Highly doubt the Tegra 2 is on par with the A4, unless the A4 has a dual-core Cortex A9... Info suggests the A4 is only a single core Cortex A9 which would make the Tegra2 at least 2x more powerful. Not to mention Nvidia vs ARM based graphics core.
Absolutely. Ars is a bit of an Apple fansite. Check out Anand's discussion for more reasonable analysis (Anand uses a Mac for his main personal PC, too, but he's not affected by the RTD), suggesting as you say that the iPad most likely has less than half the CPU power of Tegra 2. Among other things, Tegra 2 also enables 1080p decoding of h.264 content, while Apple's A4 can only handle 720p and is locked to some annoying containers, meaning you'll have to transcode. GPU performance on the Tegra 2 is most likely several times that of the iPad, as well. Tegra 2's power consumption is also claimed to be several times lower than that of the iPad.
But MSI's tablet will run Android, not iPhone OS.
Yes, it was clearly the US they were targeting. If they wanted to home-school their German-speaking children, they could easily and freely moved to Switzerland (the eastern part of the country speaks German). No political asylum needed, much cheaper to travel. Also their kids could speak with their new-found friends, and read books, and watch TV, without a huge learning curve.
What are you talking about? Home-schooled kids don't have friends, and they won't have them when they grow up, either.
that's just immoral. up to now i had mostly technical reasons i disliked microsoft. now, i have stonger ethical and moral reasons as well. i won't forget. that's just bordering on treason.
I'm sort of with you, but remember that Google hasn't done anything about leaving China - they've made a public statement that they might leave and then done nothing while it's been pointed out that their Chinese revenues are almost zero. For now, judging by their actions, Google and MS are in the same boat.
As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have noticed that nearly all the Chinese groups working my area publish complete crap of no value to other researchers. There are quite a few good Chinese researchers at American universities, but I have not once found a reason to actually cite a group based in China. They have a long way to go still before they reach the same level of impact as any western country (or hell, even its neighbors Korea and Japan).
AND they still have a safety record that dwarfs NASA's.
No, they don't.
Shuttle has had 134 flights, two failures. About 1.6%.
Soyuz has had 104 flights, two failures. About 2%.
Note that in both cases, the "failures" were loss of crew accidents. If we also include failures that do not cause loss of crew, Soyuz looks even worse.
And in addition to the Shuttle's superior safety record, it has vastly greater capabilities. Soyuz is unable to go repair Hubble, for instance.
No, the downfall is that somehow just spending more money means you win the vote. At least. that what all this mincing seems to indicate.
It's a combination of your and the GP's ideas. It's important to remember that most decisive effect of the lobbying/bribery money is control over which candidates we see in the first place. When a race is between two people with $10 million budgets, you have to expect that each has $10 million in obligations to repay. The candidate who didn't take all that money didn't make it past the primary.
Except for the part where 99% is hilariously wrong.
(Per capita productivity in the U.S., including babies and such, is about $50,000. If 99% of that were being taken away, the average household would be living on like $2,000 a year)
He didn't say that 99% of the money was taken away. He said that the top 1% gets to divide of the wealth of the bottom 99%, and considering the rather ephemeral nature of wealth, it's a valid point. Subtract the cost of living from the income of every citizen and only a very small percentage are left with a substantial positive number.
No. Very few iPhone games are any good -- some puzzlers are OK, Galcon is addicting, but apart from that almost none of the action games are worth playing at all. The touchscreen UI is awful for gaming, as is the motion sensing stuff.
I have a jailbroken device with the codesigning disabled, and I know how to use Google, so I've played almost everything worth trying. Most of it is crap.
Big name EA type games are almost all universally terrible, with bad load times, OK graphics, and untested gameplay. Some of the indie games are decent, but not worth plunking down hundreds of dollars for hardware on.
Just get a DS and an R4.
I completely agree. Galcon is the best thing I've seen in my Touch, and it's a 30 second timewaster game. There are probably about a dozen decent to good games on the iPhone/Touch, but none of them are worth buying the hardware. If you want it for the phone features, or as an mp3 player, then the games are a nice bonus. There's nothing particularly special here, though.
