One could speculate that mobile carriers are scared to death of VOIP becoming possible on jailbroken iphones, such that they would want to be able to disable such features on phones on their networks. I suspect that this would be the ultimate reason why Apple would like the power to remotely cripple apps. It is evil behavior, no doubt. But I doubt Apple would care if it weren't for the mobile companies wanting to maintain their absurd uneven charges for different types of bits. The best way to stop such evil behavior is via government regulation. There will never be enough mobile carriers to allow true competition.
Irrespective of humanity's perceived impact, does this not happen throughout history in a cyclical fashion? I would look at this type of activity as the main source of evolutionary change. The species that are equipped to survive the conditions will prevail.
A significant amount of evolution is driven by mass die offs. That is, the population of a species reduced by 99% or more. We could evolve to be a species with average height of 7.5 feet very quickly...just kill off everyone except for a few hundred people who are taller than 7.5 feet. Let them have babies, and kill off any progeny who is shorter than 7.5 feet for a generation or two, and we would be a very tall species. Would you care to draw straws?
Do you really think that civilization can survive a significant reduction in the food supply? Do you have any idea what it is like to die of starvation? Your comment seems to show an implicit assumption that this would be somehow good for humanity, that having some competition would cause us to evolve, to become better, stronger, faster. It is easy to develop this detachment when staring at the fossil record. Wow, at the K/T boundary, the dinosaurs disappear, and the valiant rodents survived the asteroid/comet impact to evolve into us. Excellent, we wouldn't be here without that happening. Evolution is good. It resulted in us. Let the dying begin. Care to pony up your own grand-children first? After all, it's all in the name of evolution and progress.
It seems likely to me that ice loss at an ocean boundary will cause a reduction in floating ice sheets. Those floating ice sheets act as a barrier to glacial ice flowing into the ocean. Their reduction could cause an acceleration of ice flow into the sea.
In addition, it also seems likely to me that increases in ice in certain areas are associated with the increased moisture carrying capacity of warmer air. To snow, all you need is for the temperature to be below 32F/0C. If the warming continues, the ice thickness increases could be reversed, as those areas warm above the melting point of water during part of the year.
Maybe the loan gets paid back. That would be great! As is, I'd rather we (the US government) stop lending so much when we need to add to our deficit. Yes, even at the cost of lower growth.
Obtuse much?!! Have you flown on a Boeing aircraft recently? Boeing is in many ways directly subsidized by the government. Driven recently? Car companies have been indirectly subsidized for decades via the publicly funded construction of our road and highway system. I could go on and on. Your nice neat and tidy division of "public" and "private" doesn't really exist. The two sphere's overlap.
In the end, the only thing that truly keeps governments accountable is the threat of disorder and revolution. Governments that are unhindered by this fear because of their willingness to use "as much force as is necessary" are usually the most tyrannical. Think of France. They have a history of protesting and if necessary rioting. Their government has possibly as a result of this, enacted many policies that are directly to the benefit of the public.
What scares me most about these so called "soft" weapons is that they can be so easily used, and without the blood and gore that usually comes with batons and bullets. These weapons have the potential to make real protest impossible.
To quote the definition of demagogue (Oxford English Dictionary):
a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.
Note first the prominent placement of "Al Gore" in the article. Immediately the prejudices against Gore are brought out in the reader, as much work has been done to demonize him. Then the "luxury car" moniker, implying that this isn't for the good of the "common people", but only for rich elites. Finally comes the "rights of the taxpayer" meme, where firmly instilled prejudices against government taxation and spending are brought out.
Nowhere in the article is any real perspective given about the development cycle of high tech products, and about how new tech often first appears in luxury goods before percolating down to the mass market. Nowhere is it mentioned that government has often helped nurture other high tech companies in the past (Boeing for example via military spending). The article is much like the bell for Pavlov's dog, where certain words such as "Gore" and "taxation" elicit a conditioned response in indoctrinated readers. The Wall Street Journal has become the Pravda of the right.
The line between [governments] and the mafia is a grey one.
Yeah, except that we can vote to change the leaders of our government. Democracy isn't perfect. In fact, it is the worst system of government, except for all the others.
Democratic governments are often the only thing protecting us from the raw profit seeking power of private corporations. Corporate media conglomerates have been very successful in inculcating cynicism of governments into the public as a whole, as evidenced by the parent post. When citizens lose faith in their democratic governments, they pull back into their own spheres, ceasing to care about the large issues that affect society. Democracy weakens as citizens pull away from public life. And private powers move in to fill the power vacuum left by the withered democracy.
