That's essentially true, but this beats out solar and wind on the grounds of power density.
So does thermonuclear power generation, which like travelling wave fission generators has the theoretical basics well-established but is still working out the engineering details for practical use in energy generation.
So do lots of other things that you can't actually deploy right now.
So pointing to this not-yet-usable form of nuclear fission generation as the "one true answer" to our energy needs is poppycock.
Its one potential thing that might, if and when it is practically deployable, have some advantages in certain applications and environments.
Or it might not, depending on what else is available when that happens.
For nations with not a lot of land area available to devote to energy farming, these will come out on top.
Or, buying energy from a regional grid will come out on top; just as for nations with not a lot of non-urbanized land for the more traditional kind of farming, buying food comes out on top.
pretty much all methods of storing power for any length of time require that you throw 40% to 50% of it away at a minimum.
That's not true; superconducting storage is about 95% efficient, round-trip; its really, really expensive right now, but we're nowhere near the point where storage for anything beyond power quality (avoiding minute-to-minute variations) from plants is needed for most of the grid, because we aren't anywhere near the deployment level for wind, solar, and similar technologies where they supply more than the total grid demand at their peak output. Once we reach that level of deployment, any storage technology (even an inefficient one) is useful to reduce demand on the peaker plants using on-demand technologies (whether hydro, nuclear, fossil fuel, or whatever else.)
You can run your laptop for a few hours off a little battery but to run a city you'd need skyscrapers entirely filled with batteries which all need to be replaced every year or so and god help you if there's a fire in the building.
Its possible one could imagine a worse energy storage system for the application under discussion than batteries, but it would require an effort; even just constraining oneself to chemical storage mechanisms, regenerative fuel cells are vastly superior.
But it doesn't really matter, because we haven't, in most of the world, reached anywhere close to the level of deployment of the relevant technologies where long-term storage would be a limiting factor to their further expansion.
After researching as much as possible into TWRs I'd say the current stage of developement is trying to get the exact alloy of uranium, burnable poisons (look these up too, they're sweet), etc just right to create a long lived sustained reaction.
IOW, its a stage comparable to much higher (than current) efficiency solar, nuclear fusion, and lots of other technologies where the theoretical groundwork has been laid but the engineering difficulties not worked out, and there is no basis for saying it is the "only solution" to anything, and it is especially dishonest to say it is the best future approach based on comparisons to existing alternatives with large scale deployment and not to other technologies that are in the same general state where the basic theory has been demonstrated but the engineering work necessary for viable, deployable solutions are still in progress.
Re:Can't forget Bill Gates didn't finish college
on
Bill Gates On Energy
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· Score: 2
Bill Gates is smart and has a whole lot of field-specific knowledge about PCs. He's not well educated outside his field.
I think he has a lot more field-specific knowledge about business, and particularly technology business, than he has about PCs, though not through formal education.
He also has some field specific knowledge about public policy for much the same reason, though not as much as about any of those other areas.
Let's let the let the guys with the PhDs in science, math, and engineering figure out energy policy.
A Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering qualifies you as an expert in any area of policy about as much as a Ph.D. in Public Policy and/or Administration qualifies you as an expert in science, math, or engineering.
Though, again, academic credentials aren't the only source or indicator of expertise.
You think fossil plants don't have this problem? They are a perpetual accident, we're just used to it and the cost (health problems, environmental damage, pollution, etc, etc.) are implicitly externalized onto society by now.
That's not entirely true on the "just used to it" from, or at least is misleading. Its not that those costs are discounted, its that the status quo external costs of fossil fuels are the common baseline now, such that the absence of those external costs is viewed as an external benefit justifying a subsidy. Subsidies for less-polluting energy production methods are a way of internalizing this external benefit (or, really, internalizing the external cost of fossil fuels.)
If nuclear were really economical, the public wouldn't have to offer loans to build the plants, and wouldn't have to assume liability for accidents.
The principle of subsidizing nuclear has always been the same as subsidizing other alternatives, that it is "not economical" only because of the fact that the externalities of its benefits (or, more properly, the external costs of fossil fuels) aren't properly internalized; externalizing the risks of nuclear power is based on the premise that this acts as a mechanism to internalize its external benefits compared to competing mechanism (principally, fossil fuels).
There is, of course, obviously room for debate over whether this overstates the relative value of the externalized risk of nuclear vs. internalized benefits when compared to fossil fuels, and whether the net effect of the subsidy creates too much of an incentive for nuclear compared to other non-fossil fuel alternatives that don't share its risks.
