What if the doctor lies about their performance? Or like was popular in the 80's TV news shows moves from state to state setting up news businesses but performing the same malpractice? Any attempt by the government to require publishing accountable performance metrics is always met with "undo government regulation" by libertarians and conservatives.. Checks and balances are fundamental to a market and to say the government has no place in them defies the result of the past 200 years.
In the popular media we always hear about how negative workers unions are on the "free market" but those same pundits never say a word about corporate trade unions. If union busting is so great for the economy then lets bust up the corporate ones as well.
I am sure all the "job creator" corporate executives who constantly bemoan any and all government regulations claiming they interfere with the "free market" will certainly oppose this kind of transparency. However, a common knowledge of market prices forms the very basis of free markets!!! I personally wish the IRS would publish personal income data for all US citizens. Then we would see real market competition, people striving to find where the money is going and attempting to compete for those positions. If an employer is over or under compensating an employee they should certainly be able to market a rational reason for their action. As the saying goes, "Knowledge is Power" and those in the labor consumer role will do whatever they are legally allowed to do enhance their bargaining power.
Funny how the Chinese use tariffs to protect their industries and their economy is booming while our leadership bleats "unfettered trade, no taxes!" and our economy is declining and our government going bankrupt. Surely the communist Chinese are adhereing to the lenin axiom "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Our pie-eyed leadership is so focused on short term greed that they cannot see the long term threat.
Nixon officially ended the US gold standard in 1972. In the decades since, with the federal reserve corporation fully in control of monetary supply, the common American has seen their income stagnate for the past three decades while the top 10%, who coincidentally are financially well connected to the moneyed banks and corporations, have been reaping all the income gains and increases in wealth. Income disparity has never been greater in America than now. Is that a mark of success? With the economy in the anemic condition it is in and the federal reserve corporation has no more monetary gimmicks to play we all shall see what the real economy is when it finally corrects itself. I for one side with great Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson that central banking is vile and contrary to Republican principle.
Ron Paul authored a bill to allow competing currencies so it is not accurate to say he is only for imposing an exclusive gold or silver standard. Maybe even a bitcoin currency would be fully legal tender under a Ron Paul presidency:)
Very true. Ron Paul would take on the federal reserve corporation unlike barry has done or the McCain would have. The globalist money manipulation is at the root of the global recession and long term trade imbalances. Only Ron Paul has the gumption to challenge the banksters. America is a great experiment and we need to go back to having 50 sub-experiments as was intended with the 10th Amendment and States rights, something Ron Paul has always been fully in favor of. I hardly agree with all of Ron Paul's political beliefs but his adherence to limited Federal government would leave me with more influence in deciding political matters locally rather than in the corruption that comes with the centralization of power in DC.
At least in Texas deregulation also played a huge part in the astronomical increase in tuition. Of course when the federal reserve corporation is printing money at 0% interest hyperinflation will eventually surface somewhere at some point.
Collective Punishment is a lazy and reviled method of government action which defiles the very idea of Justice. There was a time in this country where our leaders fretted over government encroachment stating things like "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated". In the digital era it is inexcusable that the government cannot make a best effort to identify offending content and release the rest of the content back to their rightful property owners. This is just another instance where the government favors the interests of the financial elites over the interests of the average citizen.
Just as America was a "Great Experiment" so is copyright law. The whole intent of it was to balance the incentives of content producers and consumers with the main goal of maximizing the progress of the Arts and Sciences. Today it has been perverted into an entitlement system where the government enforces perpetual royalties. In the information age where millions have higher educational skills the antiquated copyright laws only server to retard innovation. Even worse anyone caught in ambiguity like the person EFF is championing is now automatically presumed guilty. Fortunately this injustice is not lost on everyone. I feel EFF is the most effective non-profit organization I donate to and I plan to increase my monthly contribution.
I hope they don't stop printing the "Great Books of the Western World" series too. I plan to buy the series in the next few years. Of course that collection is timeless and will not change like contemporary topics do.
I am not a Chinese government fan by any means but as a sovereign country they have an obligation to protect the interests of their citizens above the financial gains of the globalists. Besides, these are the same guys that say the free market solves all problems. As the price of these materials go up alternatives should surface or recycling efficiency should increase.
One more thing, Steam does not currently integrate with Windows Media Center so if you want to run your HTPC completely through WMC you are out of luck unless you want to spend a few hour researching and building your own WMC launcher.
