of 1/453 already gets more representation per person than someone in California
Wyoming has (per the 2000 Census apportionment count), ~1/568 (~0.176%) of the US population. It has 1/435 (~0.230%) of the seats in the House of Representatives.
California has ~12.06% of the population, ~12.18% of the seats in the House.
I'm not seeing a lot of favoritism toward big states here.
A law being unjust is not justification for breaking.
You are welcome to your opinion of what justifies breaking a law; that's completely irrelevant to the point on which you claimed I was mistaken.
Civil disobedience is refusing to comply with a command of government (including, but not limited to, a law) as a way of protesting the injustice of either the command/law, or the claim to authority of the government issuing the command/law. Whether civil disobedience is justified, either in general or in any specific case, is a matter of opinion, and irrelevant to the discussion of what civil disobedience is.
My stance is the one used in the Civil Rights movement, by Gandhi, etc.
No, its not. Neither Gandhi nor the Civil Rights Movement took the stance that the injustice of law cannot justify breaking them; both, to the contrary, to the position that the illegitimacy of law (either because of the illegitimacy of the authority issuing it, in the case of Gandhi's anti-colonial movement, or because of the injustice of its content, in the case of Civil Rights Movement) could justify breaking it in certain, non-violent ways.
Take it up with any PoliSci professor and you'll see that I'm right.
Unlikely. At least, none of the ones I interacted in the course of getting a Bachelor's degree in the field ever had your rather unique views on those movements. Perhaps you should consider, though, some more direct source material, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail":
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. [...] The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a more responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
The act proposed upthread may fail to be proper "civil disobedience" because it isn't open defiance of the law with acceptance of the consequences, but it certainly doesn't fail because it is breaking the law. If it wasn't breaking the law, civil disobedience would instead be called "civil obedience".
Any redundancy in a programming language is a design flaw.
Perhaps. But we're really not discussing redundancy in a programming language, we are talking about redundant information in source code. There certainly is the point of view that any redundancy in source code is a "design flaw" (the theory that advocates that code should speak for itself and comments should not be used, as well as the theory beyond Python's whitespace handling, is an example of that.)
One of the redundant portions is 'real' and the other is typically a convention.
Convention is not a feature of the programming language, it is a feature of programming style (similar to conventions) that is irrelevant to the computer processing the source code but intended as an aid to the human reader. To a certain degree (certainly, where it comes to indentation and related formatting conventions) such convention can, in fact, be automatically imposed on code not written to the convention by automated tools. It is no more a language feature than syntax highlighting done by an editor is a feature of the language.
When the convention is easier to track and follow than the 'real' the design flaw is most obvious.
Since the convention is imposed on code for human readability and can be changed without changing the meaning of the code (just as syntax highlighting can be), I disagree. Indeed, the convention is entirely irrelevant to the design of the language, not a flaw in its design.
For example we use whitespace in every modern language to show how the structure nests.
More accurately, "it is common for people to use a whitespace arrangement that suits their personal tastes and those of their group to show how structure nests in most modern languages."
Any language that also uses symbols to indicate the 'real' is fundamentally flawed.
If its not "real" but convention the relation of whitespace to structure is not part of the language, any more than a conventional arrangement of comments to indicate function preconditions and return types is. If its not part of the language, it clearly can't be a flaw in the language.
While Python is far from perfect and has plenty of warts its use of whitespace is the correct choice.
No, its not the correct choice. It is a valid choice, and it aims to implement one subjective ideal of programming languages. Personally, I think that if you are going to use that ideal, though, it would be better to enforce a strict and consistent standard at the language level (e.g., "each new block level is indented by four spaces from the previous level") rather than "whatever mix of space and tabs you prefer, but each tab will be treated as if it were 8 spaces", so I wouldn't even say Python has a particularly well-chosen approach even given the guiding principal it has chosen, much less the one-true-correct choice.
That is not civil disobedience; it's breaking the law.
Civil disobedience is nonviolent refusal to comply with a law or command of government, either because the law or command itself is perceived as unjust or because or because the government issuing the law or command is viewed as illegitimate independent of the merit of the particular law or command.