"I don't read Newspapers, I read the news on the internet", and mentioned that all the news stories of the day have been driven by sites like Drudge, LittleGreenFootballs and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post, not by NYT or Washington Post.
The traditional "National News Media" is fast becoming irrelevant, because information dissemination is faster than a Newspaper can be printed.
Information is moving (literally) at the speed of light (Internet). By the time NYT puts it on the front page, it is often 24 hours too late to be of much use.
What you're describing applies almost exclusively to celebrity gossip and irrelevant political rumors. News that doesn't matter after 24 hours tends not to be real news. At best you get early results of elections or public announcements. Real reporting isn't simply a list of the obvious facts given by a single source. It means checking the source, describing differing viewpoints and evaluating those sources, and providing a reader with real insight, not just information.
Real reporting still has its place, and not one of those sites does any. They're sensationalist aggregators, sort of like Slashdot but with angry political themes. Bloggers and tweeters also don't do real reporting, either. They're, at best, sources to be evaluated in a much broader context by real reporters.
Now that graphics are largely stagnant in between console generations, the PC's graphics advantages tend to be limited to higher resolution, higher framerate, anti-aliasing, and somewhat higher texture resolution. If the huge new emphasis on tesselation in GF100 strikes a chord with developers, and especially if something like it gets into the next console generation, games may ship with much more detailed geometry which will then automatically scale to the performance of the hardware on which they're run. This would allow PC graphics to gain the additional advantage of having an order of magnitude increase in geometry detail, which would make more of a visible difference than any of the advantages it currently has, and it would occur with virtually no extra work by developers. It would also allow performance to scale much more effectively across a wide range of PC hardware, allowing developers to simultaneously hit the casual and enthusiast markets much more effectively.
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the/. audience.
And on that note, the wonderful thing about NYT opinion pieces (which are clearly labeled as such), is that they involve lucid argumentation and reasonable discussion. They're not meant to be propaganda and they would be very ineffective as such, because tend they argue an issue rather than asserting a point. Most people look for evidence to support, rather than shape, their beliefs. If you're in the rational minority, intelligent discussion is always useful.
I'm going to pay. I read the NYTimes online everyday; a habit I started more than 10 years ago. The sites/shows you have listed are really just aggregators. Someone needs to be there, hit the pavement and get the story. This article [nytimes.com] is a great example of good reporting. I think it is worth value. If I have to pay a few cents for it... so be it.
The question is how many of the employees and journalists paid by the NYT are actually out there, hitting the pavement and getting the story. And how many are basically just dead weight writing bullcrap to fill space.
If you've read the Times you'd see that they have a shitload of pavement-hitting employees all around the world. In the last few years most newspapers have switched to not doing much more than collecting and reprinting AP stories. The Times is the main other source of investigative journalism in print media, and when they write about what they find it includes excellent discussion, valuable and valued by readers across the political spectrum (as long as your location on the spectrum isn't "moron"...seriously, smart Republicans who care about the happenings of the world read the Times, not Ann Coulter). Beyond investigative journalists, the other on-the-ground source of news is the nascent blogger or tweeter. However, the blogger and tweeter are about breadth, not depth. And as much as some people like to complain about the ethics of journalists, they're generally an order of magnitude more reliable than an internet source.
PS. Free Shuttle parts for the cost of transport?! Please, will somebody in the know confirm you don't have to be some large educational institution or venerable museum?;)
Confirmed. And if you have Amazon Prime, it's free 2-day shipping.
Why not? If you're allowed to weaponize earth, why not space? Is it some kind of holy shrine? As for the 'bad idea' part- Well they should have thought of that when they created weapons in the first place right? India is doing what it takes to protect itself from some sort of maniacal attack from the Amreicans and the ruskies who'll try to blame it on someone else.
It's a bad idea because blowing up a few satellites may make low Earth orbit a field of debris dense enough that it is impossible to keep the other satellites intact. Once we cross a certain orbital debris density threshold, the debris will impact with satellites and create new debris faster than existing debris falls to Earth due to drag. I think that's called the Kessler Effect (someone correct me here). Once that happens, we may be locking the whole world away from space exploration and exploitation (like commercial communication satellites) for a long time.
