The other obvious reason is that if the company taking the money takes too much.
That's an advantage to credit cards over giving someone permission to directly access your bank account, but there are other payment methods which involve neither credit cards nor authorizing creditors to take whatever they feel like out of your bank account.
Presumably, the newsreports of their explicit statement that they now oppose SOPA (as well as the SOPA-alternative, PIPA, being advanced in the Senate.)
GoDaddy did NOT reverse their stance on SOPA. They only removed the publication on their supporting stance of SOPA. So they still support it, they just don't say it out loud.
GoDaddy, the domain register targeted by online activists in response to its enthusiasm for a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills, has finally denounced the legislation in response to a boycott scheduled for today.
Warren Adelman, the company's chief executive, said today that "GoDaddy opposes SOPA," meaning the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is facing a House of Representatives committee vote next month.
A GoDaddy spokeswoman confirmed to CNET this afternoon that "we oppose PIPA, as well." That's the Senate bill known as Protect IP, which will be debated on the Senate floor January 24. (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)
What is actually more impressive is the stupidity of your argument. If the GM corn pest resistance becomes ineffective there is of course no reason to continue purchasing it thereby harming Monsanto's revenues.
Well, there eventually becomes a reason not to purchase that GM strain (which, if Monsanto is lucky, is near or even after the time the patent expires), but by then Monsanto should have a new strain out that produces a different pesticide in order to be effective against insects that are resistant to the pesticide produced by the old strain.
Its essentially a probabilistic form of planned obsolescence.
And there's your solution: flag all images as inapropriate (... or have a script do it for you...), and it becomes prohibitively expensive for them to check them all...
Simply scheduling the order of review in a way which causes people with lots of flags to get their pictures scheduled for review less frequently neatly makes it so that this attack has minimal effect on the speed with which Google can review flags of pictures by people who aren't adopting this attempt to bog the system down, without consuming substantial additional resources.
And its easy to go a step further, and include a weighting factor incorporating how reliably the users previously-reviewed flaggings were found to be pictures that Google found inappropriate so that frequent-but-accurate flaggers aren't pushed back but frequent-but-useless-to-Google flaggers are.
Given that all of this is pretty basic to effectively managing review of user-flagged inappropriate content when you have potentially a lot of content that might get flagged, whether or not you are worried about people abusing flagging as a protest against your policies, and given that Google has had facilities for flagging inappropriate content a lot longer than Google+ has been around (e.g., in blogspot), and given that this kind of data analyis and application to processes is the kind of thing Google is known for, I'd be surprised if they didn't already have something like this in place.
Not just that, but they've been pushing web-based replacements for desktop applications that are Chrome-only, like the HTML5 version of Angry Birds and pretty much the entirety of NaCl.
HTML5 is, obviously, not a Chrome-only technology, and the HTML5 version of Angry Birds that can be "installed" through the Chrome Web Store doesn't rely on any Chrome-specific technology, and works fine (according to all reports I've seen) in Firefox.
NaCl is an open technology that Google is pushing that is only currently implemented in Chrome, but Google is pushing it to try to get other browser vendors on board with it (with, so far, little success), not as a closed competitive advantage for Chrome.
Chrome and Firefox are competitors, but Google only created Chrome for pushing ads.
I doubt that. Most likely, Google created Chrome and its specific features to push the browser market in a direction that favored web-based replacements for desktop application -- you'll note that, in addition to advertisements, Google sells both its own web-based services and a hosting platform for third-party web-based services, and has consistently used Chrome to push technologies designed to address barriers to web services displacing traditional desktop apps (and also on enabling new kinds of web apps besides areas where desktop apps are popular.) JavaScript performance was the big area that was a focus when Chrome was launched, though the focus has moved somewhat from JavaScript performance as such to support for a broader range of APIs that push into non-traditional web roles (e.g., WebGL) and non-JavaScript application options (particularly Native Client), but still largely focus on browser-as-app platform.
Google created Chrome to push Google's (current and planned) revenue-generating services, but that's more than just advertising, and I would say that Chrome exists disproportionately to push Google's non-advertising services (though, of course, it doesn't miss the easy opportunity to directly push Google advertising, either.)
Which is absurd. Chrome and Firefox are competing for the same users.
As long as Google is the primary search provider in Firefox, and as long as Mozilla is actually pursuing its statement mission of advancing the open web, Chrome and Firefox are both places where Google is spending money to an getting the same basic thing for the money: 1) Direct promotion of google's search advertisement revenue through placement as the default search provider, and 2) Indirect promotion of the market for a wide range of Google's for-pay services (including search and non-search advertisement, application hosting through App Engine, and others) by making open web technologies a more attractive application platform and the web a place where users spend more time.
