These may all be unprejudiced articles containing nothing but true statements, but they do show a certain direction of interest.
And how exactly do you do research without "a certain direction of interest," pray tell? Or is your own research entirely aimless?
What's unfortunate is the destructive effect of popular attitudes and governmental policies on scientific research.
Wake me up when "scientific research" is anything but a bunch of petty office politics, infighting, and backstabbing about who gets tenure, time for research, who published more articles with a higher impact factor or some other garbage metric, and who gets grant money or public money for research that will be patented for private gain, who gets the patent money, and meanwhile the public can't even access a write-up or report of this research without paying an exorbitant fee to some journal that touts its "high impact factor".
You scientists are just grubbing for money like the rest of us who are trying to make a buck to get by in this life, so don't try to pawn your work off on us like it's some grand altruism or search for the truth, because it's not. Like everything else, it's all about making a buck somehow or another.
It's quite true that correlation does not imply causation, but how does it really matter whether or not pot smoking causes stupidity, or stupidity causes pot smoking? Smoking pot is still a stupid thing to do, and that remains well established. The really stupid part is that people who have willingly drugged themselves into oblivion think they have a right to live as stoned and high as they please on public assistance because they are unable to work as a pilot, stockbroker, heavy equipment operator, truck driver, lawyer, physician, surgeon or any other position that requires mental or physical coordination and judgment on the job.
And we wonder why the 47% are on welfare, with all those stupid pieces of metal sticking out of mutilated gauged-out body parts, ugly tattoos all over their skin, and brains damaged not just from pot, but meth, crack, heroin, and hard liquor. Never mind the USA is still by far the easiest country to work yourself out of "low socioeconomic status"---these people just don't want to because they enjoy that way of life.
Look. I don't have to be that smart or intelligent to say this.
I don't have any use for MySpace, FaceBook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc., etc. ad nauseam. I am simply sick and tired of the pervasiveness of the online social networking cancer. I can't even read the newspaper without seeing some column about a girl's "Wah! Wah! Wah! My boyfriend unfriended me!" or "My friend friended so-and-so, but she won't friend me, and so-and-so posted this or that on their 'wall' about me? What am I supposed to do?" Then we have Google+ "circles"---just like middle school, it's all about who's in and who's out of the "right" clique.
In the first place, I'm not the kind of person who refuses to speak to friend A any more because friend B doesn't get along with him/her all the time, or isn't "in" with the right crowd. In the second place, it's none of these disgusting companies' business who my friends are. In the third place, a very similar kind of centralized tracking of friends and connections (from phone company records) was instrumental in the Holocaust of the 1930s; let's not forget history.
I don't think I have to be a privacy freak to have my limits on how much I want a complete stranger to know or find out about me unbeknownst to me. Just mind your own business, and leave me alone. And just a hint to the marketing people. "Like" lacks an imperative in anything approaching halfway correct English. In the English language, I either like something or I don't, and if I do like something, it has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. You can't order me to "like" anything. "Like us on Facebook!" makes no sense whatsoever in proper English, and it rubs me the wrong way whenever I see that monstrosity of a phrase.
Manual skilled labor doesn't have too much to do IQ. The 'skilled' part, but not the manual labor part.
I would argue not the skilled part either, but rather how quickly/easily the skill was obtained and mastered. Even then, the individual person and skill probably matter too.
Having a high IQ and obtaining and mastering a skill quickly and easily is not going to get you through a 2000 hour apprenticeship any faster than the guy who barely understands what he's doing. It's not going to earn you any more money or help your career, especially in "manual skilled labor." That kind of work is often but not always unionized, pay is strictly by seniority, not merit, and if you have better than average skills or a high IQ, you keep it to yourself. Management doesn't want you as a worker if you think you're too smart, and co-workers won't cooperate with you if you work too hard because it makes them look bad. You're going to have a difficult career of it if _anyone_ gets the impression that you have better than average intelligence in any way, shape, or form.
