This is wrong. Actually, the LRF was only sanctioned in 2000, when inflation was already at 5.97% yearly.
The main factor behind reducing the inflation was not the URV hack, but the government's fulfilled commitment to markets to keep inflation low at all costs: through skyrocketing interest rates [around 25%], for instance (thus reducing credit -> reducing consumption -> reducing prices); or by binding it to the US Dollar and bankrupting many national industries.
Where I live (Brazil) there has been widespread debate about state funding of political parties. It happens at the moment (I think something like 400mi USD is invested in it), but the issue with it is that it has prompted a load of small, socially inexpressive political parties to be founded to get money from that fund.
Debate also spins around prohibition of donations from companies or from donations over 2000 reais or something by a person (around 950 USD). Some would argue that company interests are valid and that prohibiting that would just generate that sort of funding illegally; others would say this sort of company funding is the root of a very corrupt system. This should be one of the main points of a try at political reform in the next four years.
Not necessarily is "being a parliament" a problem -- after all, parties are together for a reason. Except they are usually ideological in most countries (liberals, social-democrats, socialists), and not a group of people that got into parties to get, as noted by the article, in the party most convenient for the district where you come from.
I wouldn't say the US being rich is a question of government organization, rather of not having been a colony whose sole purpose was to export raw materials.
Higher dimensions also means more tax collection, which could be perfectly invested into making the standard of living of Americans better (it seems absurd to me that you don't have any public universal healthcare). The government prefers to invest 50% of it in Defense though. Consequence (also) of arms industry lobbyists and geopolitical strategy etc. but certainly not of size.
Holding defense spending against the U.S. while comparing it to Europe doesn't make much sense. The U.S. subsidizes defense for Europe. Look, Europe spent the last several hundred years warring with each other, then stopped suddenly with U.S. ascendency. They didn't evolve beyond war. It just became unimaginable when the U.S. has all the guns and will enforce the status quo.
The European Union is widely regarded to be the main reason driving a peaceful Europe. I've not really heard of the argument at all, ever, that the US is what keeps Europe from engaging in war.
It's true that the US-led United Nations and principles of the right of self-determination led to massive post-war decolonization, leading to Europe being much less imperialistic (which accelerated the inevitable independence movements which were already in full force in most countries) but even here the US subsidizing defense doesn't apply, the amount of military power that was used for the colonies was quite slim, almost everywhere they became police-heavy, and the US wouldn't have subsidized colonial powers, on the contrary.
As for Europe warring until US ascendancy... while it's certainly true that the US was never more powerful relatively to everyone else than after the second world war, but they've been the largest economy in the world since the 19th century. They were the superpower before the first world war even started, let alone the second. Hell if anything, since then the US only lost power as Russia became a superpower, Western Europe became united and China rose, none of which were true at the end of the 19th century, and the per-capita wealth gap between the US and everyone else only slimmed since then.
But I'll agree with you on the fact that the US subsidizes defense spending through the NATO in the tug of war for eastern Europe, sure. It's unlikely that the EU could have grown eastward so much, without NATO we would've seen today's Ukraine happen much sooner with say Estonia, Latvia, Romania or Poland 10 years ago.
It's less a question of American economic power and more a question of the tens of thousands of American troops stationed throughout Europe. The U.S. military presence already in Europe is larger than the militaries of many European countries, and there's almost a million more American troops who can be deployed there if need be. If the U.S. was willing to do that in 1918, instead of turning isolationist again, World War II could have been prevented, just as the Pax Americana after World War II successfully prevented World War III.
The US has extensive public healthcare. Medicare and Medicaid are huge programs. I realize there is a fair chance that you mean some baseline universal care, but imprecise terms make the conversation more difficult.
Large corporations are also hilariously micro-socialist in the way health care is provided to workers (partly by government rule, partly because they hire productive workers and can afford to compete with benefits).
Edit: The ACA (Obamacare) was also a big step towards universal care. The funding/payment model is messy, but all someone needs to do in the US to get health coverage now is apply for it and make payments, they don't have to hope they get accepted by the insurance company (and I guess it is also much harder to drop coverage).