And, of course, those argument that nuclear is "economical" while other non-fossil-fuel alternatives are not based on the direct subsidies that are used for other fossil fuels but ignoring the massive subsidies provided to nuclear in the form of externalized risk (and the fact that the industry itself is unwilling to build more plants without even more subsidies) is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
Are there _any_ nuclear power plants in the US that could exist without large subsidies an tax relief though?
There are no nuclear plants in the U.S. that could exist without large subsidies in the form of shields from liability in the case of disaster that are not provided to other power generating industries, as well as other existing forms of government support that act as subsidies, and even with those large existing subsidies the industry isn't building new plants and is lobbying for more subsidies as a prerequisite for doing so.
Solutions that are only practical in 20% of the US doesn't help the other 80% of the country.
Yeah, its not like electricity can be used any place outside of a very small radius of where its generated. And its not like you can use different renewable solutions in different parts of the country so that several different solutions that are each only practical in a small part of the country could, together, work for most of the country.
Really? Because last I checked, there are about a billion ways of storing energy that are widely deployed on Earth right now.
Its true that we don't currently have lots of storage systems online for use with mains power (because we have historically used "live" generation almost exclusively for that purpose), and its true that just as any form of electricity transmission is lossy, storage and recovery of stored energy involve some losses,. But to say that "we don't have a way of storing" is completely ludicrous.
The farming lobby is one of the strongest in Congress. You'll have every midwestern senator and his brother screaming holy bloody murder before debate even begins.
I'm actually pretty sure that most of Congress, and particularly midwestern Senators that are plugged in to US agricultural interests, would be quite happy with the European Union ending farm subsidies; the E.U. (unlike the EE.UU.) isn't the U.S.
Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.
Reform the tax code so that instead of taxing capital income at a low rate while taxing labor income (and hiring workers) at a higher rate, you do the reverse, or at least equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital income (including, for instance, applying taxes that support Social Security and Medicare to capital income and including capital income in the benefit calculation for Social Security and the minimum credits calculation to qualify for Medicare benefits); this way: 1. You eliminate the tax incentive to automate (or offshore labor) when automation (or offshoring) and labor are equally cost-effective (or automation/offshoring is less cost effective, but by a small enough margin that it is more than offset by the tax distortion) before considering tax impacts. 2. You shift the returns to capital and labor so that those currently dependent on labor are more able to build wealth and begin acquiring capital, reducing the degree to which new capital goes to the current owners of capital, 3. You extend the same safety net to people making sufficient returns for current support (but not necessarily large excesses) through capital ownership as to those who are making the same income through labor, 4. Because of #1, you reduce the rate of job losses to automation and offshoring, 5. Because of #2 and #3, you increase, over time, the degree to which capital holding is spread throughout the economy, 6. Because of #5, over time, automation and offshoring (which are still going to happen, they'll just displace workers at a reduced pace without the tax incentive to eliminate local workers) become less harmful as a greater share of the population is able to earn a substantial living through managing capital resources.
Now, certainly, the existence of some of the current programs that are addressed by the policy above (Social Security and Medicare) could be considered a form of "socialism" in the loosest terms, but this proposal doesn't create them, they are status quo policies. All this proposal does is remove a market-distorting incentive created by the unequal treatment of different forms of income in the current tax code which exacerbates the problems being discussed. Removing distortions from unequal tax treatment that punish certain activities which earn income and reward other income-earning activities in favor of equal tax treatment of income is hardly "socialism".
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but back in the 80s were promised expert systems that would do these things and free us up for leisure time.
Labor "saving" advances never directly create leisure time, they simply reduce the labor input required (and thus the cost) to earn the same gross return on capital (thus increasing the net return on capital.) This can increase leisure time -- but only for capital owners, and only to the extent that they chose to retain the same level of income plus more leisure time rather than maintaining the effort in actively managing capital (and thus, the same mixture of working and leisure time) in favor of greater income. It certainly doesn't increase returns to labor, since it reduces demand for labor relative other industrial inputs.
We had a general manager who said that only quality products should be released to customers and as engineers we wholeheartedly agreed with him. The problem was that the vice-president of engineering had the view that it is best to be first to market and you can make it better after it ships.