Of course, in this case the RTM was already at a higher quality than the corporate world had seen in a commercial OS, but it's hard to break with habit. It's doubly hard when you've spent years convincing management that SPx is the time to switch.
That's a problem. I was reading somewhere (sorry, don't recall where... it was a news article months ago) about how the majority of all US peanut butter brands are filled with peanuts from China. Apparently they control the majority of the market.
Just imagine the things leaching into their soil over there...
ugh.
Buy this peanut butter instead. The nuts come from Virginia and the only other ingredient is salt. Compare to the weird sludge called peanut butter in most supermarkets (Jif, etc.). Better yet, buy a jar of each and do a taste test. You won't ever go back.
Vendors promise all sorts of things. That doesn't make them true. I'll believe it when I see Tom's Hardware or someone equally competent test one of these things and they actually get 12 hours.
Until then, I'll file this one under "vendors promise the world".
If you want competency, you might check with Anand instead of Tom.
My 1005HA EEEPC has more battery life than Asus claimed (I get 11 hours just typing in notepad with the radio off), so I wouldn't be surprised if the 12 hour claim were true. Keep in mind that the quoted number is always for minimal usage.
I think FGSiI could use an update for modern audiences. Maybe let The Gemberling gain a few more pounds and then have every episode be based around Maze Master dance sequences.
Mac is still, and long will be the favorite computer of most graphicians/artists.
Tablet+screen has some serious disadvantages. You draw in one place, image appears elsewhere.
With a good touchscreen capable of providing precision comparable to decent Wacoms, this can become a dream tool for an artist.
There's a 64 bit Photoshop for Windows and not for OSX. Surprisingly, it gives serious performance gains over the 32 bit binary, on the order of 20-30%. OSX will get a 64 bit binary before long, I assume, but for now OSX is substantially slower on the same hardware for Photoshop. Also, the same hardware costs a lot more when using OSX now that Psystar is out of the picture.
I'm tempted to agree with you... really strongly tempted.
But but but:
1) Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly.
2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens (I presume you will agree that they have the motivation). I'm in no position to carry out a realistic threat assessment, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
All that said, I still agree that these scanners are a ridiculous intrusion and will not help solve the problem. I'd far rather see more behaviour-based profiling.
Doesn't Israel have more terrorist attacks than any other "western-aligned" nation? Doesn't Israel also have the strongest countermeasures of such a nation? That's a pretty strong correlation, and I suspect there's causation involved.
You assume that major countermeasures don't create terrorists, and I think you're wrong.
I feel fairly confident that if I buy a book from them, I can access it in the future.
Don't be too sure about that. In a supremely ironic move, Amazon recently deleted Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles even though the books had been legally purchased. It's as if Amazon walked into your house and took books from your shelves, leaving a few bucks in their place. Being backed by a huge retailer makes me less confident that I'll be able t read the ebooks I purchase in the future.
Thanks to the public outcry, they then apologized, gave them back, and promised never to do so again.
Aren't we constantly told that the EU is so much better in regards to patents and copyrights and it's only the big bad US that is constantly trying to push all this stuff on people?
No, we're not. The EU is the hot spot for three strikes laws. If anything, it's usually shown as an example of a dark possible future for the US.
Hell, just 2 days ago Obama signed $1.1 trillion more in spending, on a whim. WTF?
I love the scene produced by this evocative statement.
Obama's playing Tetris on his cell phone and an aide approaches with a silver platter covered in spending bills.
"Sir, congress has prepared for you a selection of the finest budgets."
Obama glances quickly away from his screen with a scowl. "Bring them back later. I can't figure out how to pause this thing."
"Very good, sir." The aide bows and begins backing away.
"Damn it," Obama shouts in dismay. "You made me miss with my T. Whatever, give me a pen." He grabs a bill at random. "I'm only signing this one. Throw out the rest. Tell them that next time they either need to combine all the bills or include a grant to fund research into pausing Tetris."
Slashdot Mirror
Highly doubt the Tegra 2 is on par with the A4, unless the A4 has a dual-core Cortex A9... Info suggests the A4 is only a single core Cortex A9 which would make the Tegra2 at least 2x more powerful. Not to mention Nvidia vs ARM based graphics core.