Damn right, now why wouldn't Google avail themselves of it?
Because Google doesn't need to. Google has its own "Google Internet Authority" for signing its own certs. What are you complaining about? My point was that SSL certs that Google or anybody else will accept _are_ available for the "little guy" to use as he pleases at little to no cost.
Are you suggesting they provide a certificate signing system of their own to these people, or have an out of bound interface to upload self signed certs to a BIGASS trust store on their end?
I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. In fact I think they did the right thing here by just not dealing with self-signed certs. Big commercial company; vanilla commercial certs are good enough.
the commercial x.509 system
is "good enough" for everyday nickel-and-dime retail commerce on the internet, and not much more. I'm not even disagreeing with you on this point. So trust but verify: your nickels and dimes are probably safe with it, but go over your credit card statements promptly with a fine-toothed comb. Compartmentalize your life a little, be circumspect about the trails you leave online, and don't spill all your secrets to Facebook. If you have something to hide, don't allow it near a computer that will ever be attached to the internet. The internet is not and never will be a crypto utopia.
A cert from BigNameInternetCompany costs next to nothing
In fact it costs nothing from StartSSL, like several commenters have pointed out, but people forget that the commercial x.509 PKI is for convenience, not security.
A self-signed cert is highly secure as long as you can verify through independent means that it is in fact the same cert installed on your server, and as long as the private key has not been compromised. In fact this is really the only way you can really get this level of security from even a commercial cert --- to verify independently that it is in fact the cert you think it is, and you have not been subject to a man-in-the-middle-attack.
It's not as though Google previously made any effort to verify the authenticity of those self-signed certs, or if accepting those self-signed certs as they did before would give their users anything but a false sense of security. Surely it is not a money issue for the "small guy". Commercial certs can be had, if not free from the one provider I already mentioned, for a very minimal price from many different providers, on the order of what the "small guy" is already paying for his domain registration. Why is it that the "small guy" always seems to choose the most expensive, heavily advertised vendors of some service or product and then proceed to complain about the price?
I have to agree (mostly) with Frosty here. No, the mainstream commercial PKI is not the most highly secure thing in the world, but you're trying to authenticate your server to a big commercial company---you need a commercial cert. And if you're trusting such a big commercial company as Google, then you may as well trust the whole commercial PKI, because you're extending your trust far and wide in either case, which there is nothing wrong with, as long as you be mindful of what you are entrusting to the "big boys."
if I can't find a felony you've committed during that 24 hour period,... Dozens have tried. Nobody's won so far.
Example scenarios, please. Not that I have reason to disbelieve you, but you are talking about felonies here, not misdemeanors. At least a short vignette and a citation to U.S. Code or state law, and maybe some court decisions, because otherwise the other comments are fully justified in that you're full of hot air.
So I don't think, do I? Not that potheads put me in a very thoughtful mood.
You, sir, stand as vivid evidence for the need of an intelligence test to enable the voting privilege. I suggest you permanently cease using Faux Newz as your primary information source,
I have little to no interest in Fox News, Huffington Post, talk radio, and other such dumbed-down media. On the other hand, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has something to say on the dumbing-down effects of marijuana.
take up a great hobby like knitting or perhaps crocheting
According to my grandmother, it was a man that taught her to crochet. I think it's a little boring myself, but it would certainly be a better hobby than pot.
and never, ever breed.
Surely you do not feel so threatened by my manliness as to make a comment like that.
Many recreational users already have that much [half a million dollars] (or more) property.
I don't think so. The way pot destroys ambition, motivation, and self-discipline, and erodes intelligence, it is hardly a path to prosperity. For these reasons the vast majority of pot users are unable to make a living for themselves and thus depend on public assistance and petty crime to support themselves and their habit. Never mind they would be perfectly capable of supporting themselves were it not for their use of pot --- they would rather be stoned and live off the burden of others.
