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Please understand the difference in equality - we're talking about Government and it's role, and as long as Government is to treat you equally, without regard to race, gender, religion, socio-economic status, then we're on the right path. It's not to put up roadblocks to any group or show preference over another. If you want to succeed, Government is to make sure there are no roadblocks to you that do not exist for others.

And for many immigrants, that is the case. Overwhelmingly immigrants tend to outpace native minority groups! Perhaps it's Government trying to game the system for the outcomes rather than the starting line that society as a whole gets that is the problem.

If your parents worked hard and suceeded, yes you will benefit from that more than a person who's parents did not. But as long as you both have access to equal services from the Government, then it's working as it should. In life, no one is guaranteed to win and no one is promised not to lose. And you do not have to stay where you are - you can move up OR down.

Since 1971 OPEC is being bullied to sell Oil exclusively in US dollars resulting in friction between 1.8 billion Muslims Worldwide and The West;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
http://www.zerohedge.com/print...

Since 1971 OPEC is bullied to sell Oil exclusively in US dollars resulting in friction between 1.8 billion Muslims Worldwide and The West;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a...

You can look at RIM/Blackberry to see where all other non-Apple, non-Android smartphone makers ended up. The feature phone market dried up, ending Nokia's most successful niche. The company's downward slide had already started before Elop signed-on. "The company's board was widely seen to be searching for a turn-around CEO." Note that you don't need a "turn-around" if your company is doing great... Or if you don't believe that, you can just look at the charts and see the decline BEFORE Elon was hired on. In fact RIM/Blackberry sales were still climbing a couple years after Nokia's downward slide began...

"Elop's CEO contract with Nokia included a bonus clause worth $25 Million dollars, if Elop sold the handset unit specifically to Microsoft." So obviously Nokia's board were specifically eying a Microsoft buyout when they signed Elop on.

No question Elop was a lousy leader who didn't help things, but everybody knew Nokia was broken before his tenure started. I'd call Elop's tenure a symptom, not the disease. Note that Blackberry had a precipitous downward slide, too, without any former Microsoft execs involved.

Oh right, Groundwork. So yes, Alphabet (nee Google) is manipulating searches to help Hillary Clinton. But the same could be said of any SEO outfit.

1. Not all transit providers are equal. Some make better deals with peers than others.

Not all watermelons are equal, either; some are larger and/or have fewer seeds than others. In fact, outside of mathematics, it is quite rare to find two truly equal entities. Basically, inequality is a given in the real world. Hell, not all streaming video providers are equal, which is why many people subscribe to two or more. In fact, Netflix uses multiple transit providers[1-8] for similar reasons.

2. Some transit providers are less expensive because they lack the ability to make the best deals with peers.

This is just plain backwards. A transit provider who makes better peering deals has lower costs, so they don't have to charge as much! I know this seems counter-intuitive when you consider that those providers also offer a better service, as you'd think that's something they could charge a premium for, but it should make a bit more sense when you consider the corollary: a transit provider who makes worse peering deals has higher costs, which they must recoup from their customer. Sort of like how Costco charges less because they make better deals buying in bulk; or, rather, other retailers must charge more because they didn't make the same deals.

3. To cut costs, Netflix chose a less expensive transit provider.

First of all, your assertion that Netflix uses a single transit provider is just plain wrong[1-8]. It has been made public knowledge (despite being none of our damn business) that their primary transit providers are Level 3 and Cogent[1-8], and that they purchase transit services from at least 4 other providers, Tata, XO, NTT, and Telia[1,3].

As for your assertion that Netflix only buys from the lowest bidder, well, it appears that the buy from anyone who can provide transit between them and the networks their customers are on[1-8]. Not only do they buy transit from all three available providers who route directly from their POIs to Comcast's[1], they even buy transit from Comcast now[3]. And, despite that, I still see buffering issues with Netflix on a 75Mbps Comcast Business connection, which points to the issue not lying with Level 3, Cogent, or any of Comcast's other providers with names not starting with C and rhyming with "bombast".