Absolutely. Ars is a bit of an Apple fansite. Check out Anand's discussion for more reasonable analysis (Anand uses a Mac for his main personal PC, too, but he's not affected by the RTD), suggesting as you say that the iPad most likely has less than half the CPU power of Tegra 2. Among other things, Tegra 2 also enables 1080p decoding of h.264 content, while Apple's A4 can only handle 720p and is locked to some annoying containers, meaning you'll have to transcode. GPU performance on the Tegra 2 is most likely several times that of the iPad, as well. Tegra 2's power consumption is also claimed to be several times lower than that of the iPad. But MSI's tablet will run Android, not iPhone OS.
Yes, it was clearly the US they were targeting. If they wanted to home-school their German-speaking children, they could easily and freely moved to Switzerland (the eastern part of the country speaks German). No political asylum needed, much cheaper to travel. Also their kids could speak with their new-found friends, and read books, and watch TV, without a huge learning curve.
What are you talking about? Home-schooled kids don't have friends, and they won't have them when they grow up, either.
that's just immoral. up to now i had mostly technical reasons i disliked microsoft. now, i have stonger ethical and moral reasons as well. i won't forget. that's just bordering on treason.
I'm sort of with you, but remember that Google hasn't done anything about leaving China - they've made a public statement that they might leave and then done nothing while it's been pointed out that their Chinese revenues are almost zero. For now, judging by their actions, Google and MS are in the same boat.
As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have noticed that nearly all the Chinese groups working my area publish complete crap of no value to other researchers. There are quite a few good Chinese researchers at American universities, but I have not once found a reason to actually cite a group based in China. They have a long way to go still before they reach the same level of impact as any western country (or hell, even its neighbors Korea and Japan).
It's the same in polymer physics and every field. Read this, which puts "leading the world in science" in perspective: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/will-china-achieve-science-supremacy/?ref=science In short, China tells people they have to publish or perish on a much greater scale than in other countries. As a result, there is a huge amount of published crap.
No, they don't.
Shuttle has had 134 flights, two failures. About 1.6%.
Soyuz has had 104 flights, two failures. About 2%.
Note that in both cases, the "failures" were loss of crew accidents. If we also include failures that do not cause loss of crew, Soyuz looks even worse.
And in addition to the Shuttle's superior safety record, it has vastly greater capabilities. Soyuz is unable to go repair Hubble, for instance.
No, the downfall is that somehow just spending more money means you win the vote. At least. that what all this mincing seems to indicate.
It's a combination of your and the GP's ideas. It's important to remember that most decisive effect of the lobbying/bribery money is control over which candidates we see in the first place. When a race is between two people with $10 million budgets, you have to expect that each has $10 million in obligations to repay. The candidate who didn't take all that money didn't make it past the primary.
Except for the part where 99% is hilariously wrong.
(Per capita productivity in the U.S., including babies and such, is about $50,000. If 99% of that were being taken away, the average household would be living on like $2,000 a year)
He didn't say that 99% of the money was taken away. He said that the top 1% gets to divide of the wealth of the bottom 99%, and considering the rather ephemeral nature of wealth, it's a valid point. Subtract the cost of living from the income of every citizen and only a very small percentage are left with a substantial positive number.
No. Very few iPhone games are any good -- some puzzlers are OK, Galcon is addicting, but apart from that almost none of the action games are worth playing at all. The touchscreen UI is awful for gaming, as is the motion sensing stuff.
I have a jailbroken device with the codesigning disabled, and I know how to use Google, so I've played almost everything worth trying. Most of it is crap.
Big name EA type games are almost all universally terrible, with bad load times, OK graphics, and untested gameplay. Some of the indie games are decent, but not worth plunking down hundreds of dollars for hardware on.
Just get a DS and an R4.
I completely agree. Galcon is the best thing I've seen in my Touch, and it's a 30 second timewaster game. There are probably about a dozen decent to good games on the iPhone/Touch, but none of them are worth buying the hardware. If you want it for the phone features, or as an mp3 player, then the games are a nice bonus. There's nothing particularly special here, though.
