Except there was no crash to turn it off, so it will have just kept recording and it is on a 30 minute loop. So chances are it doesn't include any of that time period - and if there was something incriminating on it they would have just made sure to take 30 minutes...
The author's argument is that they aren't doing it legally. Given the author isn't a lawyer or an accountant and Microsoft employs a bunch of them to make sure they dot the i's and cross the t's, large amounts of salt are in order.
Which given all the government subsidies and monopoly rights the "owners" were given initially would seem to be a reasonable claim from the net neutrality people.
Both those location were at sea level (well a few feet above given I wasn't always swimming).
And obviously since it's a temperature standard temperature is irrelevant.
You may also notice that I said 0C, I did not say 0.0C or 0.000C. So clearly I was being approximate and yet you didn't let it go likely because you are an idiot.
And yet the temperature here measured in F gets negative every winter. And where I previously lived it got above 100F every summer (and it also does where I am now, but only a day or three each year).
But in both those places a temperature of 0C was the freezing point of water, and 100C the boiling point. Yes that 100C one isn't so useful in terms of daily temperature, the 0C is though since whether water will freeze or not is the main transition point in daily temperature.
So why submit the post? It has wifi, how does having the ability to also use a cell phone network matter? I'm sure you could break it if it is that big a deal.
You said : "Also bear in mind that this is only about twice (possibly trending towards three times) as deadly as using school-buses:"
And gave 27 as the number from school-buses.
Flu season usually peaks in November and plateaus through April. That's 151 days (11/1 through 4/1), At 43 people 47 days that's 138 children, which is five times your school bus number.
And that's assuming the second half of October sees no deaths, and that it has peaked early this year.
Note: I'm not saying it is in the end of world. I haven't been vaccinated and I'm not planning to (though I've never had a flu shot so that's not unexpected). But it is shaping up to be more that 2-3 times the number of children dieing that school buses give us.
Seriously you compare the number of deaths annually of one cause (OK there are 180 school days usually...) with the number of deaths in a 47 day period for another cause. And keep a straight face?
You wish it was irrelevant. Lower taxes == less money for services, couldn't be simpler. And pointing out that education or health care costs have increased in no way shape or form changes the fact that the end-user cost would be far cheaper with more public funding.
But the reductions in funding don't account for the entire increase in fees, hence there must be more to it than just decreased funding.
Universities are state run institutions, not Wal-Mart.
And yet they've still raised fees at rates way above inflation.
Simplistic nonsense with no basis in reality. Our public schools have mandatory enrollment, rising overall population, yet we haven't seen public education costs rise 50% in the last few years.
And notice that the government doesn't hand out money for people to pay for public schools. In fact the money tends to come from taxes on local residents (property taxes where I'm from) so increased costs directly translates to tax payers being out of pocket. So that would be evidence for my point.
Universities are different, the government makes it really easy to borrow large amounts of money to pay for them, so of course the costs have risen to match what people can now seemingly afford to pay.
And an increasing population using a finite resource (land) wouldn't have anything to do with that, no sir. But your analogy fails when applied to education, because teachers are not a finite resource. If one person in 100 is a teacher, it doesn't matter if you have 10 million people in the United States or a couple billion. You're also willfully ignoring the economics of scale, which means that costs should go down with more students, not up.
Did the population just drop overnight? Or did new land magically appear over night? No? But real estate prices dropped 50% in some markets recently. Clearly the price increases were not due to population increases or land shortages. What did change? Credit tightened, so people couldn't afford those high prices anymore and surpriser surprise prices fell.
I said nothing about costs going up or down with an increase in students.
I said that if people have more money to spend on education then the price of education will increase to match.
If the world is all roses and unicorns then that increase in cost will be directed toward investment in educational stuff - equipment, training, etc. If the world isn't so wonderful then some of it will go to increasing the amount of money leached from the system or to pay increases with no educational performance increase. If the world is dark and evil then it will all go to toys for the chancellor.
