Yeah, profit takers are going to dump the stock. Apple's up 6% this morning. Hey, can you manage my portfolio? I feel like losing a lot of money day trading, and you sound like the guy to do it for me.
"Obsolete" seems harsh. Look at it this way: if someone is already invested in the iTunes app store environment, by already owning either an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, it seems reasonable that if they wanted the form factor of the iPad mini, the differences in CPU, GPU, RAM, and resolution would not matter all that much. Indeed, sales figures would seem to back up that assertion.
For the millionth time, just because it's not right for the super-geeks here, doesn't mean it isn't useful to a significant portion of the non-nerd electronics-buying public.
Nixon wasn't ashamed after he got caught either. He simply faced the reality that it would be slightly less shameful to resign than to be forced out, which was inevitable. If his impeachment and conviction hadn't been a foregone conclusion, he would've served out his term with the same arrogance as every president since and most presidents before.
Your anti-Obama-wired brain has clouded your vision, and your understanding of politics and politicians seems to come from the superficial level that most of us get these days from info-tainment programs.
Sure. I was born in an Eastern-bloc country (not Russia) and my dad took my mom and I out of there before I was 2. All I heard growing up was how America was the land of the free, and the evil Russians were holding down my cousins back in the homeland, and all of that was true. They were the enemy. They were opening the mail going back and forth between us and our relatives (literally - you could see it when the letters arrived, at both ends) and they were keeping more of them from leaving and joining us in the US, although some more did make it over.
Now we're the ones opening the mail of our own citizens. So what if it's electronic? Then you have one guy who made public a lot of the details of how the US government is spying on its own citizens, (and I'm glad he did it although I feel sorry for him because he's getting fucked) and he's being punished by the current gov't bringing the full weight of diplomatic pressure to make sure he can't get anywhere, even as they lie through their teeth and claim there's nothing special about his case and no backdoor dealing is being done to get "some hacker."
For me, it doesn't get any more backwards from what I grew up with.
natural gas which has gone up more than 100% in the U.S. since Dec of 2011
I'm all for using less fossil fuels and getting the US off of our addiction to them, but you do us a disservice when you exaggerate like this. You picked the absolute low point of natural gas prices, and while they've (almost) doubled since Dec of 2011 (3.59 vs 1.95 then), they're still ONE-QUARTER the price level in June of 2008 (over $13). Cherry-picking doesn't help anyone when trying to make a rational argument.
I never said it was acceptable. The question was "why would anyone shell out $10 for a ticket....then spend most of the movie texting or talking on the phone." Yes, they also do this at the food court at the mall. Yes, maybe they'll do it at their friends' basement if their parents aren't home. And maybe they'll even go to a park, although that seems less likely for a teenager than a movie theater. $10 is nothing, especially when their parents give it to them just to get 'em out of the house for a few hours. So sometimes they're also going to a movie, because it's cheap, and they'll text through it, because they do that ALL THE TIME, wherever they are.
Yes, let's allow people to talk and text in movie theaters because of on-call shift workers that might lose a shift to the next person in line. Makes total sense.
The one time I asked politely for someone to stop talking during a film, one row ahead of me and about 5 seats away, I heard: "You can't tell me what to do!"
It's nice that you had a different experience, but I would believe in my part of the country, that'd be the exception.
I use the screen as a low-level flashlight all the time. It's plenty bright. And if some kid has the brightness turned up all the way on their phone, which most of them do because hey, it's there, why wouldn't I want max brightness? then it's extremely annoying even 3 rows and 4 seats away in a movie theater.
So if it's a summer movie, I wait a few weeks for the HD torrent version to appear online and I watch it on my couch. I'd gladly pay $20 for that option (2 tickets), but what I won't do is pay $20 to get annoyed by people the manager doesn't want to, or doesn't care about, throwing out for being rude. So they lose my business, except on Mondays thru Wednesdays during the school year.