Automation is making human labor irrelevant, regardless of union participation.
That's a Luddite attitude if I ever saw one. To think that so many people on this site, many of whom work in high tech, would be such Luddites is mind-boggling.
The recent boom and bust is a minor blip in the big scheme of things, and why would you ever expect advancement in anything without booms and busts? The truth of the matter is the more booming and busting, the wealthier we all become in the long run. The busts come because we as humans collectively take risks with our capital and labor, and without a willingness to take such risks to try something new, we would be forever stuck in the past and technology in particular would never advance.
Over time, as technology advances, labor becomes more productive, that is, easier, but not without many failures on the way. Nor is it human nature to be satisfied with the fruits of one's labor: we always want more, and as long as technology advances, in the long run there will always be demand for all the wealth that all available labor can produce from all available technology.
People talk about capital vs. labor, but capital is nothing more than the accumulation of fruits of labor that one has refrained from consuming at the time. Capital isn't just that of a financier or rentier class, either. If you work for wages and have any 401k or other retirement account, then you are providing your share of capital as well as labor to society, and you rightfully expect a return from both. If you ever want to retire, others have to pick up your labor where you left off, using the capital that you have accumulated in your account, and your retirement must come from returns to that capital, not labor, since you are not working anymore.
At the moment it looks like email client support is dead â" Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"
I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.
Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.
Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.
ICANN has seen over $350 million come in as a result of the process
That should tell you right there it's all about the money.
but said that covered the cost of dealing with the whole process.
So it went into the pockets of a bunch of connected buddies and well-paid consultants as usual. They had control of a system and found a way to make money off it, so they went for it. The whole "process" is nothing but a farce.
Hint: science majors are overwhelmingly white and Asian. It's not a secret why such a man would support this. What have science majors ever done for the African-American community?
I am so sick of this kind of patronizing of minorities. If a black man can be President, then I am quite sure he can handle a science major. Perhaps the African-American community needs to have some African-American men of science step out and act as role models rather than those basketball stars and rap stars with the trashy lifestyles who are continually foisted on them (and all of us) by the popular media.
What planet you living on? Most people don't even make half that through their whole lives.
You still have to be very prudent with it if it's going to last you your whole life. Most people who win the lottery and take a lump sum are not prudent with it, and they end up broke in a few years. Just like some of the high-paid sports stars when they enter middle age.
U.S.P.S. postage is not taxable by any state.
Nor is freight for goods shipped across state lines. Interstate commerce is federal jurisdiction, not state. States are simply not allowed under federal law to impose their own taxes in a federal jurisdiction.
As far as costs of doing business goes, $1250 is a god damn bargain.
Really wish people would stop whining about $100 development certificate. It's a negligible cost in the face of the actual App development cost.
Whatever you're selling, it's way too expensive if you can throw $1250 out the window as the "cost of doing business" as some freelancer developing an "app" that is supposed to run on some fiddly little device. The entire Apple ecosystem is way overpriced, from their consumer products to their stock, as well as all the little "apps" that run on those things. My pocketbook is staying firmly closed when it comes to anything Apple.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I get my work done on a real PC on my desktop, and when I have to talk to someone on the phone, I use a land-line, because cell phone reception is insufferably poor, spotty, and unreliable out here in the boondocks. A cell phone is great to carry when I'm out and about town in case of emergency, but as a rule I buy the cheapest piece-of-junk cell phone I possibly can, and I interact with the thing as little as possible. I resent the idea that I'm supposed to waste so much of my time to fiddle with some little pocket device encumbered with a thousand patents to text and email people who don't have the time to communicate in real life---and I'd have to "jailbreak" the thing if I ever wanted to interact with it on my own terms anyway.
You need to look at the big picture of what you're developing apps for. Someday people will realize and learn to work with the inherent limitations of interfacing with a little piece-of-junk device that fits in your pocket, and then maybe it won't be so bad, but until then, please spare me the hype and all the stupid cutesy little "apps."
'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'
That's the problem right there.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And there's way too much money being made with this particular hammer for shrinks, in their "right mind" of self-interest and ultimately greed, to refrain from using it. I think it's altogether too common for shrinks to have material conflicts of interest due to unseemly financial ties with the collusive and highly profitable industry of Big Pharma.
I also want to remark that it's unfortunate that legitimate opposition to the excesses and corruption of the psychiatric industry appears to have been co-opted by the Church of Scientology, whose real intent appears to be to collude in allowing such corruption to continue unrestrained behind the scenes while they make an outward show of railing against it in public.
I don't gamble. A COD from my bank right now will yield 1.05% on a 36 month note.
You're gambling that puny 1.05% that you won't need your money before 36 months are up. According to the BLS as of August the CPI-U is up +1.7% from a year ago. Of course half the battle of saving is is simply the self-discipline not to spend it, but you're proposing to tie up your money for three years at an almost certain loss.
I still can't get over the feeling that public money was spent for private gain, and it just isn't right in my book. If the government's intent had anything to do with getting a monetary return on investment, it would liquidate that fund, use the proceeds to pay down the debt, and let us the people decide how to invest our own money. If, on the other hand, the government's intent is to stimulate certain research, there needs to be a more ethical way to do it than giving away intellectual property monopolies to private parties for research done on the public dime.
The public is taking a lot of risk in these partnerships, and the big gains are staying in private pockets. It smells like baksheesh, and I just don't like it.
Made this HUGE mistake myself. As a geek, I got too involved in messing around and setting up the systems instead of focusing on the business. Things like sales and marketing are what bring in greenbacks, not my choice of which brand of UPS I buy for my local server.
Granted, sales and marketing are good and necessary for bringing in the greenbacks, but you need to come through with what you sold to your customers for their hard-earned cash. If your customers feel that they aren't getting their money's worth, and/or better/cheaper alternatives are available, you won't be in business for long.
A UPS is not a good choice of example for your case. You don't need a UPS unless it's mission critical, and if it's mission critical, "grab the first one you see off the shelf" is not exactly the right attitude for procuring one. Cheap consumer-grade UPSs fail more often than your power will tend to go out anyway, and when they go into a failure mode, those sealed battery units tend to evolve a lot of rather flammable hydrogen gas under pressure, and meanwhile a lot of little parts are getting much hotter than they are supposed to in normal operation. Not a good thing, because all those greenbacks you raked in just went up in smoke and flames.
You don't need to fiddle and mess around endlessly, but you still need to do the research, make a sound decision given the circumstances and your knowledge, and follow through on it for what it's worth. No shortcuts here. It's hard work.
You know, the government has absolutely no business running an investment fund, especially a "secret" one where it looks like there's no meaningful oversight. This is we the people's money, and we the people have no interest in being the angel to some sleazy fly-by-night foreign start-up who just wants to suck at Uncle Sam's ever-so-generous teat.
if you're starting a business, just about the last thing you should be doing is worrying about is being sysadmin for your phone system - let alone doing so according to the "right" political principles and hoping you can get it to work together. Call your local phone company, get setup with them or some other turnkey provider and turn your attention towards your business.
Now that's a kneejerk response if I ever saw one.
The "right" political principles have absolutely nothing to do with a business case for an open-source phone system. Your phone system is probably business-critical, and some "turnkey" providers are not only ridiculously expensive, but truly awful as well. And sooner or later you'll find out it lacks some important feature, which either requires some super-expensive add-on module to implement, or is simply unavailable from that vendor. By that time you are good and well locked in because you've already invested so much time, money, and effort in that vendor's "turnkey" system.
No, open source doesn't always make sense for any particular business need, but the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" approach isn't always appropriate for a small business which out of necessity has to take care of its own $#!& and take out its own trash in order to stay ahead of the competition.
...all I can say is sell your HP stock! They're doomed.
... for what it's worth anymore. I paid $29.59 a share and today it closed at $14.91:-(
They were once a company I admired for their quality printers and calculators, but ever since that ill-fated acquisition of Compaq, it's just been downhill. What a misdirected, aimless company. Make something half-way decent and reliable like you used to, not 2100 different models of laser printers, and all those crappy laptops and desktop computers that never were your core competency to begin with.
Not going to turn the company around until 2016! Ha, ha, ha! That's several more CEOs into the future, if the company lasts that long.
In serious studies, you don't get to choose your null hypothesis or how you're going to analyse the data after collecting it. That's a textbook example of introducing confirmation bias.
There is also the danger of making an unjustified assumption of objectivity. In preliminary studies, scientists will have gathered data, analyzed it, looked for patterns, and tried to come up with all kinds of hypotheses that could be tested. Even the most final, definitively objective experiment is not designed in a cleanroom with complete objective naivete, and often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected. So how significant is a failure to reject a null hypothesis? We cannot say without a full application of Bayes' theorem to interchange the roles of statistical power and degree of confidence.
Slashdot Mirror
And how exactly do you do research without "a certain direction of interest," pray tell? Or is your own research entirely aimless?
Wake me up when "scientific research" is anything but a bunch of petty office politics, infighting, and backstabbing about who gets tenure, time for research, who published more articles with a higher impact factor or some other garbage metric, and who gets grant money or public money for research that will be patented for private gain, who gets the patent money, and meanwhile the public can't even access a write-up or report of this research without paying an exorbitant fee to some journal that touts its "high impact factor".
You scientists are just grubbing for money like the rest of us who are trying to make a buck to get by in this life, so don't try to pawn your work off on us like it's some grand altruism or search for the truth, because it's not. Like everything else, it's all about making a buck somehow or another.
It's quite true that correlation does not imply causation, but how does it really matter whether or not pot smoking causes stupidity, or stupidity causes pot smoking? Smoking pot is still a stupid thing to do, and that remains well established. The really stupid part is that people who have willingly drugged themselves into oblivion think they have a right to live as stoned and high as they please on public assistance because they are unable to work as a pilot, stockbroker, heavy equipment operator, truck driver, lawyer, physician, surgeon or any other position that requires mental or physical coordination and judgment on the job.
And we wonder why the 47% are on welfare, with all those stupid pieces of metal sticking out of mutilated gauged-out body parts, ugly tattoos all over their skin, and brains damaged not just from pot, but meth, crack, heroin, and hard liquor. Never mind the USA is still by far the easiest country to work yourself out of "low socioeconomic status"---these people just don't want to because they enjoy that way of life.
Look. I don't have to be that smart or intelligent to say this.
I don't have any use for MySpace, FaceBook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc., etc. ad nauseam. I am simply sick and tired of the pervasiveness of the online social networking cancer. I can't even read the newspaper without seeing some column about a girl's "Wah! Wah! Wah! My boyfriend unfriended me!" or "My friend friended so-and-so, but she won't friend me, and so-and-so posted this or that on their 'wall' about me? What am I supposed to do?" Then we have Google+ "circles"---just like middle school, it's all about who's in and who's out of the "right" clique.
In the first place, I'm not the kind of person who refuses to speak to friend A any more because friend B doesn't get along with him/her all the time, or isn't "in" with the right crowd. In the second place, it's none of these disgusting companies' business who my friends are. In the third place, a very similar kind of centralized tracking of friends and connections (from phone company records) was instrumental in the Holocaust of the 1930s; let's not forget history.
I don't think I have to be a privacy freak to have my limits on how much I want a complete stranger to know or find out about me unbeknownst to me. Just mind your own business, and leave me alone. And just a hint to the marketing people. "Like" lacks an imperative in anything approaching halfway correct English. In the English language, I either like something or I don't, and if I do like something, it has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. You can't order me to "like" anything. "Like us on Facebook!" makes no sense whatsoever in proper English, and it rubs me the wrong way whenever I see that monstrosity of a phrase.
Having a high IQ and obtaining and mastering a skill quickly and easily is not going to get you through a 2000 hour apprenticeship any faster than the guy who barely understands what he's doing. It's not going to earn you any more money or help your career, especially in "manual skilled labor." That kind of work is often but not always unionized, pay is strictly by seniority, not merit, and if you have better than average skills or a high IQ, you keep it to yourself. Management doesn't want you as a worker if you think you're too smart, and co-workers won't cooperate with you if you work too hard because it makes them look bad. You're going to have a difficult career of it if _anyone_ gets the impression that you have better than average intelligence in any way, shape, or form.
Because Google doesn't need to. Google has its own "Google Internet Authority" for signing its own certs. What are you complaining about? My point was that SSL certs that Google or anybody else will accept _are_ available for the "little guy" to use as he pleases at little to no cost.
I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. In fact I think they did the right thing here by just not dealing with self-signed certs. Big commercial company; vanilla commercial certs are good enough.
is "good enough" for everyday nickel-and-dime retail commerce on the internet, and not much more. I'm not even disagreeing with you on this point. So trust but verify: your nickels and dimes are probably safe with it, but go over your credit card statements promptly with a fine-toothed comb. Compartmentalize your life a little, be circumspect about the trails you leave online, and don't spill all your secrets to Facebook. If you have something to hide, don't allow it near a computer that will ever be attached to the internet. The internet is not and never will be a crypto utopia.
In fact it costs nothing from StartSSL, like several commenters have pointed out, but people forget that the commercial x.509 PKI is for convenience, not security.
A self-signed cert is highly secure as long as you can verify through independent means that it is in fact the same cert installed on your server, and as long as the private key has not been compromised. In fact this is really the only way you can really get this level of security from even a commercial cert --- to verify independently that it is in fact the cert you think it is, and you have not been subject to a man-in-the-middle-attack.
It's not as though Google previously made any effort to verify the authenticity of those self-signed certs, or if accepting those self-signed certs as they did before would give their users anything but a false sense of security. Surely it is not a money issue for the "small guy". Commercial certs can be had, if not free from the one provider I already mentioned, for a very minimal price from many different providers, on the order of what the "small guy" is already paying for his domain registration. Why is it that the "small guy" always seems to choose the most expensive, heavily advertised vendors of some service or product and then proceed to complain about the price?
I have to agree (mostly) with Frosty here. No, the mainstream commercial PKI is not the most highly secure thing in the world, but you're trying to authenticate your server to a big commercial company---you need a commercial cert. And if you're trusting such a big commercial company as Google, then you may as well trust the whole commercial PKI, because you're extending your trust far and wide in either case, which there is nothing wrong with, as long as you be mindful of what you are entrusting to the "big boys."
Example scenarios, please. Not that I have reason to disbelieve you, but you are talking about felonies here, not misdemeanors. At least a short vignette and a citation to U.S. Code or state law, and maybe some court decisions, because otherwise the other comments are fully justified in that you're full of hot air.
I have little to no interest in Fox News, Huffington Post, talk radio, and other such dumbed-down media. On the other hand, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has something to say on the dumbing-down effects of marijuana.
According to my grandmother, it was a man that taught her to crochet. I think it's a little boring myself, but it would certainly be a better hobby than pot.
Surely you do not feel so threatened by my manliness as to make a comment like that.
I don't think so. The way pot destroys ambition, motivation, and self-discipline, and erodes intelligence, it is hardly a path to prosperity. For these reasons the vast majority of pot users are unable to make a living for themselves and thus depend on public assistance and petty crime to support themselves and their habit. Never mind they would be perfectly capable of supporting themselves were it not for their use of pot --- they would rather be stoned and live off the burden of others.
That's a Luddite attitude if I ever saw one. To think that so many people on this site, many of whom work in high tech, would be such Luddites is mind-boggling.
The recent boom and bust is a minor blip in the big scheme of things, and why would you ever expect advancement in anything without booms and busts? The truth of the matter is the more booming and busting, the wealthier we all become in the long run. The busts come because we as humans collectively take risks with our capital and labor, and without a willingness to take such risks to try something new, we would be forever stuck in the past and technology in particular would never advance.
Over time, as technology advances, labor becomes more productive, that is, easier, but not without many failures on the way. Nor is it human nature to be satisfied with the fruits of one's labor: we always want more, and as long as technology advances, in the long run there will always be demand for all the wealth that all available labor can produce from all available technology.
People talk about capital vs. labor, but capital is nothing more than the accumulation of fruits of labor that one has refrained from consuming at the time. Capital isn't just that of a financier or rentier class, either. If you work for wages and have any 401k or other retirement account, then you are providing your share of capital as well as labor to society, and you rightfully expect a return from both. If you ever want to retire, others have to pick up your labor where you left off, using the capital that you have accumulated in your account, and your retirement must come from returns to that capital, not labor, since you are not working anymore.
I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.
Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.
Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.
That should tell you right there it's all about the money.
So it went into the pockets of a bunch of connected buddies and well-paid consultants as usual. They had control of a system and found a way to make money off it, so they went for it. The whole "process" is nothing but a farce.
I am so sick of this kind of patronizing of minorities. If a black man can be President, then I am quite sure he can handle a science major. Perhaps the African-American community needs to have some African-American men of science step out and act as role models rather than those basketball stars and rap stars with the trashy lifestyles who are continually foisted on them (and all of us) by the popular media.
You still have to be very prudent with it if it's going to last you your whole life. Most people who win the lottery and take a lump sum are not prudent with it, and they end up broke in a few years. Just like some of the high-paid sports stars when they enter middle age.
U.S.P.S. postage is not taxable by any state. Nor is freight for goods shipped across state lines. Interstate commerce is federal jurisdiction, not state. States are simply not allowed under federal law to impose their own taxes in a federal jurisdiction.
Government thrives on mediocrity.
Whatever you're selling, it's way too expensive if you can throw $1250 out the window as the "cost of doing business" as some freelancer developing an "app" that is supposed to run on some fiddly little device. The entire Apple ecosystem is way overpriced, from their consumer products to their stock, as well as all the little "apps" that run on those things. My pocketbook is staying firmly closed when it comes to anything Apple.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I get my work done on a real PC on my desktop, and when I have to talk to someone on the phone, I use a land-line, because cell phone reception is insufferably poor, spotty, and unreliable out here in the boondocks. A cell phone is great to carry when I'm out and about town in case of emergency, but as a rule I buy the cheapest piece-of-junk cell phone I possibly can, and I interact with the thing as little as possible. I resent the idea that I'm supposed to waste so much of my time to fiddle with some little pocket device encumbered with a thousand patents to text and email people who don't have the time to communicate in real life---and I'd have to "jailbreak" the thing if I ever wanted to interact with it on my own terms anyway.
You need to look at the big picture of what you're developing apps for. Someday people will realize and learn to work with the inherent limitations of interfacing with a little piece-of-junk device that fits in your pocket, and then maybe it won't be so bad, but until then, please spare me the hype and all the stupid cutesy little "apps."
That's the problem right there.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And there's way too much money being made with this particular hammer for shrinks, in their "right mind" of self-interest and ultimately greed, to refrain from using it. I think it's altogether too common for shrinks to have material conflicts of interest due to unseemly financial ties with the collusive and highly profitable industry of Big Pharma.
I also want to remark that it's unfortunate that legitimate opposition to the excesses and corruption of the psychiatric industry appears to have been co-opted by the Church of Scientology, whose real intent appears to be to collude in allowing such corruption to continue unrestrained behind the scenes while they make an outward show of railing against it in public.
You're gambling that puny 1.05% that you won't need your money before 36 months are up. According to the BLS as of August the CPI-U is up +1.7% from a year ago. Of course half the battle of saving is is simply the self-discipline not to spend it, but you're proposing to tie up your money for three years at an almost certain loss.
I still can't get over the feeling that public money was spent for private gain, and it just isn't right in my book. If the government's intent had anything to do with getting a monetary return on investment, it would liquidate that fund, use the proceeds to pay down the debt, and let us the people decide how to invest our own money. If, on the other hand, the government's intent is to stimulate certain research, there needs to be a more ethical way to do it than giving away intellectual property monopolies to private parties for research done on the public dime.
The public is taking a lot of risk in these partnerships, and the big gains are staying in private pockets. It smells like baksheesh, and I just don't like it.
Granted, sales and marketing are good and necessary for bringing in the greenbacks, but you need to come through with what you sold to your customers for their hard-earned cash. If your customers feel that they aren't getting their money's worth, and/or better/cheaper alternatives are available, you won't be in business for long.
A UPS is not a good choice of example for your case. You don't need a UPS unless it's mission critical, and if it's mission critical, "grab the first one you see off the shelf" is not exactly the right attitude for procuring one. Cheap consumer-grade UPSs fail more often than your power will tend to go out anyway, and when they go into a failure mode, those sealed battery units tend to evolve a lot of rather flammable hydrogen gas under pressure, and meanwhile a lot of little parts are getting much hotter than they are supposed to in normal operation. Not a good thing, because all those greenbacks you raked in just went up in smoke and flames.
You don't need to fiddle and mess around endlessly, but you still need to do the research, make a sound decision given the circumstances and your knowledge, and follow through on it for what it's worth. No shortcuts here. It's hard work.
You know, the government has absolutely no business running an investment fund, especially a "secret" one where it looks like there's no meaningful oversight. This is we the people's money, and we the people have no interest in being the angel to some sleazy fly-by-night foreign start-up who just wants to suck at Uncle Sam's ever-so-generous teat.
Now that's a kneejerk response if I ever saw one.
The "right" political principles have absolutely nothing to do with a business case for an open-source phone system. Your phone system is probably business-critical, and some "turnkey" providers are not only ridiculously expensive, but truly awful as well. And sooner or later you'll find out it lacks some important feature, which either requires some super-expensive add-on module to implement, or is simply unavailable from that vendor. By that time you are good and well locked in because you've already invested so much time, money, and effort in that vendor's "turnkey" system.
No, open source doesn't always make sense for any particular business need, but the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" approach isn't always appropriate for a small business which out of necessity has to take care of its own $#!& and take out its own trash in order to stay ahead of the competition.
... for what it's worth anymore. I paid $29.59 a share and today it closed at $14.91 :-(
They were once a company I admired for their quality printers and calculators, but ever since that ill-fated acquisition of Compaq, it's just been downhill. What a misdirected, aimless company. Make something half-way decent and reliable like you used to, not 2100 different models of laser printers, and all those crappy laptops and desktop computers that never were your core competency to begin with.
Not going to turn the company around until 2016! Ha, ha, ha! That's several more CEOs into the future, if the company lasts that long.
Yes you do.
There is also the danger of making an unjustified assumption of objectivity. In preliminary studies, scientists will have gathered data, analyzed it, looked for patterns, and tried to come up with all kinds of hypotheses that could be tested. Even the most final, definitively objective experiment is not designed in a cleanroom with complete objective naivete, and often enough the scientist will have a pretty good idea of the expected nature of the data to be collected. So how significant is a failure to reject a null hypothesis? We cannot say without a full application of Bayes' theorem to interchange the roles of statistical power and degree of confidence.