I meant to imply firstly that both the mafia and corporations are profit seeking entities. They are almost always larger than any single human being, and when large enough, they cease to be affected by the feelings of individual human beings. I would argue that corporations and the mafia become very much like machines as they become large. These machines act with their own particular logic, which is most often to maximize profit. Any member of these entities that act against this purpose is usually ejected from the organization. Thus individual emotions of group members such as anger, fear, sadness and empathy become irrelevant in the day to day operation of the organization. The machines soldier on in an unrelenting quest to increase profits.
Of course corporations operate ostensibly within the bounds of law, while the mafia does not. And this is no doubt an important difference. However, corporations do at times flout the law, especially when they span several nations, and can play national legal systems off against one another to gain advantage. They also do often act against the law when lax enforcement means it is unlikely they will be caught. If the penalties are low and if the public doesn't care, then a corporation may continue to disobey laws as part of its day to day operations.
In fact, I might argue that the mafia exemplifies the purest form of corporation, since it is nearly unbound by government regulation. If free market enthusiasts are to be believed, then the government is the enemy of the free market, holding back the potential of private corporations. The mafia has cast off those restrictions and operates with few restrictions on its profit seeking behavior.
I am not arguing that corporations should be abolished. Far from it...they are useful and necessary tools. But I think that we should be aware of what corporations are, and how they often behave, for if they become too powerful, then they will endanger the functioning of our society.
The line between major corporations and the mafia is a grey one. Do we really think that if a major corporation could get away with this, that they wouldn't do it, if it contributed significantly to their bottom line? Corporate behavior is all about cost-benifit analysis. The mafia operates by a slightly different risk profile. It also seems likely that what we think of as the mafia owns substantial portions of equity in our major corporations.
Why do I think this comment is appropriate to the discussion? Because I watch the behavior of legitimate corporations and see similarities. Gold mining companies often create huge pools of arsenic waste. The oil sands companies in Canada create huge and persistent pools of massively polluted water, sucking away and polluting water that would have otherwise gone for agriculture or human consumption. Major shipping companies routinely dump their oil laden bilge water in the open ocean. How exactly does this behavior not fall under the category of "organized crime"?
1) The OLED display is tons brighter than the display on the iPhone, so their point is moot.
It isn't so simple. LCD screens have a reflective element. That is, even without a backlight they are readable, if not always very well. OLED screens do not have a reflective element to the image...they must produce all of the light to overcome reflections from ambient light. Not to mention that OLED screens will probably show significant degradation in performance over relatively short periods. And they will draw more energy for brighter pictures.
I freely admit that I haven't actually handled a "Zune HD", but I doubt the parent poster has either. I don't think it bodes well for this device that most of the demos I have seen have been done in dark rooms. The proof will be in the pudding, but I strongly suspect that this device's display will look horrible in conditions where there is significant ambient light.
Most of the demo's are done in dark rooms because the OLED screen sucks in bright light. LED screens can be read partially by reflected light, but the OLED screen must produce all of the light to overcome bright sunshine shining on it. The OLED screen also sucks more power for bright pictures, since each individual picture element is producing light. The result is a screen that won't work well in daylight, and won't live up to its stated potential for battery savings.
Ah, the stink of envy and class warfare. Ever the siren song of the collectivist left. Just give them an axe and they will cut everyone down to the same size.
Again, a thoughtless slogan answer. Are you only capable of making arguments that will fit on a bumper sticker?
So for the record, I will put forward some of the reasons I think the way I do, though I doubt you will read them, for you don't seem interested in getting at the truth through rational enquiry.
I believe that there should be some income distribution. I don't think it should be complete, and I believe that communism is evil. But I think that using some money that billionaires have amassed and that would have otherwise been spent buying Lamborghinis and Beluga Caviar, to instead educate brilliant but otherwise poor students, so that they may make a contribution to society will help the economy and improve the lot of everyone.
I come to this opinion honestly. Specifically, a relative of mine grew up relatively poor, but received an excellent education from the public system. He ended up going to a prestigious university and pursued a career in politics. He is currently an important figure in world affairs. Had he not received a good education and a good upbringing, something that was made possible through income redistribution, he could have ended up languishing, of following a career that went nowhere. Leaving aside the moral issues, on a pure economic basis, the investment that society made in his education has been returned to society many times over.