These two requirements, as stated, are common in industry, and are pretty much exactly what Agile is directed at: You release quality product with a limited feature set first tat fills an unfilled need, and then expand the feature set in subsequent releases. You are, therefore, able to both release only quality product and release it quickly, making subsequent improvements that expand features after the initial release, without sacrificing quality.
While TFS and TFA call them "programming" mistakes, the actual source refers to them as the "Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors".
A programming mistake is one where you meant to type x+1 and instead you write x-1.
No, that's a typographical error, not a programming mistake.
A programming mistake is when you incorrectly analyze the requirements and think you need to type x-1 to correctly implement them when in fact you need to type x+1.
But either one results in a "software error"; the list and the original source are fine, the fluff piece in between the original source and Slashdot (and, consequently, the Slashdot summary) is the only potential problem here.
If software was a car, you wouldn't say it's a manufacturing problem if the car didn't have a place to install a lock - you'd say it's a design problem. It would only be a "programming" issue if it had a place for a lock but it was left uninstalled.
While its fun to construct ways to point the finger somewhere else in an organization, or to pedantically categorize errors in to narrow boxes, what I'd say is that its a failure of each and every person who had sufficient contact with the product that they should have seen the relevant facts, and sufficient technical skill that they should have recognized the error, and who either did not recognize the error or who did recognize the error but did not take action to have it corrected [whether that was implementing a fix or providing notice up the line]. Plus all the people responsible for the process that produced the error.
And most of the errors on the list are things that, whether or not they should be explicitly foreseen in requirements, programmers are positioned to recognize and ought to be taking steps to prevent. Programming isn't narrowly constrained assembly-line work, at least in any organization that expects to produce quality software.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I suspect you really mean that Oracle has a lot of PL/SQL features that MySQL doesn't have.
No, I mean SQL, not PL/SQL.
ANSI SQL doesn't really do a whole lot more than INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE and such.
If by "and such" you mean "and all the rest of the commands in ANSI SQL", then this is true by definition, but standard SQL does quite a bit that MYSQL SQL doesn't in terms both of supported commands and supported options within those commands. And, like most real world databases, Oracle's SQL has several extensions to the standard (within SQL, we aren't talking about PL/SQL which is a separate procedural language.) Oracle both supports more of the standard than MySQL does and has various useful extensions that MySQL doesn't. (The same is true of PostgreSQL vs. MySQL.)
For one broadly useful feature of the standard that is supported by current versions of DB2, Oracle, MS SQL, Postgres, and Firebird, but not MySQL, consider Common Table Expressions.
If the economy is so bad, why are stock indexes back to prerecession levels?
Because stock indexes don't measure the performance of the economy, either in aggregate or distributional terms. They measure the value of a (changing) selection of corporate stocks against a particular national currency, which really has only a distant relation to anything else. A decrease in the concentration of interest in particular stocks would drop stock indexes without any change in overall economic performance.
The budget needs to be balanced, and it can't be balanced on the backs of the tax payer alone.
I would hardly characterize a $200M/yr expanded application of sales tax in a budget that features over $10B/yr in spending cuts (with another $4B in triggered cuts if revenue doesn't meet expectations) as balancing the budget "on the backs of the tax payer alone".
First, with a single stroke, Amazon now gets 25k angry letters and phone calls made to the state gov't.
Given the number of angry letters and calls over the massive cutbacks in education in the current budget (or pick any one of the other big cuts with broad impact), 25k probably won't even get noticed.
Secondly, they also send a clear warning to any other state considering the same type of thing.
No, the warning was the first state they did it to. By now, every state -- including California -- considering such a move already knows how Amazon is going to react.
If California were more creative, they should have tried defining a nexus as anyone who uses a shipping service with warehouses and vehicle depots in the state of California.
Except that that's exactly the kind of nexus the Supreme Court specifically rejected as adequate in the cases establishing the physical presence test, so while there is plenty of reason to think that the Court might drop the physical presence taste based on changed factual circumstances, there is very little reason to think they would for that kind of nexus.
Meanwhile, in many (most?) places the fire department is volunteer
It may be in most "places" (i.e., by land area) [though maybe not; lots of land area is covered by federal agencies and state agencies like CalFIRE], but most of the local fire departments in heavily populated areas are professional, not volunteer.
the military is required by the US Constitution
No, it is explicitly authorized by the federal Constitution, rather than required by it.
and the roads are a clear use of the "general welfare" since everyone uses them.