In case you want sources, here[1] are[2] a[3] few[4] you[5] can[6] check[7]. out[8].

At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.

Footnotes:
[1] "Netflix attempted to address congested routes into Comcast by purchasing all available transit capacity from transit providers that did not pay access fees to Comcast—which involved agreements with Cogent, Level 3, NTT, TeliaSonera, Tata, and X0 Communications. Although all six of those providers sold transit to the ent

Page changed, try this .

You keep changing your claims, now you've made one that is disproved by the very data you claim supports it. Here

Actually our prison system is in dire straights for all the right reasons.

But yes I do agree with you. Some power in the hands of fine enforcement agencies is good. Lots of power in the hands of martial law is not.

I suspect they are all fast enough but your ISP may not like the VOD competition.

Forget the birds. Won't someone please think of the gamblers flying into Las Vegas?

https://www.google.com/search?...
"Including results for icahn china"

A quick google points to Carl Icahn, some kind of notable investor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://qz.com/673035/carl-icah...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

> One disappointing thing about the last leak is that it basically had no US connections

That's because americans don't need to leave the US to use shell corps. Delaware and Nevada make it easy to do right here at home.

In Soviet Russia, grocery store flies to you!

PS4 has only been out for 3 years, and you are comparing units moved to systems that had a decade or more sales lifetime and drawing conclusions based on those being equivalent things to compare?

The numbers in the article are difficult to understand, but I think their presentation allowed them to talk about a "decline" because gosh, the chart goes down after the Sony PlayStation 2 (2000).

So I took their numbers and actually crunched some data. I temporarily published it via Google: Best-selling videogame consoles. The generated chart doesn't show labels for all the bars, but you can hover your mouse over the bar to see missing labels.

This chart borrows the sales numbers provided from the Quartz article "The golden era of video-game console sales is over" and uses year introduced v year discontinued dates from Wikipedia. In all cases, I used the earliest available date introduced and the latest date discontinued. From there, it's simple math to figure out the average number of units sold per year. Quartz used millions, so my chart displays millions of units sold per year available. The chart is sorted by year introduced (most recent at top).

While not perfect, this is a better comparison because it allows you to compare per year averages rather than total units. (Ravaldy says that the 10 million Xbox One number is wrong, it should be 20 million, so you might double the value in my chart, about on par with PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.)

This shows that the "golden era of videogame consoles" is not over. Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 4 both sold/sell almost 15 million per year, a bit more than PlayStation 2 (12 million/year) and a bit less than the original PlayStation (17.5 million/year). From my interpretation of the data, I think the "golden era" started with the original PlayStation and is still going strong.

http://qz.com/556988/here-are-...

Now adjust for income. Oops!!

I don't deny them, I simply don't call them subsidies.

Society pays for those costs, so that the producers don't have to. This lowers the sale price of the goods to half their true cost. If it waddles like a subsidy, and quacks like a subsidy...

Anyway, we can disagree about the transition time, but consider this: The average lifespan of a coal power plant is about 40 years - and many of them are due for replacement fairly soon. Knowing what we now know, it would be insane to replace them with more coal plants, and since new solar & new wind is already cheaper than new coal in many places, we have the opportunity to clean up a whole sector by 2050. And most vehicles have significantly shorter lifespans than that, so they can be transitioned too. In fact, TFA itself points out that Brazil changed their whole market over to flex-fuel ethanol-capable vehicles in just 5 years, so any cars sold after that can be fully carbon neutral.

http://qz.com/657433/donald-tr...

No, the article does not condone him. Just explain his method and style fits more with poetry than logic.

and many others.

That's not what this article says. Only 3.2% of the orders placed in the stock martket actually go through. That was the second quarter of 2013, well after the 2010 flash crash. And on some exchanges a whopping 99.76% of orders is canceled.

Quote from that link: "High frequency trading firms have been known to flood the market with orders, trying to determine the price institutional or retail investors are offering, then cancel 90% of them a split-second later. This can artificially alter the price of a security, netting high-frequency traders profits at the expense of their counterparties."