So "That is not civil disobedience; its's breaking the law" reveals a deep misunderstanding of the entire concept of civil disobedience. That's not saying one could not argue that the form of disobedience suggested is a poorly chosen and/or ineffective method of civil disobedience.
But assembly is different; even if you don't have to program in it, you will greatly profit from knowing it. It's a fundamental building block of CS that impacts every language.
Maybe like how knowing Greek and Latin will improve your English? Nah, that's a bad analogy. Can somebody give me something better, involving cars?
"Learning assembly will make you a better HLL programmer the way learning to synthesize the rubber used in the tires will make you a better Indy-car driver"?
No, that's probably not the analogy you are looking for...
Credit crunch. Boom and bust are built in to the monetary system itself.
No, they aren't.
By basing your currency on debt you are required to inflate forever (exponentially) to pay the previous round of debts.
Fiat currency is not "based on debt".
When you can't inflate any more a contraction begins.
Even if this were true, there is no point at which you "cannot inflate any more".
Fiat currency has, on balance, everywhere in the world, worked better than commodity or representational currency ever has, because it isn't as subject to short-term extreme fluctuations based on the market for a single commodity of any commodity or representational system.
This is simply wrong.
No, its not.
You've heard of the business cycle?
Yes, I've heard of business cycles, and they have little to do with the volatility of currency.
That is caused by our monetary system's requirement for continual inflation
Well, aside from the fact that its mostly irrelevant to currency volatility, no, business cycles are caused by a mixture of positive and negative feedbacks that are present in society, regardless of whether the currency is commodity, representational, or fiat, and were, in fact, first identified before fiat currency was the norm.
Then there's the long term devaluation of the currency, essentially the theft of wealth from those who can least afford it.
The slow devaluation of the currency mostly affects those whose assets are mostly cash or fixed-value debts, and mostly those who hold those assets for extraordinarily long periods of time. The prime "victims" are large financial institutions.
A dollar is now worth a tiny fraction of it's original value, something like 5%.
Based on what? Its not like there is anything like a reliable inflation series back to the original adoption of the dollar in 1785 or 1792 (either can be argued to the "original" dollar), and if there were it wouldn't be all that meaningful (short term inflation measures are of limited value and hotly contested because a good basket meaningful for basic survival [and thus the poor] doesn't represent the relative prices of goods purchased in other segments of society and vice versa.)
And, in any rate, using currency as a long-term store of value is dumb. Yes, it can be that, but the market provides plenty of negligible- and low-risk alternatives for that (in both the private and public arenas). The indispensable role of currency is as a medium of exchange. Avoiding short-term volatility is important, long-term value-holding is less important (though having a fairly constant long-term trend is valuable because it enables people to make better long-run decisions when it comes to fixed-nominal-return investments.)
Yes, actually, its rather easy to compare the volatility of commodity prices with regard to an inflation adjusted currency figure (to get, e.g., a gold:constant $ ratio) vs. the volatility of existing real world currencies (e.g., current $:constant $).
Gold standard has not been tried under the modern information system.
So?
And, yes, I am claiming that wider availability of information reduces volatility.
Irrelevant. Gold is traded as a commodity in an environment with modern information systems. Using gold traded for its commodity value as currency will give the currency the volatility of gold as a commodity.
And second, if gold standard would reduce institutional holding of assets, sign me up.
It wouldn't. It would increase the reward institutions that, over a very long period, held large stocks of cash and dollar-denominated financial assets, and punish (compared to the status quo) those that hold non-dollar/gold physical assets.
Third, I've tried to be patient.
If you say so.
But apparently the economics geeks have not yet gone through the same metamorphism as the technology geeks
metamorphism (n.): "The process by which rocks are altered in composition, texture, or internal structure by extreme heat, pressure, and the introduction of new chemical substances."