David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS, had a more likely hypothesis, which is that Google is protecting itself from increased antitrust scrutiny.
A whole lot more plausible of a hypothesis is that Google is spending money in the search deal to advance is direct and immediate revenue stream from search advertisements, and that the indirect benefits to its strategic interests in its other revenue sources are a reason that Google is willing to spend more for that advertising revenue than other bidders, particular Microsoft, who don't share Google's other interests in Mozilla.
Antitrust concerns are a pretty ridiculous hypothesis for Google investment in Mozilla, since Mozilla doesn't compete with Google anywhere where Google is dominant.
Many took this as charity, and for the purpose of advancing the web.
I don't think that's accurate. What would be more accurate is that many media outlets have misrepresented various Googler's comments that what Google pays Mozilla advances Google's interest in the open web, and that that is one reason why Google would continue to funnel lots of money to Mozilla even though it has its own browser which competes directly with Firefox as a claim about "charity".
That claim has nothing to do with charity, its a statement that is about revenue -- largely ad revenue, but also revenue from Google's other services -- because the more happy people are with doing things on the web (whether new things or things they previously would use desktop apps or non-web technologies for) the bigger the market is for online advertising, web application hosting, and all kinds of other services Google provides for a price. And the more the web uses open standards to do that, the more Google's various services that rely on scraping, analyzing, and summarizing data from across the web can do.
There's also, of course, the direct search ad revenue that Google derives from use of their products in search, which is the most direct and visible reason they would pay Mozilla to be the default Firefox search provider. And of course that's important, too. But their strategic interest in making the web friendlier to promote their whole host of services (which is still mostly advertising, but not all of that advertising is search advertising) is why they are consistently willing to pay more to be the default search provider in Firefox than Microsoft, for whom promoting the open web isn't a strategic interest in the way it is for Google. Because Google sees a return beside the direct search revenue that Microsoft doesn't, because Google's long-term business interest are more closely aligned with Mozilla's ideological interests.
Indeed, causing the days of the week to rotate would wreak havoc. Suppose that this year, the Sabbath day falls on calendar Wednesday due to weekday rotation. Now, all the observant employees at your company will be out of the office every Wednesday, the entire year.
You are aware that not all religious groups that have a day of observance that is fixed with regard to the week of the Gregorian calendar have it fixed on the same day as all other religious groups that have such a weekly observance, right?
And you know that not all religious groups that have an approximately-weekly day of observance have one that is fixed with regard to the Gregorian calendar weeks to start with, right?
"Religious" includes more than "mainstream Christian".
What we're talking about here, is having a large fraction of your workforce essentially permanently on a different schedule.
Assuming that you have a unit like the week that isn't 7 days, its a schedule that has required days off that rotates around the new week, sure. So?
For decency's sake, you want to give people a two day weekend, not two days non-adjacent to each other throughout the week.
Whether that's true or not really depends on what the alternative reform does to the week. The whole point of a leap-weak calendar is to serve some other calendar reform objective while preserving a continuous 7-day week. You seem to presume that the alternative reform keeps a 7-day week but has intercalary days that push it off the existing continuous week schedule. That's one possibility, but not the only one.
That means that, in practice, the religious folks will be taking off TWO days during the regular work week, and working on weekends when the other half of the office is not present. So you spend 40% of your time with an incomplete contingent in the office.
I'm not sure how you get 40%. The situation you describe (the "religious folks" taking two days off during the regular work week and working on the 2-day weekend) actually has 4 out of 7 days at less-than-full staffing (2 non-weekend days and 2 weekend days) -- or 57% of the time -- if you assume that all the "religious folks" are taking the same two days off. If, say, you have religious observers with three different weekly days of observance none of which are on a weekend (as you would have with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday observers if the traditional Saturday fell anywhere from the new Tuesday to the new Thursday), you'd have 5 of 7 or 71%, even just to accommodate the day of observance (adding the second adjacent day doesn't change this number at all.)
Of course neither of those are the average, and they only apply to out-of-synch seven-day weeks with a standard two-day "weekend" and an offset two-day weekend for observers, which is hardly the only plausible non-leap-week calendar reform scenario.
That would be unacceptable to anybody who celebrates a Sabbath on a certain day of the week on every 7th day.
That's the commonly-stated motivation for leap week calendars, but, you know, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have a number of important holy days that drift around the Gregorian calendar as it is. I doubt that they'd have any trouble continuing to observe their seven-day cycle of regular observations if the unit-above-day of the secular calendar didn't align with it -- if workplaces were flexible enough in scheduling to accommodate employees religious obligations.
I think that leap week supporters mostly are wrong that the main barrier to calendar reform which is convenient for other reasons is that breaking the week is unacceptable to some major religions. The real barrier to calendar reforms of the type they propose is that no one real sees enough benefit from any proposed reform to justify the one-time cost from losing familiarity. If anything, leap weeks make it worse, because the extra week is a bigger burden than most of the burdens that calendar reformers seek to mitigate.