FYI: China is building solar power even if there is no one using the power, as a way to prop up the industry.

Funny, if you google "Europe terrorist attacks between WW2 and the late 90s." you get this: http://qz.com/558597/charted-t... (tl;dr: terrorism has been decreasing in Europe since the 70s, except for a peak in 2004 (Madrid bombings) and 2015 (Paris)). We've had Basques, IRA, Palestinians, extreme-left in Germany and France, extreme right in Italy... maybe you weren't paying attention at the time, but the current wave of terrorism is nothing new here, sadly.

If the US creates this precedent, the Chinese will take it even further, and while you may think the FBI is trustworthy I doubt most people would extend similar trust to the governments of every country in which Apple operates.

In fact, unlike you, I trust neither Apple, nor the FBI, nor the Chinese government. You live in a fantasy if you think that Apple hasn't already cooperated with the Chinese government in order to get access to the Chinese market, just like Microsoft has already done with the Russian government. That is why I so strenuously object to the fiction that somehow Apple's public refusal to comply with the FBI amounts to anything in terms of security.

Keep in mind that Cook is a gay man ... I wouldn't be surprised if for Mr. Cook personally, the idea that a government that would view people like him as sub-human or criminals due to their sexual preference might request the exact same tools that the FBI is requesting is terrifying.

Well, and I am a gay man and immigrated from a country where conditions were much worse than what Cook ever experienced. That's why I object to Cook's attempt at security-through-obscurity and the security fictions he is peddling. It's also why I don't trust or believe Apple when they say they have my best interests at heart: I've seen too many people like Cook stand up proclaiming that they are protecting privacy while quietly cooperating with governments to spy on people.

That does appear to be the way he is pushing his engineers.

The fact that iPhone encryption wasn't secure against government demands has been known for a long time. Tim Cook has been in charge of Apple since 2011, so he could have "pushed his engineers" to do this for nearly five years, but he didn't. The logical conclusion is he either didn't give a fuck about it until it became a PR problem, or the security holes in the iPhone's architecture are there deliberately to make the Russian and Chinese governments happy.

The original concept of the internet was something like "fault tolerance through decentralization". There would be no single thing for a war to take out that could destroy the whole network.

In the years since, we have backed further and further away from that concept. The internet is now simply broken if you block all of Google's IP ranges. Too many sites depend on things they load from Google, and they just won't work. Most people's email would stop working. Without 2 or 3 sites like Facebook and Twitter, most people would now be clueless about how to communicate with their family and friends on the internet. To much of the world, those sites ARE "the internet".

But the solution to this is not yet another central authority. The solution is education. We need people to realize that giving too much authority to anybody, whether it's a government "information minister", or Facebook and Google, is a bad idea. We need control to move back to smaller units of granularity, where just a few sites can no longer exert such a huge level of control over what people are permitted to say and over those people's "view of reality".

Centralization IS the problem. Having even more centralization will not help.

I agree with everything you wrote there, except for the claim "the problem is the focus on grades".

Thought experiment: Let's remove grades and just replace it with an honest pass/fail system about whether you've mastered the skills or not. Now the education majors are all flat-out failing all their math courses. And now they're surely even more upset, right? The problem is not really the grades per se, it's that the math/science courses are where there's an unavoidable demonstration that U.S. education majors are perennially the dumbest people going to college. And those people are then the ones in charge of teaching broken math to our elementary-school students, in a repetitive cycle. If anything, the grades (polite C's and D's to the weak students) are serving to mask how completely broken at math the education majors are; the fact that those same students are so confused as to think it's a GPA-number issue is just a Dunning-Kruger type effect.

Apple’s response to US and UK government demands for backdoors to user data has been direct, bordering on defiant. Yesterday (Feb. 16), Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter explaining the company’s refusal to comply with a US federal court order to help the FBI access data on a phone recovered from one of the attackers in the San Bernardino, California shootings.

Apple appears to take a different tack in dealing with data security demands from China, a key growth market for the company.