I think you are looking for "metamorphosis". Or, if you would just use the most natural English word for the meaning, "change". Or, if you need a big Greek-origin word that captures the meaning you are looking for more specifically than just "change" (which "metamorposis" or "metamorphism" in its archaic sense does not), "metanoia", though that's usually used in a religious context.
the metamorphism of realizing that interacting with non-experts involves having to occasionally explain things to people who are not experts in your field.
I see relatively little evidence that "technology geeks", as a class, have generally gone through that particular conversion experience. And its not like I haven't been explaining things to you at length. And I'm not really an economics-specific geek.
But bravo on the series of inaccuracies and unsupported generalizations crammed into that one sentence.
I'll say it one more time. Please, drop the invective.
What invective?
If you think you get something better than I do because you know more, quote your source.
You can try to establish the standard where you get to make any claim you want with no substantiation and anyone who contradicts you needs to provide external sources, but don't expect anyone else to play that game.
But it is elitist to claim that "people are stupid".
No, its not. Though its perhaps unnecessarily loaded language, and "people fall short of the rational actors that are a convenient simplification of economic theory in that they often fail to apply all the information at hand to determine the course of action with the greatest expected utility" would be better.
But "people are stupid" is short and to the point.
And it is inaccurate to claim that it is the only reason that they go out and make bad investments even though they don't have to.
Certainly. People are ignorant* as well as stupid**.
* if you prefer the verbose and less colorful version: "People fall short of the rational actor model, besides the way discussed above, by not having perfect information from which to assess the utilities of their decisions, which would frustrate them in their efforts to act 'rationally' [in terms of the model] even if they did fully utilize the information available, which, as discussed previously, they frequently do not."
** See discussion in the first response paragraph in this post.
Their lack of education on the subject is not the only reason they do that.
Lack of education isn't stupidity (or even a source of stupidity, though it may be the product of it). It is, frequently, a contributor to ignorance, though.
Calling an argument elitist is not an ad hominem.
Yes. Exactly. Saying "X is no more Y than Z is" is not saying "Z is X". Now that that's clarified, go back and read the post you were responding to here: you might actually understand it this time.
While such promise maybe implied by the fact of writing the check, it most certainly is not made so legally.
Since I was discussing the pragmatics on not the legalities, that's pretty irrelevant. But you are wrong on the legalities, as well.
Ie, writing a bad check to a store for $1000 does not make one liable for $1000 dollars until the bank delivers the funds to the presenter of the check.
No, agreeing to purchase the items creates a purchase contract which makes the purchaser liable for $1000; the check if and when honored satisfies that obligation.
You can't be sued for issuing an IOU either. You can be sued for not paying on an IOU, just as you can be sued for not having the funds for a check.
The first part is true, the second part is not true.
No, they're both true. You can, in fact, be sued for passing a bad check, but not for writing a check that isn't bad. You can't sued for writing an IOU, only for not paying on it.
The act of writing an IOU creates a liability. The act of writing a check does not constitute a legally-binding promise. Again, UCC article 3.
The UCC, covering, as it does, contracts in which their is an exchange for goods, doesn't address bare (gratuitously-issued) notes or checks. It does address checks and notes ("IOU") given in satisfaction of an existing (or simultaneously created) obligation, such as a purchase contract. And, under UCC 3-310, a check or note (other than certified, cashier's, or teller's check, which has the same effect as money) has the same effect on the pre-existing obligation: the check or note suspends the obligation until the check or note is either dishonored or paid. (Checks are a little bit different in that they can be certified after given, in which case they discharge the obligation as if they were money.)
I'm not sure what you are imagining supports your argument in UCC Article 3. Could you be more specific?
That is pretty much the reason that checks have fallen out of favor. Unlike payment by a credit card, a payment by check is accepted based on trust (rather than legally-binding obligation) that the writer has the funds.
Certainly under the UCC, that's entirely wrong; a dishonored check or note can be enforced under the UCC (Sec. 3-310(3)-(4)), and the drawer (the person writing the check) is legally obligated to pay the amount of the check if the bank on which it was drawn does not pay it or agree in writing to pay it. (UCC Sec. 3-414).
