Raising taxes is proven not to work, and has a dampening effect on the economy.
Lowering taxes is proven not to work as well... and cutting expenses also has a dampening effect on the economy. In the US now, you need higher total taxes. And cuts. Cutting 1.2 trillion on defense and "discretionary spending" just isn't possible, as that is pretty much the complete spending outside social security/medicare/medic aid.
Also, the US needs to revisit how health care is done... the cost as part of GDP is almost twice as other countries, e.g. Norway - but still, a large part of the population isn't covered. The results (life expectance, child mortality rate etc) are worse, and the cost higher.
Shame we can't get a balanced budget amendment (with an exception for DECLARED wars) passed. Probably wouldn't work, but it looks like it's the only real option that has a chance.
That's a really, really bad idea. Over time, it should be balanced - obviously. But if you have set up a constraint so that a big downturn - and thus a spike in demand for certain sevices - have to be met with big cuts at the same same time, you're creating a death spiral.
A much better approach is to build reserves and pay down debt in good times, and have a deficit in bad times. The US' problem isn't that it's spending too much money right now, it's that the deficit has been growing massively in good years too. One major contributor is unfunded tax cuts...
That's not exactly true. Obama and the Dems tried to let at least some of them expire, but that was blocked by the Tea Party faction.
That was just a minor subset of them. Symbolic sure, but that's not where there is enough money. There aren't enough rich people. Tax cuts that can't be funded shouldn't be enacted, but noone has the guts to fix it. The US needs balance first (soon), and then later tax cuts can be looked into when the funding is there. Although they might want to pay down a bit on the debt first....
For someone from a country with a better grip on its economy, the whole ordeal seems rather strange:
An agreement was made on the budget just a couple of months ago. The debt ceiling increase is just a consequence of the budget, not a separate item. So why the fight?
It's rather obvious that cuts alone won't do it. The amount is just too big, there needs to be a mix.
Going back to see when the deficit started coming, it's rather obvious that the Bush tax cuts can't be afforded. Still, noone is talking about letting them expire. And when the budget is balanced again, always be vigilant in finding expenses to cut so tax cuts can be funded.
Dragon Age II: short as hell unless you shell out more and more for DLC.
About 50-60 hours if you play it through once? Dragon Age II certainly has a couple of issues (e.g. an incredible amount of reuse, combat system much worse than DA I) , but it's certainly long enough that you shouldn't feel ripped off... I don't even think there is that much DLC yet; just one extra party member.
How did tablets look before the iPad? While iPad was the first tablet most people/businesses cared about - the genius of the iPad is that was not a laptop in a different form factor - there were tablets before. Did they look similar? Or is it just after the iPad that the design looks obvious?
Assuming that the machine's power management firmware is equal, and the efficiency of the components used is equal. Judging by the reviews which all get very similar results, I'd say these assumptions are false;).
And for this purpose, also the OS. The Macbook Pros have a significantly better battery time running MacOS X than Windows.
Windows (not WM6/WP7) has a few orders of magnitude more users than iOS. HTML5 isn't just for mobile devices.
While I agree with your general point, iOS passed the "100 million devices" mark last June. So I doubt that Windows is a few orders of magnitude larger.
"If this submission be right, McDonald’s should not have served drinks at any temperature which would have caused a bad scalding injury. The evidence is that tea or coffee served at a temperature of 65 C will cause a deep thickness burn if it is in contact with the skin for just two seconds. Thus, if McDonald’s were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55 C and 60 C. But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85 C and 95 C. Further, people generally like to allow a hot drink to cool to the temperature they prefer. Accordingly, I have no doubt that tea and coffee served at between 55 C and 60 C would not have been acceptable to McDonald's customers. Indeed, on the evidence, I find that the public want to be able to buy tea and coffee served hot, that is to say at a temperature of at least 65 C, even though they know (as I think they must be taken to do for the purposes of answering issues (1) and (2)) that there is a risk of a scalding injury if the drink is spilled.
While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000.
She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused..
None of this changes the fact that coffee should be served hot, and that it was her own stupidity that caused the damage. Would you put your coffee cup between your legs at home, and sue the one who made the coffee if you spilled? Serving cold coffee avoids the problem, true, but people like hot coffee and hot foods.