It has nothing to do with economies of scale, they apply to the cost of providing education. Which is irrelevant, we are talking about the cost of getting an education. The cost of the parts and labor used in making a Denon link cable (http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp) don't determine the price the consumer pays for it - they just set a minimum.
University costs to the student have increased dramatically faster than the cost of providing an education. Surely that is obvious? So why do you think the cost of providing an education matters in this discussion?
That's irrelevant. Tuition costs have increased faster than direct government funding of universities have decreased.
Universities have done the rational thing, push up the price to whatever the market will bear. And the more the government tries to increase the amount of money students can get to spend on their education the more they'll increase the price.
Just like the government (vie FHA, FRE, FNM, etc) increasing the amount of money people have access to for housing pushed up the price of housing to match.
Somehow the government manages to simultaneously not understand this simple cause and effect and to try to stimulate the economy using the exact same methods to try and cause the exact same effect.
And students won't be getting a bail out since student loans are already government guaranteed so the banks already have a bailout in that area. Those mortgage bailouts weren't for the people with the mortgage after all, they were for the banks that the money was owed to.
$100k in the hole isn't worth the increase quality of the school in most cases. Especially since you can increase the quality yourself by doing your own study on the side. Especially in fields like computer science, physics not as much since it is much more hardware dependent.
Of course it's usually a reasonable idea after you graduate from the local university to go and do the shortest cheapest related post-graduation course you can find at a prestigious institution, nobody looks at anything but what your last school was anyway.
There's a point at which the cost is not worth it. Clearly your situation didn't cross that point. For a lot of people it did but they didn't think about it until after the fact.
How does it sacrifice the quality of your education?
I assume you have some numbers to back up the claim that State Universities provide a lower quality of education (which we must note is unrelated to the quality of networking and old-boys-clubs)?
It's not picking on some minor fault, it's the entire claim:
""" A Billion dollars per year could by a handful of rice, corn, or wheat to put into the hands of every single starving kid in the world. """
Now you call 22 billion dollars a "drop in the bucket". So just how is a mere billion dollars going to do what you said above?
People pointing out that your claim doesn't really seem to make sense don't have to make a point of their own.
But the post you're replying to did in fact make a point, which is that the main problem with feeding the world's staving children isn't buying the food it is that any food delivered to them is stolen by the local thugs/military/government.
The simplest way to lower the cost of higher education is not to set things up so that people can borrow tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for those high prices.
Of course reducing the interest rate does the exact opposite of that.
HECS isn't a scholarship because it is not based on ability, and because it has to be paid back.
America screwed up yet another simple thing, because idiots who don't understand the first thing about economics decided to let the "free market" work things out.
And places like the Communist States of Australia ended up with a "freer market" than the US in education.
In the US the government set up student loans by setting a bunch of rules that makes them good bets for banks. Of course that means students can borrow large amounts of money. Colleges will then of course raise their prices to get that money and keep raising them until students can no longer get those loans. At which point the government says "oh noes look how expensive education is, this isn't fair on poor people" so they give the students more money so the colleges can raise prices further.
Whereas Australia said to colleges, we will pay you $X per semester for a full time science students, and $Y per semester for a full time law student, and so on. And the government then collects it back from the students via a levy on top of their taxes once they hit an income threshold until it is paid back. The universities offer a fixed number of HECS places (which I'm sure it where the negotiations between government and the university lobbyists come in - setting the number of places and the X, Y, and Z numbers). Universities offer additional places at whatever price they like for students who don't qualify for HECS (foreign students for example) or who didn't make the cutoff for the HECS places (not getting high enough scores in high school, for example - but way below anything at scholarship level).
The US system results in ever increasing prices so rational people who won't saddle themselves with that much debt early in life can't afford to go to college. The Australian system avoids that at the cost of there being a risk the government sets the HECS payments to the universities too low in which case we have essentially price controls and the supply will dry up - but that hasn't happened yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Except there was no crash to turn it off, so it will have just kept recording and it is on a 30 minute loop. So chances are it doesn't include any of that time period - and if there was something incriminating on it they would have just made sure to take 30 minutes...