Actually, the roads (insofar as the federal government is involved) aren't applications of any "general welfare" power, they are applications of the explicit grant of authority for post roads (since they are used by the postal service, whether or not that is there exclusive use), and national defense functions (e.g., the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and the, overlapping, Strategic Highway Network [STRAHNET].)
I don't completely disagree, but a higher reliance on property taxes would certainly not be helping the situation now.
Without California's existing property tax limitations, it might well have.
In case you haven't noticed, in most parts of California property values have taken a big dump the last couple of years.
Yes, but the California property bubble was enhanced because of California's property tax structure; in addition to the limits on the property tax rate, there is a limit on the increase in the assessed value and property is only assessed at full value when it is sold; this has made California localities extremely dependent on encouraging new development, redevelopment, and turnover, since increasing value of existing property (even at a rapid rate) results in revenues increasing slower than inflation (IIRC, the maximum increase in assessed value, regardless of market value, is 2% per annum.) Higher ad valorem taxes and assessment year-to-year at full market value would have dampened the bubble and weakened the bust, and provided a more stable tax base.
I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm pretty positive that this will blow up in California's face. You can't fix a deficit that big by adding a new tax
The ~$200M anticipated from extending the collection of sales tax is a drop in the bucket compared to the spending cuts and other measures taken to close the budget gap.
Virtually all of the deficit reduction is being done by spending cuts (most of them immediate, some of them triggered cuts if revenue doesn't improve as much as the budget anticipates.)
Since Texas theoretically can secede from the union
Any theoretical right of Texas to secede was pretty firmly extinguished the first time they tried to secede.
then why can't the union secede California?
Since California remains a net contributor to the federal government (that is, the union is a drag on California rather than vice versa), the union expelling (not seceding, which makes no sense) California would be worse for the union and than for California (it might even be a net benefit for California.) If California took up the responsibility of providing the same value of services as California receives from the feds, but wasn't dragged down by the funds that go to the feds from California to pay for services to the rest of the union, it would reduce either the overall tax burden or the overall government deficit (or both) California was dealing with.
The problem is, the stuff the government spends money on is *necessarily* valued less than stuff the private sector spends money on.
This is true if and only if you ignore externalities (benefits or costs accruing to those not directly participating in an economic transaction), which is a very common simplifying assumption in introductory economics classes, but no more representative of economic reality than ignoring friction is of physical reality.
Amazon's position has been tested all the way to the Supreme Court. Amazon is in the right and CA is trying to do something the Constitution prohibits.
It's worth noting that the Supreme Court's Quill decision in 1992, while upholding the Bella Hess (1967) physical presence test, did so not on the basis that physical presence was inherently Constitutionally mandatory (indeed, it took the unusual step of specifically noting that it was likely that, had the issue been one of first impression in 1992, the decision would have been different) but that the combination of the value of maintaining precedent and having a bright-line rule, in the circumstances actually present at the time, outweighed the benefits from adopting a more flexible approach to determining whether a sufficient nexus existed to allow a state to collect sales and use taxes on a transaction. Add to that that "on-line affiliates", the nexus used in many of the recent state taxes on online merchants, are not a kind of nexus that existed at the time of Bella Hess, or even Quill, and its quite easy to see the Court today not applying a strict physical presence test, and either applying alternate nexus criteria that would include on-line affiliates or simplying overruling the physical presence test altogether.
Oddly, this may be even more true given the heavily conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, because the conservative justices on the Court tend both to favor state (as opposed to federal) power and to read the federal powers (including the negative ones at issue here) in the Commerce Clause narrowly.
XE is a free for development use, not production use, version of Oracle Database.
False. The free (gratis) license for XE allows both development and production use (internal production use, and redistribution to licensees provided that the licensee accepts the same XE license as well as the license for your software.) Go read the "License Rights" section again.
Slashdot Mirror
So does thermonuclear power generation, which like travelling wave fission generators has the theoretical basics well-established but is still working out the engineering details for practical use in energy generation.
So do lots of other things that you can't actually deploy right now.
So pointing to this not-yet-usable form of nuclear fission generation as the "one true answer" to our energy needs is poppycock.
Its one potential thing that might, if and when it is practically deployable, have some advantages in certain applications and environments.
Or it might not, depending on what else is available when that happens.
Or, buying energy from a regional grid will come out on top; just as for nations with not a lot of non-urbanized land for the more traditional kind of farming, buying food comes out on top.