So here in Europe, most people I know still see this as a good example of ridiculous American legal practices... just as warnings that it could be dangerous to fall down from a ladder, so the manufacturer can't be sued.
This is a good idea. When you send an invite to an email address of a friend today, they won't know it's from you - they will just see a gamer tag. Similarly, I have no idea who sent the requests I've gotten.
A key difference to the Blizzard scenario, is that this is you sending this information targeted to a friend - rather than broadcasting it to everyone in forums, and, eventually, google. People are understandably a bit squeamish about getting their name attached to this when people google you in 5 years.
(about Android fragmentation) Huh? It's a lot less fragmented and inconsistent than Windows or the desktop Linux market, and those seem to be doing quite well.
Seriously, I've been using Android since the G1 came out, and I know tons of people with everything from Samsung Galaxies to Nexus Ones, and I've yet to hear that complaint. Not once.
I bought a new Android phone, HTC Wildfire, for my girlfriend a month ago. Applications like Skype and Evernote still aren't available for this phone, unfortunately - so Android fragmentation is a fact of life. She couldn't get spotify to work either, but that might have been resolved since then.
(about flash on mobile devices)It is best to be able to make the choice yourself.
In principle, I agree with you. That said, there is a benefit to a ban on a major device. The benefit is that the world adapts - video is made available in HTML5 format, to give one example. If everyone had the option, the web sites would just say "turn it on".
And if there is one think I dislike more than not having flash on iPhone, it would be having it. Other than youtube and its ilk, which are moving to HTML5 because of the flash ban, my flash experience is that it makes the web a worse place. Large, annoying, animated ads. And little else.
You wouldn't ship your windows game without the required external libraries, right? then why the hell would you do that with linux? Compile it all static and ship with the game.
The license of many of the libraries you use would prevent that - while LGPL doesn't prevent you from making proprietary applications, it does prevent you from linking statically as you shall be able to have the code for the LGPL parts and change those.
Really Good netbooks would cannibalize notebook sales. Expect "product differentiation" to ensure little of that happens.
You need to have some degree of control over the market to take this into consideration. E.g. Intel and Microsoft can do this, Apple too for some categories. But for a laptop like this? It's more about not seeing a big potential for an expensive premium device (pixel qi, macbook air looks/quality) that isn't Apple and doesn't run Windows. And with an ARM chip, that's what would be the case.
I agree here. Does the algorithm do everything on its own and the programmer's bosses have no input? I'll bet the software is a very small piece of the money-making picture. Was the programmer provided with any resources to write that algorithm? Could the programmer write the algorithm on his own, freelance style, and sell it to the company? I doubt it. Maybe these programmers deserve a raise, and the bosses probably get paid too much, but this is a one-sided story
I doubt someone gave the programmer a task "earn money", and he came up with a novel idea on his own to do that. Much more likely, someone much higher up the food chain identified an opportunity - either himself, or more likely, copying it from someone else doing the same thing. Maybe even tweaking it a little bit. The code would be a little part of the whole picture - the whole picture probably includes things like real-time trade access, working capital and the tweaks/monitoring management do.
In the big picture, of course Wall Street anything makes way too much. And the rationale for attracting the best brains into what is arguably a zero-sum game most of the time - or recession-inducing madness at other times - can obviously be discussed as well, on the macro level. But I doubt the programmer here added more value than most other normally competent programmers would do. They got a task, and did it. And got a good salary for doing what they're told.
Not sure about china, however in US, each real dollar (as in someone's savings) can be loaned up to a thousand folds. As in if you save 1$, banks get to loan 1000$ of money out of thin air.
That's just a misunderstanding. A bank can't lend more money than it has. People misunderstand two effects, and then make up something weird to compensate.
A bank can't lend more than a certain multiple of the money the owners have put into the company and accumulated there. Often around 6-10%. As a result of this, if you increase the equity (or other forms of "special" capital, which the bank can use to cover losses if needed) the bank can solicit more deposits (or borrow money elsewhere) and then lend it multiplied by 10-15 times. Note that no money burst into existence by this.