Yeah great example. You'd rather pay taxes on that first $95k in that famously low tax haven known as Europe...
The author's argument is that they aren't doing it legally. Given the author isn't a lawyer or an accountant and Microsoft employs a bunch of them to make sure they dot the i's and cross the t's, large amounts of salt are in order.
you are not going to find anything that uses 30W, since if the metric is the mini uses 85W then 30W by that metric is about -10W in reality.
Which given all the government subsidies and monopoly rights the "owners" were given initially would seem to be a reasonable claim from the net neutrality people.
What's the point of insulting people if they smile?
Tears of self disgust and shame, that's the ticket.
The occasional suicide perhaps...
Both those location were at sea level (well a few feet above given I wasn't always swimming).
And obviously since it's a temperature standard temperature is irrelevant.
You may also notice that I said 0C, I did not say 0.0C or 0.000C. So clearly I was being approximate and yet you didn't let it go likely because you are an idiot.
And yet the temperature here measured in F gets negative every winter. And where I previously lived it got above 100F every summer (and it also does where I am now, but only a day or three each year).
But in both those places a temperature of 0C was the freezing point of water, and 100C the boiling point. Yes that 100C one isn't so useful in terms of daily temperature, the 0C is though since whether water will freeze or not is the main transition point in daily temperature.
So why submit the post? It has wifi, how does having the ability to also use a cell phone network matter? I'm sure you could break it if it is that big a deal.
You said : "Also bear in mind that this is only about twice (possibly trending towards three times) as deadly as using school-buses:"
And gave 27 as the number from school-buses.
Flu season usually peaks in November and plateaus through April. That's 151 days (11/1 through 4/1), At 43 people 47 days that's 138 children, which is five times your school bus number.
And that's assuming the second half of October sees no deaths, and that it has peaked early this year.
Note: I'm not saying it is in the end of world. I haven't been vaccinated and I'm not planning to (though I've never had a flu shot so that's not unexpected). But it is shaping up to be more that 2-3 times the number of children dieing that school buses give us.
Seriously you compare the number of deaths annually of one cause (OK there are 180 school days usually...) with the number of deaths in a 47 day period for another cause. And keep a straight face?
Your statement is blatantly false. As the most minor of checks would show you.
Children don't due from flu in the hundreds each year.
So show us your stats source, or did you just make it up because you are an uninformed idiot?
But the reductions in funding don't account for the entire increase in fees, hence there must be more to it than just decreased funding.
And yet they've still raised fees at rates way above inflation.
And notice that the government doesn't hand out money for people to pay for public schools. In fact the money tends to come from taxes on local residents (property taxes where I'm from) so increased costs directly translates to tax payers being out of pocket. So that would be evidence for my point.
Universities are different, the government makes it really easy to borrow large amounts of money to pay for them, so of course the costs have risen to match what people can now seemingly afford to pay.
Did the population just drop overnight? Or did new land magically appear over night? No? But real estate prices dropped 50% in some markets recently. Clearly the price increases were not due to population increases or land shortages. What did change? Credit tightened, so people couldn't afford those high prices anymore and surpriser surprise prices fell.
I said nothing about costs going up or down with an increase in students.
I said that if people have more money to spend on education then the price of education will increase to match.
If the world is all roses and unicorns then that increase in cost will be directed toward investment in educational stuff - equipment, training, etc. If the world isn't so wonderful then some of it will go to increasing the amount of money leached from the system or to pay increases with no educational performance increase. If the world is dark and evil then it will all go to toys for the chancellor.
It has nothing to do with economies of scale, they apply to the cost of providing education. Which is irrelevant, we are talking about the cost of getting an education. The cost of the parts and labor used in making a Denon link cable (http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp) don't determine the price the consumer pays for it - they just set a minimum.
University costs to the student have increased dramatically faster than the cost of providing an education. Surely that is obvious? So why do you think the cost of providing an education matters in this discussion?
Too late.
Might be one way to convince the religious right...
"We must stop homocentric warming!"