I would argue that one of the great strengths of America, economic and otherwise has been that it has in the past invested in its brilliant students, whether they be poor or rich. I think this is one of the main reasons why America prospered under the New Deal. These poor students often went on to become doctors and engineers, and became important contributors to the wealth and power of our society. If too much wealth is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, many of these brilliant students will fail to achieve their potential, because there will be insufficient resources given for their education and upbringing.
Thus, a certain amount of income distribution is good for society. Not too much, for that would remove the incentive to become wealthy, and would degenerate into communism, which is a mountrous ideology.
The parent post to this one was a simple and idiotic slogan. My response is an attempt at making a rational argument. I doubt the parent poster is even capable of stringing five sentences together to make a rational argument. Need I remind everyone of the types of regimes that speak mainly in slogans? Mussolini's Italy. Hitler's Germany.
...and that's what your comment amounts to...noise. Why is it that so many "conservative" posters hold their arguments close to their chest like a hand in poker? What makes them so afraid to argue logically? Do they think their arguments won't stand up to scrutiny? Or do they actually not have any arguments at all? It's kind of hard to tell when all some neocon posters do is post slogans.
Oh please, economics is NOT is science in the same way as physics and chemistry. It does not have hard and testable hypotheses. Its predictions are always approximate, and are seemingly rarely falsified, largely due to their vagueness. Most economic theories are inwards looking and self-referential. The theories are logical based on a certain set of assumptions, but those base assumptions are mere speculation.
I like to look at economics as a useful tool. It may have some preductive utility, not unlike technical stock analysis. But it certainly shouldn't be used as the main guiding force by which to operate a society. I believe that the fundamental flaw of economics is that it seeks to make predictions about phenomenon that are largely psychological. In the end, market behavior is based on psychology, on desires, on fears, on needs. To assume that we can reduce such a massively complicated thing as fear to a simple set of equations is ludicrous.
I certainly hope you are trolling. These days,it's sometimes hard to tell. But if you are not, I assume you will be first in line to man the gas chambers.
See if you can recognize the following characteristics in today's Fox News/Jeff Beck/Rush Limbaugh followers in the following list (note especially point #3 in regard to the parent post):
Fascism Anyone?
The 14 characteristics of Fascism
by Dr. Lawrence Britt
Free Inquiry magazine, Spring 2003
Dr. Britt, a political scientist, studied the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He found the regimes all had 14 things in common, and he calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism.
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism -- Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights -- Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to 'look the other way' or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause -- The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military -- Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism -- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and antigay legislation and national policy.
6. Controlled Mass Media -- Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or through sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security -- Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined -- Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected -- The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed -- Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts -- Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -- Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses, and even forego civil liberties, in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption -- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to
Following the Great Depression and World War II, the leaders of our society decided to start taxing the wealthy more and more, while using that money for the betterment of society as a whole. It was called the New Deal. And this policy worked quite well, propelling America into a period of rapid economic growth, while at the same time creating a profound sense of economic security for the middle class. Vacation pay became the norm (it largely didn't exist before the Great Depression), and middle class Americans had enough disposable income to spend on luxuries like vacations.
This system was made possible by several other policies that prevented the rich from quickly withdrawing their money from the country. If you were wealthy in the UK in the 1950's, it was extremely difficult to get your money out of the country. It became common in this period for rich British citizens to build huge sailing yachts, which they sailed to other countries and then sold. They used their boats as a store of their wealth (read Myles Smeeton's Once is Enough for a story of one such couple).
Then came the right wing "neo-liberal/neo-conservative" politicians. When they got into power, one of the first things they did was to remove the barriers to capital mobility. Money was able to flow almost completely freely across national borders. This has brought economic growth for some, especially in countries like China. But it has also ensured that the countries that originally used taxes on the wealthy to ensure a healthy middle class were at a huge disadvantage. Rich individuals have withdrawn their money from America, and invested it in countries like China.
What many of us don't realize is that the complete and free mobility of capital will lead to the virtual disappearance of the American middle class as we have seen it over the past four decades, because it will ensure that money will flow away from countries with high taxes towards productive countries with low taxes. The country will increasingly look like Britain in the 1800's during the beginning of the industrial revolution (i.e. the world of Oliver Twist). There will be a very wealthy class. And there will be a worker class, which will comprise the vast majority of the population. Things like vacation pay, comfortable pensions, affordable quality health care, and disposable income will slowly but surely disappear for the vast majority of the former middle class. I am not prophesizing this; I am watching it happen before my eyes. IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING! Take an honest look at America right now, and tell me that our standard of living isn't slipping. And this at a time when we have never been able to make products more efficiently!
