What do you expect? We're minting MBAs at a higher rate than ever. Those people need to go do something to prove that middle management is value added.
Computer Science degrees are not degrees in programming languages. They are degrees in the science of computation, and they use specific languages as a platform for that education.
However, there is nothing wrong with a university (or more commonly a community college) providing courses on specific languages. Perhaps you already have a CS degree, but find a classroom setting better for learning than hacking on your own. If such a person wants to take the local Ruby class, I would encourage them to do so.
Not all plumbing requires much training. I can't plumb a house, but I can replace a faucet. Likewise, you shouldn't expect professional work out of someone who spent a quarter taking iOS programming, but if someone wants to do so and uses that knowledge to hack out a $0.99 game, more power to them.
Or, you could just use the lower bike weight to ride faster at the same heart-rate. That's useful not just for racing, but also for commuting. The only time that weight doesn't matter is if your only goal is to get a scenic ride in for exercise.
SS shouldn't be lumped together with medicare/medicaid. SS is not a problem. It is more or less stable and more or less sustainable. It needs continual tweaks to keep it that way (retirement at 67 or at 70?), but there's no reason to believe it will grow out of control and dominate the federal budget.
The medical entitlements are different, because medical costs are growing so quickly. Eliminating republican tax spending won't fix it, it just pushes the problem off a few extra years. But you're right that if we today undid the legacies of the Bush finances (tax cuts, military spending, and drug expansions) that we'd eliminate the deficit.
It is not the biggest problem, but it is close to the biggest problem. It also has questionable returns for each dollar put in. If we spend $1 on education or infrastructure, that usually returns much more than $1. Spending $1 on wealth transfer from 35 y/o to 75 y/o should return almost exactly $1 to the economy. Spending $1 on a fighter jet we don't need will return $0 to the economy (unless that fighter jets development produces research). In this case, we're talking about cutting research so we can keep making the jet, and that's an incredible drag on the US economy.
That response is complete bunk. There is a lot of room to debate how much action should be taken with respect to AGW. I'm sure some green party members think we should hold a lottery and kill off 90% of the population. It's possible some people would even argue that a warmer planet might mean more food, and thus we should put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible. There's even room for rational debate within that wide stretch of craziness. Should we commit 0% of GDP to fighting AGW, or 5%?
Regardless of your opinion, at least we can hold a rational debate about what (if anything) to do. Unless, you're a skeptic. Then, by definition you can't even converse with the reasonable people. It all seems, to me, like a ruse to bypass having to reason about your position. If someone says that AGW might displace 50,000,000 people in the next 40 years and they use that to argue that we should spend $X today to reduce that, the deniers out there can just plug their ears and hum.
For the record, I think liberals often exaggerate the damage of AGW to argue their points, but at least they are in the same building as the facts if not the same room. Meanwhile conservatives...
IF you really truly need a DB, then SQL is usually a better choice for no other reason than there are several vendors offering several levels of capability all more or less compatible with the SQL language. Obviously there are times when your domain requires NoSQL, so know your domain and choose the right tool. But if you don't know yet, it's probably wiser to start with SQL.
Of course, as others have pointed out, often when people think they need a DB, what they really need is a hash table and maybe a text file.
That doesn't make any sense. Digital distribution is cheaper, which means you can have more competitors than you could with print distribution.
What's killing news is that digital means there are essentially no more scoops. When a story comes out, it is on every cable news channel well within the hour, and posted on every digital newspaper within minutes, and news aggregators like HuffPo within seconds. Before, a true scoop meant your had the only paper publishing a story that day. Not only did that garner eyeballs, but it brought prestige too. Now it mostly means increased news consumption overall with a lot of that consumption going to your competitors with no compensation for your own paper's work.
Which is why news agencies have been cutting their staff for years. It's cheaper for everyone to ride the coattails of someone else. It's even cheaper to have interns watching twitter for trending stories. The bottom line is news is both a product but also a public good, and like many public goods capitalism may not be the optimal structure for maximizing it's non-monetary benefit to society.