They don't care. Last I checked, Hollywood gross revenue increases were still outpacing inflation, so why do they need my measly business? Easier to employ 4 people in the entire megaplex and pay them nothing and let people like me stay away. If there were enough people that cared about watching movies without distractions, they would do something about it, but there aren't, so they don't.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Socrates, maybe. (origin is disputed)
What's not in dispute is that from the beginning of time, and until the end of time, old people will complain about the bad manners of young people, conveniently forgetting that when they were young, old people were saying the same thing about them, and only the numbers on the calendar have changed. It's a phenomenon that someone should really do some serious research on.
Also, now it's your turn to say, "yeah but these kids are DIFFERENT", thus proving my point while being blissfully unaware of it.
Because they're kids. And they want to get out of the house, not sit there with their parents and watch a movie while texting. They want to get out, go out with friends, text other friends, and have an excuse to do so. A $10 movie ticket is still the cheapest night out there is, and one of the few options available to under-21 folks.
"to text or not to text" while watching the movie doesn't even enter into it - it's a given; they're going to be texting and checking facebook no matter where they are. The only option you have is to do what I'm doing - go on Mon, Tues, or Wed nights, after a movie's been out for a couple of weeks. And in the summertime, even that doesn't work. So I torrent summer movies once an HD version hits the net and my wife and I watch it on a 60" plasma with a $1 bucket of popcorn that tastes 10 times better than the one at the movie theater anyway.
Nobody talked in such absolutes except for you. Wake up. The world is a complicated place. Maybe you try to oversimplify it into black and white for a personal reason.
It's almost like you replied to three posts above you without even reading them. Hmmm.....
I got a great idea, Lets loan a bunch of money to people we're pretty sure wont pay it back. Sounds like a great business plan right?
This part is sort of accurate but an oversimplification. In reality, they were pretty sure a certain percentage wouldn't pay it back (higher than the normal foreclosure rate), which is why they charged higher interest on those loans. According to the fuzzy math being used, they'd still make money in the long run. They didn't count on a massive real estate bubble that resulted, and the subsequent higher foreclosure rate resulting from many more people walking away from their mortgages once they were underwater. But yes, it was a terrible business plan that was originated by some greedy people and then copied over and over again by greedy people that weren't as original.
Oh, the caveat, we don't have to worry about the loan because the government will guarantee it for us. We don't even have to worry about it once we have the loan origination fees.
This part kind of shows your ignorance of what really happened. Many of the banks (the smarter ones, from a Machiavellian point of view) packaged up those bad loans, lied about how safe they were, and sold them off as packaged securities to people like Lehman Brothers. Ask Dick Fuld if the government bailed him out. He lost about half a billion in personal wealth and managed to self-implode Lehman in the process (don't worry, he still has ~$100 million to fall back on). Other lenders, like Countrywide, simply got swallowed up after their stock became near-worthless. After Lehman went down, it became clear that if the other banks weren't bailed out, we'd have a Great Depression on our hands. To suggest that people at the heads of those banks could've predicted the exact turn of events leading up to that point is giving them way too much credit.
Of course with out stupid government regulation this business plan would have never worked. It was even worse than most other types of welfare and almost as bad as things like rent control.
This one, of course, is as backwards as your first effort. We've already discussed how wrong it is. Perhaps you should read that part too.
You're coming at the whole history of the 2008 financial meltdown with this hard-coded "it's the government's fault!" attitude that's been bred into you by who knows what. Maybe it's possible for you to actually apply some logic and reason to the process. Maybe not. Either way, no one is listening to you except the other members of your choir.
Actually I live in the US and i don't think it sucks, so I wasn't really going for easy karma (mine's excellent, thanks anyway). I was more trying to point out, in a subtle way (too subtle I guess) that the poster's "widely unstable" and "Ponzi scheme" descriptions could apply to either Bitcoin or the US dollar, depending on the opinions of who you ask. Both of those phrases are hugely loaded and very much an oversimplification if they're used to describe EITHER currency.