And to those of you who reflexively demonize those like me as "liberals", ask yourself this question? Are you a Billionaire? If not, then why are you thinking like a billionaire? Why do you think that lower wages for most of society is in your interest? Why do you think that taxing billionaires and spending that money to build roads isn't in your interest?
Do you think that the $20000 you have invested in stocks will pay for your comfortable retirement? What you seem to forget is that the billionaire who owns $200 million of those same stocks will make slightly more than you. And he will use the money he makes to buy even more stocks. Meanwhile, you, with your ever decreasing salary will have less and less disposable money to invest.
Of all the posts I've read on this list, this one makes the most sense. It sounds like M$ to design their own GPU/circuit board and do it in a half-assed way. Their corporate culture seems to guarantee that they won't use "best engineering practices" in any of their products, either software or hardware. The corporate culture is to shit out products, and to use hard-ball business/marketing practices to cause consumers to buy them.
The funny thing is that products that are poorly engineered are actually more expensive to maintain/upgrade/support. A perfect example of this is Windows itself. M$ spent nearly a decade to develop Vista. Apple was able to not only come up with a fully new operating system, but to port it to a new CPU, all in about the same time that it took M$ to develop Vista. And Apple has a tenth of the workforce of M$.
Usability for who? I have been a Mac user (unfortunately) since MacOS5 days and up to this day I find the Apple way of thinking wayyyyy overrated.
Do you ever notice how comments such as the above appear become more common across web discussion boards in near synchrony, especially when a new Micro$oft release appears immenent. I think that this is a sign that they are part of a Micro$oft marketing push.
And say what you will about WIndows 7, but it still has the registry. And it still uses the ugly dll system. You can put all the user facing lipstick you want on the operating system, but it still can't change the fact that this iteration of windows is fundamentally ugly underneath the hood.
Europe and Japan have had economic limits on energy consumption for decades. The result: they use their energy substantially more efficiently than we do. Japan specifically has had a long term concern about becoming too dependent on foreign energy production, since they have limited domestic energy production. They have used numerous levers of power to ensure that Japanese citizens and corporations use their energy efficiently. These policies have resulted in both high energy use efficiency AND substantial economic growth.
Is it good for the economy to allow energy to flow freely out of our homes due to poor insulation?
Is it good for the economy to drive obscenly large trucks/SUV's who's usual purpose is to move a single person?
Is it good for the economy to continue to contribute greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, with the likely result of increasing drought in our food production areas? (google California drought...California produces the majority of our food).
Imagine a hypothetical city who in their great wisdom install a huge torch in the centre of their city. The torch serves no other purpose than to amuse the inhabitants. The torch is so big that it consumes as much energy as all the cars and all the buildings in the city. How is such a wasteful monstrosity any different than allowing heat to escape from poorly insulated homes or from driving wasteful and inefficient cars. How is such waste good for the economy?
Those who make the simplistic argument that reduced energy consumption must result in economic decline are guilty of the same simplistic thinking that caused our current economic problems. Remember when we were told to borrow as much as we could, that borrowing would allow the economy to grow forever? Those people were wrong, because their thinking had little nuance, little attachment to history or the real world. Those who pronounce that energy conservation is bad should look outside our country to other countries that have already implemented the proposed policies. They should look at reality, instead of making up their own reality.
...but must agree that the new OS X update really does not have any new incredible features I am dying for.
Actually, I'm glad that Apple has followed through on its promise to include architectural improvements instead of outwards facing bloat features. One of the main problems that software writers face is the pressure to include new features without concentrating on invisible but important architectural structures. This is obviously caused by the pressure to sell software at all costs by adding bells and whistles. The end result will be ugly architecture and bloat.
[wishful thinking] I hope that their improvements add to the stability of the system, and that we won't go through the standard cycle of critical bugs and updates...we'll see[/wishful thinking]
For me, I came out of my physics education with a realization that the world is far far far stranger than anything our everyday experience would lead us to believe. It has also left me with a strong sense that none of our knowledge is absolutely certain. That doesn't mean that I believe that our scientific theories are necessarily completely wrong, but rather that our current theories may very well be incomplete.
String theory is definitely interesting. Gaining even a glimpse into it is far more humbling than learning quantum mechanics, and that is saying something! Where it will lead is completely unknown. For all we know, string theory may turn into a dead end (or into a massively complicated labyrinth with nothing but dead ends). Or it may turn into an immensely powerful predictive tool. Who can tell?