Also, you'll notice that the advent of the printing press didn't eliminate writing things by hand. Likewise, the telephone did not stop people from physically going to other people's homes to sit and chat. And the TV hasn't stop people from sitting on their porch and watching the sun set.
All this really says is that cell phone technology in general (and smartphones in particular) have been broadly adopted at an incredibly fast pace compared to previous data points. Or it might say that nothing about a smartphone is really new technology from the human factors perspective. After all, we've had personal computers for 30 years. We've also had walky-talkies much longer. The smartphone just combines things that have been around a long time into a more convenient package.
Actually, if you break it down a lot of time spent in many video game genres is actually just collecting. You have actual collecting quests FPS. You also have collecting a full set of accomplishments (get all secrets in a level to get a gold star for that level) in platform games. RPGs are almost entirely about collecting (collect this great loot, collect completing all these arbitrary missions).
When you think about it, this guy just took it to another meta-level.
Yes, but profit for a credit union is different than for say the Red Cross. Most nonprofits work from donations and will of course try to use additional funds (say after a major disaster) to expand their visions. Meanwhile, the credit union exists to better it's members lives, specifically through availability of cheaper financial instruments. While they might spend some profits on adding locations, a typical credit union will (and should) pass most profits back to members through lower rates on housing or auto loans, or higher interest returns on savings/checking accounts.
Since when did the profit of banks contribute to society? The reason we want banks is as market makers (you want a house, someone wants to sell it, you don't have enough money on hand to buy so the bank loans to you to make the housing market possible). That's the societal value they create. Credit Unions do exactly that, except they siphon off fewer resources from borrowers. The price we pay for using credit unions is usually that they are less likely to take outsized risks for outsized gains.
If, like me, you believe (big) banks operate more like casinos with other peoples money, then you are helping society by moving your money to a credit union or smaller bank. If on the other hand, you believe big banks are capable of providing valuable financial innovation that smaller banks cannot, then you might see that move as a bad thing. The tax ramifications on the entity itself are almost entirely a nonissue. Especially when you consider that most large companies offshore profits to avoid taxes. And if Google can figure out how to cheat Uncle Sam, you can bet your house that so can JP Morgan.
Does that really matter? Of course many of his complaints about C++ are erroneous (though for kernel code I'd agree with the C++ exception mechanism complaint). On the other hand, his work has been incredibly beneficial to the community. The fact is, almost all of us are really dumb about somethings, even if we're really smart about other things. Sometimes, we're even really convinced we're right when we are wrong. Often, the smarter you are, the more convinced you will be about what you're wrong about. These generalizations are broadly true, and in this case they are true about Linus as well.
Here's the thing though. Where he's wrong, he's not really doing any damage. Suppose he convinces some teams to use C on projects were C++ would have been more appropriate. So what? Those teams might waste a little time reimplementing lists or some such thing, but overall they will probably be approximately as successful as they would be without the 'no C++" rants. It's not like he's making erroneous claims for weapons of mass destruction...
The world has changed, and mostly for the better. It used to be that if you were a subsistence farmer, you might be capable of saving just enough to get through one bad year (drought, blight, whatever). If that's what you were capable of, then personal responsibility meant saving that much, and if you had two consecutive bad years, well you sold the farm and hoped to live through the experience.
Today, if you are living anywhere from poverty to middlish class (say $35k a year), its somewhere between fiendishly difficult to impossible to save up just a couple thousand dollars. Meanwhile, if you do get sick, costs can easily exceed a mortgage. My personal experience is that when a family member fell ill and passed 10 days later, it cost $180K in efforts to save them. If you have no medical insurance, it takes literally 1 bad event to bankrupt your family, and there is literally no possible scenario where a family living on $30k a year could be expected to have 6x annual salary saved. It literally cannot be done.
You're assuming that today's net worth needs to cover all unfunded liabilities. Many of those SS/Medicare liabilities are extrapolated decades into the future. Most economists would assume that the current net worth of the US will be greater in 2065 than it is today.
Does growth solve all the problems? I don't think it does. But you do a disservice to holding an intelligent conversation when you present such clearly biased numbers and expect people to jump to your conclusion.