Which is the problem: the whole point of leap week calendars is to push calendar reform that starts each year on the same day without running into resistance from major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) that are attached to a seven-day weeks with no breaks in between and which would presumably be unwilling to adopt a calendar for business purposes which caused their regular observances to rotate around the general week (though similar rotation already occurs with regard to the Gregorian calendar for significant annual observances of the same religions, including the religion that instituted that calendar.)
Can't you just use logical contradiction? Here's three random christian postulates which we are not allowed to question:
1) christian god created everything 2) christian god is good guy not bad guy 3) people are capable of doing evil
Only get to pick 2 of those 3. Any two are logically consistent, but one Must be false,
Even if you make the usually-unstated assumptions about Good and Evil that are usually used to make the argument that existence of either the capacity to do evil or any actual evil in the universe disproves God (under some particular definition of God.)
Merely being the Creator of everything doesn't get you to that problem. That's why people making this argument usually invoke other traditional attributes of God, usually omniscience and/or omnipotence.
But even with those, you have to assume (as is usually unstated) that the existence of the capacity for evil is itself an evil greater than any good which logically requires the existence of the capacity to do evil. This isn't necessarily wrong, but its an unstated assumption that certainly isn't uncontroversial.
The tea party is becoming a third one. OWS could be the fourth.
No, its not, and no, it couldn't.
First the U.S. has a lot more than two parties now, it just has two that are electorally competitive. So, if the Tea Party and OWS became parties, it wouldn't be the third and fourth.
Second, at its height of popularity, the Tea Party movement polled with support about equal to and almost entirely overlapping that of the Republican Party. Before and after that it has been less than but largely contained in the support for the Republican Party. It is, essentially, a movement within the Republican Party.
OWS hasn't used party-like labels and hasn't been as policy focussed as the Tea Party, but to the extent that it has gone beyond trying to call attention to particular issues to recommend policy approaches to addressing them, they've generally been approaches that have been embraced by some subset of the Democratic Party, both before and after they were embraced by OWS.
And the reasons why the US has pretty much always had two major parties (though not always the same two major parties -- the Federalists having been replaced by the Whigs who were later replaced the Republicans -- each after the preceding major party collapsed) are a matter of electoral structures which reinforce duopoly by creating strong disincentives to voting for any party other than the most popular two in any election, since doing so in most cases makes it more likely that the major party most antithetical to your views wins the election in question; its only when a formerly-major party becomes non-competitive than other parties really have a chance, and what happens then is one of those becomes a major party and the duopoly is restored.
This could be changed, but its not going to be changed by simply getting more activist movements each with views that diverge slightly from the mainstream of one of the major parties trying to push their platforms and become major parties -- for the most part those will just continue to fail, with every century or so one of them being lucky enough to be focussed on the right issue at the time a major party completely falls apart to claim its spot.
What it would take is substantial change to the electoral systems used for legislative and executive elections at the state and federal levels. Majority-runoff and plurality systems will continue to preserve the two party system as long as they are the dominant election systems used.
Microsoft's traditional strategy of going over the heads of hardware vendors to meet the needs of consumers and application developers does not work in the phone market, says Kindel, where the handset makers and carriers have the biggest say in determining the winners (Apple is an exception).
How is Apple an exception? Apple became a hardware manufacturer rather than trying to dictate to hardware manufacturers, and Apple has done quite a lot to work with carriers, at least in the U.S. market.
Sure, once the iPhone was in high demand, Apple had more power in those negotiations, but I can't see that they are an exception.
It is fairly obvious to anyone schooled in human nature that in the late 1700s there were some people that actually knew a thing or two about how people work. The US government is designed to do nothing. Nothing at all.
Its actually fairly obvious that this is wrong, since the US Government under the Articles of Confederation was much, much better at doing nothing, and was abandoned largely for that reason.
The people that founded the Federal Government knew what they wanted and designed a government to do absolutely as little as possible.
If you mean the people that wrote the Articles of Confederation (who can arguably be said to have founded the Federal Government), then this is true.
But its also true that the people who dumped the AoC for the Constitution -- while they clashed among themselves quite a bit on exactly what the role, scope, and power of the federal government should be -- agreed pretty much on one thing (and probably not much else), and that was that the government established under the AoC was flawed specifically because it did, and could do, so little.
It redirects to media reports about him, organizations he has worked for, a public-service video he appeared in with Nancy Pelosi, etc. How is any of this "misinformation"? It's information he doesn't want to emphasize in his current campaign, sure, but that doesn't make it false or even deceptive.