In January 2015, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily claimed, in a tweet, that Apple had agreed to security checks by the Chinese government. This followed a piece in the Beijing News (link in Chinese) that claimed Apple acceded to audits after a meeting between Cook and China’s top internet official, Lu Wei. China’s State Internet Information Office would reportedly be allowed to perform “security checks” on all Apple products sold on the mainland. According to the report, this was despite Cook’s assurances that the devices didn’t contain backdoors accessible by any government, including the US.

If Apple had indeed agreed to a Beijing security audit, it could have shared vital information with the Chinese government, such as its operating system’s source code, that could indirectly help government agents discover vulnerabilities on their own. It would have been a serious departure from Apple’s public, privacy-centric stance.

So, Apple proudly stands up to the US government, while bending over and submitting to special audits from China. It's like Hollywood and how they would never, ever censor their true artistic vision - except in China where they happily cut out the hero's heartfelt speech about how people should be free. It's like some kind of cuckold fetish where American companies feel great pleasure to submitting to violation. And yet, at home, they maintain the facade with angry denials and "we love freedom" speeches.

Apple’s response to US and UK government demands for backdoors to user data has been direct, bordering on defiant. Yesterday (Feb. 16), Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter explaining the company’s refusal to comply with a US federal court order to help the FBI access data on a phone recovered from one of the attackers in the San Bernardino, California shootings.

Apple appears to take a different tack in dealing with data security demands from China, a key growth market for the company.

In January 2015, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily claimed, in a tweet, that Apple had agreed to security checks by the Chinese government. This followed a piece in the Beijing News (link in Chinese) that claimed Apple acceded to audits after a meeting between Cook and China’s top internet official, Lu Wei. China’s State Internet Information Office would reportedly be allowed to perform “security checks” on all Apple products sold on the mainland. According to the report, this was despite Cook’s assurances that the devices didn’t contain backdoors accessible by any government, including the US.

If Apple had indeed agreed to a Beijing security audit, it could have shared vital information with the Chinese government, such as its operating system’s source code, that could indirectly help government agents discover vulnerabilities on their own. It would have been a serious departure from Apple’s public, privacy-centric stance.

So, Apple proudly stands up to the US government, while bending over and submitting to special audits from China. It's like Hollywood and how they would never, ever censor their true artistic vision - except in China where they happily cut out the hero's heartfelt speech about how people should be free. It's like some kind of cuckold fetish where American companies feel great pleasure to submitting to violation. And yet, at home, they maintain the facade with angry denials and "we love freedom" speeches.

Apple’s response to US and UK government demands for backdoors to user data has been direct, bordering on defiant. Yesterday (Feb. 16), Apple CEO Tim Cook published a letter explaining the company’s refusal to comply with a US federal court order to help the FBI access data on a phone recovered from one of the attackers in the San Bernardino, California shootings.

Apple appears to take a different tack in dealing with data security demands from China, a key growth market for the company.

In January 2015, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily claimed, in a tweet, that Apple had agreed to security checks by the Chinese government. This followed a piece in the Beijing News (link in Chinese) that claimed Apple acceded to audits after a meeting between Cook and China’s top internet official, Lu Wei. China’s State Internet Information Office would reportedly be allowed to perform “security checks” on all Apple products sold on the mainland. According to the report, this was despite Cook’s assurances that the devices didn’t contain backdoors accessible by any government, including the US.

If Apple had indeed agreed to a Beijing security audit, it could have shared vital information with the Chinese government, such as its operating system’s source code, that could indirectly help government agents discover vulnerabilities on their own. It would have been a serious departure from Apple’s public, privacy-centric stance.

So, Apple proudly stands up to the US government, while bending over and submitting to special audits from China. It's like Hollywood and how they would never, ever censor their true artistic vision - except in China where they happily cut out the hero's heartfelt speech about how people should be free. It's like some kind of cuckold fetish where American companies feel great pleasure to submitting to violation. And yet, at home, they maintain the facade with angry denials and "we love freedom" speeches.