Also, the majority of the US' fiscal problems come from medical costs. The numbers you quote make assumptions about those costs, which are unpredictable. They could continue to rise apace, but it's also possible that a variety of improvements in technology (say computer systems that diagnose better than doctors, or cheap/disposable medical monitors that strap on and replace rooms of equipment) could radically alter the cost curve. Likewise, if society in general were to transition towards cheaper end of life care (something like half of all lifetime medical costs are incurred in the final six months) we could drastically alter those figures. Those are the public debates we really need to be having rather than fighting over abortion for the thousandth time.
The only thing you listed as superfluous that actual qualifies is the struct/class business. Aside from that, your rant looks like of like admitting you don't fully understand or aren't comfortable with certain language features. What's worse, your justification to "reduce bloat" isn't even valid in many of these cases. Are diamond patterns bloat? If you eliminated them, how would you inherit multiple interfaces (all methods are pure virtual) that inherit from the same root interface? You couldn't do that without adding a new concept for interface classes (more BLOAT).
Also, C++ standard library is the definition of minimalist for OOP languages. Pretty much all it contains (prior to C++0x11) is strings, containers (not even hashes), container algorithms, and iostreams. Despite that you'd eliminate half of those features? You honestly believe that qualifies as bloat? The JDK includes (not one, not two, but) three stream implementations, two UI implementations, specific versions of CORBA, and who knows what else. The fact is, standard libraries are good for standard things. The fact that std::transform is standard means when I bump into it and don't know what it does, I can quickly find documentation on it. That's much better than bumping into someone else's custom modify_each_value method and needing to read through there code to verify it works properly.
Does it matter? If my feed is indicative of anything, it's already withering. Everybody might be on the Facebook, but from what I can tell during the once a month I bother to log in, only about 3% of the users post more than 5 times a year. Interestingly, the changes to timeline and such have had the effect of filtering out the banal posts, so it appears less activity is occurring than the now limited amount there is.
I might be an outlier. Maybe the people I know are bored of Facebook but everyone else is gung-ho. It probably won't die, but perhaps the fate in store for Facebook is much worse. It will become an evite planner and not much else.
No, how about you read the constitution. If you manage to get past the 2nd amendment, you'll notice that the federal government has broad authority to create laws and taxes. ACA is both a law and a tax.
All these slippery slope arguments are frankly pathetic. We have a democracy. If a party runs on the "tax anyone who doesn't eat enough veggies and then ship broccoli to them via UPS" platform and they win the majority of support, then yes we deserve that mandate (both for good and ill).
BTW, the flaw in this libertarian speak is it necessarily ignores that almost all freedoms we grant you are taken from other people's potential freedoms. At the most absurd level, that it's illegal to murder means you have taken away other people's right to murder. Non sociopaths will view this tradeoff of freedoms as overall a net benefit, but it is still a sacrifice of some freedom. At the extreme of your strawman argument, allowing people to eat junk takes away healthy eaters freedom from subsidizing the junk-foodies. How, you might ask? Yes, health care costs, but also entirely free market things like gasoline prices (fat people weigh more/use more gas, which increases demand and drives up prices for everyone). I don't think we should mandate eating veggies, that's taking too much freedom for too little benefit, but we might tax sugary drinks or candy at a higher rate and not feel that burden is inappropriate.
You missed the memo. "Constitutional" does not mean "is found in the text of the constitution", it means "Glenn Beck likes it". Glenn Beck does not like ACA, and thus it is clearly unconstitutional.
We all know what the justices said, but clearly the argument that states can mandate things and the feds cannot is idiocy. You're telling me that if CA declared that all citizens must buy 1 lb of broccoli a week or face felony charges, that all the conservatives would say, "While I disagree with the content of that law, it is well within the powers of the state of CA to impose a broccoli mandate"? I call BS.
This entire charade was never about freedom or separation of powers. It was about one side of the political spectrum deciding that a law their think tanks developed, which was supported by their politicians at the national level only 15 years ago, and implemented by one of their governors just a half dozen years ago was suddenly unconscionable the moment that the other party decided to suggest such a law.