My notion of "public healthcare" is being able to walk into a government clinic or hospital and get free treatment or appointments as long as you show you're a citizen -- sorry for not having cleared that up.
I personally do like the single-payer approach, where you get coverage on a no-fee basis purely by showing you're a citizen/resident; and that's how it's done here in Denmark. But it's not the only way of providing universal care, even in Europe. Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are typically considered to also have universal healthcare, but it's administered via health insurance, not as a single-payer model with direct state provision of services. There are various options for coverage, but having some baseline coverage is mandatory and intended to be universal (with subsidies for people who can't afford it), somewhat closer to the ACA model than to the Scandinavian or Canadian model.
I changed my original comment to "public universal healthcare". I once again apologize for the lack of clarity of the original comment, and I hope you understand what my point was.
Europeans visiting the states are genuinely worried that they will be carjacked, which I always find hilarious. Life is not like the movies or the news.
Brazil is a country where the correctional systems runs with 200.000 people over capacity and has had a 100-page UN report condemning practices which deny basic human rights, yet prison riots are treated by media simply as gang plots with no particular reason; Captain Nascimento, the protagonist of the "Elite Squad" films (who methodically kills/tortures drug traffickers) is regarded almost always as a hero instead of an aspect of the police to be criticized.
Particularly in the elections that happened last year, proposals to "end impunity" (as lowering the age for being treated as an adult in court) have had largely more electoral effect and have been widely more propagated than projects for improving rehabilitation capability or respecting human rights in prisons. In fact, it's common to hear the maxim "Human rights for right people [and not for criminals]" around here to disqualify proposals of the latter.
Thanks to this public opinion trend, stories like those in the article about people who are able to "get out" instead of being arrested or killed are largely ignored. (Seeing them on Hacker News is easier than on the daily newspaper or even than on left-wing blogs which hardly have journalism potential to get a story like this.) It's nice to see them.
There's a propagated distortion regarding the meaning of human rights here in Brazil, it seems to me. There's this idea that human rights is synonym with being soft on crime, not actually punishing wrongdoings, treating criminals better than honest working folk. So, understandably, a lot of people start seeing "human rights" as part of the problem.
Crime can be solved in two ways, one of them is through the kind of policies you've mentioned. The other -- which may only work with crime committed or allegedly committed by the poor -- is by widespread oppression and institution of elements of a police state (the drawbacks are many as you can imagine). Brazil currently does not have the infrastructure to follow the former so it seems to be courting the latter; It doesn't seem to be in the best interest of politicians to work towards the better option. Possibly, who knows, because it would be the harder and riskier approach regarding whether it could bring them immediate votes and popularity.
Elite Squad 2 went more in depth. It went at the underlying corruption that limited economic opportunities for the poor and how it uses the police power to maintain this situation.
The same way capitalist concentration made building a small business very hard by the start of the 20th Century, the same process is taking place right now with the Internet. We usually don't notice or even like it (why, isn't it great to have every service in the same place?), but it is a tendency. Many arguments in favor of the small business and the virtues of free competition that were used back then are being used now by this post. The post even acknowledges that "the world isn't flat", but presumes the Internet needs to be, as if it was isolated from the rest of the system.
Even if net neutrality were approved, I don't think that unless there are other technological revolutions that open new sectors up like the PC or the Internet were, that subdivisions of large companies will be responsible for most new stuff, taking the most of the market for itself anyway and making competition harder, as we can see today in many ways. It'd just be a (very positive) way to preserve the current state of things a while longer, but not something capable of keeping the Internet "flat" in the long term.
Educacional is their provider for some online content (mainly games and similar stuff for young kids to have IT lessons). The grades db, memos and so on are managed by the school itself, and the news as well. Educacional, as far as my app is concerned, is simply a gateway for getting authentication tokens to /those/ services which I actually use.
And, the app that I mentioned in the article (which could be considered as a competitor of sorts) is also being developed by the school itself.