That chart is correct and follows best-practices. Only column charts must have the axis at zero.
It is okay not to start your y axis at zero
When should the y axis of a graph start at zero?

And a fun one:
The most misleading charts of 2015: fixed

That chart is correct and follows best-practices. Only column charts must have the axis at zero.
It is okay not to start your y axis at zero
When should the y axis of a graph start at zero?

And a fun one:
The most misleading charts of 2015: fixed

There's a strange type of inertia that applies to large companies. Even when they completely screw the pooch, they tend to hang on for years and years after the fact. RIM (or BlackBerry since they renamed themselves) are still around even though they haven't do anything relevant in years. Hell, even Real Networks is still around, seemingly stuck in some endless buffering state where they just can't die, and AOL still has 2 million dial-up subscribers. The technology graveyard is full of zombies.

Cheaper? I'm seeing uncapped peak pricing making up the difference.

I am not — during peak hours the prices match those of taxis, other times they are way below. Maybe, your experience is different, but I also remember, how impossible it was to hail a cab in the situations, in which Uber today is available — even if at a higher price. What good is a nominal price of even 1 penny per trip, if you can not find an actual car?

It was so bad, economists started using the phenomenon of "umbrellas vs. taxis" as an example. Now, with Uber, Lyft at al. solving this problem, they'll have to look for some other illustration.

So, the prices really are lower throughout — comparing Uber's "uncapped" price with that of a cab is like judging Venezuela's economy by the official prices — nobody can buy anything at those either.

Its in the (qz.com) after the word Weekend.
http://qz.com/594920/apples-mo...

Why its difficult to build a hydrogen bomb?
http://qz.com/588519/why-its-s...

> For real basic income, look at Finland; they're actually doing it.

http://qz.com/566702/finland-p...

Actual studies contradict that tired narrative.

Man, what an emotional rant filled with fear. I strongly encourage you to take a step back and calm down. Breathe. It'll be okay!

Look, the facts are this: our country is wealthier than it's ever been in history. It may be hard to notice though, because the richest 1% have harvested the majority of that wealth. If we divided up the nation's wealth equally among all citizens (which you don't seem to realize I'm not advocating for BTW), more people would get a bigger slice than if we had done that in any time in history.

We do have the means to ensure a bare minimum lifestyle floor for every citizen whether you believe we do or not. The apocalyptic scenarios you expect to come to pass will not occur. Poverty in this country is not going to get worse, unless we keep voting for austerity policies you support. We can end poverty if we continue to innovate technologically, economically, and culturally as we have in the past.

The two biggest drivers for the decline in labor participation are increasing automation squeezing people out of jobs (unemployment driven by technological obsolescence) and people voluntarily leaving the workforce because they don't need to work anymore (early retirement among those who can afford it). I feel bad for people who want to work but can't find a job, and that's exactly why we need to share the new wealth we've created with exactly those people who are experience technological obsolescence as a result of our more productive than ever economy.

Proposals like universal basic income are exactly what our obsolete underclass needs to stay out of poverty and devote their time to learning 21st century skills so they can compete in the new economy. Western Europe has just begun to realize this. Finland is currently exploring implementing UBI as a way to tackle unemployment.

If you set aside your fear and take the time to read more about this stuff, you will see that America's best days are still ahead.

Fossil fuel, not Coal is the culprit;
http://qz.com/568450/fossil-fu...

Since 1971 OPEC is selling crude oil exclusively in US$, starting the friction between Islamic and Western; It's a lose-lose proposition; You're riding a Frankenstein monster; As a Muslim, President Obama is pretty much aware of it;
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a...

Since 1971 OPEC is selling crude oil exclusively in US$, starting the friction between Islamic and Western; It's a lose-lose proposition; You're riding Frankensteinâ(TM)s monster; As a Muslim, President Obama is pretty much aware of it;
http://qz.com/562128/isil-is-a...

Beats your usual track record.

I work remotely, for Google, and get good performance reviews. I suppose one counterexample doesn't necessarily destroy your claim, but it does call it into question.