There are special standards for "misinformation" when it comes to Gingrich, who famously said -- on May 17 of this year -- "any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood".
Except that they voted it down because they want a full year tax break...
So do the House Democrats. So do the Senate Democrats. So do the Senate Republicans. So does the President.
Democrats, disagree with Republicans, on other policies aside from the payroll tax holiday extension, some of which are directly related (e.g., offsetting tax increases or spending cuts to account for the lost revenue expected from extending the payroll tax holiday) and some of which are tangential but which parties are trying to use the popular payroll tax holiday as a lever to force the other side into agreeing to (e.g., accelerating approval timeline for the Keystone XL pipeline.)
The Senate, by an 89-10 vote, approved a 2 month extension of the payroll tax holiday along with a comprise mechanism for covering the cost of the short extension and with some agreements on some of the peripheral issues, to address the fact that the expiration of the tax holiday was rapidly approaching and to provide some time for more negotiations to reach a compromise on the remaining details to accompany a longer-term extension.
and the Senate Democrats refuse to even vote on the bill that the House already passed supporting the full year tax break.
The Senate has already debated a full year tax break and failed to reach a consensus on the funding and other peripheral issues. They already know where the positions are of everyone in the Senate are right now on those issues, and know that neither the version of those issues in the House bill nor any other version has sufficient support to pass the Senate right now. Which is why, after extensive discussion and negotiation around the full-year extension requested by the President, the Senate passed the interim 2 month extension to provide time to reach a deal on a longer term extension, a goal which has nearly-universal support in the Senate, but where key differences on implementation details remain that would be fatal to any particular bill until they are resolved.
The US Government isn't designed to run fast, it is designed to be slow and offer small solutions.
No, its not. The U.S. Government isn't the product of a design effort with a coherent objective. Its the product of centuries of individual compromises on specific issues between not merely diverse but -- from the outset -- radically opposed priorities.
It was designed at the outset (of the Constitutional system) both to run fast and have strong central power (one of the main motives for revising the Articles of Confederation to produce the Constitution) and to be hamstrung and dependent on the States. There are features -- in the text of the Constitution (original and in amendments), in the statute law, in the case law, in the bodies of federal regulations and other binding executive acts -- that represent far extremes and every conceivable point in between, implemented on narrow issues over the whole history of the Republic, with little in the way of rationalization over time.
To say that the US government is designed to do any one particular thing (other than be the US government) or to implement any one particular philosophy of the role, scale, or model of government is, well, fundamentally wrong and more misleading than useful.
Chrome is proprietary, dart, NACL, SPDY, and special javascript extensions,
None of those are proprietary in the sense of non-open, though they may be proprietary in the sense of non-standard.
IE 10 is the most conforment browser to date.
IE does the best on a test suite that is composed disproportionately of tests developed and submitted by Microsoft to test the features of the applicable standards that are implemented by IE.
This is somewhat unsurprising, and also somewhat pointless.
Google is too big and a threat to Mozilla's survival.
I don't see it. Nothing that Google derives substantial revenue from is hurt by Firefox, so Google has no reason to be a threat to Firefox.
Google's ecosystem includes all their cloud apps where extensions are Chrome OS/Browser applets and they use their search engine as a way to force it in.
Um, what? This sentence wanders into bizarro world after the word "apps".
Extensions to Google cloud apps are, for the most part, also cloud hosted. There are browser extensions that tie into Google cloud apps, and some of them are Chrome-specific, but they are mostly peripheral to the functionality of the apps, which work on any modern browser.
I think Mozilla needs to rethink as MS is moving away from silveright, IE 6, and even win32 to a certain extent for mobile users.
Is there any indication that Microsoft is interested in writing Mozilla as big a check as Google is? Because if not, your whole "Go with Bing" plan would be opting for a clear, short-term threat to Firefox's viability in order to avoid a very speculative, long-term threat that doesn't have much of a sensible basis.
I thought this would be Google's chance to kill Firefox. Not many other search providers for Mozilla to run to. Microsoft can attempt to tie IE and Bing together and Google can tie Chrome and Google search. Firefox is left out in the cold to whither and die like Netscape.
One of Google's key interests is encouraging apps to be built on open web technologies rather than OS/browser specific ones (especially ones that are specific to someone else's OS/browser.)
Every competing desktop browser with non-negligible marketshare advances that interest. If Firefox vanished and half its marketshare went to IE and half to Chrome, that would be a loss for Google, not a gain.
But wasn't it the idea that you reduce expenses in boon times, and go anti-cyclic, and thereby spend more in bad times?
No. Its that you reduce deficits in boom times, which isn't the same thing as reducing expenses.