I guess next time I need to be a bit more literal to get my point across. To you, and the one mod who said "Flamebait!" anyway. Actually, now that i think about it, why would I care?
I've heard this line of BS many times and it amazes me how many people buy into it.
It's a nice line that anti-government types like to pull out, and the only problem is that it ignores reality and gets it backwards. Banks basically paid off, through lobbying and "donations", both legal and illegal ones, enough members of Congress to get regulations RELAXED - as in, the law signed in 2000 that made Wall Street exempt from the "bucket shop" restriction. Great idea! Except that it was the biggest contributing factor to sinking the economy. The bad loans themselves, if that were all that were being defaulted on, were a tiny fraction of a percent of our GDP. The bad bets MADE on the loans, however, compounded the problem by orders of magnitude.
In other words, even if your claim of government forcing banks to loan more money were true (it's debatable, and if you read enough about it it's clear that the banks weren't being forced to do anything they didn't want to do) - it STILL didn't sink the economy. Deregulation, of one specific type, did.
Wow, a car analogy to demonstrate a failed point on slashdot! How original, and ineffective. I'll spell it out for you - when you do a Google search, you'd like to see the same results that everyone else sees, and an AC was claiming that a search for "Obama" was resulting in different results on a left-wing and right-wing person's computer. Meanwhile, on Google+ you'd EXPECT to get results tailored to you, but you felt like it was the same thing, I guess.
Exactly what "motives" are being covered up? (this is the part where you get to reveal that you're a conspiracy-theory fan and everyone breathes a sigh of relief "okay, he's a nutjob, move along....")
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, profit takers are going to dump the stock. Apple's up 6% this morning. Hey, can you manage my portfolio? I feel like losing a lot of money day trading, and you sound like the guy to do it for me.
"Obsolete" seems harsh. Look at it this way: if someone is already invested in the iTunes app store environment, by already owning either an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, it seems reasonable that if they wanted the form factor of the iPad mini, the differences in CPU, GPU, RAM, and resolution would not matter all that much. Indeed, sales figures would seem to back up that assertion.
For the millionth time, just because it's not right for the super-geeks here, doesn't mean it isn't useful to a significant portion of the non-nerd electronics-buying public.
Depends what you mean by many. OS X's market-share has been rising for almost a decade, slowly but steadily. Has Linux's?
You, sir, deserve some points for that one.
Has Bush II? Has Clinton? Has Bush I? etc.....
Nixon wasn't ashamed after he got caught either. He simply faced the reality that it would be slightly less shameful to resign than to be forced out, which was inevitable. If his impeachment and conviction hadn't been a foregone conclusion, he would've served out his term with the same arrogance as every president since and most presidents before.
Your anti-Obama-wired brain has clouded your vision, and your understanding of politics and politicians seems to come from the superficial level that most of us get these days from info-tainment programs.
Sure. I was born in an Eastern-bloc country (not Russia) and my dad took my mom and I out of there before I was 2. All I heard growing up was how America was the land of the free, and the evil Russians were holding down my cousins back in the homeland, and all of that was true. They were the enemy. They were opening the mail going back and forth between us and our relatives (literally - you could see it when the letters arrived, at both ends) and they were keeping more of them from leaving and joining us in the US, although some more did make it over.
Now we're the ones opening the mail of our own citizens. So what if it's electronic? Then you have one guy who made public a lot of the details of how the US government is spying on its own citizens, (and I'm glad he did it although I feel sorry for him because he's getting fucked) and he's being punished by the current gov't bringing the full weight of diplomatic pressure to make sure he can't get anywhere, even as they lie through their teeth and claim there's nothing special about his case and no backdoor dealing is being done to get "some hacker."
For me, it doesn't get any more backwards from what I grew up with.
and he is us.
natural gas which has gone up more than 100% in the U.S. since Dec of 2011
I'm all for using less fossil fuels and getting the US off of our addiction to them, but you do us a disservice when you exaggerate like this. You picked the absolute low point of natural gas prices, and while they've (almost) doubled since Dec of 2011 (3.59 vs 1.95 then), they're still ONE-QUARTER the price level in June of 2008 (over $13). Cherry-picking doesn't help anyone when trying to make a rational argument.