That's not true; superconducting storage is about 95% efficient, round-trip; its really, really expensive right now, but we're nowhere near the point where storage for anything beyond power quality (avoiding minute-to-minute variations) from plants is needed for most of the grid, because we aren't anywhere near the deployment level for wind, solar, and similar technologies where they supply more than the total grid demand at their peak output. Once we reach that level of deployment, any storage technology (even an inefficient one) is useful to reduce demand on the peaker plants using on-demand technologies (whether hydro, nuclear, fossil fuel, or whatever else.)
Its possible one could imagine a worse energy storage system for the application under discussion than batteries, but it would require an effort; even just constraining oneself to chemical storage mechanisms, regenerative fuel cells are vastly superior.
But it doesn't really matter, because we haven't, in most of the world, reached anywhere close to the level of deployment of the relevant technologies where long-term storage would be a limiting factor to their further expansion.
IOW, its a stage comparable to much higher (than current) efficiency solar, nuclear fusion, and lots of other technologies where the theoretical groundwork has been laid but the engineering difficulties not worked out, and there is no basis for saying it is the "only solution" to anything, and it is especially dishonest to say it is the best future approach based on comparisons to existing alternatives with large scale deployment and not to other technologies that are in the same general state where the basic theory has been demonstrated but the engineering work necessary for viable, deployable solutions are still in progress.
I think he has a lot more field-specific knowledge about business, and particularly technology business, than he has about PCs, though not through formal education.
He also has some field specific knowledge about public policy for much the same reason, though not as much as about any of those other areas.
A Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering qualifies you as an expert in any area of policy about as much as a Ph.D. in Public Policy and/or Administration qualifies you as an expert in science, math, or engineering.
Though, again, academic credentials aren't the only source or indicator of expertise.
That's not entirely true on the "just used to it" from, or at least is misleading. Its not that those costs are discounted, its that the status quo external costs of fossil fuels are the common baseline now, such that the absence of those external costs is viewed as an external benefit justifying a subsidy. Subsidies for less-polluting energy production methods are a way of internalizing this external benefit (or, really, internalizing the external cost of fossil fuels.)
The principle of subsidizing nuclear has always been the same as subsidizing other alternatives, that it is "not economical" only because of the fact that the externalities of its benefits (or, more properly, the external costs of fossil fuels) aren't properly internalized; externalizing the risks of nuclear power is based on the premise that this acts as a mechanism to internalize its external benefits compared to competing mechanism (principally, fossil fuels).
There is, of course, obviously room for debate over whether this overstates the relative value of the externalized risk of nuclear vs. internalized benefits when compared to fossil fuels, and whether the net effect of the subsidy creates too much of an incentive for nuclear compared to other non-fossil fuel alternatives that don't share its risks.
And, of course, those argument that nuclear is "economical" while other non-fossil-fuel alternatives are not based on the direct subsidies that are used for other fossil fuels but ignoring the massive subsidies provided to nuclear in the form of externalized risk (and the fact that the industry itself is unwilling to build more plants without even more subsidies) is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
There are no nuclear plants in the U.S. that could exist without large subsidies in the form of shields from liability in the case of disaster that are not provided to other power generating industries, as well as other existing forms of government support that act as subsidies, and even with those large existing subsidies the industry isn't building new plants and is lobbying for more subsidies as a prerequisite for doing so.
Yeah, its not like electricity can be used any place outside of a very small radius of where its generated. And its not like you can use different renewable solutions in different parts of the country so that several different solutions that are each only practical in a small part of the country could, together, work for most of the country.
Really? Because last I checked, there are about a billion ways of storing energy that are widely deployed on Earth right now.
Its true that we don't currently have lots of storage systems online for use with mains power (because we have historically used "live" generation almost exclusively for that purpose), and its true that just as any form of electricity transmission is lossy, storage and recovery of stored energy involve some losses,. But to say that "we don't have a way of storing" is completely ludicrous.
I'm actually pretty sure that most of Congress, and particularly midwestern Senators that are plugged in to US agricultural interests, would be quite happy with the European Union ending farm subsidies; the E.U. (unlike the EE.UU.) isn't the U.S.
By not opting in. Neither Google+ nor Google Profiles are default for most google services (Buzz requires a profile, and Google+ obviously does.)
Google is just deleting all private profiles when this goes into effect. Its not forcing people to acquire public ones.