There are alternatives to string theory that show promise in uniting quantum mechanics and gravity. I haven't fully digested this yet, but this paper summary argues that space-time may have fractal elements that have the potential to predict both quantum mechanics and gravity.
The bottom line is that the universe is immense, and immensely complicated, and we are small. In such a universe, certainty becomes an absurdity.
What this sony shill has said is symptomatic of a corporate mindset in which the only things that have value are those that can be valued in currency. It is a convenient mindset that has the end result of maximizing profits for large corporations. To slightly modify a quote by Einstein:
Not everything important can be valued in money, and not everything that can be valued in money is important.
Slashdot Mirror
One could speculate that mobile carriers are scared to death of VOIP becoming possible on jailbroken iphones, such that they would want to be able to disable such features on phones on their networks. I suspect that this would be the ultimate reason why Apple would like the power to remotely cripple apps. It is evil behavior, no doubt. But I doubt Apple would care if it weren't for the mobile companies wanting to maintain their absurd uneven charges for different types of bits. The best way to stop such evil behavior is via government regulation. There will never be enough mobile carriers to allow true competition.
A significant amount of evolution is driven by mass die offs. That is, the population of a species reduced by 99% or more. We could evolve to be a species with average height of 7.5 feet very quickly...just kill off everyone except for a few hundred people who are taller than 7.5 feet. Let them have babies, and kill off any progeny who is shorter than 7.5 feet for a generation or two, and we would be a very tall species. Would you care to draw straws?
Do you really think that civilization can survive a significant reduction in the food supply? Do you have any idea what it is like to die of starvation? Your comment seems to show an implicit assumption that this would be somehow good for humanity, that having some competition would cause us to evolve, to become better, stronger, faster. It is easy to develop this detachment when staring at the fossil record. Wow, at the K/T boundary, the dinosaurs disappear, and the valiant rodents survived the asteroid/comet impact to evolve into us. Excellent, we wouldn't be here without that happening. Evolution is good. It resulted in us. Let the dying begin. Care to pony up your own grand-children first? After all, it's all in the name of evolution and progress.
It seems likely to me that ice loss at an ocean boundary will cause a reduction in floating ice sheets. Those floating ice sheets act as a barrier to glacial ice flowing into the ocean. Their reduction could cause an acceleration of ice flow into the sea.
In addition, it also seems likely to me that increases in ice in certain areas are associated with the increased moisture carrying capacity of warmer air. To snow, all you need is for the temperature to be below 32F/0C. If the warming continues, the ice thickness increases could be reversed, as those areas warm above the melting point of water during part of the year.
Obtuse much?!! Have you flown on a Boeing aircraft recently? Boeing is in many ways directly subsidized by the government. Driven recently? Car companies have been indirectly subsidized for decades via the publicly funded construction of our road and highway system. I could go on and on. Your nice neat and tidy division of "public" and "private" doesn't really exist. The two sphere's overlap.
In the end, the only thing that truly keeps governments accountable is the threat of disorder and revolution. Governments that are unhindered by this fear because of their willingness to use "as much force as is necessary" are usually the most tyrannical. Think of France. They have a history of protesting and if necessary rioting. Their government has possibly as a result of this, enacted many policies that are directly to the benefit of the public.
What scares me most about these so called "soft" weapons is that they can be so easily used, and without the blood and gore that usually comes with batons and bullets. These weapons have the potential to make real protest impossible.
To quote the definition of demagogue (Oxford English Dictionary):
Note first the prominent placement of "Al Gore" in the article. Immediately the prejudices against Gore are brought out in the reader, as much work has been done to demonize him. Then the "luxury car" moniker, implying that this isn't for the good of the "common people", but only for rich elites. Finally comes the "rights of the taxpayer" meme, where firmly instilled prejudices against government taxation and spending are brought out.
Nowhere in the article is any real perspective given about the development cycle of high tech products, and about how new tech often first appears in luxury goods before percolating down to the mass market. Nowhere is it mentioned that government has often helped nurture other high tech companies in the past (Boeing for example via military spending). The article is much like the bell for Pavlov's dog, where certain words such as "Gore" and "taxation" elicit a conditioned response in indoctrinated readers. The Wall Street Journal has become the Pravda of the right.
Yeah, except that we can vote to change the leaders of our government. Democracy isn't perfect. In fact, it is the worst system of government, except for all the others.
Democratic governments are often the only thing protecting us from the raw profit seeking power of private corporations. Corporate media conglomerates have been very successful in inculcating cynicism of governments into the public as a whole, as evidenced by the parent post. When citizens lose faith in their democratic governments, they pull back into their own spheres, ceasing to care about the large issues that affect society. Democracy weakens as citizens pull away from public life. And private powers move in to fill the power vacuum left by the withered democracy.