Slashdot Mirror
They declined both Apple and Microsoft offers of a free-of-cost customized-but-not-open-source variant of each company's commercial operating system as the principal operating system for the project—having an F/OSS standard software stack was central to the ideals of the project.
I'm sure if Apple wants to make an OSX variant that can be installed on the XO, that supports the XO security model including rollback to the factory-installed Linux OS, OLPC will extend them the same cooperation that is being extended to Microsoft.
As I understand it, for a particular machine, yes. But centrally-distributed software can't perform those functions on arbitrary XO laptops; the user has to have a developer key tied to the machine and choose to allow the operation.
An executive action (a set of regulations) that doesn't have its first deadline until near the end of the next presidential term, doesn't have its main effect until a year into the following term, and doesn't have its full effect until the end of that term is hardly a fait accompli.
There is plenty of time to push for executive modification of the regulations or legislative modification (or outright repeal) of the underlying law, and elections in between to focus that pressure around.
I think that really depends on the degree of automatic formatting applied; I think at the default levels in most editors, there remains some utility. But, ultimately, a lot of this is a matter of taste, not right and wrong. What's useless or even bothersome to one person is a big readability aid to another, and just neither good nor bad to yet another.
While I don't necessarily think the GIL is "wrong" in some kind of universal sense (its clearly a compromise, though), I agree that whitespace is a minor issues compared to most of the differences between Python and almost any other language, even generally similar dynamic scripting languages like Perl and Ruby.
No, the Constitution does not specify the mechanism for allocation of fractional seats. "One man one vote" misstates the basis for any legal challenge, what would have to be the basis is that the present system, by not being the closest approximation (given that representatives are indivisible quantum units) of representation in proportion to population does not implement, and in fact violates, the Constitutional rule on how seats are to be apportioned.
Our founders essentially viewed political office as a spare-time hobby for a narrow elite of the enfranchised population (e.g., white male property holders). This was, of course, quite a bit of progress from domination by a formal, titled aristocracy. We've continued to make progress (in fits and starts, with some reverses, not continuously and smoothly) toward a more democratic view of both of political participation at the lowest levels and political office-holding.
That something is "not what our founders conceived of" is not a good argument against it. That's just converting the founders into quasi-religious figures whose notions are too be followed without question about their merits and applicability to our present circumstance, which is not only irrational, but self-contradictory, since the many of the founders themselves expressed that they believed that the fundamentals of government needed regular, comprehensive reconsideration by succeeding generations.
Why should we want to get in the way of the notion of a career politician? Isn't a term-limited politician more likely to become decreasingly concerned with "serving the public", or even appearing to do so, and more concerned with building the connections with the elites that will enable them to move into high-powered positions outside of politics?
Is experience something we really want to select against in our leaders?
The problem with at-large elections as practiced formerly in the U.S. is that, instead of using multimember elections with a method which produces roughly proportional results like S.T.V., at-large members were still elected in statewide winner-take-all elections, which made them an effective method of denying minorities within the state a voice in government, even if the geographic distribution of those minorities would make it difficult or impossible to gerrymander districts so that they wouldn't dominate at least a few of them. That's why at-large districts for the House of Representatives are currently prohibited by federal statute -- I'm not sure off the top of my head if particular implementations were struck down by the courts prior the statute.
The UCC isn't focussed on interstate commerce, and isn't adopted by Congress. It is a product of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the American Law Institute, and then adopted (if at all), either as written or with modifications by state legislatures. All US states (and, IIRC, all or most other US jurisdictions) have adopted the UCC in whole or in large part, Louisiana is notable because they didn't adopt Article 2 (covering sales of goods). All this and more is covered in the fairly good wikipedia article on the UCC.
Inflation or deflation in any currency has differential effects on people based on whether they are creditors and/or hold cash (on the one hand) or are debtors (on the other).
Whether the currency is commodity, representational, or fiat currency does not change that.
Even if that were the case (I think you misjudge who was particular influence over the money supply and how they've used it, and how the corporations that benefit from war influence policy, which isn't mostly through the money supply), it's not like those same corporations don't have the assets to very quickly acquire control of gold mining if a gold standard was adopted.