"Oil works for homocentric warming, down with oil!!!"
Yes it is.
Because usually 7 year olds don't have guns to shoot at people, but they do have mouths to run?
That's irrelevant. Tuition costs have increased faster than direct government funding of universities have decreased.
Universities have done the rational thing, push up the price to whatever the market will bear. And the more the government tries to increase the amount of money students can get to spend on their education the more they'll increase the price.
Just like the government (vie FHA, FRE, FNM, etc) increasing the amount of money people have access to for housing pushed up the price of housing to match.
Somehow the government manages to simultaneously not understand this simple cause and effect and to try to stimulate the economy using the exact same methods to try and cause the exact same effect.
And students won't be getting a bail out since student loans are already government guaranteed so the banks already have a bailout in that area. Those mortgage bailouts weren't for the people with the mortgage after all, they were for the banks that the money was owed to.
$100k in the hole isn't worth the increase quality of the school in most cases. Especially since you can increase the quality yourself by doing your own study on the side. Especially in fields like computer science, physics not as much since it is much more hardware dependent.
Of course it's usually a reasonable idea after you graduate from the local university to go and do the shortest cheapest related post-graduation course you can find at a prestigious institution, nobody looks at anything but what your last school was anyway.
There's a point at which the cost is not worth it. Clearly your situation didn't cross that point. For a lot of people it did but they didn't think about it until after the fact.
Since the computer is deciding what dice to provide, why slow it down by having a stupid gesture to make get them to roll?
How does it sacrifice the quality of your education?
I assume you have some numbers to back up the claim that State Universities provide a lower quality of education (which we must note is unrelated to the quality of networking and old-boys-clubs)?
I take it the people on this list with a State University next to their name sacrificed the quality of their education: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1227055,00.html
Didn't seem to hurt them much.
We are bombing the shit out of Ethiopia, Sudan, Haiti, Niger?
Who knew!
It's not picking on some minor fault, it's the entire claim:
"""
A Billion dollars per year could by a handful of rice, corn, or wheat to put into the hands of every single starving kid in the world.
"""
Now you call 22 billion dollars a "drop in the bucket". So just how is a mere billion dollars going to do what you said above?
People pointing out that your claim doesn't really seem to make sense don't have to make a point of their own.
But the post you're replying to did in fact make a point, which is that the main problem with feeding the world's staving children isn't buying the food it is that any food delivered to them is stolen by the local thugs/military/government.
The simplest way to lower the cost of higher education is not to set things up so that people can borrow tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for those high prices.
Of course reducing the interest rate does the exact opposite of that.
HECS isn't a scholarship because it is not based on ability, and because it has to be paid back.
America screwed up yet another simple thing, because idiots who don't understand the first thing about economics decided to let the "free market" work things out.
And places like the Communist States of Australia ended up with a "freer market" than the US in education.
In the US the government set up student loans by setting a bunch of rules that makes them good bets for banks. Of course that means students can borrow large amounts of money. Colleges will then of course raise their prices to get that money and keep raising them until students can no longer get those loans. At which point the government says "oh noes look how expensive education is, this isn't fair on poor people" so they give the students more money so the colleges can raise prices further.
Whereas Australia said to colleges, we will pay you $X per semester for a full time science students, and $Y per semester for a full time law student, and so on. And the government then collects it back from the students via a levy on top of their taxes once they hit an income threshold until it is paid back. The universities offer a fixed number of HECS places (which I'm sure it where the negotiations between government and the university lobbyists come in - setting the number of places and the X, Y, and Z numbers). Universities offer additional places at whatever price they like for students who don't qualify for HECS (foreign students for example) or who didn't make the cutoff for the HECS places (not getting high enough scores in high school, for example - but way below anything at scholarship level).
The US system results in ever increasing prices so rational people who won't saddle themselves with that much debt early in life can't afford to go to college. The Australian system avoids that at the cost of there being a risk the government sets the HECS payments to the universities too low in which case we have essentially price controls and the supply will dry up - but that hasn't happened yet.