I meant to imply firstly that both the mafia and corporations are profit seeking entities. They are almost always larger than any single human being, and when large enough, they cease to be affected by the feelings of individual human beings. I would argue that corporations and the mafia become very much like machines as they become large. These machines act with their own particular logic, which is most often to maximize profit. Any member of these entities that act against this purpose is usually ejected from the organization. Thus individual emotions of group members such as anger, fear, sadness and empathy become irrelevant in the day to day operation of the organization. The machines soldier on in an unrelenting quest to increase profits.
Of course corporations operate ostensibly within the bounds of law, while the mafia does not. And this is no doubt an important difference. However, corporations do at times flout the law, especially when they span several nations, and can play national legal systems off against one another to gain advantage. They also do often act against the law when lax enforcement means it is unlikely they will be caught. If the penalties are low and if the public doesn't care, then a corporation may continue to disobey laws as part of its day to day operations.
In fact, I might argue that the mafia exemplifies the purest form of corporation, since it is nearly unbound by government regulation. If free market enthusiasts are to be believed, then the government is the enemy of the free market, holding back the potential of private corporations. The mafia has cast off those restrictions and operates with few restrictions on its profit seeking behavior.
I am not arguing that corporations should be abolished. Far from it...they are useful and necessary tools. But I think that we should be aware of what corporations are, and how they often behave, for if they become too powerful, then they will endanger the functioning of our society.
The line between major corporations and the mafia is a grey one. Do we really think that if a major corporation could get away with this, that they wouldn't do it, if it contributed significantly to their bottom line? Corporate behavior is all about cost-benifit analysis. The mafia operates by a slightly different risk profile. It also seems likely that what we think of as the mafia owns substantial portions of equity in our major corporations.
Why do I think this comment is appropriate to the discussion? Because I watch the behavior of legitimate corporations and see similarities. Gold mining companies often create huge pools of arsenic waste. The oil sands companies in Canada create huge and persistent pools of massively polluted water, sucking away and polluting water that would have otherwise gone for agriculture or human consumption. Major shipping companies routinely dump their oil laden bilge water in the open ocean. How exactly does this behavior not fall under the category of "organized crime"?
It isn't so simple. LCD screens have a reflective element. That is, even without a backlight they are readable, if not always very well. OLED screens do not have a reflective element to the image...they must produce all of the light to overcome reflections from ambient light. Not to mention that OLED screens will probably show significant degradation in performance over relatively short periods. And they will draw more energy for brighter pictures.
I freely admit that I haven't actually handled a "Zune HD", but I doubt the parent poster has either. I don't think it bodes well for this device that most of the demos I have seen have been done in dark rooms. The proof will be in the pudding, but I strongly suspect that this device's display will look horrible in conditions where there is significant ambient light.
Most of the demo's are done in dark rooms because the OLED screen sucks in bright light. LED screens can be read partially by reflected light, but the OLED screen must produce all of the light to overcome bright sunshine shining on it. The OLED screen also sucks more power for bright pictures, since each individual picture element is producing light. The result is a screen that won't work well in daylight, and won't live up to its stated potential for battery savings.
World War II WAS a government stimulus program, the only type that America really seems to be able to stomach in any great quantity.
Ah, the stink of envy and class warfare. Ever the siren song of the collectivist left. Just give them an axe and they will cut everyone down to the same size.
Again, a thoughtless slogan answer. Are you only capable of making arguments that will fit on a bumper sticker?
So for the record, I will put forward some of the reasons I think the way I do, though I doubt you will read them, for you don't seem interested in getting at the truth through rational enquiry.
I believe that there should be some income distribution. I don't think it should be complete, and I believe that communism is evil. But I think that using some money that billionaires have amassed and that would have otherwise been spent buying Lamborghinis and Beluga Caviar, to instead educate brilliant but otherwise poor students, so that they may make a contribution to society will help the economy and improve the lot of everyone.
I come to this opinion honestly. Specifically, a relative of mine grew up relatively poor, but received an excellent education from the public system. He ended up going to a prestigious university and pursued a career in politics. He is currently an important figure in world affairs. Had he not received a good education and a good upbringing, something that was made possible through income redistribution, he could have ended up languishing, of following a career that went nowhere. Leaving aside the moral issues, on a pure economic basis, the investment that society made in his education has been returned to society many times over.