And if a strict gold standard is adopted (i.e., either gold commodity currency or a strictly-managed, freely-convertible representative gold currency, or a combination; rather than the fuzzy, only-certain-parties-can-redeem, loosely representative currency of the Breton woods-era "gold standard"), controlling the gold supply is exactly the same as controlling the currency supply. Even if, optimistically, its a different narrow group, with a gold-based currency, a narrow group has even tighter control of the money supply than any group of corporations has over the present money supply.
Goldbugs trot this line out a lot, but it doesn't even begin to make sense. Any drop in value before they get the money is already factored into their economic behavior, and thus can't be considered a "tax" on them. The gradual decline in the value of money might more fairly be described as a "hidden tax" on people with large cash stockpiles and who extend large amounts of credit, and conversely a "hidden tax credit" for those with large debts compared to their cash stockpiles
First, I never made the claim that a check "creates" a promise, especially not a generally legally-binding one (I haven't said it doesn't, either claim is irrelevant to my point.) I have said that a check acts as a promise and is accepted, as is an IOU, on trust. Whether there is legal enforcement and under what circumstances is largely irrelevant.
You've gone off on a bizarre (and inaccurate) tangent arguing that a check isn't a legally-enforceable promise to pay in the way that an IOU is, and claiming that this position is supported by Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code. I've pointed to the precise provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code which make any check to which the UCC applies just as enforceable as an IOU.
Neither does a gratuitously-given promissory note (IOU). A one-sided offer of something that isn't in exchange for return consideration can't form a contract. OTOH, a check given in exchange for something creates just as much of an obligation as an IOU given in such an exchange.
Incorrect. A promise is required for a contract, a contract is not required for a promise.
A merchant's acceptance of a check is based on trust in the implied promise that the check-writer has the funds on deposit, and the merchant's trust in the banks ability and willingness to fulfill its obligation to pay, whether or not such a promise is enforceable in law (in fact, the promises are enforceable in law, as the provisions of the UCC article you waved vaguely at to defend the contrary position show, as the specific sections of that article I cited in the prior post show. I invited you to point to the specific provisions you felt supported your position, an invitation which you have ignored.)
Since trust in a representational or fiat currency requires only trust in the institution standing behind it (either to redeem representational currency or manage fiat currency until you have a chance to exchange it for goods of intrinsic value for fiat currency), rather than such an institution plus the person drawing a draft, there really is nothing, in terms of reliance on trust or promise, to recommend a system based on commodity currency where most practical transactions require some trust-based alternative medium to one in which you just use a representational or fiat currency. Indeed, there is little practical distinction between a check drawn on a gold-denominated account and a gold-denominated representational currency, except that you have trust at least two different people/institutions to accept the former, and only one for the latter.
Sure, if you were forced to operate in a commodity-currency system, that's pretty much a necessary course of action. But if you are going to be forced to resort to that, you are better off with a representational currency if you are wedded to the idea of some tight chain to a commodity: at least that way, you only have to trust the issuing/redeeming institution, not a bank plus a check-writer. And once you do that, you realize you are even better off with a fiat currency, where you are mostly insulated (once you purchase it) from short-term fluctuations in the supply or demand for a particular commodity that may be unrelated to your interests, yo
That's a really bad idea. If all the states were equal sizes, this would be arguably a good idea (I think candidate-centered elections are better than party-list, so I'd oppose it even then, but it would at least make some sense.)
As it is, states have between 1 and 53 representatives, so you get single member districts in several states, and huge party-list systems where most candidates are relatively unknown to the electorate in large states.
A better idea would be to expand the size of the House (may it, say, 5 times its current size), require districts to be of 4-7 members (set a floor of 4 or 5 members per state), and use a candidate-centered method that produces proportional results, like Single Transferrable Vote. You get the desirable features of proportional systems while at the same time keeping individual candidates directly accountable to the electorate.
Each state has one electoral vote per seat it has in the Congress.
The Congress is not just the House of Representatives.