You implied the opposite, that it was a city. I was saying that it seems such behavior in theaters are more of a problem in cities. Real ones.
I never said it was acceptable. The question was "why would anyone shell out $10 for a ticket....then spend most of the movie texting or talking on the phone." Yes, they also do this at the food court at the mall. Yes, maybe they'll do it at their friends' basement if their parents aren't home. And maybe they'll even go to a park, although that seems less likely for a teenager than a movie theater. $10 is nothing, especially when their parents give it to them just to get 'em out of the house for a few hours. So sometimes they're also going to a movie, because it's cheap, and they'll text through it, because they do that ALL THE TIME, wherever they are.
Yeah, you should've mentioned that at the start. That situation would go down a whole different way here, 95% of the time.
At least where I live (a city of 200K people in the US),
That's a largish town, in the area of the US that I live.
If you're in the same theater as the person who's playing Angry Birds, then I suppose you're paying the same $10 for poop that they are.
Yes, let's allow people to talk and text in movie theaters because of on-call shift workers that might lose a shift to the next person in line. Makes total sense.
The one time I asked politely for someone to stop talking during a film, one row ahead of me and about 5 seats away, I heard: "You can't tell me what to do!"
It's nice that you had a different experience, but I would believe in my part of the country, that'd be the exception.
I use the screen as a low-level flashlight all the time. It's plenty bright. And if some kid has the brightness turned up all the way on their phone, which most of them do because hey, it's there, why wouldn't I want max brightness? then it's extremely annoying even 3 rows and 4 seats away in a movie theater.
So if it's a summer movie, I wait a few weeks for the HD torrent version to appear online and I watch it on my couch. I'd gladly pay $20 for that option (2 tickets), but what I won't do is pay $20 to get annoyed by people the manager doesn't want to, or doesn't care about, throwing out for being rude. So they lose my business, except on Mondays thru Wednesdays during the school year.
They don't care. Last I checked, Hollywood gross revenue increases were still outpacing inflation, so why do they need my measly business? Easier to employ 4 people in the entire megaplex and pay them nothing and let people like me stay away. If there were enough people that cared about watching movies without distractions, they would do something about it, but there aren't, so they don't.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Socrates, maybe. (origin is disputed)
What's not in dispute is that from the beginning of time, and until the end of time, old people will complain about the bad manners of young people, conveniently forgetting that when they were young, old people were saying the same thing about them, and only the numbers on the calendar have changed. It's a phenomenon that someone should really do some serious research on.
Also, now it's your turn to say, "yeah but these kids are DIFFERENT", thus proving my point while being blissfully unaware of it.
Because they're kids. And they want to get out of the house, not sit there with their parents and watch a movie while texting. They want to get out, go out with friends, text other friends, and have an excuse to do so. A $10 movie ticket is still the cheapest night out there is, and one of the few options available to under-21 folks.
"to text or not to text" while watching the movie doesn't even enter into it - it's a given; they're going to be texting and checking facebook no matter where they are. The only option you have is to do what I'm doing - go on Mon, Tues, or Wed nights, after a movie's been out for a couple of weeks. And in the summertime, even that doesn't work. So I torrent summer movies once an HD version hits the net and my wife and I watch it on a 60" plasma with a $1 bucket of popcorn that tastes 10 times better than the one at the movie theater anyway.
Nobody talked in such absolutes except for you. Wake up. The world is a complicated place. Maybe you try to oversimplify it into black and white for a personal reason.
I got a great idea, Lets loan a bunch of money to people we're pretty sure wont pay it back. Sounds like a great business plan right?