I would argue that one of the great strengths of America, economic and otherwise has been that it has in the past invested in its brilliant students, whether they be poor or rich. I think this is one of the main reasons why America prospered under the New Deal. These poor students often went on to become doctors and engineers, and became important contributors to the wealth and power of our society. If too much wealth is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, many of these brilliant students will fail to achieve their potential, because there will be insufficient resources given for their education and upbringing.
Thus, a certain amount of income distribution is good for society. Not too much, for that would remove the incentive to become wealthy, and would degenerate into communism, which is a mountrous ideology.
The parent post to this one was a simple and idiotic slogan. My response is an attempt at making a rational argument. I doubt the parent poster is even capable of stringing five sentences together to make a rational argument. Need I remind everyone of the types of regimes that speak mainly in slogans? Mussolini's Italy. Hitler's Germany.
...and that's what your comment amounts to...noise. Why is it that so many "conservative" posters hold their arguments close to their chest like a hand in poker? What makes them so afraid to argue logically? Do they think their arguments won't stand up to scrutiny? Or do they actually not have any arguments at all? It's kind of hard to tell when all some neocon posters do is post slogans.
Oh please, economics is NOT is science in the same way as physics and chemistry. It does not have hard and testable hypotheses. Its predictions are always approximate, and are seemingly rarely falsified, largely due to their vagueness. Most economic theories are inwards looking and self-referential. The theories are logical based on a certain set of assumptions, but those base assumptions are mere speculation.
I like to look at economics as a useful tool. It may have some preductive utility, not unlike technical stock analysis. But it certainly shouldn't be used as the main guiding force by which to operate a society. I believe that the fundamental flaw of economics is that it seeks to make predictions about phenomenon that are largely psychological. In the end, market behavior is based on psychology, on desires, on fears, on needs. To assume that we can reduce such a massively complicated thing as fear to a simple set of equations is ludicrous.
I certainly hope you are trolling. These days,it's sometimes hard to tell. But if you are not, I assume you will be first in line to man the gas chambers.
Neo-conservative != fascist
See if you can recognize the following characteristics in today's Fox News/Jeff Beck/Rush Limbaugh followers in the following list (note especially point #3 in regard to the parent post):
Following the Great Depression and World War II, the leaders of our society decided to start taxing the wealthy more and more, while using that money for the betterment of society as a whole. It was called the New Deal. And this policy worked quite well, propelling America into a period of rapid economic growth, while at the same time creating a profound sense of economic security for the middle class. Vacation pay became the norm (it largely didn't exist before the Great Depression), and middle class Americans had enough disposable income to spend on luxuries like vacations.
This system was made possible by several other policies that prevented the rich from quickly withdrawing their money from the country. If you were wealthy in the UK in the 1950's, it was extremely difficult to get your money out of the country. It became common in this period for rich British citizens to build huge sailing yachts, which they sailed to other countries and then sold. They used their boats as a store of their wealth (read Myles Smeeton's Once is Enough for a story of one such couple).
Then came the right wing "neo-liberal/neo-conservative" politicians. When they got into power, one of the first things they did was to remove the barriers to capital mobility. Money was able to flow almost completely freely across national borders. This has brought economic growth for some, especially in countries like China. But it has also ensured that the countries that originally used taxes on the wealthy to ensure a healthy middle class were at a huge disadvantage. Rich individuals have withdrawn their money from America, and invested it in countries like China.
What many of us don't realize is that the complete and free mobility of capital will lead to the virtual disappearance of the American middle class as we have seen it over the past four decades, because it will ensure that money will flow away from countries with high taxes towards productive countries with low taxes. The country will increasingly look like Britain in the 1800's during the beginning of the industrial revolution (i.e. the world of Oliver Twist). There will be a very wealthy class. And there will be a worker class, which will comprise the vast majority of the population. Things like vacation pay, comfortable pensions, affordable quality health care, and disposable income will slowly but surely disappear for the vast majority of the former middle class. I am not prophesizing this; I am watching it happen before my eyes. IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING! Take an honest look at America right now, and tell me that our standard of living isn't slipping. And this at a time when we have never been able to make products more efficiently!
And to those of you who reflexively demonize those like me as "liberals", ask yourself this question? Are you a Billionaire? If not, then why are you thinking like a billionaire? Why do you think that lower wages for most of society is in your interest? Why do you think that taxing billionaires and spending that money to build roads isn't in your interest?