I tried to make my own Steam gaming box as a part of the HTPC I built over the Christmas break. First, Valve has not delivered the Steam Big Picture mode which it promised a year ago (!). This means you need to use the native Windows application navigation with small fonts that even on a big HDTV it is difficult to read and navigate. Next Steam just acts as wrapper to native Windows games so there are still installer/update issues. As my first effort I tried to get Mass Effect 1 to run on my HDTV through steam and spent a couple of hours trying to determine why the launcher would silently die. It turns out I needed to manually download a patch from EA that Steam did not automatically include and apply it along with setting the game launcher to run as administrator. Not very user friendly at all. Then, I find out that on the PC Bioware/EA crippled game controller support for Mass Effect since they want you to buy the XBox 360 version for that so it only supports native mouse/keyboard. I had to buy a third party utility, xpadder, and manually create an control schema myself that works OK with a wireless 360 controller.
With all that said, I will continue to use Steam as a lower end cloud based backup service for buying bargain games future proofed against console obsolescence. Beyond that, Steam still requires all the PC gaming overhead of troubleshooting/patching/driver updates and probably will never provide the plug and play experience the polished consoles can.
I am not sure what XML3D provides that X3D or Collada does not. Another "not invented here" technology? 3D scene creation is complex and compelling visualizations will never be able to be XML hand coded like HTML can be.
The Apple execs are akin to the 1800s plantation owners in that they claim without slavery they can't produce the products the market demands. How many of these dormitory workers are able to afford any of Apple's products? Whenever workers are unable to afford the products they produce themselves it leads to an unsustainable economy. Our country learned that during the Great Depression but our generation has forgotten all the lessons from that experience. Of course the global economy has been floated some time by currency manipulation by both China and the US but once those parlor games no longer work the reality of the true economy will reveal itself.
China is still a communist nation; what would happen to Apple if some sort of conflict erupts between the US and China and China either implements a US embargo or nationalizes Apples manufactures for the good of the Chinese party? Certainly the Apple execs have thought about this and have made certain that they get compensated regardless.
The ironic thing is that Apple claims they have no responsibility to help solve the US economic and unemployment problems while at the same time they donate millions to candidates and lobbyists to protect and promote their own special interests, drowning out the voice of everyday Americans. This is like when the Madoffs of the corporate world who spend their whole lives combating regulations and "government interference" are interviewed after a huge fraud is exposed and the first words out of their mouths are "It may be unethical but it is not illegal".
As Socrates wrote long ago:
"I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good, public and private."
Good point. If a piece of content was universally offensive then it would never be created because the authors of the content would be offended by the idea and not manifest it into reality.
Quote from former Alan Greenspan: "First off The Federal Reserve is an Independent Agency which basically means no other agency can over rule of the actions that we take." The federal reserve corporation believes and acts as if it is above the laws of our Republic, regardless of whatever the law actually is.
My concern is that this type of technology could be used as tool of oppression by authoritarian governments who would use it to stratify a population into those friendly to the regime and those who are declared hostile. This type of technology and the resulting power it would yeild could be abused and it should be the electorate that sets the policy around its use. In this case the sharing of sensitive citizen data with a foreign country reflects poorly on the sovereignty of Afganistan.
Yes, the company Micro$oft licensed the Kinect technology from Open Sourced the platform at openni.org and Asus has already has released a Kinect competitor called the Xtion Pro. If someone has a good motion capture product idea they can develop it independently of M$. This is just a ploy by Micro$oft to the troll the community for promising future product ideas so that they can patent the most promising ones for themselves.
Yes, the malcontents organized and publicly expressed their grievances to the government. They are expected to silently suffer individually, out of sight and out of mind; down the memory hole where not my problem is not my problem until it becomes my problem.
Last week on HDNet Dan Rather Reports did a special on Singapore schools, some of the best in the world. One thing that stuck out in my mind is that culturally the teaching profession is held in the highest esteem there. Here in America teaching has become a job of last resort where only the desperate or truely dedicated put up with the abuse and meager wages. There was a time in America where learning was cherished as a virtuous means of self improvement for both private and public good as the ancient greek philosophers promoted. Now with avarice instead of virtue motivating our country teachers are restricted to simply programming automatons for a standardized test and are held in contempt for being in any way associated with the government. Respect and upraise our teachers; they are directly involved in defining our country's future.
People who collect sealed box games like me could be held legally liable if we sell an item we believe to be unopened but later find out from the purchaser that this is not the case. Gamestop sells many special collector edition games and if they don't clarify their policy on this type of product tampering they stand to lose considerable business.
Free trade agreements destroyed all the manufacturing jobs that the midwest depended upon whereas Texas has always had agricultural and natural resources to generate wealth from. If you leave the urban areas of Texas and enter the rural parts the economy is as bad there as it is anywhere else in the nation. Don't try to spin that the general economy and government revenues in Texas are so much better than the rest of the country due to corporate pandering. People who have lived in Texas longer than you know better.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the doctor lies about their performance? Or like was popular in the 80's TV news shows moves from state to state setting up news businesses but performing the same malpractice? Any attempt by the government to require publishing accountable performance metrics is always met with "undo government regulation" by libertarians and conservatives.. Checks and balances are fundamental to a market and to say the government has no place in them defies the result of the past 200 years.