"I don't read Newspapers, I read the news on the internet", and mentioned that all the news stories of the day have been driven by sites like Drudge, LittleGreenFootballs and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post, not by NYT or Washington Post.
The traditional "National News Media" is fast becoming irrelevant, because information dissemination is faster than a Newspaper can be printed.
Information is moving (literally) at the speed of light (Internet). By the time NYT puts it on the front page, it is often 24 hours too late to be of much use.
What you're describing applies almost exclusively to celebrity gossip and irrelevant political rumors. News that doesn't matter after 24 hours tends not to be real news. At best you get early results of elections or public announcements. Real reporting isn't simply a list of the obvious facts given by a single source. It means checking the source, describing differing viewpoints and evaluating those sources, and providing a reader with real insight, not just information. Real reporting still has its place, and not one of those sites does any. They're sensationalist aggregators, sort of like Slashdot but with angry political themes. Bloggers and tweeters also don't do real reporting, either. They're, at best, sources to be evaluated in a much broader context by real reporters.
Now that graphics are largely stagnant in between console generations, the PC's graphics advantages tend to be limited to higher resolution, higher framerate, anti-aliasing, and somewhat higher texture resolution. If the huge new emphasis on tesselation in GF100 strikes a chord with developers, and especially if something like it gets into the next console generation, games may ship with much more detailed geometry which will then automatically scale to the performance of the hardware on which they're run. This would allow PC graphics to gain the additional advantage of having an order of magnitude increase in geometry detail, which would make more of a visible difference than any of the advantages it currently has, and it would occur with virtually no extra work by developers. It would also allow performance to scale much more effectively across a wide range of PC hardware, allowing developers to simultaneously hit the casual and enthusiast markets much more effectively.
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the /. audience.
And on that note, the wonderful thing about NYT opinion pieces (which are clearly labeled as such), is that they involve lucid argumentation and reasonable discussion. They're not meant to be propaganda and they would be very ineffective as such, because tend they argue an issue rather than asserting a point. Most people look for evidence to support, rather than shape, their beliefs. If you're in the rational minority, intelligent discussion is always useful.
I'm going to pay. I read the NYTimes online everyday; a habit I started more than 10 years ago. The sites/shows you have listed are really just aggregators. Someone needs to be there, hit the pavement and get the story. This article [nytimes.com] is a great example of good reporting. I think it is worth value. If I have to pay a few cents for it... so be it.
The question is how many of the employees and journalists paid by the NYT are actually out there, hitting the pavement and getting the story. And how many are basically just dead weight writing bullcrap to fill space.
If you've read the Times you'd see that they have a shitload of pavement-hitting employees all around the world. In the last few years most newspapers have switched to not doing much more than collecting and reprinting AP stories. The Times is the main other source of investigative journalism in print media, and when they write about what they find it includes excellent discussion, valuable and valued by readers across the political spectrum (as long as your location on the spectrum isn't "moron"...seriously, smart Republicans who care about the happenings of the world read the Times, not Ann Coulter). Beyond investigative journalists, the other on-the-ground source of news is the nascent blogger or tweeter. However, the blogger and tweeter are about breadth, not depth. And as much as some people like to complain about the ethics of journalists, they're generally an order of magnitude more reliable than an internet source.
PS. Free Shuttle parts for the cost of transport?! Please, will somebody in the know confirm you don't have to be some large educational institution or venerable museum? ;)
Confirmed. And if you have Amazon Prime, it's free 2-day shipping.
Why not? If you're allowed to weaponize earth, why not space? Is it some kind of holy shrine? As for the 'bad idea' part- Well they should have thought of that when they created weapons in the first place right? India is doing what it takes to protect itself from some sort of maniacal attack from the Amreicans and the ruskies who'll try to blame it on someone else.
It's a bad idea because blowing up a few satellites may make low Earth orbit a field of debris dense enough that it is impossible to keep the other satellites intact. Once we cross a certain orbital debris density threshold, the debris will impact with satellites and create new debris faster than existing debris falls to Earth due to drag. I think that's called the Kessler Effect (someone correct me here). Once that happens, we may be locking the whole world away from space exploration and exploitation (like commercial communication satellites) for a long time.