Its been a month or so since I finished the book, but I don't remember any that were actually good. Still, he's right that the broad issues are ones that need to be discussed, and the Constitution shouldn't be viewed as some kind of unchangeable divine ordinance.
Its also is the only thing that is still expressly prohibited to be done by amendment in the Constitution, so you can't actually do it.
It would be better, if you want to make the legislative branch more effectively democratic while retaining the same basic structure, to simply reduce the power of the Senate.
This is Constitutionally easier than Sabato's idea; its even less of a good idea, though.
Republican (in the general and not partisan sense) ideals don't conflict with democratic ones and don't need to be "blended" with them. Insofar as republican ideals exist, they consist of having elected leaders rather than direct popular rule; a popularly elected Senate is not less "republican" than one appointed by state governments.
Now, the elected Senate may conflict with the ideal of the US as a loose confederation of states, but that's an idea that has become less useful with advancing technology and typical geographical scope of trade, travel, and rapid information interchange. The most reasonable arrangement of responsibility in the 21st century isn't what it was in the 18th century.
Since its not heritable, and Presidents are elected and not appointed, its not much like a "nobility". That's not to say that I'm sold on the idea, either in outline or Sabato's particular proposal, though.
So what? The whole point of the book is questioning decisions, not quasi-religious devotion to centuries-old decisions as if they were divine revelations rather than fallible human decisions.
That being said, while some tinkering with electoral terms might make sense, and synchronization might even be a good idea if done in the right context, his whole arrangement of terms (the President gets a basic term with a possibility of a short extension, etc.) is ill-considered, overcomplicated, and doesn't seem to have any clear benefit. Like many of his proposals, the setup is clever, but not much else.
National service, as he describes it, is not necessarily military service, and I'm not really sure there is a whole lot of evidence that the all-volunteer force has "served us well". Its only existed since the end of the Vietnam-era draft, and its hardly as if the US military's performance after Vietnam has been any better than it would have been expected to be based on its performance prior to and through Vietnam.
"Shall not exceed" is not the same thing as "shall be"; X <=Y is very different than X = Y.
If you want to fix a problem, design a system where the drawing of district boundaries doesn't matter much instead of one where it does. Its easier to do, for one thing: simply increase the number of seats per district, and adopt a preference voting system that generates proportional results, like STV. This makes it difficult to do much to ensure "safe" seats or enhance partisan advantage by messing with district boundaries.
Actually, there are two different things that are frequently done in redistricting: one is carving safe seats to protect incumbents, the other is maximizing seats in which one party has a majority. These are, to an extent, conflicting goals.
No, it doesn't. It says that (except for the period prior to the first Census, for which it spells out exact by-state representation) each state will have a number of representatives assigned in proportion to population based on a census count, except that each state will have at least one representative. It further states that the total number of representatives shall not be greater than 1 for every 30,000 people (that's not that the number will be 1/30,000: if that was the rule, the House would have, based on the 2000 census, 9,381 members — which would certainly reduce the voting-power impact of rounding problems from fractional seats.)
Wyoming has (per the 2000 Census apportionment count), ~1/568 (~0.176%) of the US population. It has 1/435 (~0.230%) of the seats in the House of Representatives.
California has ~12.06% of the population, ~12.18% of the seats in the House.
I'm not seeing a lot of favoritism toward big states here.
Sorry, but, no, I'm not.
You are welcome to your opinion of what justifies breaking a law; that's completely irrelevant to the point on which you claimed I was mistaken.
Civil disobedience is refusing to comply with a command of government (including, but not limited to, a law) as a way of protesting the injustice of either the command/law, or the claim to authority of the government issuing the command/law. Whether civil disobedience is justified, either in general or in any specific case, is a matter of opinion, and irrelevant to the discussion of what civil disobedience is.
No, its not. Neither Gandhi nor the Civil Rights Movement took the stance that the injustice of law cannot justify breaking them; both, to the contrary, to the position that the illegitimacy of law (either because of the illegitimacy of the authority issuing it, in the case of Gandhi's anti-colonial movement, or because of the injustice of its content, in the case of Civil Rights Movement) could justify breaking it in certain, non-violent ways.