The only thing this fight was ever about was making sure "Obama failed". In the end, the right lost their chance in 2009 to have significant say in the actual bill, because they gave up on legislation and doubled down on opposition.
Tech journalism seems to be substantially more dreadful still.
This term of yours confuses me. I am familiar with tech companies of course. It's none to surprising that those companies hire PR teams as well as advertisers. Also, I have experience with the organizations that gather PR releases and periodically publish them or post them to webpages. But I know nothing of this "tech journalism" you speak of.
Slashdot readers seem confused, because the Surface really is a "family" as they put it, of devices attacking different markets.
In which case, the Surface family is in trouble. If the tech literate are confused about what is being offered, what will happen when regular people start getting these as gifts and they don't do what they thought they did?
Not gradually. Surface is an upside down laptop. In a laptop, the screen is the cover and all the computation happens under the keyboard. In surface, the keyboard is the cover and all the computation happens behind the screen.
Given the ports and what not, this device is going to be quite similar to the Apple Air. In short, do you like to set a platform on your lap with a screen poking up, buy an Air. Do you like a screen in your hands or resting on your knee, buy a Surface.
Thank god we have grammar Nazis (see what I did there?).
If something is an accepted norm, then it is not bad grammar. All that means is the codified grammar rules you're reading from are out of date. Grammar is whatever the speakers/writers of a language in aggregate agree it is. Even though capitalizing all proper nouns is in the books; I tend to see relatively lax capitalization for places (but not "people") the author considers imaginary. So, if writers choose not to capitalize heaven/hell, and if readers accept that, then it's proper grammar.
On the specific topic of heaven and hell, you are of course also wrong even by the book. There are other proper names we frequently do not capitalize; chief among them is the proper noun 'earth'. Since people group things semantically, and earth is a place where people live, it's not surprising that heaven would be lowercase since it's a place where people afterlive.
Not everything is meant as an insult to the "other side".
Slashdot Mirror
What do you expect? We're minting MBAs at a higher rate than ever. Those people need to go do something to prove that middle management is value added.
This is both right and entirely wrong.
Computer Science degrees are not degrees in programming languages. They are degrees in the science of computation, and they use specific languages as a platform for that education.
However, there is nothing wrong with a university (or more commonly a community college) providing courses on specific languages. Perhaps you already have a CS degree, but find a classroom setting better for learning than hacking on your own. If such a person wants to take the local Ruby class, I would encourage them to do so.
Not all plumbing requires much training. I can't plumb a house, but I can replace a faucet. Likewise, you shouldn't expect professional work out of someone who spent a quarter taking iOS programming, but if someone wants to do so and uses that knowledge to hack out a $0.99 game, more power to them.
Or, you could just use the lower bike weight to ride faster at the same heart-rate. That's useful not just for racing, but also for commuting. The only time that weight doesn't matter is if your only goal is to get a scenic ride in for exercise.
SS shouldn't be lumped together with medicare/medicaid. SS is not a problem. It is more or less stable and more or less sustainable. It needs continual tweaks to keep it that way (retirement at 67 or at 70?), but there's no reason to believe it will grow out of control and dominate the federal budget.
The medical entitlements are different, because medical costs are growing so quickly. Eliminating republican tax spending won't fix it, it just pushes the problem off a few extra years. But you're right that if we today undid the legacies of the Bush finances (tax cuts, military spending, and drug expansions) that we'd eliminate the deficit.
It is not the biggest problem, but it is close to the biggest problem. It also has questionable returns for each dollar put in. If we spend $1 on education or infrastructure, that usually returns much more than $1. Spending $1 on wealth transfer from 35 y/o to 75 y/o should return almost exactly $1 to the economy. Spending $1 on a fighter jet we don't need will return $0 to the economy (unless that fighter jets development produces research). In this case, we're talking about cutting research so we can keep making the jet, and that's an incredible drag on the US economy.