Of course, in this case the RTM was already at a higher quality than the corporate world had seen in a commercial OS, but it's hard to break with habit. It's doubly hard when you've spent years convincing management that SPx is the time to switch.
But Republican Agent just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Run! It's Karl Rove!
Star Wars: The Old Republic will crush this game. SW:ToR won't be out until October, but it will be the final nail in the coffin for this game.
I read last night that it's been delayed until Spring 2011.
That's a problem. I was reading somewhere (sorry, don't recall where... it was a news article months ago) about how the majority of all US peanut butter brands are filled with peanuts from China. Apparently they control the majority of the market.
Just imagine the things leaching into their soil over there...
ugh.
Buy this peanut butter instead. The nuts come from Virginia and the only other ingredient is salt. Compare to the weird sludge called peanut butter in most supermarkets (Jif, etc.). Better yet, buy a jar of each and do a taste test. You won't ever go back.
Vendors promise all sorts of things. That doesn't make them true. I'll believe it when I see Tom's Hardware or someone equally competent test one of these things and they actually get 12 hours.
Until then, I'll file this one under "vendors promise the world".
If you want competency, you might check with Anand instead of Tom. My 1005HA EEEPC has more battery life than Asus claimed (I get 11 hours just typing in notepad with the radio off), so I wouldn't be surprised if the 12 hour claim were true. Keep in mind that the quoted number is always for minimal usage.
I think FGSiI could use an update for modern audiences. Maybe let The Gemberling gain a few more pounds and then have every episode be based around Maze Master dance sequences.
Photoshop.
Mac is still, and long will be the favorite computer of most graphicians/artists.
Tablet+screen has some serious disadvantages. You draw in one place, image appears elsewhere. With a good touchscreen capable of providing precision comparable to decent Wacoms, this can become a dream tool for an artist.
There's a 64 bit Photoshop for Windows and not for OSX. Surprisingly, it gives serious performance gains over the 32 bit binary, on the order of 20-30%. OSX will get a 64 bit binary before long, I assume, but for now OSX is substantially slower on the same hardware for Photoshop. Also, the same hardware costs a lot more when using OSX now that Psystar is out of the picture.
I'm tempted to agree with you... really strongly tempted.
But but but: 1) Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly. 2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens (I presume you will agree that they have the motivation). I'm in no position to carry out a realistic threat assessment, but I'd be surprised if that were the case. All that said, I still agree that these scanners are a ridiculous intrusion and will not help solve the problem. I'd far rather see more behaviour-based profiling.
Doesn't Israel have more terrorist attacks than any other "western-aligned" nation? Doesn't Israel also have the strongest countermeasures of such a nation? That's a pretty strong correlation, and I suspect there's causation involved. You assume that major countermeasures don't create terrorists, and I think you're wrong.
Don't be too sure about that. In a supremely ironic move, Amazon recently deleted Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles even though the books had been legally purchased. It's as if Amazon walked into your house and took books from your shelves, leaving a few bucks in their place. Being backed by a huge retailer makes me less confident that I'll be able t read the ebooks I purchase in the future.
Thanks to the public outcry, they then apologized, gave them back, and promised never to do so again.
Aren't we constantly told that the EU is so much better in regards to patents and copyrights and it's only the big bad US that is constantly trying to push all this stuff on people?
No, we're not. The EU is the hot spot for three strikes laws. If anything, it's usually shown as an example of a dark possible future for the US.
Hell, just 2 days ago Obama signed $1.1 trillion more in spending, on a whim. WTF?
I love the scene produced by this evocative statement. Obama's playing Tetris on his cell phone and an aide approaches with a silver platter covered in spending bills. "Sir, congress has prepared for you a selection of the finest budgets." Obama glances quickly away from his screen with a scowl. "Bring them back later. I can't figure out how to pause this thing." "Very good, sir." The aide bows and begins backing away. "Damn it," Obama shouts in dismay. "You made me miss with my T. Whatever, give me a pen." He grabs a bill at random. "I'm only signing this one. Throw out the rest. Tell them that next time they either need to combine all the bills or include a grant to fund research into pausing Tetris."