Their app's feature set consists of contact information, maps to the school, a gallery of static photos about the school, and webviews that display their website's content directly. It doesn't even comprise grades, memos and so on, which is what my product's focus is. That's why I don't think that's the reason.
So, you requested written permission... didn't get it... charged for your app... and now they are just a bunch of luddite meanies turning you into an evil villain instead of fawning all over you?
You are serving as a proxy for credentials into a system where the school is legally liable to protect the privacy of the students, families, and staff. Yeah. You get shut down NOW. It doesn't matter where your code is or how great your work is. you are taking control of something that they are required to protect.
If someone can hack iOS or your app and steal credentials, who's ass is on the line for discovering, disclosing, remediating, rebuilding trust, resigning, etc.? All those people have enough work without your app. They are responsible for what they create. They can't be responsible for your work. If they knowingly let it exist, they will have to take responsibility for any fallout that may come from it.
Who is going to be handling all the calls when people change their passwords at the site, but your app locks their accounts out by trying to use the cached credentials?
They have plenty to lose with your app. You are learning many things.
I think there are tons of valid reasons why the app should be shutdown. The OP mentions some of them as well. What he finds ridiculous is that of all the things the school could object to, they complained about "copyright infringement" , saying that you're displaying our data to the people who it is meant for, who are authorized to view it.
But it sounds like the app isn't doing anything a web browser couldn't do. This is a recurring theme among authoritarians now: take something that a web browser does, and argue that because it's being done outside of a web browser, somehow that's wrong. Look at weev; that's exactly what he did (there are certainly other aspects, but it was one used to scare the court and the aspect that the prosecutor willfully failed to understand).
"All those people" are responsible for a public API; in this case, it is a text-based api over HTTP only, meant for human consumption, but it's an API nonetheless. This app does not bypass that API. If they don't like how the API is being used, they need to change it; but of course you can't close it completely. This is the analog hole of the Internet.
Web browsers are just a client for that particular kind of API. It's ridiculous to limit which clients can access an API, as long as they do so correctly. Of course, you can make it difficult or impossible for unapproved clients to access the API, that will achieve the goal; that's what DRM does. But by not putting those controls on the API you're allowing new competing clients to connect with it.
You can try to recontextualize it to suit some internal need of yours to feel OK or good about something being bent to suit another purpose. That doesn't change the copyright in spirit or in law.
It's not a public API meant for human consumption. It's a viewstate object, which is meant for currying data back and forth inside controls, etc. in an ASP.Net application. It's not an API. He had to hack that format which is feasibly a DMCA violation as well.
Weev would be a horrible example to bring up.
I'm not sure we're going to close a gap here if you feel all copyright is stripped the moment data can be presented in an anonymous user's browser.
First of all, don't trick yourself: HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language parsed by your web browser which then turns that markup into cool websites.
Then, wanting to code "the fastest way" is a wrong concept. Learn everything you can, doesn't matter how long it takes, learn right.
There are basic tutorials on programming languages online which are good for starting up, and then there are thousands of books and documentation which might help you around. Specifically, for iPhone development you need to know the Objective-C programming language, so here's a tip: Don't head into coding a huge app hoping you'll just learn by making it, while you just end up copying code from StackOverflow entries. Learn, and then use what you learned inside an app.
IRC is a great way to talk to experienced developers, and browsing source code is also great for learning new coding techniques. If you need any more help, I'm always reachable.
(Also, as a wise man said, "Age is just a number". Just because you're very young, it doesn't mean you can't do stuff better than a 30 year old might. All it takes is effort.)
Thank you very much. Ya, my concept of speed does not matter as long as I do it right. I have looked at alot of iTunes U tutorials and have also finished alot of codecademy couses. Thanks for your effort!!!
The main factor behind reducing the inflation was not the URV hack, but the government's fulfilled commitment to markets to keep inflation low at all costs: through skyrocketing interest rates [around 25%], for instance (thus reducing credit -> reducing consumption -> reducing prices); or by binding it to the US Dollar and bankrupting many national industries.