But the last decade, the USA has clearly acted cyclic, not anti-cyclic. The US has spent money like its life depended on it
The last decade hasn't been "boon times" or "boom times", its been fairly weak growth during the parts of it that weren't recessions, with even worse distributional effects everywhere but the top few percent than is typical given the growth rates. The last boom times in this country was the Clinton-era expansion when the federal deficit was completely eliminated and a surplus acheived, which is a fairly good example of counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
The problem is that for most of the last decade, the particular set of tax cuts and spending increases that were adopted were poorly directed at economic growth. This isn't a pro- or counter-cyclical fiscal policy issue on the big-picture level, its much more about the details of the particular spending and tax policies.
I really wish that they would not extend the payroll tax cut. Not that I'm itching to pay more taxes or anything, but are we giving up all pretense that Social Security is an earned benefit?
Its earned by work. The only thing reducing (or even outright eliminating) the payroll tax would give up pretense of is that it is a purchased personal asset rather than an earned benefit.
A federal payroll tax reduction for two months is being pushed by the President.
No, its not.
A continuation of the current federal payroll tax "holiday" for a full year is being pushed by the President. Congress has a broad bipartisan agreement with this goal, but hasn't been able to agree on how to pay for it (Republicans want program cuts, Democrats what tax increases on the wealthy), and the compromise adopted in the Senate has been for a two-month extension to provide time for negotiations on a long-term solution.
Paying less money to the government seems good
Its actually between "paying the same money to the government as currently" (if the measure passes) and "paying more money to the government" (if it fails), paying less money isn't on the table.
but if the law is changed it will change the payroll taxes in January and February.
No, if the law is not changed, payroll tax rates will change in January. If the law is changed, payroll tax rates will remain the same in January as they are now.
Many of us can well imagine what that will do to the many payroll systems which are already programmed with the 2012 tax rates.
It will require them to be updated to reflect the same rates that the same systems applied for all of 2011, which -- even if the rates are hardcoded such that it requires a new build and code deployment -- should be fairly trivial. Since tax rate changes are a fairly regular occurrence, presumably on even moderately well-designed payroll systems this won't involve a code change at all, just a configuration change, table update, or something similar.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an advantage to credit cards over giving someone permission to directly access your bank account, but there are other payment methods which involve neither credit cards nor authorizing creditors to take whatever they feel like out of your bank account.
Presumably, the news reports of their explicit statement that they now oppose SOPA (as well as the SOPA-alternative, PIPA, being advanced in the Senate.)
Wrong.
GoDaddy, the domain register targeted by online activists in response to its enthusiasm for a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills, has finally denounced the legislation in response to a boycott scheduled for today.
Warren Adelman, the company's chief executive, said today that "GoDaddy opposes SOPA," meaning the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is facing a House of Representatives committee vote next month.
A GoDaddy spokeswoman confirmed to CNET this afternoon that "we oppose PIPA, as well." That's the Senate bill known as Protect IP, which will be debated on the Senate floor January 24. (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)
Well, there eventually becomes a reason not to purchase that GM strain (which, if Monsanto is lucky, is near or even after the time the patent expires), but by then Monsanto should have a new strain out that produces a different pesticide in order to be effective against insects that are resistant to the pesticide produced by the old strain.
Its essentially a probabilistic form of planned obsolescence.
Simply scheduling the order of review in a way which causes people with lots of flags to get their pictures scheduled for review less frequently neatly makes it so that this attack has minimal effect on the speed with which Google can review flags of pictures by people who aren't adopting this attempt to bog the system down, without consuming substantial additional resources.
And its easy to go a step further, and include a weighting factor incorporating how reliably the users previously-reviewed flaggings were found to be pictures that Google found inappropriate so that frequent-but-accurate flaggers aren't pushed back but frequent-but-useless-to-Google flaggers are.
Given that all of this is pretty basic to effectively managing review of user-flagged inappropriate content when you have potentially a lot of content that might get flagged, whether or not you are worried about people abusing flagging as a protest against your policies, and given that Google has had facilities for flagging inappropriate content a lot longer than Google+ has been around (e.g., in blogspot), and given that this kind of data analyis and application to processes is the kind of thing Google is known for, I'd be surprised if they didn't already have something like this in place.
HTML5 is, obviously, not a Chrome-only technology, and the HTML5 version of Angry Birds that can be "installed" through the Chrome Web Store doesn't rely on any Chrome-specific technology, and works fine (according to all reports I've seen) in Firefox.
NaCl is an open technology that Google is pushing that is only currently implemented in Chrome, but Google is pushing it to try to get other browser vendors on board with it (with, so far, little success), not as a closed competitive advantage for Chrome.