That response is complete bunk. There is a lot of room to debate how much action should be taken with respect to AGW. I'm sure some green party members think we should hold a lottery and kill off 90% of the population. It's possible some people would even argue that a warmer planet might mean more food, and thus we should put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible. There's even room for rational debate within that wide stretch of craziness. Should we commit 0% of GDP to fighting AGW, or 5%?
Regardless of your opinion, at least we can hold a rational debate about what (if anything) to do. Unless, you're a skeptic. Then, by definition you can't even converse with the reasonable people. It all seems, to me, like a ruse to bypass having to reason about your position. If someone says that AGW might displace 50,000,000 people in the next 40 years and they use that to argue that we should spend $X today to reduce that, the deniers out there can just plug their ears and hum.
For the record, I think liberals often exaggerate the damage of AGW to argue their points, but at least they are in the same building as the facts if not the same room. Meanwhile conservatives ...
IF you really truly need a DB, then SQL is usually a better choice for no other reason than there are several vendors offering several levels of capability all more or less compatible with the SQL language. Obviously there are times when your domain requires NoSQL, so know your domain and choose the right tool. But if you don't know yet, it's probably wiser to start with SQL.
Of course, as others have pointed out, often when people think they need a DB, what they really need is a hash table and maybe a text file.
That doesn't make any sense. Digital distribution is cheaper, which means you can have more competitors than you could with print distribution.
What's killing news is that digital means there are essentially no more scoops. When a story comes out, it is on every cable news channel well within the hour, and posted on every digital newspaper within minutes, and news aggregators like HuffPo within seconds. Before, a true scoop meant your had the only paper publishing a story that day. Not only did that garner eyeballs, but it brought prestige too. Now it mostly means increased news consumption overall with a lot of that consumption going to your competitors with no compensation for your own paper's work.
Which is why news agencies have been cutting their staff for years. It's cheaper for everyone to ride the coattails of someone else. It's even cheaper to have interns watching twitter for trending stories. The bottom line is news is both a product but also a public good, and like many public goods capitalism may not be the optimal structure for maximizing it's non-monetary benefit to society.
Also, you'll notice that the advent of the printing press didn't eliminate writing things by hand. Likewise, the telephone did not stop people from physically going to other people's homes to sit and chat. And the TV hasn't stop people from sitting on their porch and watching the sun set.
All this really says is that cell phone technology in general (and smartphones in particular) have been broadly adopted at an incredibly fast pace compared to previous data points. Or it might say that nothing about a smartphone is really new technology from the human factors perspective. After all, we've had personal computers for 30 years. We've also had walky-talkies much longer. The smartphone just combines things that have been around a long time into a more convenient package.
And that is different than Pokemon how?
Actually, if you break it down a lot of time spent in many video game genres is actually just collecting. You have actual collecting quests FPS. You also have collecting a full set of accomplishments (get all secrets in a level to get a gold star for that level) in platform games. RPGs are almost entirely about collecting (collect this great loot, collect completing all these arbitrary missions).
When you think about it, this guy just took it to another meta-level.
Yes, but profit for a credit union is different than for say the Red Cross. Most nonprofits work from donations and will of course try to use additional funds (say after a major disaster) to expand their visions. Meanwhile, the credit union exists to better it's members lives, specifically through availability of cheaper financial instruments. While they might spend some profits on adding locations, a typical credit union will (and should) pass most profits back to members through lower rates on housing or auto loans, or higher interest returns on savings/checking accounts.
Since when did the profit of banks contribute to society? The reason we want banks is as market makers (you want a house, someone wants to sell it, you don't have enough money on hand to buy so the bank loans to you to make the housing market possible). That's the societal value they create. Credit Unions do exactly that, except they siphon off fewer resources from borrowers. The price we pay for using credit unions is usually that they are less likely to take outsized risks for outsized gains.
If, like me, you believe (big) banks operate more like casinos with other peoples money, then you are helping society by moving your money to a credit union or smaller bank. If on the other hand, you believe big banks are capable of providing valuable financial innovation that smaller banks cannot, then you might see that move as a bad thing. The tax ramifications on the entity itself are almost entirely a nonissue. Especially when you consider that most large companies offshore profits to avoid taxes. And if Google can figure out how to cheat Uncle Sam, you can bet your house that so can JP Morgan.