It greatly depends on the group, but the group I was involved with was rather large, and has since gotten rid of many of the remote employees.

The most successful remote employees were those who were well thought of because of their existing reputation in the field, or because they would periodically fly in and stay for at least a week to build a rapport, before flying out again, or because they were critical path, and most everyone knew it, and they did their job.

The least successful were those who were *not* critical path, and most everyone knew it, or they would fly in rarely (e.g. every 3 months), and tended to stay for only a couple of days, or who were relatively unknown players in CS.

A lot of the review intermediation is also done by your manager, meaning that if your manager likes you and your work, they can buffer bad reviews, and pick other people to place at the bottom of the bell curve instead of you.

Stacked ranking is somewhat of a malaise on the entire industry at this point, and you don't have to look very far to find articles about the negative effects it has had on organization (predominantly, it causes forced churn of employees). Here are a couple of them:

http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://qz.com/320532/marissa-m...
http://www.nbcnews.com/busines...
http://www.halogensoftware.com...

A number of companies in Silicon Valley just give severance to the bottom 30% (yes, 30%!) in the rankings.

This must happen a lot: Rent is so high in San Francisco that I am a software engineer and I live in a van

People do not listen to facts. You need an emotional angle.
http://qz.com/521628/keep-losi...

"More than 4 billion people don't have a voice online."

@ortholattice: 'He really means "More than 4 billion people don't have access to Facebook, its tracking icons, and its ads." And he wants the gov't to pay for it.' ref

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Tesla entered a market that was perceived by their competitors to be saturated.

Competitors didn't see that market as saturated. Instead, they didn't see a potential for profit which if you look at the state of Tesla, sound like they may have been right FOR NOW.
http://qz.com/207249/tesla-is-...

The iPod and iPhone also entered markets that were perceived to be saturated.

That's not what most companies though. The smart phone market in 2004 was expected to grow by 300%. This is marketing information that companies like Rogers Communication were basing their development decisions on.

In addition the smart phone market was only a few year old. You can't compare it with a 80+ year old industry.

Don't take me wrong, I'm a strong believer that Apple can do it and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

How did Nadella emerge from this minefield of candidates?
In addition to being a Microsoft loyalist, he was perceived as being willing to change things and look outside an insular culture. More importantly, perhaps, heâ(TM)s a âoegenuinely niceâ person who both Steve and Bill love, and who people seem to actually want to follow. Gatesâ(TM) decision to take a more active role also required someone he could work closely with. Most
http://qz.com/278237/heres-how...

The interesting thing in the video is that some suspect the pilot of espionage, and couple that with the recent Chinese army drill on a close copy of a Taiwanese presidential office.
http://qz.com/461110/video-a-c...

The issue as always isn't multirotors, it's human behavior.

When I said what's different between the banks and Apple, it was about the process itself.

My bank keeps gets information on my credit card usage even though all the information is stored with VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, etc...

What is fundamentaly different from a patent perspective between what Apple pantented and what the banks do when it comes to targeted adds based on credit availability? I would say that the only differences would be that Apple would have external ads that are targeted based on a certain credit availability. Even then, I've see ads from afiliated 3rd parties from my bank for insurance companies whereas my son, who doesn't have a job and doesn't have a lot of money going into his account, does not see any of those ads. I would think that the targeted add has looked at our credit worthiness before showing specific ads.

But if you wanted to look at it from your perpective, Apple might become a bank in the future...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/...
http://thehill.com/policy/fina...
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

I am not sure if it could happen in the US, but in other jurisdictions, I could see it happening. It's already hapening with phone companies becoming banks in Africa:

http://qz.com/424535/in-south-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

It irritates me every time I hear this ruddy nonsense that keeps spewing out of Seattle and San Fransisco that we're not cranking out enough computer science graduates.

Hey Microsoft! Newsflash! Computer science majors rise and fall as starting salaries rise and fall.

If you want to see more majors, raise your starting salaries. Stop firing everyone and outsourcing to India.