Fractional banking. You deposit 100 USD. If the bank aren't over its limit (see above), it can then lend this money to someone else. Who can then deposit it again, etc. Still, see above. This effect increases the supply of money
But what are you worth? There are multiple ways to look at this. One would be to simply look at "what would someone else be willing to do this for", either locally or globally. Another is "of what value is the work I do". Typically, the latter would be higher than the former - so the closer you can get your compensation to this level, the better off you are. This is one of the major reasons how brokers, executive-level management manage to get astronomical levels of compensation
Unionizing is how grunts try to get some of the same treatment, to be paid what their work is worth to the employer rather than what they'd have to pay replacements. At some points in history, that has definitely brought society forward - while at other times, it has gotten stale and corrupted and has negative effects.
What they are afraid of is people using non-Apple music and video stores and people creating applications that also work on Android.
Apple allow non-Apple music and video solutions - they allow e.g. spotify, wimp, netflix and many more. The latter is definitely one of their targets - not because they don't want things to work on Android, even though not being able to share the costs might be a fringe benefit now that the iPhone app market is so dominant. Their real goal is to avoid development environments that abstracts away their platform - and target the lowest common denominator, and won't give access to new iOS features when available.
As an iphone user, I really hate and love their approach. I dislike that I can't develop what I want. On the other side, the quality of the apps is higher - and I prefer a phone experience with no flash. Probably without iAd too, I don't want rich, intrusive ads.
What scares me more than their technical requirements, is their content censoring. I don't want a walled, Disney-like "think of the children!" world.
This user can't upgrade from XP/IE6:My primary role is programming mail merge documents while maintaining all of the document templates we use within Siebel
Based on my experience with the evil that is Siebel and applications built on top of it using ActiveX, I would guess that this a big reason why. It's not just replacing machines, it's all the servers and applications in the department that needs to change too. Now that Oracle has bought it and want you to use their own CRM, changing this will be a gigantic and extremely costly proposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Raising taxes is proven not to work, and has a dampening effect on the economy.
Lowering taxes is proven not to work as well... and cutting expenses also has a dampening effect on the economy. In the US now, you need higher total taxes. And cuts. Cutting 1.2 trillion on defense and "discretionary spending" just isn't possible, as that is pretty much the complete spending outside social security/medicare/medic aid.
Also, the US needs to revisit how health care is done... the cost as part of GDP is almost twice as other countries, e.g. Norway - but still, a large part of the population isn't covered. The results (life expectance, child mortality rate etc) are worse, and the cost higher.
Shame we can't get a balanced budget amendment (with an exception for DECLARED wars) passed. Probably wouldn't work, but it looks like it's the only real option that has a chance.
That's a really, really bad idea. Over time, it should be balanced - obviously. But if you have set up a constraint so that a big downturn - and thus a spike in demand for certain sevices - have to be met with big cuts at the same same time, you're creating a death spiral.
A much better approach is to build reserves and pay down debt in good times, and have a deficit in bad times. The US' problem isn't that it's spending too much money right now, it's that the deficit has been growing massively in good years too. One major contributor is unfunded tax cuts...
Just curious: which country is that ?
Norway. Not likely to get into trouble in the Greek or American style shortly.
That's not exactly true. Obama and the Dems tried to let at least some of them expire, but that was blocked by the Tea Party faction.
That was just a minor subset of them. Symbolic sure, but that's not where there is enough money. There aren't enough rich people. Tax cuts that can't be funded shouldn't be enacted, but noone has the guts to fix it. The US needs balance first (soon), and then later tax cuts can be looked into when the funding is there. Although they might want to pay down a bit on the debt first....
For someone from a country with a better grip on its economy, the whole ordeal seems rather strange:
The owners. "Outsourcing management" is called "starting the business elsewhere", which many do.
Dragon Age II: short as hell unless you shell out more and more for DLC.
About 50-60 hours if you play it through once? Dragon Age II certainly has a couple of issues (e.g. an incredible amount of reuse, combat system much worse than DA I) , but it's certainly long enough that you shouldn't feel ripped off... I don't even think there is that much DLC yet; just one extra party member.