Unlikely. At least, none of the ones I interacted in the course of getting a Bachelor's degree in the field ever had your rather unique views on those movements. Perhaps you should consider, though, some more direct source material, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail":
The act proposed upthread may fail to be proper "civil disobedience" because it isn't open defiance of the law with acceptance of the consequences, but it certainly doesn't fail because it is breaking the law. If it wasn't breaking the law, civil disobedience would instead be called "civil obedience".
Perhaps. But we're really not discussing redundancy in a programming language, we are talking about redundant information in source code. There certainly is the point of view that any redundancy in source code is a "design flaw" (the theory that advocates that code should speak for itself and comments should not be used, as well as the theory beyond Python's whitespace handling, is an example of that.)
Convention is not a feature of the programming language, it is a feature of programming style (similar to conventions) that is irrelevant to the computer processing the source code but intended as an aid to the human reader. To a certain degree (certainly, where it comes to indentation and related formatting conventions) such convention can, in fact, be automatically imposed on code not written to the convention by automated tools. It is no more a language feature than syntax highlighting done by an editor is a feature of the language.
Since the convention is imposed on code for human readability and can be changed without changing the meaning of the code (just as syntax highlighting can be), I disagree. Indeed, the convention is entirely irrelevant to the design of the language, not a flaw in its design.
More accurately, "it is common for people to use a whitespace arrangement that suits their personal tastes and those of their group to show how structure nests in most modern languages."
If its not "real" but convention the relation of whitespace to structure is not part of the language, any more than a conventional arrangement of comments to indicate function preconditions and return types is. If its not part of the language, it clearly can't be a flaw in the language.
No, its not the correct choice. It is a valid choice, and it aims to implement one subjective ideal of programming languages. Personally, I think that if you are going to use that ideal, though, it would be better to enforce a strict and consistent standard at the language level (e.g., "each new block level is indented by four spaces from the previous level") rather than "whatever mix of space and tabs you prefer, but each tab will be treated as if it were 8 spaces", so I wouldn't even say Python has a particularly well-chosen approach even given the guiding principal it has chosen, much less the one-true-correct choice.
Civil disobedience is nonviolent refusal to comply with a law or command of government, either because the law or command itself is perceived as unjust or because or because the government issuing the law or command is viewed as illegitimate independent of the merit of the particular law or command.
So "That is not civil disobedience; its's breaking the law" reveals a deep misunderstanding of the entire concept of civil disobedience. That's not saying one could not argue that the form of disobedience suggested is a poorly chosen and/or ineffective method of civil disobedience.
"Learning assembly will make you a better HLL programmer the way learning to synthesize the rubber used in the tires will make you a better Indy-car driver"?
No, that's probably not the analogy you are looking for...
No, they aren't.
Fiat currency is not "based on debt".
Even if this were true, there is no point at which you "cannot inflate any more".
No, its not.
Yes, I've heard of business cycles, and they have little to do with the volatility of currency.
Well, aside from the fact that its mostly irrelevant to currency volatility, no, business cycles are caused by a mixture of positive and negative feedbacks that are present in society, regardless of whether the currency is commodity, representational, or fiat, and were, in fact, first identified before fiat currency was the norm.
The slow devaluation of the currency mostly affects those whose assets are mostly cash or fixed-value debts, and mostly those who hold those assets for extraordinarily long periods of time. The prime "victims" are large financial institutions.
Based on what? Its not like there is anything like a reliable inflation series back to the original adoption of the dollar in 1785 or 1792 (either can be argued to the "original" dollar), and if there were it wouldn't be all that meaningful (short term inflation measures are of limited value and hotly contested because a good basket meaningful for basic survival [and thus the poor] doesn't represent the relative prices of goods purchased in other segments of society and vice versa.)
And, in any rate, using currency as a long-term store of value is dumb. Yes, it can be that, but the market provides plenty of negligible- and low-risk alternatives for that (in both the private and public arenas). The indispensable role of currency is as a medium of exchange. Avoiding short-term volatility is important, long-term value-holding is less important (though having a fairly constant long-term trend is valuable because it enables people to make better long-run decisions when it comes to fixed-nominal-return investments.)