In the popular media we always hear about how negative workers unions are on the "free market" but those same pundits never say a word about corporate trade unions. If union busting is so great for the economy then lets bust up the corporate ones as well.
I am sure all the "job creator" corporate executives who constantly bemoan any and all government regulations claiming they interfere with the "free market" will certainly oppose this kind of transparency. However, a common knowledge of market prices forms the very basis of free markets!!! I personally wish the IRS would publish personal income data for all US citizens. Then we would see real market competition, people striving to find where the money is going and attempting to compete for those positions. If an employer is over or under compensating an employee they should certainly be able to market a rational reason for their action. As the saying goes, "Knowledge is Power" and those in the labor consumer role will do whatever they are legally allowed to do enhance their bargaining power.
This article reminds me of the STNG episode "The Chase"
Funny how the Chinese use tariffs to protect their industries and their economy is booming while our leadership bleats "unfettered trade, no taxes!" and our economy is declining and our government going bankrupt. Surely the communist Chinese are adhereing to the lenin axiom "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." Our pie-eyed leadership is so focused on short term greed that they cannot see the long term threat.
Nixon officially ended the US gold standard in 1972. In the decades since, with the federal reserve corporation fully in control of monetary supply, the common American has seen their income stagnate for the past three decades while the top 10%, who coincidentally are financially well connected to the moneyed banks and corporations, have been reaping all the income gains and increases in wealth. Income disparity has never been greater in America than now. Is that a mark of success? With the economy in the anemic condition it is in and the federal reserve corporation has no more monetary gimmicks to play we all shall see what the real economy is when it finally corrects itself. I for one side with great Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson that central banking is vile and contrary to Republican principle.
Ron Paul authored a bill to allow competing currencies so it is not accurate to say he is only for imposing an exclusive gold or silver standard. Maybe even a bitcoin currency would be fully legal tender under a Ron Paul presidency :)
Very true. Ron Paul would take on the federal reserve corporation unlike barry has done or the McCain would have. The globalist money manipulation is at the root of the global recession and long term trade imbalances. Only Ron Paul has the gumption to challenge the banksters. America is a great experiment and we need to go back to having 50 sub-experiments as was intended with the 10th Amendment and States rights, something Ron Paul has always been fully in favor of. I hardly agree with all of Ron Paul's political beliefs but his adherence to limited Federal government would leave me with more influence in deciding political matters locally rather than in the corruption that comes with the centralization of power in DC.
At least in Texas deregulation also played a huge part in the astronomical increase in tuition. Of course when the federal reserve corporation is printing money at 0% interest hyperinflation will eventually surface somewhere at some point.
Collective Punishment is a lazy and reviled method of government action which defiles the very idea of Justice. There was a time in this country where our leaders fretted over government encroachment stating things like "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated". In the digital era it is inexcusable that the government cannot make a best effort to identify offending content and release the rest of the content back to their rightful property owners. This is just another instance where the government favors the interests of the financial elites over the interests of the average citizen.
Just as America was a "Great Experiment" so is copyright law. The whole intent of it was to balance the incentives of content producers and consumers with the main goal of maximizing the progress of the Arts and Sciences. Today it has been perverted into an entitlement system where the government enforces perpetual royalties. In the information age where millions have higher educational skills the antiquated copyright laws only server to retard innovation. Even worse anyone caught in ambiguity like the person EFF is championing is now automatically presumed guilty. Fortunately this injustice is not lost on everyone. I feel EFF is the most effective non-profit organization I donate to and I plan to increase my monthly contribution.
I hope they don't stop printing the "Great Books of the Western World" series too. I plan to buy the series in the next few years. Of course that collection is timeless and will not change like contemporary topics do.
I am not a Chinese government fan by any means but as a sovereign country they have an obligation to protect the interests of their citizens above the financial gains of the globalists. Besides, these are the same guys that say the free market solves all problems. As the price of these materials go up alternatives should surface or recycling efficiency should increase.
One more thing, Steam does not currently integrate with Windows Media Center so if you want to run your HTPC completely through WMC you are out of luck unless you want to spend a few hour researching and building your own WMC launcher.