This part is sort of accurate but an oversimplification. In reality, they were pretty sure a certain percentage wouldn't pay it back (higher than the normal foreclosure rate), which is why they charged higher interest on those loans. According to the fuzzy math being used, they'd still make money in the long run. They didn't count on a massive real estate bubble that resulted, and the subsequent higher foreclosure rate resulting from many more people walking away from their mortgages once they were underwater. But yes, it was a terrible business plan that was originated by some greedy people and then copied over and over again by greedy people that weren't as original.
Oh, the caveat, we don't have to worry about the loan because the government will guarantee it for us. We don't even have to worry about it once we have the loan origination fees.
This part kind of shows your ignorance of what really happened. Many of the banks (the smarter ones, from a Machiavellian point of view) packaged up those bad loans, lied about how safe they were, and sold them off as packaged securities to people like Lehman Brothers. Ask Dick Fuld if the government bailed him out. He lost about half a billion in personal wealth and managed to self-implode Lehman in the process (don't worry, he still has ~$100 million to fall back on). Other lenders, like Countrywide, simply got swallowed up after their stock became near-worthless. After Lehman went down, it became clear that if the other banks weren't bailed out, we'd have a Great Depression on our hands. To suggest that people at the heads of those banks could've predicted the exact turn of events leading up to that point is giving them way too much credit.
Of course with out stupid government regulation this business plan would have never worked. It was even worse than most other types of welfare and almost as bad as things like rent control.
This one, of course, is as backwards as your first effort. We've already discussed how wrong it is. Perhaps you should read that part too.
You're coming at the whole history of the 2008 financial meltdown with this hard-coded "it's the government's fault!" attitude that's been bred into you by who knows what. Maybe it's possible for you to actually apply some logic and reason to the process. Maybe not. Either way, no one is listening to you except the other members of your choir.
I only say this to help you and those around you when the shock of the real world causes you to enter a narcissistic rage.
You're projecting your own insecurities onto those who have a disagreement in opinion with you. Guess what that's a sign of?
Actually I live in the US and i don't think it sucks, so I wasn't really going for easy karma (mine's excellent, thanks anyway). I was more trying to point out, in a subtle way (too subtle I guess) that the poster's "widely unstable" and "Ponzi scheme" descriptions could apply to either Bitcoin or the US dollar, depending on the opinions of who you ask. Both of those phrases are hugely loaded and very much an oversimplification if they're used to describe EITHER currency.
I guess next time I need to be a bit more literal to get my point across. To you, and the one mod who said "Flamebait!" anyway. Actually, now that i think about it, why would I care?
I've heard this line of BS many times and it amazes me how many people buy into it.
It's a nice line that anti-government types like to pull out, and the only problem is that it ignores reality and gets it backwards. Banks basically paid off, through lobbying and "donations", both legal and illegal ones, enough members of Congress to get regulations RELAXED - as in, the law signed in 2000 that made Wall Street exempt from the "bucket shop" restriction. Great idea! Except that it was the biggest contributing factor to sinking the economy. The bad loans themselves, if that were all that were being defaulted on, were a tiny fraction of a percent of our GDP. The bad bets MADE on the loans, however, compounded the problem by orders of magnitude.
In other words, even if your claim of government forcing banks to loan more money were true (it's debatable, and if you read enough about it it's clear that the banks weren't being forced to do anything they didn't want to do) - it STILL didn't sink the economy. Deregulation, of one specific type, did.
Even on Slashdot, Bitcoin is widely considered unstable and generally considered to be a Ponzi scheme.
How's that different from the US dollar, then?
Wow, a car analogy to demonstrate a failed point on slashdot! How original, and ineffective. I'll spell it out for you - when you do a Google search, you'd like to see the same results that everyone else sees, and an AC was claiming that a search for "Obama" was resulting in different results on a left-wing and right-wing person's computer. Meanwhile, on Google+ you'd EXPECT to get results tailored to you, but you felt like it was the same thing, I guess.
Exactly what "motives" are being covered up? (this is the part where you get to reveal that you're a conspiracy-theory fan and everyone breathes a sigh of relief "okay, he's a nutjob, move along....")