Yes, actually, its rather easy to compare the volatility of commodity prices with regard to an inflation adjusted currency figure (to get, e.g., a gold:constant $ ratio) vs. the volatility of existing real world currencies (e.g., current $:constant $).
So?
Irrelevant. Gold is traded as a commodity in an environment with modern information systems. Using gold traded for its commodity value as currency will give the currency the volatility of gold as a commodity.
It wouldn't. It would increase the reward institutions that, over a very long period, held large stocks of cash and dollar-denominated financial assets, and punish (compared to the status quo) those that hold non-dollar/gold physical assets.
If you say so.
metamorphism (n.): "The process by which rocks are altered in composition, texture, or internal structure by extreme heat, pressure, and the introduction of new chemical substances."
I think you are looking for "metamorphosis". Or, if you would just use the most natural English word for the meaning, "change". Or, if you need a big Greek-origin word that captures the meaning you are looking for more specifically than just "change" (which "metamorposis" or "metamorphism" in its archaic sense does not), "metanoia", though that's usually used in a religious context.
I see relatively little evidence that "technology geeks", as a class, have generally gone through that particular conversion experience. And its not like I haven't been explaining things to you at length. And I'm not really an economics-specific geek.
But bravo on the series of inaccuracies and unsupported generalizations crammed into that one sentence.
What invective?
You can try to establish the standard where you get to make any claim you want with no substantiation and anyone who contradicts you needs to provide external sources, but don't expect anyone else to play that game.
Um, I didn't. You're the only one who has used that kind of language in this exchange. Perhaps you ought to practice what you preach.
No, its not. Though its perhaps unnecessarily loaded language, and "people fall short of the rational actors that are a convenient simplification of economic theory in that they often fail to apply all the information at hand to determine the course of action with the greatest expected utility" would be better.
But "people are stupid" is short and to the point.
Certainly. People are ignorant* as well as stupid**.
* if you prefer the verbose and less colorful version: "People fall short of the rational actor model, besides the way discussed above, by not having perfect information from which to assess the utilities of their decisions, which would frustrate them in their efforts to act 'rationally' [in terms of the model] even if they did fully utilize the information available, which, as discussed previously, they frequently do not."
** See discussion in the first response paragraph in this post.
Lack of education isn't stupidity (or even a source of stupidity, though it may be the product of it). It is, frequently, a contributor to ignorance, though.
Yes. Exactly. Saying "X is no more Y than Z is" is not saying "Z is X". Now that that's clarified, go back and read the post you were responding to here: you might actually understand it this time.
Since I was discussing the pragmatics on not the legalities, that's pretty irrelevant. But you are wrong on the legalities, as well.
No, agreeing to purchase the items creates a purchase contract which makes the purchaser liable for $1000; the check if and when honored satisfies that obligation.
No, they're both true. You can, in fact, be sued for passing a bad check, but not for writing a check that isn't bad. You can't sued for writing an IOU, only for not paying on it.
The UCC, covering, as it does, contracts in which their is an exchange for goods, doesn't address bare (gratuitously-issued) notes or checks. It does address checks and notes ("IOU") given in satisfaction of an existing (or simultaneously created) obligation, such as a purchase contract. And, under UCC 3-310, a check or note (other than certified, cashier's, or teller's check, which has the same effect as money) has the same effect on the pre-existing obligation: the check or note suspends the obligation until the check or note is either dishonored or paid. (Checks are a little bit different in that they can be certified after given, in which case they discharge the obligation as if they were money.)
I'm not sure what you are imagining supports your argument in UCC Article 3. Could you be more specific?
Certainly under the UCC, that's entirely wrong; a dishonored check or note can be enforced under the UCC (Sec. 3-310(3)-(4)), and the drawer (the person writing the check) is legally obligated to pay the amount of the check if the bank on which it was drawn does not pay it or agree in writing to pay it. (UCC Sec. 3-414).