I tried to make my own Steam gaming box as a part of the HTPC I built over the Christmas break. First, Valve has not delivered the Steam Big Picture mode which it promised a year ago (!). This means you need to use the native Windows application navigation with small fonts that even on a big HDTV it is difficult to read and navigate. Next Steam just acts as wrapper to native Windows games so there are still installer/update issues. As my first effort I tried to get Mass Effect 1 to run on my HDTV through steam and spent a couple of hours trying to determine why the launcher would silently die. It turns out I needed to manually download a patch from EA that Steam did not automatically include and apply it along with setting the game launcher to run as administrator. Not very user friendly at all. Then, I find out that on the PC Bioware/EA crippled game controller support for Mass Effect since they want you to buy the XBox 360 version for that so it only supports native mouse/keyboard. I had to buy a third party utility, xpadder, and manually create an control schema myself that works OK with a wireless 360 controller.
With all that said, I will continue to use Steam as a lower end cloud based backup service for buying bargain games future proofed against console obsolescence. Beyond that, Steam still requires all the PC gaming overhead of troubleshooting/patching/driver updates and probably will never provide the plug and play experience the polished consoles can.
I am not sure what XML3D provides that X3D or Collada does not. Another "not invented here" technology? 3D scene creation is complex and compelling visualizations will never be able to be XML hand coded like HTML can be.
The Apple execs are akin to the 1800s plantation owners in that they claim without slavery they can't produce the products the market demands. How many of these dormitory workers are able to afford any of Apple's products? Whenever workers are unable to afford the products they produce themselves it leads to an unsustainable economy. Our country learned that during the Great Depression but our generation has forgotten all the lessons from that experience. Of course the global economy has been floated some time by currency manipulation by both China and the US but once those parlor games no longer work the reality of the true economy will reveal itself.
China is still a communist nation; what would happen to Apple if some sort of conflict erupts between the US and China and China either implements a US embargo or nationalizes Apples manufactures for the good of the Chinese party? Certainly the Apple execs have thought about this and have made certain that they get compensated regardless.
The ironic thing is that Apple claims they have no responsibility to help solve the US economic and unemployment problems while at the same time they donate millions to candidates and lobbyists to protect and promote their own special interests, drowning out the voice of everyday Americans. This is like when the Madoffs of the corporate world who spend their whole lives combating regulations and "government interference" are interviewed after a huge fraud is exposed and the first words out of their mouths are "It may be unethical but it is not illegal".
As Socrates wrote long ago:
"I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good, public and private."
Good point. If a piece of content was universally offensive then it would never be created because the authors of the content would be offended by the idea and not manifest it into reality.
Quote from former Alan Greenspan: "First off The Federal Reserve is an Independent Agency which basically means no other agency can over rule of the actions that we take." The federal reserve corporation believes and acts as if it is above the laws of our Republic, regardless of whatever the law actually is.
My concern is that this type of technology could be used as tool of oppression by authoritarian governments who would use it to stratify a population into those friendly to the regime and those who are declared hostile. This type of technology and the resulting power it would yeild could be abused and it should be the electorate that sets the policy around its use. In this case the sharing of sensitive citizen data with a foreign country reflects poorly on the sovereignty of Afganistan.
Yes, the company Micro$oft licensed the Kinect technology from Open Sourced the platform at openni.org and Asus has already has released a Kinect competitor called the Xtion Pro. If someone has a good motion capture product idea they can develop it independently of M$. This is just a ploy by Micro$oft to the troll the community for promising future product ideas so that they can patent the most promising ones for themselves.
Yes, the malcontents organized and publicly expressed their grievances to the government. They are expected to silently suffer individually, out of sight and out of mind; down the memory hole where not my problem is not my problem until it becomes my problem.
Last week on HDNet Dan Rather Reports did a special on Singapore schools, some of the best in the world. One thing that stuck out in my mind is that culturally the teaching profession is held in the highest esteem there. Here in America teaching has become a job of last resort where only the desperate or truely dedicated put up with the abuse and meager wages. There was a time in America where learning was cherished as a virtuous means of self improvement for both private and public good as the ancient greek philosophers promoted. Now with avarice instead of virtue motivating our country teachers are restricted to simply programming automatons for a standardized test and are held in contempt for being in any way associated with the government. Respect and upraise our teachers; they are directly involved in defining our country's future.
Its the plutonomy, stupid
People who collect sealed box games like me could be held legally liable if we sell an item we believe to be unopened but later find out from the purchaser that this is not the case. Gamestop sells many special collector edition games and if they don't clarify their policy on this type of product tampering they stand to lose considerable business.
Free trade agreements destroyed all the manufacturing jobs that the midwest depended upon whereas Texas has always had agricultural and natural resources to generate wealth from. If you leave the urban areas of Texas and enter the rural parts the economy is as bad there as it is anywhere else in the nation. Don't try to spin that the general economy and government revenues in Texas are so much better than the rest of the country due to corporate pandering. People who have lived in Texas longer than you know better.