How did tablets look before the iPad? While iPad was the first tablet most people/businesses cared about - the genius of the iPad is that was not a laptop in a different form factor - there were tablets before. Did they look similar? Or is it just after the iPad that the design looks obvious?
Assuming that the machine's power management firmware is equal, and the efficiency of the components used is equal. Judging by the reviews which all get very similar results, I'd say these assumptions are false ;).
And for this purpose, also the OS. The Macbook Pros have a significantly better battery time running MacOS X than Windows.
Windows (not WM6/WP7) has a few orders of magnitude more users than iOS. HTML5 isn't just for mobile devices.
While I agree with your general point, iOS passed the "100 million devices" mark last June. So I doubt that Windows is a few orders of magnitude larger.
You don't serve close-to-boiling coffee at home either. That was the point. If you spill coffee in your lap at home, you don't need skin grafts.
Other courts judged otherwise, that people want hot coffee:
"If this submission be right, McDonald’s should not have served drinks at any temperature which would have caused a bad scalding injury. The evidence is that tea or coffee served at a temperature of 65 C will cause a deep thickness burn if it is in contact with the skin for just two seconds. Thus, if McDonald’s were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55 C and 60 C. But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85 C and 95 C. Further, people generally like to allow a hot drink to cool to the temperature they prefer. Accordingly, I have no doubt that tea and coffee served at between 55 C and 60 C would not have been acceptable to McDonald's customers. Indeed, on the evidence, I find that the public want to be able to buy tea and coffee served hot, that is to say at a temperature of at least 65 C, even though they know (as I think they must be taken to do for the purposes of answering issues (1) and (2)) that there is a risk of a scalding injury if the drink is spilled.
While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000. She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused. .
None of this changes the fact that coffee should be served hot, and that it was her own stupidity that caused the damage. Would you put your coffee cup between your legs at home, and sue the one who made the coffee if you spilled? Serving cold coffee avoids the problem, true, but people like hot coffee and hot foods.
So here in Europe, most people I know still see this as a good example of ridiculous American legal practices... just as warnings that it could be dangerous to fall down from a ladder, so the manufacturer can't be sued.
Looks like someone is cranky because it isn't a Mac clone.
Given that the parent writes of "ctrl+t" rather than "cmd+t", I don't think he uses a mac. "ctrl+t" only works on Windows and Linux.
This is a good idea. When you send an invite to an email address of a friend today, they won't know it's from you - they will just see a gamer tag. Similarly, I have no idea who sent the requests I've gotten.
A key difference to the Blizzard scenario, is that this is you sending this information targeted to a friend - rather than broadcasting it to everyone in forums, and, eventually, google. People are understandably a bit squeamish about getting their name attached to this when people google you in 5 years.
(about Android fragmentation) Huh? It's a lot less fragmented and inconsistent than Windows or the desktop Linux market, and those seem to be doing quite well. Seriously, I've been using Android since the G1 came out, and I know tons of people with everything from Samsung Galaxies to Nexus Ones, and I've yet to hear that complaint. Not once.
I bought a new Android phone, HTC Wildfire, for my girlfriend a month ago. Applications like Skype and Evernote still aren't available for this phone, unfortunately - so Android fragmentation is a fact of life. She couldn't get spotify to work either, but that might have been resolved since then.
Simplest solution I see is for Google to include the Gnash player on Android and ensure that YouTube works with it.
Why? Youtube can just stream HTML5 video, as they've already started to do. Problem solved, no flash required. Everybody wins.
(about flash on mobile devices)It is best to be able to make the choice yourself.
In principle, I agree with you. That said, there is a benefit to a ban on a major device. The benefit is that the world adapts - video is made available in HTML5 format, to give one example. If everyone had the option, the web sites would just say "turn it on".
And if there is one think I dislike more than not having flash on iPhone, it would be having it. Other than youtube and its ilk, which are moving to HTML5 because of the flash ban, my flash experience is that it makes the web a worse place. Large, annoying, animated ads. And little else.
You wouldn't ship your windows game without the required external libraries, right? then why the hell would you do that with linux? Compile it all static and ship with the game.