Does that really matter? Of course many of his complaints about C++ are erroneous (though for kernel code I'd agree with the C++ exception mechanism complaint). On the other hand, his work has been incredibly beneficial to the community. The fact is, almost all of us are really dumb about somethings, even if we're really smart about other things. Sometimes, we're even really convinced we're right when we are wrong. Often, the smarter you are, the more convinced you will be about what you're wrong about. These generalizations are broadly true, and in this case they are true about Linus as well.
Here's the thing though. Where he's wrong, he's not really doing any damage. Suppose he convinces some teams to use C on projects were C++ would have been more appropriate. So what? Those teams might waste a little time reimplementing lists or some such thing, but overall they will probably be approximately as successful as they would be without the 'no C++" rants. It's not like he's making erroneous claims for weapons of mass destruction...
The world has changed, and mostly for the better. It used to be that if you were a subsistence farmer, you might be capable of saving just enough to get through one bad year (drought, blight, whatever). If that's what you were capable of, then personal responsibility meant saving that much, and if you had two consecutive bad years, well you sold the farm and hoped to live through the experience.
Today, if you are living anywhere from poverty to middlish class (say $35k a year), its somewhere between fiendishly difficult to impossible to save up just a couple thousand dollars. Meanwhile, if you do get sick, costs can easily exceed a mortgage. My personal experience is that when a family member fell ill and passed 10 days later, it cost $180K in efforts to save them. If you have no medical insurance, it takes literally 1 bad event to bankrupt your family, and there is literally no possible scenario where a family living on $30k a year could be expected to have 6x annual salary saved. It literally cannot be done.
You're assuming that today's net worth needs to cover all unfunded liabilities. Many of those SS/Medicare liabilities are extrapolated decades into the future. Most economists would assume that the current net worth of the US will be greater in 2065 than it is today.
Does growth solve all the problems? I don't think it does. But you do a disservice to holding an intelligent conversation when you present such clearly biased numbers and expect people to jump to your conclusion.
Also, the majority of the US' fiscal problems come from medical costs. The numbers you quote make assumptions about those costs, which are unpredictable. They could continue to rise apace, but it's also possible that a variety of improvements in technology (say computer systems that diagnose better than doctors, or cheap/disposable medical monitors that strap on and replace rooms of equipment) could radically alter the cost curve. Likewise, if society in general were to transition towards cheaper end of life care (something like half of all lifetime medical costs are incurred in the final six months) we could drastically alter those figures. Those are the public debates we really need to be having rather than fighting over abortion for the thousandth time.
The only thing you listed as superfluous that actual qualifies is the struct/class business. Aside from that, your rant looks like of like admitting you don't fully understand or aren't comfortable with certain language features. What's worse, your justification to "reduce bloat" isn't even valid in many of these cases. Are diamond patterns bloat? If you eliminated them, how would you inherit multiple interfaces (all methods are pure virtual) that inherit from the same root interface? You couldn't do that without adding a new concept for interface classes (more BLOAT).
Also, C++ standard library is the definition of minimalist for OOP languages. Pretty much all it contains (prior to C++0x11) is strings, containers (not even hashes), container algorithms, and iostreams. Despite that you'd eliminate half of those features? You honestly believe that qualifies as bloat? The JDK includes (not one, not two, but) three stream implementations, two UI implementations, specific versions of CORBA, and who knows what else. The fact is, standard libraries are good for standard things. The fact that std::transform is standard means when I bump into it and don't know what it does, I can quickly find documentation on it. That's much better than bumping into someone else's custom modify_each_value method and needing to read through there code to verify it works properly.
Does it matter? If my feed is indicative of anything, it's already withering. Everybody might be on the Facebook, but from what I can tell during the once a month I bother to log in, only about 3% of the users post more than 5 times a year. Interestingly, the changes to timeline and such have had the effect of filtering out the banal posts, so it appears less activity is occurring than the now limited amount there is.