I doubt that. Most likely, Google created Chrome and its specific features to push the browser market in a direction that favored web-based replacements for desktop application -- you'll note that, in addition to advertisements, Google sells both its own web-based services and a hosting platform for third-party web-based services, and has consistently used Chrome to push technologies designed to address barriers to web services displacing traditional desktop apps (and also on enabling new kinds of web apps besides areas where desktop apps are popular.) JavaScript performance was the big area that was a focus when Chrome was launched, though the focus has moved somewhat from JavaScript performance as such to support for a broader range of APIs that push into non-traditional web roles (e.g., WebGL) and non-JavaScript application options (particularly Native Client), but still largely focus on browser-as-app platform.
Google created Chrome to push Google's (current and planned) revenue-generating services, but that's more than just advertising, and I would say that Chrome exists disproportionately to push Google's non-advertising services (though, of course, it doesn't miss the easy opportunity to directly push Google advertising, either.)
As long as Google is the primary search provider in Firefox, and as long as Mozilla is actually pursuing its statement mission of advancing the open web, Chrome and Firefox are both places where Google is spending money to an getting the same basic thing for the money:
1) Direct promotion of google's search advertisement revenue through placement as the default search provider, and
2) Indirect promotion of the market for a wide range of Google's for-pay services (including search and non-search advertisement, application hosting through App Engine, and others) by making open web technologies a more attractive application platform and the web a place where users spend more time.
A whole lot more plausible of a hypothesis is that Google is spending money in the search deal to advance is direct and immediate revenue stream from search advertisements, and that the indirect benefits to its strategic interests in its other revenue sources are a reason that Google is willing to spend more for that advertising revenue than other bidders, particular Microsoft, who don't share Google's other interests in Mozilla.
Antitrust concerns are a pretty ridiculous hypothesis for Google investment in Mozilla, since Mozilla doesn't compete with Google anywhere where Google is dominant.
I don't think that's accurate. What would be more accurate is that many media outlets have misrepresented various Googler's comments that what Google pays Mozilla advances Google's interest in the open web, and that that is one reason why Google would continue to funnel lots of money to Mozilla even though it has its own browser which competes directly with Firefox as a claim about "charity".
That claim has nothing to do with charity, its a statement that is about revenue -- largely ad revenue, but also revenue from Google's other services -- because the more happy people are with doing things on the web (whether new things or things they previously would use desktop apps or non-web technologies for) the bigger the market is for online advertising, web application hosting, and all kinds of other services Google provides for a price. And the more the web uses open standards to do that, the more Google's various services that rely on scraping, analyzing, and summarizing data from across the web can do.
There's also, of course, the direct search ad revenue that Google derives from use of their products in search, which is the most direct and visible reason they would pay Mozilla to be the default Firefox search provider. And of course that's important, too. But their strategic interest in making the web friendlier to promote their whole host of services (which is still mostly advertising, but not all of that advertising is search advertising) is why they are consistently willing to pay more to be the default search provider in Firefox than Microsoft, for whom promoting the open web isn't a strategic interest in the way it is for Google. Because Google sees a return beside the direct search revenue that Microsoft doesn't, because Google's long-term business interest are more closely aligned with Mozilla's ideological interests.
You are aware that not all religious groups that have a day of observance that is fixed with regard to the week of the Gregorian calendar have it fixed on the same day as all other religious groups that have such a weekly observance, right?
And you know that not all religious groups that have an approximately-weekly day of observance have one that is fixed with regard to the Gregorian calendar weeks to start with, right?
"Religious" includes more than "mainstream Christian".
This are more than one of them, but true.
Assuming that you have a unit like the week that isn't 7 days, its a schedule that has required days off that rotates around the new week, sure. So?
Whether that's true or not really depends on what the alternative reform does to the week. The whole point of a leap-weak calendar is to serve some other calendar reform objective while preserving a continuous 7-day week. You seem to presume that the alternative reform keeps a 7-day week but has intercalary days that push it off the existing continuous week schedule. That's one possibility, but not the only one.
I'm not sure how you get 40%. The situation you describe (the "religious folks" taking two days off during the regular work week and working on the 2-day weekend) actually has 4 out of 7 days at less-than-full staffing (2 non-weekend days and 2 weekend days) -- or 57% of the time -- if you assume that all the "religious folks" are taking the same two days off. If, say, you have religious observers with three different weekly days of observance none of which are on a weekend (as you would have with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday observers if the traditional Saturday fell anywhere from the new Tuesday to the new Thursday), you'd have 5 of 7 or 71%, even just to accommodate the day of observance (adding the second adjacent day doesn't change this number at all.)
Of course neither of those are the average, and they only apply to out-of-synch seven-day weeks with a standard two-day "weekend" and an offset two-day weekend for observers, which is hardly the only plausible non-leap-week calendar reform scenario.