The license of many of the libraries you use would prevent that - while LGPL doesn't prevent you from making proprietary applications, it does prevent you from linking statically as you shall be able to have the code for the LGPL parts and change those.
Really Good netbooks would cannibalize notebook sales. Expect "product differentiation" to ensure little of that happens.
You need to have some degree of control over the market to take this into consideration. E.g. Intel and Microsoft can do this, Apple too for some categories. But for a laptop like this? It's more about not seeing a big potential for an expensive premium device (pixel qi, macbook air looks/quality) that isn't Apple and doesn't run Windows. And with an ARM chip, that's what would be the case.
I agree here. Does the algorithm do everything on its own and the programmer's bosses have no input? I'll bet the software is a very small piece of the money-making picture. Was the programmer provided with any resources to write that algorithm? Could the programmer write the algorithm on his own, freelance style, and sell it to the company? I doubt it. Maybe these programmers deserve a raise, and the bosses probably get paid too much, but this is a one-sided story
I doubt someone gave the programmer a task "earn money", and he came up with a novel idea on his own to do that. Much more likely, someone much higher up the food chain identified an opportunity - either himself, or more likely, copying it from someone else doing the same thing. Maybe even tweaking it a little bit. The code would be a little part of the whole picture - the whole picture probably includes things like real-time trade access, working capital and the tweaks/monitoring management do.
In the big picture, of course Wall Street anything makes way too much. And the rationale for attracting the best brains into what is arguably a zero-sum game most of the time - or recession-inducing madness at other times - can obviously be discussed as well, on the macro level. But I doubt the programmer here added more value than most other normally competent programmers would do. They got a task, and did it. And got a good salary for doing what they're told.
Not sure about china, however in US, each real dollar (as in someone's savings) can be loaned up to a thousand folds. As in if you save 1$, banks get to loan 1000$ of money out of thin air.
That's just a misunderstanding. A bank can't lend more money than it has. People misunderstand two effects, and then make up something weird to compensate.
Please don't use Disney as an example here. Disney distributed Kill Bill.
I think it illustrates my point very well... in the US, violence in mass media of various kinds are accepted. There is no restrictions on showing violence/murder over the air, on cable, at any time of the day. Show a nipple by accident for half a second, and all hell breaks loose. The US has a rather disturbed view on violence vs. sex, and I don't like Apple being able to impose this weird behaviour onto more developed nations.
you never get paid what you're worth
But what are you worth? There are multiple ways to look at this. One would be to simply look at "what would someone else be willing to do this for", either locally or globally. Another is "of what value is the work I do". Typically, the latter would be higher than the former - so the closer you can get your compensation to this level, the better off you are. This is one of the major reasons how brokers, executive-level management manage to get astronomical levels of compensation
Unionizing is how grunts try to get some of the same treatment, to be paid what their work is worth to the employer rather than what they'd have to pay replacements. At some points in history, that has definitely brought society forward - while at other times, it has gotten stale and corrupted and has negative effects.
What they are afraid of is people using non-Apple music and video stores and people creating applications that also work on Android.
Apple allow non-Apple music and video solutions - they allow e.g. spotify, wimp, netflix and many more. The latter is definitely one of their targets - not because they don't want things to work on Android, even though not being able to share the costs might be a fringe benefit now that the iPhone app market is so dominant. Their real goal is to avoid development environments that abstracts away their platform - and target the lowest common denominator, and won't give access to new iOS features when available.
As an iphone user, I really hate and love their approach. I dislike that I can't develop what I want. On the other side, the quality of the apps is higher - and I prefer a phone experience with no flash. Probably without iAd too, I don't want rich, intrusive ads.
What scares me more than their technical requirements, is their content censoring. I don't want a walled, Disney-like "think of the children!" world.
This user can't upgrade from XP/IE6:My primary role is programming mail merge documents while maintaining all of the document templates we use within Siebel
Based on my experience with the evil that is Siebel and applications built on top of it using ActiveX, I would guess that this a big reason why. It's not just replacing machines, it's all the servers and applications in the department that needs to change too. Now that Oracle has bought it and want you to use their own CRM, changing this will be a gigantic and extremely costly proposition.