I'm sorry, but this is a matter of fact and not opinion.
You haven't studied every religion that has ever existed - this would be impossible. So you cannot have come up with some empirical way to arrive at the Bible as your answer, and I'm doubtful if you've even examined the many variations of the bible that have been claimed as the word of God for the last two thousand years. Your faith in Jesus has no rational basis to be held above the faith in Ra or Baal or Mohammed or the Great Spirit or Shiva or tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of other imagined supernatural beings.
You claim to have found the book, out of tens of thousands of holy texts, that reveals the mind of God, based on your opinion on what the mind of God is. This is a fantastic claim, supported only by hearsay and conjecture, which is an untenable position at best. Every argument you can possibly make can also be made for a number of other religions. Christianity has no unique qualities apart from any other mystical belief system, so regardless of what you claim, you are in the same boat with other cults, large and small, that have come and gone throughout our human history.
Your personal, anecdotal experience, untouchable by hypothesis or repeatable and verifiable experiment, is the only thing you have. Therefore, it has no connection to science, and must be forever separated from it.
You make some interesting points, but your prematurely drawn conclusions about me and my motivation and your replies to points I didn't make do put me off.
The Bible and science are not mutually exclusive.
I don't think my guesses were misplaced. And unfortunately, unless you interpret the bible entirely as allegory, it is totally incompatible with science. Ideas that are faith based cannot be scientific, because they cannot be falsified. And believing that water can be turned into wine or that you can take two fish and five loaves of bread and feed 5000 people are ideas that would be ridiculed if they were not part of the Bible, because without any further information, everyone's experience informs them that it is impossible.
Slightly offtopic, but many people don't know Orwell's original introduction to the Animal Farm was censored because it was anti-Soviet. It's a telling sign of how easy it is to get the entire media to wholly invest in obvious lies at the order of government and business interests. The enemy of my enemy...
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
The important question which I've never seen the math for is how much CO2 is output by random natural events during a certain time period versus how much we output currently.
We are taking a few hundred million years worth of biomass and burning it up in a about a hundred and fifty. Perhaps this has no effect on the environment, but I think it's prudent to make sure that we don't send the climate into a self-feedback loop that destroys our way of life. It's not as if riding around in traffic or having an iPod is worth giving up food and water.
I've read the bible all the way through, right after I got saved. Once I finished it, I quit the church, and religions in general, because they kept asking me to accept it on faith instead of what it actually said.
I don't believe in a God who could ever justify any number of things in the old testament. I don't believe the world is 6000 years old, because Shell does not bet it's billion dollars on some ideas from stupendously uneducated peasants in the Middle East. I know I wouldn't consider a person good and moral if they ever punished me for not liking them, and I don't make exceptions for God just because some person claims he is above my judgement.
So, if you believe that a person should be joyous when they dash an infants head against a rock, or a female slave is less valuable then a male slave, or that Jews are better than Amalachites, or God suspended the order of the universe to allow his followers to slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal (but saving the virgins for themselves) in a rival village, or that a woman can give birth without having sex, or that Diabolical Mimicry is the devil at work, or that you can cure leprosy by killing a bird in a certain way, please continue being a Christian. I'll continue to pity what they have done to your reasoning skills.
You don't believe in Ra, Zeus, Dionysus, Mithras, Zoroaster, or any other flight of fancy from other cultures, though they are all sons of God, born of a virgin, who died and rose to save their followers. You've developed a blind spot for Christ because it's convenient to your worldview, not because it's true.
Every culture has moral reasoning for treating people with respect, loving each other, and being kind to the unfortunate. This does not prove that religions provided us with these values, but it does show that the only good portions of religion are borrowed from evolutionary morality everyone already possesses. A social group that doesn't support it's members when they need help getting back on their feet does not last.
Think about what does a "sound banking system" actually means. It means that old money stays that way. It means that generation after generation, the same banks gain more and more power and get to call more and more of the agenda. Stable banking systems are good for people who are already wealthy and powerful. Wiping out unwisely invested wealth punishes the greedy and gives the have-nots a new opportunity.
Booms and busts always benefit the wealthy. When the booms come, they are making money hand over fist. When the bust arrives, they pick up competitors and assets for pennies on the dollar.
They had a spectacular run for a decade
Give me a few billion dollars, and I can make money. It's easy. In an economic boom it's even easier, and anyone with cash invested will usually see a huge gain.