Reform the tax code so that instead of taxing capital income at a low rate while taxing labor income (and hiring workers) at a higher rate, you do the reverse, or at least equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital income (including, for instance, applying taxes that support Social Security and Medicare to capital income and including capital income in the benefit calculation for Social Security and the minimum credits calculation to qualify for Medicare benefits); this way:
1. You eliminate the tax incentive to automate (or offshore labor) when automation (or offshoring) and labor are equally cost-effective (or automation/offshoring is less cost effective, but by a small enough margin that it is more than offset by the tax distortion) before considering tax impacts.
2. You shift the returns to capital and labor so that those currently dependent on labor are more able to build wealth and begin acquiring capital, reducing the degree to which new capital goes to the current owners of capital,
3. You extend the same safety net to people making sufficient returns for current support (but not necessarily large excesses) through capital ownership as to those who are making the same income through labor,
4. Because of #1, you reduce the rate of job losses to automation and offshoring,
5. Because of #2 and #3, you increase, over time, the degree to which capital holding is spread throughout the economy,
6. Because of #5, over time, automation and offshoring (which are still going to happen, they'll just displace workers at a reduced pace without the tax incentive to eliminate local workers) become less harmful as a greater share of the population is able to earn a substantial living through managing capital resources.
Now, certainly, the existence of some of the current programs that are addressed by the policy above (Social Security and Medicare) could be considered a form of "socialism" in the loosest terms, but this proposal doesn't create them, they are status quo policies. All this proposal does is remove a market-distorting incentive created by the unequal treatment of different forms of income in the current tax code which exacerbates the problems being discussed. Removing distortions from unequal tax treatment that punish certain activities which earn income and reward other income-earning activities in favor of equal tax treatment of income is hardly "socialism".
Labor "saving" advances never directly create leisure time, they simply reduce the labor input required (and thus the cost) to earn the same gross return on capital (thus increasing the net return on capital.) This can increase leisure time -- but only for capital owners, and only to the extent that they chose to retain the same level of income plus more leisure time rather than maintaining the effort in actively managing capital (and thus, the same mixture of working and leisure time) in favor of greater income. It certainly doesn't increase returns to labor, since it reduces demand for labor relative other industrial inputs.
These two requirements, as stated, are common in industry, and are pretty much exactly what Agile is directed at: You release quality product with a limited feature set first tat fills an unfilled need, and then expand the feature set in subsequent releases. You are, therefore, able to both release only quality product and release it quickly, making subsequent improvements that expand features after the initial release, without sacrificing quality.
While TFS and TFA call them "programming" mistakes, the actual source refers to them as the "Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors".
No, that's a typographical error, not a programming mistake.
A programming mistake is when you incorrectly analyze the requirements and think you need to type x-1 to correctly implement them when in fact you need to type x+1.
But either one results in a "software error"; the list and the original source are fine, the fluff piece in between the original source and Slashdot (and, consequently, the Slashdot summary) is the only potential problem here.
While its fun to construct ways to point the finger somewhere else in an organization, or to pedantically categorize errors in to narrow boxes, what I'd say is that its a failure of each and every person who had sufficient contact with the product that they should have seen the relevant facts, and sufficient technical skill that they should have recognized the error, and who either did not recognize the error or who did recognize the error but did not take action to have it corrected [whether that was implementing a fix or providing notice up the line]. Plus all the people responsible for the process that produced the error.
And most of the errors on the list are things that, whether or not they should be explicitly foreseen in requirements, programmers are positioned to recognize and ought to be taking steps to prevent. Programming isn't narrowly constrained assembly-line work, at least in any organization that expects to produce quality software.
No, I mean SQL, not PL/SQL.
If by "and such" you mean "and all the rest of the commands in ANSI SQL", then this is true by definition, but standard SQL does quite a bit that MYSQL SQL doesn't in terms both of supported commands and supported options within those commands. And, like most real world databases, Oracle's SQL has several extensions to the standard (within SQL, we aren't talking about PL/SQL which is a separate procedural language.) Oracle both supports more of the standard than MySQL does and has various useful extensions that MySQL doesn't. (The same is true of PostgreSQL vs. MySQL.)
For one broadly useful feature of the standard that is supported by current versions of DB2, Oracle, MS SQL, Postgres, and Firebird, but not MySQL, consider Common Table Expressions.