That's the commonly-stated motivation for leap week calendars, but, you know, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have a number of important holy days that drift around the Gregorian calendar as it is. I doubt that they'd have any trouble continuing to observe their seven-day cycle of regular observations if the unit-above-day of the secular calendar didn't align with it -- if workplaces were flexible enough in scheduling to accommodate employees religious obligations.
I think that leap week supporters mostly are wrong that the main barrier to calendar reform which is convenient for other reasons is that breaking the week is unacceptable to some major religions. The real barrier to calendar reforms of the type they propose is that no one real sees enough benefit from any proposed reform to justify the one-time cost from losing familiarity. If anything, leap weeks make it worse, because the extra week is a bigger burden than most of the burdens that calendar reformers seek to mitigate.
Which is the problem: the whole point of leap week calendars is to push calendar reform that starts each year on the same day without running into resistance from major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) that are attached to a seven-day weeks with no breaks in between and which would presumably be unwilling to adopt a calendar for business purposes which caused their regular observances to rotate around the general week (though similar rotation already occurs with regard to the Gregorian calendar for significant annual observances of the same religions, including the religion that instituted that calendar.)
Even if you make the usually-unstated assumptions about Good and Evil that are usually used to make the argument that existence of either the capacity to do evil or any actual evil in the universe disproves God (under some particular definition of God.)
Merely being the Creator of everything doesn't get you to that problem. That's why people making this argument usually invoke other traditional attributes of God, usually omniscience and/or omnipotence.
But even with those, you have to assume (as is usually unstated) that the existence of the capacity for evil is itself an evil greater than any good which logically requires the existence of the capacity to do evil. This isn't necessarily wrong, but its an unstated assumption that certainly isn't uncontroversial.
No, its not, and no, it couldn't.
First the U.S. has a lot more than two parties now, it just has two that are electorally competitive. So, if the Tea Party and OWS became parties, it wouldn't be the third and fourth.
Second, at its height of popularity, the Tea Party movement polled with support about equal to and almost entirely overlapping that of the Republican Party. Before and after that it has been less than but largely contained in the support for the Republican Party. It is, essentially, a movement within the Republican Party.
OWS hasn't used party-like labels and hasn't been as policy focussed as the Tea Party, but to the extent that it has gone beyond trying to call attention to particular issues to recommend policy approaches to addressing them, they've generally been approaches that have been embraced by some subset of the Democratic Party, both before and after they were embraced by OWS.
And the reasons why the US has pretty much always had two major parties (though not always the same two major parties -- the Federalists having been replaced by the Whigs who were later replaced the Republicans -- each after the preceding major party collapsed) are a matter of electoral structures which reinforce duopoly by creating strong disincentives to voting for any party other than the most popular two in any election, since doing so in most cases makes it more likely that the major party most antithetical to your views wins the election in question; its only when a formerly-major party becomes non-competitive than other parties really have a chance, and what happens then is one of those becomes a major party and the duopoly is restored.
This could be changed, but its not going to be changed by simply getting more activist movements each with views that diverge slightly from the mainstream of one of the major parties trying to push their platforms and become major parties -- for the most part those will just continue to fail, with every century or so one of them being lucky enough to be focussed on the right issue at the time a major party completely falls apart to claim its spot.
What it would take is substantial change to the electoral systems used for legislative and executive elections at the state and federal levels. Majority-runoff and plurality systems will continue to preserve the two party system as long as they are the dominant election systems used.
How is Apple an exception? Apple became a hardware manufacturer rather than trying to dictate to hardware manufacturers, and Apple has done quite a lot to work with carriers, at least in the U.S. market.
Sure, once the iPhone was in high demand, Apple had more power in those negotiations, but I can't see that they are an exception.
Its actually fairly obvious that this is wrong, since the US Government under the Articles of Confederation was much, much better at doing nothing, and was abandoned largely for that reason.
If you mean the people that wrote the Articles of Confederation (who can arguably be said to have founded the Federal Government), then this is true.
But its also true that the people who dumped the AoC for the Constitution -- while they clashed among themselves quite a bit on exactly what the role, scope, and power of the federal government should be -- agreed pretty much on one thing (and probably not much else), and that was that the government established under the AoC was flawed specifically because it did, and could do, so little.
There are special standards for "misinformation" when it comes to Gingrich, who famously said -- on May 17 of this year -- "any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood".
So do the House Democrats. So do the Senate Democrats. So do the Senate Republicans. So does the President.
Democrats, disagree with Republicans, on other policies aside from the payroll tax holiday extension, some of which are directly related (e.g., offsetting tax increases or spending cuts to account for the lost revenue expected from extending the payroll tax holiday) and some of which are tangential but which parties are trying to use the popular payroll tax holiday as a lever to force the other side into agreeing to (e.g., accelerating approval timeline for the Keystone XL pipeline.)