Do you think that the $20000 you have invested in stocks will pay for your comfortable retirement? What you seem to forget is that the billionaire who owns $200 million of those same stocks will make slightly more than you. And he will use the money he makes to buy even more stocks. Meanwhile, you, with your ever decreasing salary will have less and less disposable money to invest.
Of all the posts I've read on this list, this one makes the most sense. It sounds like M$ to design their own GPU/circuit board and do it in a half-assed way. Their corporate culture seems to guarantee that they won't use "best engineering practices" in any of their products, either software or hardware. The corporate culture is to shit out products, and to use hard-ball business/marketing practices to cause consumers to buy them.
The funny thing is that products that are poorly engineered are actually more expensive to maintain/upgrade/support. A perfect example of this is Windows itself. M$ spent nearly a decade to develop Vista. Apple was able to not only come up with a fully new operating system, but to port it to a new CPU, all in about the same time that it took M$ to develop Vista. And Apple has a tenth of the workforce of M$.
Do you ever notice how comments such as the above appear become more common across web discussion boards in near synchrony, especially when a new Micro$oft release appears immenent. I think that this is a sign that they are part of a Micro$oft marketing push.
And say what you will about WIndows 7, but it still has the registry. And it still uses the ugly dll system. You can put all the user facing lipstick you want on the operating system, but it still can't change the fact that this iteration of windows is fundamentally ugly underneath the hood.
The increased insulation will increase the sales price for the subsequent owners, especially if the price of energy is kept high.
Europe and Japan have had economic limits on energy consumption for decades. The result: they use their energy substantially more efficiently than we do. Japan specifically has had a long term concern about becoming too dependent on foreign energy production, since they have limited domestic energy production. They have used numerous levers of power to ensure that Japanese citizens and corporations use their energy efficiently. These policies have resulted in both high energy use efficiency AND substantial economic growth.
Is it good for the economy to allow energy to flow freely out of our homes due to poor insulation?
Is it good for the economy to drive obscenly large trucks/SUV's who's usual purpose is to move a single person?
Is it good for the economy to continue to contribute greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, with the likely result of increasing drought in our food production areas? (google California drought...California produces the majority of our food).
Imagine a hypothetical city who in their great wisdom install a huge torch in the centre of their city. The torch serves no other purpose than to amuse the inhabitants. The torch is so big that it consumes as much energy as all the cars and all the buildings in the city. How is such a wasteful monstrosity any different than allowing heat to escape from poorly insulated homes or from driving wasteful and inefficient cars. How is such waste good for the economy?
Those who make the simplistic argument that reduced energy consumption must result in economic decline are guilty of the same simplistic thinking that caused our current economic problems. Remember when we were told to borrow as much as we could, that borrowing would allow the economy to grow forever? Those people were wrong, because their thinking had little nuance, little attachment to history or the real world. Those who pronounce that energy conservation is bad should look outside our country to other countries that have already implemented the proposed policies. They should look at reality, instead of making up their own reality.
Actually, I'm glad that Apple has followed through on its promise to include architectural improvements instead of outwards facing bloat features. One of the main problems that software writers face is the pressure to include new features without concentrating on invisible but important architectural structures. This is obviously caused by the pressure to sell software at all costs by adding bells and whistles. The end result will be ugly architecture and bloat.
[wishful thinking] I hope that their improvements add to the stability of the system, and that we won't go through the standard cycle of critical bugs and updates...we'll see[/wishful thinking]
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For me, I came out of my physics education with a realization that the world is far far far stranger than anything our everyday experience would lead us to believe. It has also left me with a strong sense that none of our knowledge is absolutely certain. That doesn't mean that I believe that our scientific theories are necessarily completely wrong, but rather that our current theories may very well be incomplete.
String theory is definitely interesting. Gaining even a glimpse into it is far more humbling than learning quantum mechanics, and that is saying something! Where it will lead is completely unknown. For all we know, string theory may turn into a dead end (or into a massively complicated labyrinth with nothing but dead ends). Or it may turn into an immensely powerful predictive tool. Who can tell?
There are alternatives to string theory that show promise in uniting quantum mechanics and gravity. I haven't fully digested this yet, but this paper summary argues that space-time may have fractal elements that have the potential to predict both quantum mechanics and gravity.
The bottom line is that the universe is immense, and immensely complicated, and we are small. In such a universe, certainty becomes an absurdity.
What this sony shill has said is symptomatic of a corporate mindset in which the only things that have value are those that can be valued in currency. It is a convenient mindset that has the end result of maximizing profits for large corporations. To slightly modify a quote by Einstein: