I assume you mean "wrong" in a moral context, which is a subjective distinction. The American government has determined that it's wrong (according to American society, supposedly) to make businesses pay tax on those expenses. The Irish government has determined that it's wrong to charge a high tax rate on such income.
The only other question is whether it's morally wrong to operate in more than one jurisdiction according to what's most beneficial. So far, I don't think any international body has dared to regulate such a matter.
What would happen if you were to try to write off even a few thousand for mysterious "software" that's market value was comparable to existing "free" equivalents?
Assuming all applicable taxes were paid appropriately, nothing happens.
This is somewhat common. A company, based in Ireland or whatever country is cheapest, sells its services to its American parent company. The American company deducts the expense as the cost of doing business, so it avoids large US taxes. The Irish company pays Irish taxes on its income, but since the rate is lower than it would be in the US, less taxes are paid as a whole. The money then sits in the accounts of the Irish company until it's needed elsewhere.
Yes, it's avoiding paying taxes. No, it's not tax evasion, and it's not illegal. The United States allows companies to deduct certain expenses, and Ireland charges a lower tax rate.
all for something stupid that, he is unlikely to ever do again.
Doing it twice isn't a pattern, and it's not like blinding a pilot is putting anyone's life at risk. It's far more important to preserve our freedom!
You're absolutely right. Punishment is blown way out of proportion in this country. Look at explosives, for instance. Yeah, there's some risk to explosive chemicals, but just because some guy throws a lit stick of dynamite at a crowded building, then another at the responding police car, is no reason to lock him up for 30 months, especially if the sticks didn't actually explode. While it could have been disasterous, it wasn't, and someone could have walked over the shocked and fainted bystanders, past the dynamite, and just asked the guy not to do it again. Surely he'd learn the error of his ways.
Lasers, like explosives, firearms, revolving credit, and cars, are just dangerous toys. When someone does something reckless and still doesn't kill people, they should be applauded for their courage. Everyone of lesser courage and luck will recognize their clear inferiority, and would never try to duplicate the risky stunt. Deterrent punishment is only useful in a society where people copy each other mindlessly, and clearly everyone in the United States is too smart for that.
Alright, this is retarded. I've butted heads with APK myself, and yeah, the guy's got issues... but I actually think he's honest about them. He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
This, though, is purely offensive. Besides derailing conversations, it's mocking someone else's opinion (sane or not) without provocation. As a parody, it was funny once. Now it's just sad.
The proposal might help if signatory nation states ever openly "went at it".
All such treaties and agreements are applicable only to the nations involved, but they do let both nations stand together and apply political pressure on non-NATO countries with a bit of mutually-reinforcing moral high ground:
We've agreed not to attack hospitals, so why do you still consider hospitals to be targets?
In war, even the complete destruction of your enemy doesn't guarantee victory. The goal is to win both the military battles and the political battles, so your control is recognized once the fighting stops. Fighting dirty might make military victories easier, but you'll piss off other states who may have otherwise been accepting of your rule.
Covert attacks from unknown parties could indeed avoid the political condemnation of treaty signatories, but once they start taking the blame for the prohibited attacks, they start losing political acceptance. If a rogue group ever intends to mainain or rise to power, they'd do well to avoid such rule-breaking attacks, even though the rules don't really apply to them.
The first was solved by a long and insistent argument that ended with the builder giving up and mixing the concrete correctly.
The second one I ended up paying, and I did get a receipt, which was promptly handed over to the police when I reported the corruption. That report was probably promptly discarded. As you said, there's not much hope for government corruption.
The third was when I discovered my wife's negotiating skills. I'm pretty sure she's memorized the standard rates for every connection between every village in Ghana, and she can enforce them, too.
The fourth I ended up getting a different machete, which looked identical enough to me (as I was intending to bring it back to the States as a wall decoration), but was apparently only worth $40 to the seller. Maybe the other one was indeed better, or maybe the seller just didn't want to risk me walking away, but either way I paid the same price as a local and I now have a machete as a coat hook.
I volunteered in Ghana for several months, and saw corruption on a daily basis:
I can build that new room cheap and in a month... but it'd really be better if you pay twice as much to buy this good concrete (from my brother) rather than that crappy concrete that falls apart (when mixed ignoring the directions).
Your visa's still a week away from expiration, but even though it's not written anywhere, there's a $25 fine for not renewing it two weeks in advance. Yes, I collect the fee personally, as a agent of the government. Cash only.
Sure, you can take this taxi to that village, but there's a $5 fee for each bag, and each pocket.
Yeah, that other guy bought a machete for $40, but this identical one is my best! It's $200.
From the stories I've heard from others, the way for Westerners to do business in Africa is to first set a budget for a project, then find a local as a project manager, with the agreement that anything left in the budget goes into his pocket.
I have actually read a lot from them, and I still stand by what I said. It's not corporations having rights that's the problem, but corporations having too many rights. There was discussion about limiting corporate rights in with the Bill of Rights, but eventually the issue was left to the states, and the Constitution was written only to govern flesh-and-blood people. Now that corporations routinely span state lines, they're inherently a federal issue... but the Constitution isn't able to limit them appropriately.
I don't think the founding fathers were wholly in favor of corporations, but I do believe they accepted corporations as necessary for advancing society, and that granting corporations some limited rights is necessary for corporations to function. They were certainly aware of the risks large corporations pose, and I consider it a sad oversight that appropriate limits were not included when it was easier to do so.
Yes, but "corporate entityhood" isn't an inflammatory subject. Saying "corporate personhood" ignites a bit of cognitive dissonance, so the politics start off biased.
There is no need to treat an entity like a person, just to give it the rights it needs to function. Even free speech is not necessarily a necessary right
There's no need to treat an entity exactly like a person, but only to an extent. "Free speech", as it's been interpreted over the past 200 years, means any form of expression, including production and commerce. Tangentially, this means that using a 3D printer to make a gun is exercising both your first and second amendment rights at once.
A corporation must have some measure of free expression, to produce products that the government may not like (as Paladin Press does regularly, for example). A corporation's expression does not need to include financial donations to a political party, but specifying that distinction would require significant changes to the Constitution.
While the Founding Fathers were definitely pro-business, and frequently men of business, I have doubts that they would have been really keen on unleashing another Dutch East India Corporation on their newly-formed republic.
Agreed. Unfortunately, they didn't do anything to limit what rights companies had. We inherited the slippery slope they left for us.
Corporate personhood isn't inherently bad. It's bad for corporations to be allowed to abuse the granted rights due to their inherent nonliving status. I know it's a more difficult mantra to chant, but easy mantras make for poor policy.
The issue of corporate rights wasn't expected to be a federal matter, so it's not included in the Constitution. It was left to the states to determine what companies could do. If it had been a federal matter, the Constitution's rules could be adapted to fit the appropriate needs, similarly to how slavery was handled, rather than being applied all at once as it is now. It's due to the limitations of the Constitutional framework that "let corporations express themselves freely" gets twisted into "corporations can donate to political parties".
Why the hell else did we decid to form societies and form governments/laws anyways?
To promote what's best for our whole society, rather than selfishly just looking out for our own individual interests. The problem, of course, is defining "best". Ruling exclusively in favor of individual freedom means that collaborative effort is severely hampered, so everyone's stuck at the same low standard of living. Ruling in favor of collaborative corporations leaves the disadvantage with those who aren't part of the corporation.
What's best for the whole society is a balance between the two, allowing collaborative efforts to function efficiently, but not so efficiently as to severely harm individuals. That's a tricky balance to maintain, and sometimes it means ruling against consumers.
Since we're dragging the dead into this, I'll say that the founding fathers would likely support corporate personhood. They'd probably have less concern for the rest of the Constitution when allowing it, though.
The debate over corporate personhood starts from a simple claim: If a corporation isn't a real entity with rights, then its contracts aren't protected by contract law. That means that employment contracts aren't valid, business-to-business contracts don't matter, and the only way for anything to get done would be personal contracts, meaning the CEO is personally responsible for the office toilet paper.
For tiny companies, personal contracts are fine. For modern small businesses, even, turnover may be high enough that personal contracts won't work. Sure, you can make that agreement today with the CEO, but next week the company could fire its CEO and your contract is probably going to go unfulfilled.
The solution is to give corporations some rights. Give them contract protection, so they can legally be a party to agreements. Give them free speech, so the government can't simply shut down gun manufacturers or publishers it doesn't like. Give them the right of ownership, so the company agents can conduct business without needing any particular person to be involved in every transaction.
Once you start granting companies rights, though, you hit the slippery slope... If ownership of supplies is allowed, why not copyrights? Copyrights expire after the author's death, so that means the company's death... in a few centuries. Individuals have the right to bear arms, so a company militia is perfectly fine, right?
As I understand, there was a lot of support in the 1700s for expanding business. America was going to be the land of opportunity, with resources to spare for everyone, so where an Englishman would be lucky to have a small shop, an American could have two or four easily - and each shop's employees would need to make deals on behalf of the company. Back at the framing of the Constitution, it'd be easy enough to designate corporations as limited entities, granted only a particular set of rights to allow them to function for commerce, but not to directly sway politics. Now, though, we can't touch the sacred Constitution.
Slowly, we're moving in the right direction, but we just don't have any codified laws to lead judges. Corporations eventually get judgements clarifying that they have the rights they need, but with so much backlash against any extent of "corporate personhood", it's political suicide for any lawmaker to try to define what's allowed and what isn't. Judges have to decide for themselves what's right or wrong far more than they're supposed to.
Of course, but let's make it a polarized finger-pointing issue anyway! That's the American way!
Yeah, it's Chrome's fault for letting the untrusted code claim to be somewhat trusted. It's the kernel's fault for letting that questionable code become fully trusted. It reminds me of one of my favorite exploits where the kernel would helpfully drop core dumps in any directory the application said it was running from... including/etc/cron.d. A crafted program segfaulting could run a cron job to do aything as root. The attack didn't really exploit either program's faulty behavior, but rather the interaction between them.
I got that figure from my own iPad 2, which has few apps and basically no media on it. It's a 32 GB model, and says it has 24 GB of space available and 4.5 GB used. I'm not really sure how to interpret that, so I figured the 24 was the maximum I could have, and I had used 4 of that.
I didn't feel like wasting my time verifying the figure to suit the whims of a shill.
Cute, but no. My cell phone's an old Nokia, running some form of Symbian that does nearly nothing. My wife's phone, on the other hand, is a Samsung smartphone... whose phone app routinely crashes.
Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I think people's opinions shouldn't be bought, and I think that telephones should function as telephones, and I think that lawns should be nice and green and free from those young hooligans.
It's relevant because it discloses the bias behind the off-topic disparaging comment.
If my comments ever end up being 95% about how great Google's products are over Microsoft or Apple, please assume my account has been hacked, and mod me into oblivion.
Note that includes both me promoting Google excessively or disparaging Apple or Microsoft excessively, as determined by looking through my comment history.
I expect the same judgement I pass on others. Mystikkman's comment history shows a nearly-exclusive track record of promoting Microsoft and insulting its competitors, so I call him a shill. Your comment history shows a wide variety of opinions and affiliations, and generally appears to be genuine, so I will not even call you a troll, despite some suspicious comments.
It is not the use of products that marks a shill, nor even spreading a horror story about a competitor. It's the intentional manipulation of public opinion that is more the hallmark of a marketing agent than a satisfied customer.
You list all the unknowns and cite this as a reason NOT to do the experiment. Isn't that what basic research is supposed to be about in the first place?
No, it's not. Basic research is supposed to be about finding knowledge, not doing cool things. What I list are some of the variables in the trial (because it can't really be called an "experiment") that make it a bad candidate for spending the ISS's expensive time. A perfect experiment has only a single variable, so a fact can be conclusively determined. If a single variable cannot be isolated (as is often the case), statistical methods must be used to separate the effects of each variable, but the accuracy gets worse with each additional variable.
The notion of centrifugal "simulated gravity" has been around for a long time, but NASA has almost completely ignored it. Why? Seems like a much more simple and "elegant" solution to the problem than tinkering with cellular processes.
Those cellular processes are the actual cause of the health problems that prohibit long-term trips. If we understand them better, we will understand what to do to prevent them. For instance, by finding out that a particular protein only folds correctly with at least 1 m/s^2 acceleration, we'd know that to survive in space long-term, we need to have that much force, so any centrifuge must spin fast enough to produce that much acceleration for the astronauts to remain healthy.
That would only resolve one variable, though... we also need to better understand how circadian cycles and diet affect those cellular processes, to name a few. There are so many variables that even a successful test in a centrifuge wouldn't mean much. It would give us one particular system that worked once, but we wouldn't know why it works. A failed test with a centrifuge would be equally useless. We'd know one particular system that didn't work, but we wouldn't know what part failed. Maybe the centrifuge was spinning fast enough, but the lighting used caused psychosomatic effects.
What we're working on now is figuring out enough to make centrifuge tests worthwhile. Give it time.
...Apple and Microsoft are not pushing computers with 16GB total storage and 9GB of free space...
Microsoft is pushing a tablet with 64GB of total storage, but only 23 GB of free space. Apple sells devices with 32 GB of storage, and only 24 GB free space.
Google is pretty much the only one that's heavily pushing users towards being slaves of their cloud. And yet the Linux crowd seem to cheer them on.
That's because we know that most folks should be slaves to some cloud. Tycho of Penny Arcade says it well:
But what I like about this laptop is that it is not gregarious in any way. It barely exists; there are many, many things it can’t do, which is fucking great. If I was going to spend over a thousand dollars on some sliver of mobile computing, I would buy a generalist device: I’d get a MacBook Air, or emulate Gabriel’s example with a Surface Pro. That cover/keyboard thing is no joke. But those machines are much, much more than I want, let alone need. And what I need is very, very simple: a window that looks out onto the Cloud.
Thus far, I’ve gotta say: I like the view.
The Chromebooks fill a niche market for a device to just use the Web. Not to play video games, run heavy computations, or manage a company's network. They are a generic interface to everything on the Web, as the Web was designed to have.
Personally, I'm inclined to disagree. I think Apple should take their metric fuckton of cash and buy DropBox, then put the DropBox team in charge of iCloud.
iCloud suffers from the same foibles as Internet Explorer and GNOME. It's not really smooth enough, but it's so tightly integrated into the core system so deeply that removing it is practically impossible. I'd rther see DropBox bring their reliability, ease, and compatibility into iOS, rather than rely on the community of app developers to voluntarily integrate tightly with a non-Apple service.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you mean "wrong" in a moral context, which is a subjective distinction. The American government has determined that it's wrong (according to American society, supposedly) to make businesses pay tax on those expenses. The Irish government has determined that it's wrong to charge a high tax rate on such income.
The only other question is whether it's morally wrong to operate in more than one jurisdiction according to what's most beneficial. So far, I don't think any international body has dared to regulate such a matter.
What would happen if you were to try to write off even a few thousand for mysterious "software" that's market value was comparable to existing "free" equivalents?
Assuming all applicable taxes were paid appropriately, nothing happens.
This is somewhat common. A company, based in Ireland or whatever country is cheapest, sells its services to its American parent company. The American company deducts the expense as the cost of doing business, so it avoids large US taxes. The Irish company pays Irish taxes on its income, but since the rate is lower than it would be in the US, less taxes are paid as a whole. The money then sits in the accounts of the Irish company until it's needed elsewhere.
Yes, it's avoiding paying taxes. No, it's not tax evasion, and it's not illegal. The United States allows companies to deduct certain expenses, and Ireland charges a lower tax rate.
Well done, sir. You've successfully dodged all that nasty sarcasm. INT is your dump stat, isn't it?
all for something stupid that, he is unlikely to ever do again.
Doing it twice isn't a pattern, and it's not like blinding a pilot is putting anyone's life at risk. It's far more important to preserve our freedom!
You're absolutely right. Punishment is blown way out of proportion in this country. Look at explosives, for instance. Yeah, there's some risk to explosive chemicals, but just because some guy throws a lit stick of dynamite at a crowded building, then another at the responding police car, is no reason to lock him up for 30 months, especially if the sticks didn't actually explode. While it could have been disasterous, it wasn't, and someone could have walked over the shocked and fainted bystanders, past the dynamite, and just asked the guy not to do it again. Surely he'd learn the error of his ways.
Lasers, like explosives, firearms, revolving credit, and cars, are just dangerous toys. When someone does something reckless and still doesn't kill people, they should be applauded for their courage. Everyone of lesser courage and luck will recognize their clear inferiority, and would never try to duplicate the risky stunt. Deterrent punishment is only useful in a society where people copy each other mindlessly, and clearly everyone in the United States is too smart for that.
Companies always act in their own interests, it's just that some behave more closely like I would than how someone else would.
FTFY
Alright, this is retarded. I've butted heads with APK myself, and yeah, the guy's got issues... but I actually think he's honest about them. He really thinks the hosts file is a reasonable security measure, and he's just trying to explain this brilliant design to the world.
This, though, is purely offensive. Besides derailing conversations, it's mocking someone else's opinion (sane or not) without provocation. As a parody, it was funny once. Now it's just sad.
The proposal might help if signatory nation states ever openly "went at it".
All such treaties and agreements are applicable only to the nations involved, but they do let both nations stand together and apply political pressure on non-NATO countries with a bit of mutually-reinforcing moral high ground:
We've agreed not to attack hospitals, so why do you still consider hospitals to be targets?
In war, even the complete destruction of your enemy doesn't guarantee victory. The goal is to win both the military battles and the political battles, so your control is recognized once the fighting stops. Fighting dirty might make military victories easier, but you'll piss off other states who may have otherwise been accepting of your rule.
Covert attacks from unknown parties could indeed avoid the political condemnation of treaty signatories, but once they start taking the blame for the prohibited attacks, they start losing political acceptance. If a rogue group ever intends to mainain or rise to power, they'd do well to avoid such rule-breaking attacks, even though the rules don't really apply to them.
For the sake of completing the story:
The first was solved by a long and insistent argument that ended with the builder giving up and mixing the concrete correctly.
The second one I ended up paying, and I did get a receipt, which was promptly handed over to the police when I reported the corruption. That report was probably promptly discarded. As you said, there's not much hope for government corruption.
The third was when I discovered my wife's negotiating skills. I'm pretty sure she's memorized the standard rates for every connection between every village in Ghana, and she can enforce them, too.
The fourth I ended up getting a different machete, which looked identical enough to me (as I was intending to bring it back to the States as a wall decoration), but was apparently only worth $40 to the seller. Maybe the other one was indeed better, or maybe the seller just didn't want to risk me walking away, but either way I paid the same price as a local and I now have a machete as a coat hook.
Rats, naturally.
I, for one, welcome our mutated sentient comestible overlords.
Yep.
I volunteered in Ghana for several months, and saw corruption on a daily basis:
I can build that new room cheap and in a month... but it'd really be better if you pay twice as much to buy this good concrete (from my brother) rather than that crappy concrete that falls apart (when mixed ignoring the directions).
Your visa's still a week away from expiration, but even though it's not written anywhere, there's a $25 fine for not renewing it two weeks in advance. Yes, I collect the fee personally, as a agent of the government. Cash only.
Sure, you can take this taxi to that village, but there's a $5 fee for each bag, and each pocket.
Yeah, that other guy bought a machete for $40, but this identical one is my best! It's $200.
From the stories I've heard from others, the way for Westerners to do business in Africa is to first set a budget for a project, then find a local as a project manager, with the agreement that anything left in the budget goes into his pocket.
I have actually read a lot from them, and I still stand by what I said. It's not corporations having rights that's the problem, but corporations having too many rights. There was discussion about limiting corporate rights in with the Bill of Rights, but eventually the issue was left to the states, and the Constitution was written only to govern flesh-and-blood people. Now that corporations routinely span state lines, they're inherently a federal issue... but the Constitution isn't able to limit them appropriately.
I don't think the founding fathers were wholly in favor of corporations, but I do believe they accepted corporations as necessary for advancing society, and that granting corporations some limited rights is necessary for corporations to function. They were certainly aware of the risks large corporations pose, and I consider it a sad oversight that appropriate limits were not included when it was easier to do so.
You can be an "entity" without being a "person".
Yes, but "corporate entityhood" isn't an inflammatory subject. Saying "corporate personhood" ignites a bit of cognitive dissonance, so the politics start off biased.
There is no need to treat an entity like a person, just to give it the rights it needs to function. Even free speech is not necessarily a necessary right
There's no need to treat an entity exactly like a person, but only to an extent. "Free speech", as it's been interpreted over the past 200 years, means any form of expression, including production and commerce. Tangentially, this means that using a 3D printer to make a gun is exercising both your first and second amendment rights at once.
A corporation must have some measure of free expression, to produce products that the government may not like (as Paladin Press does regularly, for example). A corporation's expression does not need to include financial donations to a political party, but specifying that distinction would require significant changes to the Constitution.
While the Founding Fathers were definitely pro-business, and frequently men of business, I have doubts that they would have been really keen on unleashing another Dutch East India Corporation on their newly-formed republic.
Agreed. Unfortunately, they didn't do anything to limit what rights companies had. We inherited the slippery slope they left for us.
Try reading the rest of the comment, then.
Corporate personhood isn't inherently bad. It's bad for corporations to be allowed to abuse the granted rights due to their inherent nonliving status. I know it's a more difficult mantra to chant, but easy mantras make for poor policy.
The issue of corporate rights wasn't expected to be a federal matter, so it's not included in the Constitution. It was left to the states to determine what companies could do. If it had been a federal matter, the Constitution's rules could be adapted to fit the appropriate needs, similarly to how slavery was handled, rather than being applied all at once as it is now. It's due to the limitations of the Constitutional framework that "let corporations express themselves freely" gets twisted into "corporations can donate to political parties".
Why the hell else did we decid to form societies and form governments/laws anyways?
To promote what's best for our whole society, rather than selfishly just looking out for our own individual interests. The problem, of course, is defining "best". Ruling exclusively in favor of individual freedom means that collaborative effort is severely hampered, so everyone's stuck at the same low standard of living. Ruling in favor of collaborative corporations leaves the disadvantage with those who aren't part of the corporation.
What's best for the whole society is a balance between the two, allowing collaborative efforts to function efficiently, but not so efficiently as to severely harm individuals. That's a tricky balance to maintain, and sometimes it means ruling against consumers.
Since we're dragging the dead into this, I'll say that the founding fathers would likely support corporate personhood. They'd probably have less concern for the rest of the Constitution when allowing it, though.
The debate over corporate personhood starts from a simple claim: If a corporation isn't a real entity with rights, then its contracts aren't protected by contract law. That means that employment contracts aren't valid, business-to-business contracts don't matter, and the only way for anything to get done would be personal contracts, meaning the CEO is personally responsible for the office toilet paper.
For tiny companies, personal contracts are fine. For modern small businesses, even, turnover may be high enough that personal contracts won't work. Sure, you can make that agreement today with the CEO, but next week the company could fire its CEO and your contract is probably going to go unfulfilled.
The solution is to give corporations some rights. Give them contract protection, so they can legally be a party to agreements. Give them free speech, so the government can't simply shut down gun manufacturers or publishers it doesn't like. Give them the right of ownership, so the company agents can conduct business without needing any particular person to be involved in every transaction.
Once you start granting companies rights, though, you hit the slippery slope... If ownership of supplies is allowed, why not copyrights? Copyrights expire after the author's death, so that means the company's death... in a few centuries. Individuals have the right to bear arms, so a company militia is perfectly fine, right?
As I understand, there was a lot of support in the 1700s for expanding business. America was going to be the land of opportunity, with resources to spare for everyone, so where an Englishman would be lucky to have a small shop, an American could have two or four easily - and each shop's employees would need to make deals on behalf of the company. Back at the framing of the Constitution, it'd be easy enough to designate corporations as limited entities, granted only a particular set of rights to allow them to function for commerce, but not to directly sway politics. Now, though, we can't touch the sacred Constitution.
Slowly, we're moving in the right direction, but we just don't have any codified laws to lead judges. Corporations eventually get judgements clarifying that they have the rights they need, but with so much backlash against any extent of "corporate personhood", it's political suicide for any lawmaker to try to define what's allowed and what isn't. Judges have to decide for themselves what's right or wrong far more than they're supposed to.
Of course, but let's make it a polarized finger-pointing issue anyway! That's the American way!
Yeah, it's Chrome's fault for letting the untrusted code claim to be somewhat trusted. It's the kernel's fault for letting that questionable code become fully trusted. It reminds me of one of my favorite exploits where the kernel would helpfully drop core dumps in any directory the application said it was running from... including /etc/cron.d. A crafted program segfaulting could run a cron job to do aything as root. The attack didn't really exploit either program's faulty behavior, but rather the interaction between them.
I got that figure from my own iPad 2, which has few apps and basically no media on it. It's a 32 GB model, and says it has 24 GB of space available and 4.5 GB used. I'm not really sure how to interpret that, so I figured the 24 was the maximum I could have, and I had used 4 of that.
I didn't feel like wasting my time verifying the figure to suit the whims of a shill.
Cute, but no. My cell phone's an old Nokia, running some form of Symbian that does nearly nothing. My wife's phone, on the other hand, is a Samsung smartphone... whose phone app routinely crashes.
Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I think people's opinions shouldn't be bought, and I think that telephones should function as telephones, and I think that lawns should be nice and green and free from those young hooligans.
And how is Drive being down related to Google deprecating services?
It's like commenting how Bill Gates is evil in a story about MS releasing an update to Windows Phone - Completely offtopic.
It's relevant because it discloses the bias behind the off-topic disparaging comment.
If my comments ever end up being 95% about how great Google's products are over Microsoft or Apple, please assume my account has been hacked, and mod me into oblivion.
Note that includes both me promoting Google excessively or disparaging Apple or Microsoft excessively, as determined by looking through my comment history.
I expect the same judgement I pass on others. Mystikkman's comment history shows a nearly-exclusive track record of promoting Microsoft and insulting its competitors, so I call him a shill. Your comment history shows a wide variety of opinions and affiliations, and generally appears to be genuine, so I will not even call you a troll, despite some suspicious comments.
It is not the use of products that marks a shill, nor even spreading a horror story about a competitor. It's the intentional manipulation of public opinion that is more the hallmark of a marketing agent than a satisfied customer.
You list all the unknowns and cite this as a reason NOT to do the experiment. Isn't that what basic research is supposed to be about in the first place?
No, it's not. Basic research is supposed to be about finding knowledge, not doing cool things. What I list are some of the variables in the trial (because it can't really be called an "experiment") that make it a bad candidate for spending the ISS's expensive time. A perfect experiment has only a single variable, so a fact can be conclusively determined. If a single variable cannot be isolated (as is often the case), statistical methods must be used to separate the effects of each variable, but the accuracy gets worse with each additional variable.
The notion of centrifugal "simulated gravity" has been around for a long time, but NASA has almost completely ignored it. Why? Seems like a much more simple and "elegant" solution to the problem than tinkering with cellular processes.
Those cellular processes are the actual cause of the health problems that prohibit long-term trips. If we understand them better, we will understand what to do to prevent them. For instance, by finding out that a particular protein only folds correctly with at least 1 m/s^2 acceleration, we'd know that to survive in space long-term, we need to have that much force, so any centrifuge must spin fast enough to produce that much acceleration for the astronauts to remain healthy.
That would only resolve one variable, though... we also need to better understand how circadian cycles and diet affect those cellular processes, to name a few. There are so many variables that even a successful test in a centrifuge wouldn't mean much. It would give us one particular system that worked once, but we wouldn't know why it works. A failed test with a centrifuge would be equally useless. We'd know one particular system that didn't work, but we wouldn't know what part failed. Maybe the centrifuge was spinning fast enough, but the lighting used caused psychosomatic effects.
What we're working on now is figuring out enough to make centrifuge tests worthwhile. Give it time.
Point of fact: The ancestor comment does not mention Microsoft, but the person does, many many times.
...Apple and Microsoft are not pushing computers with 16GB total storage and 9GB of free space...
Microsoft is pushing a tablet with 64GB of total storage, but only 23 GB of free space. Apple sells devices with 32 GB of storage, and only 24 GB free space.
Google is pretty much the only one that's heavily pushing users towards being slaves of their cloud. And yet the Linux crowd seem to cheer them on.
That's because we know that most folks should be slaves to some cloud. Tycho of Penny Arcade says it well:
But what I like about this laptop is that it is not gregarious in any way. It barely exists; there are many, many things it can’t do, which is fucking great. If I was going to spend over a thousand dollars on some sliver of mobile computing, I would buy a generalist device: I’d get a MacBook Air, or emulate Gabriel’s example with a Surface Pro. That cover/keyboard thing is no joke. But those machines are much, much more than I want, let alone need. And what I need is very, very simple: a window that looks out onto the Cloud.
Thus far, I’ve gotta say: I like the view.
The Chromebooks fill a niche market for a device to just use the Web. Not to play video games, run heavy computations, or manage a company's network. They are a generic interface to everything on the Web, as the Web was designed to have.
By the way, Google reports the Drive outage is fixed.
Personally, I'm inclined to disagree. I think Apple should take their metric fuckton of cash and buy DropBox, then put the DropBox team in charge of iCloud.
iCloud suffers from the same foibles as Internet Explorer and GNOME. It's not really smooth enough, but it's so tightly integrated into the core system so deeply that removing it is practically impossible. I'd rther see DropBox bring their reliability, ease, and compatibility into iOS, rather than rely on the community of app developers to voluntarily integrate tightly with a non-Apple service.