The Senate, by an 89-10 vote, approved a 2 month extension of the payroll tax holiday along with a comprise mechanism for covering the cost of the short extension and with some agreements on some of the peripheral issues, to address the fact that the expiration of the tax holiday was rapidly approaching and to provide some time for more negotiations to reach a compromise on the remaining details to accompany a longer-term extension.
The Senate has already debated a full year tax break and failed to reach a consensus on the funding and other peripheral issues. They already know where the positions are of everyone in the Senate are right now on those issues, and know that neither the version of those issues in the House bill nor any other version has sufficient support to pass the Senate right now. Which is why, after extensive discussion and negotiation around the full-year extension requested by the President, the Senate passed the interim 2 month extension to provide time to reach a deal on a longer term extension, a goal which has nearly-universal support in the Senate, but where key differences on implementation details remain that would be fatal to any particular bill until they are resolved.
No, its not. The U.S. Government isn't the product of a design effort with a coherent objective. Its the product of centuries of individual compromises on specific issues between not merely diverse but -- from the outset -- radically opposed priorities.
It was designed at the outset (of the Constitutional system) both to run fast and have strong central power (one of the main motives for revising the Articles of Confederation to produce the Constitution) and to be hamstrung and dependent on the States. There are features -- in the text of the Constitution (original and in amendments), in the statute law, in the case law, in the bodies of federal regulations and other binding executive acts -- that represent far extremes and every conceivable point in between, implemented on narrow issues over the whole history of the Republic, with little in the way of rationalization over time.
To say that the US government is designed to do any one particular thing (other than be the US government) or to implement any one particular philosophy of the role, scale, or model of government is, well, fundamentally wrong and more misleading than useful.
None of those are proprietary in the sense of non-open, though they may be proprietary in the sense of non-standard.
IE does the best on a test suite that is composed disproportionately of tests developed and submitted by Microsoft to test the features of the applicable standards that are implemented by IE.
This is somewhat unsurprising, and also somewhat pointless.
I don't see it. Nothing that Google derives substantial revenue from is hurt by Firefox, so Google has no reason to be a threat to Firefox.
Um, what? This sentence wanders into bizarro world after the word "apps".
Extensions to Google cloud apps are, for the most part, also cloud hosted. There are browser extensions that tie into Google cloud apps, and some of them are Chrome-specific, but they are mostly peripheral to the functionality of the apps, which work on any modern browser.
Is there any indication that Microsoft is interested in writing Mozilla as big a check as Google is? Because if not, your whole "Go with Bing" plan would be opting for a clear, short-term threat to Firefox's viability in order to avoid a very speculative, long-term threat that doesn't have much of a sensible basis.
One of Google's key interests is encouraging apps to be built on open web technologies rather than OS/browser specific ones (especially ones that are specific to someone else's OS/browser.)
Every competing desktop browser with non-negligible marketshare advances that interest. If Firefox vanished and half its marketshare went to IE and half to Chrome, that would be a loss for Google, not a gain.
No. Its that you reduce deficits in boom times, which isn't the same thing as reducing expenses.
The last decade hasn't been "boon times" or "boom times", its been fairly weak growth during the parts of it that weren't recessions, with even worse distributional effects everywhere but the top few percent than is typical given the growth rates. The last boom times in this country was the Clinton-era expansion when the federal deficit was completely eliminated and a surplus acheived, which is a fairly good example of counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
The problem is that for most of the last decade, the particular set of tax cuts and spending increases that were adopted were poorly directed at economic growth. This isn't a pro- or counter-cyclical fiscal policy issue on the big-picture level, its much more about the details of the particular spending and tax policies.
Its earned by work. The only thing reducing (or even outright eliminating) the payroll tax would give up pretense of is that it is a purchased personal asset rather than an earned benefit.
No, its not.
A continuation of the current federal payroll tax "holiday" for a full year is being pushed by the President. Congress has a broad bipartisan agreement with this goal, but hasn't been able to agree on how to pay for it (Republicans want program cuts, Democrats what tax increases on the wealthy), and the compromise adopted in the Senate has been for a two-month extension to provide time for negotiations on a long-term solution.
Its actually between "paying the same money to the government as currently" (if the measure passes) and "paying more money to the government" (if it fails), paying less money isn't on the table.
No, if the law is not changed, payroll tax rates will change in January. If the law is changed, payroll tax rates will remain the same in January as they are now.
It will require them to be updated to reflect the same rates that the same systems applied for all of 2011, which -- even if the rates are hardcoded such that it requires a new build and code deployment -- should be fairly trivial. Since tax rate changes are a fairly regular occurrence, presumably on even moderately well-designed payroll systems this won't involve a code change at all, just a configuration change, table update, or something similar.