Because stock indexes don't measure the performance of the economy, either in aggregate or distributional terms. They measure the value of a (changing) selection of corporate stocks against a particular national currency, which really has only a distant relation to anything else. A decrease in the concentration of interest in particular stocks would drop stock indexes without any change in overall economic performance.
I would hardly characterize a $200M/yr expanded application of sales tax in a budget that features over $10B/yr in spending cuts (with another $4B in triggered cuts if revenue doesn't meet expectations) as balancing the budget "on the backs of the tax payer alone".
Given the number of angry letters and calls over the massive cutbacks in education in the current budget (or pick any one of the other big cuts with broad impact), 25k probably won't even get noticed.
No, the warning was the first state they did it to. By now, every state -- including California -- considering such a move already knows how Amazon is going to react.
Except that that's exactly the kind of nexus the Supreme Court specifically rejected as adequate in the cases establishing the physical presence test, so while there is plenty of reason to think that the Court might drop the physical presence taste based on changed factual circumstances, there is very little reason to think they would for that kind of nexus.
It may be in most "places" (i.e., by land area) [though maybe not; lots of land area is covered by federal agencies and state agencies like CalFIRE], but most of the local fire departments in heavily populated areas are professional, not volunteer.
No, it is explicitly authorized by the federal Constitution, rather than required by it.
Actually, the roads (insofar as the federal government is involved) aren't applications of any "general welfare" power, they are applications of the explicit grant of authority for post roads (since they are used by the postal service, whether or not that is there exclusive use), and national defense functions (e.g., the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and the, overlapping, Strategic Highway Network [STRAHNET].)
Without California's existing property tax limitations, it might well have.
Yes, but the California property bubble was enhanced because of California's property tax structure; in addition to the limits on the property tax rate, there is a limit on the increase in the assessed value and property is only assessed at full value when it is sold; this has made California localities extremely dependent on encouraging new development, redevelopment, and turnover, since increasing value of existing property (even at a rapid rate) results in revenues increasing slower than inflation (IIRC, the maximum increase in assessed value, regardless of market value, is 2% per annum.) Higher ad valorem taxes and assessment year-to-year at full market value would have dampened the bubble and weakened the bust, and provided a more stable tax base.
The ~$200M anticipated from extending the collection of sales tax is a drop in the bucket compared to the spending cuts and other measures taken to close the budget gap.
Virtually all of the deficit reduction is being done by spending cuts (most of them immediate, some of them triggered cuts if revenue doesn't improve as much as the budget anticipates.)
Any theoretical right of Texas to secede was pretty firmly extinguished the first time they tried to secede.
Since California remains a net contributor to the federal government (that is, the union is a drag on California rather than vice versa), the union expelling (not seceding, which makes no sense) California would be worse for the union and than for California (it might even be a net benefit for California.) If California took up the responsibility of providing the same value of services as California receives from the feds, but wasn't dragged down by the funds that go to the feds from California to pay for services to the rest of the union, it would reduce either the overall tax burden or the overall government deficit (or both) California was dealing with.
This is true if and only if you ignore externalities (benefits or costs accruing to those not directly participating in an economic transaction), which is a very common simplifying assumption in introductory economics classes, but no more representative of economic reality than ignoring friction is of physical reality.
It's worth noting that the Supreme Court's Quill decision in 1992, while upholding the Bella Hess (1967) physical presence test, did so not on the basis that physical presence was inherently Constitutionally mandatory (indeed, it took the unusual step of specifically noting that it was likely that, had the issue been one of first impression in 1992, the decision would have been different) but that the combination of the value of maintaining precedent and having a bright-line rule, in the circumstances actually present at the time, outweighed the benefits from adopting a more flexible approach to determining whether a sufficient nexus existed to allow a state to collect sales and use taxes on a transaction. Add to that that "on-line affiliates", the nexus used in many of the recent state taxes on online merchants, are not a kind of nexus that existed at the time of Bella Hess, or even Quill, and its quite easy to see the Court today not applying a strict physical presence test, and either applying alternate nexus criteria that would include on-line affiliates or simplying overruling the physical presence test altogether.
Oddly, this may be even more true given the heavily conservative makeup of the current Supreme Court, because the conservative justices on the Court tend both to favor state (as opposed to federal) power and to read the federal powers (including the negative ones at issue here) in the Commerce Clause narrowly.
False. The free (gratis) license for XE allows both development and production use (internal production use, and redistribution to licensees provided that the licensee accepts the same XE license as well as the license for your software.) Go read the "License Rights" section again.