I might be an outlier. Maybe the people I know are bored of Facebook but everyone else is gung-ho. It probably won't die, but perhaps the fate in store for Facebook is much worse. It will become an evite planner and not much else.
No, how about you read the constitution. If you manage to get past the 2nd amendment, you'll notice that the federal government has broad authority to create laws and taxes. ACA is both a law and a tax.
All these slippery slope arguments are frankly pathetic. We have a democracy. If a party runs on the "tax anyone who doesn't eat enough veggies and then ship broccoli to them via UPS" platform and they win the majority of support, then yes we deserve that mandate (both for good and ill).
BTW, the flaw in this libertarian speak is it necessarily ignores that almost all freedoms we grant you are taken from other people's potential freedoms. At the most absurd level, that it's illegal to murder means you have taken away other people's right to murder. Non sociopaths will view this tradeoff of freedoms as overall a net benefit, but it is still a sacrifice of some freedom. At the extreme of your strawman argument, allowing people to eat junk takes away healthy eaters freedom from subsidizing the junk-foodies. How, you might ask? Yes, health care costs, but also entirely free market things like gasoline prices (fat people weigh more/use more gas, which increases demand and drives up prices for everyone). I don't think we should mandate eating veggies, that's taking too much freedom for too little benefit, but we might tax sugary drinks or candy at a higher rate and not feel that burden is inappropriate.
You missed the memo. "Constitutional" does not mean "is found in the text of the constitution", it means "Glenn Beck likes it". Glenn Beck does not like ACA, and thus it is clearly unconstitutional.
Maybe the diseases we yanks have at higher rates are caused by the additional stress of possibly not having health insurance...
We all know what the justices said, but clearly the argument that states can mandate things and the feds cannot is idiocy. You're telling me that if CA declared that all citizens must buy 1 lb of broccoli a week or face felony charges, that all the conservatives would say, "While I disagree with the content of that law, it is well within the powers of the state of CA to impose a broccoli mandate"? I call BS.
This entire charade was never about freedom or separation of powers. It was about one side of the political spectrum deciding that a law their think tanks developed, which was supported by their politicians at the national level only 15 years ago, and implemented by one of their governors just a half dozen years ago was suddenly unconscionable the moment that the other party decided to suggest such a law.
The only thing this fight was ever about was making sure "Obama failed". In the end, the right lost their chance in 2009 to have significant say in the actual bill, because they gave up on legislation and doubled down on opposition.
Tech journalism seems to be substantially more dreadful still.
This term of yours confuses me. I am familiar with tech companies of course. It's none to surprising that those companies hire PR teams as well as advertisers. Also, I have experience with the organizations that gather PR releases and periodically publish them or post them to webpages. But I know nothing of this "tech journalism" you speak of.
Slashdot readers seem confused, because the Surface really is a "family" as they put it, of devices attacking different markets.
In which case, the Surface family is in trouble. If the tech literate are confused about what is being offered, what will happen when regular people start getting these as gifts and they don't do what they thought they did?
Not gradually. Surface is an upside down laptop. In a laptop, the screen is the cover and all the computation happens under the keyboard. In surface, the keyboard is the cover and all the computation happens behind the screen.
Given the ports and what not, this device is going to be quite similar to the Apple Air. In short, do you like to set a platform on your lap with a screen poking up, buy an Air. Do you like a screen in your hands or resting on your knee, buy a Surface.
Thank god we have grammar Nazis (see what I did there?).
If something is an accepted norm, then it is not bad grammar. All that means is the codified grammar rules you're reading from are out of date. Grammar is whatever the speakers/writers of a language in aggregate agree it is. Even though capitalizing all proper nouns is in the books; I tend to see relatively lax capitalization for places (but not "people") the author considers imaginary. So, if writers choose not to capitalize heaven/hell, and if readers accept that, then it's proper grammar.
On the specific topic of heaven and hell, you are of course also wrong even by the book. There are other proper names we frequently do not capitalize; chief among them is the proper noun 'earth'. Since people group things semantically, and earth is a place where people live, it's not surprising that heaven would be lowercase since it's a place where people afterlive.
Not everything is meant as an insult to the "other side".