Why should Harvard remain the wealthiest and most powerful university in perpetuity? What would be so good about a system in which, once you accumulate wealth, you, your family, or your organization just keeps it forever?
I'm all for death and estate taxes. The problem is the guys who can't even manage a college trust keep telling us to let them do whatever they want without oversight in our financial markets. People are afraid that if taxed enough, these are the people who will leave the country. I say, jack up their taxes, and if they leave, we still win.
Change and shaking things up are good. We need financial crises and recessions if we don't want stagnate or accumulate a de-facto nobility.
Again, you operate under the assumption that inflation and busts are bad for the wealthy. Look at the middle class after the Great Depression up until 1980, before Reaganomics. A thriving, well paid, blue and white collar middle class that only needed one spouse to work and could still send their kids to college. Now look at all of the bank panics since 1980, and what's happened to the middle class? What's happened to the top 3%? The numbers are plain enough.
Greed built on the naivete and faux-pious nature of blind followers, who will do whatever you ask as long as you pretend to believe in their ancient mysticism. People who are taught not to ask questions are the easiest to manipulate and control, which is why the GOP found religion in the 90s. In reality they found a voting bloc dumb enough to vote against their own interests, which, for the business party that runs both aisles, is a truly spiritual experience.
The root problem of religion is that it kills minds by telling them they're not allowed to think beyond the scope of a few hundred pages of complete bullshit. To submit to the will of master, and become a slave. It's voluntary lobotomy and self-inflicted never-ending bondage rolled into one.
The real problem is that people have lost their heads in the United States. The return of evangelicals has led to an atmosphere that is literally opposed to science. So, you get exactly what you expect. Opinions that are based on anecdote and wish thinking instead of data. The reason science works is because you start with the assumption that you don't know something until you can prove that you probably know it, with repeatable, verifiable results. When you start trusting the word of pill junkies and homophobic college dropouts versus the entire scientific community and their reams of data, get ready for some wide-reaching and catastrophic fuckups.
Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound. Every time we take cops off the financial beat, we end up with a banking crisis. These realities can be arrived at by simply reading about the last 30 years of panics, and the hundred years of bank panics that existed before the FDIC and sensible Great Depression legislation.
The pro-market propaganda will continue, and probably destroy our economy beyond repair. And then some wise ass will say that it shows that the market does work, by wiping itself out.
Beacon Power is an American corporation specializing in flywheel based energy storage headquartered in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. Beacon designs and develops products aimed at utility frequency regulation for power grid operations. The storage systems are designed to help utilities match supply with varying demand by storing excess power in arrays of 2,800-pound (1,300 kg) flywheels at off-peak times for use during peak demand.
Like your significant other giving you dagger eyes when you mention picking up a $300 video game. It's okay though. I still have Enemy Territory. I mean, those guys who it happens to still have Enemy Territory.
No, honey, I'm not on slashdot again. Yes, I'm updating my resume. What don't... what, is that a baseball bat? What are you... OH JESUS, MY LEGS! WHY ARE YOU DOI
Actually, quite a few products are made by well paid people in western countries, precisely because they have unions. Not all unions are good, but many are.
Corporations don't lower their prices when they reduce their costs. They just pocket the money. That's why Apple has tens of billions of dollars in the bank - they moved their manufacturing to China and didn't lower their prices in line with the reduction in manufacturing costs. That's why the middle class in America has been making less money for nearly thirty years, and corporate profits continue to rise, and union membership has declined. America is the only modern western nation where the middle class is worse off than in 1980, and the only nation that has a broken union movement. This is not a coincidence.
You live in a fantasy land where somehow giving all the power in a corporation to a board that's nothing more than a modern royal court is good for anyone but the royal court. Do you think for one minute that one of these guys thinks twice about pocketing extra cash for a second vacation home over offering a good paying job to someone they don't know?
You sort of have a point, except that no one has been tortured to death or hung by a government or church official because they participated in hate speech.
Hate speech is outlawed under the guise of protecting people from persecution and abuse, especially groups who are regularly assaulted after verbal confrontations. Blasphemy is outlawed so we don't offend Invisible Dad. Who is apparently omniscient, omnipresent, and a totally whiny pussy if you claim he doesn't exist.
Actually, I believe a vast majority of US assets are owned by international corporations. But that's a nice thought - we destroy your homeland, you can come over and run a Jiffy Stop. Sounds like a deal to me! If you live through the bombing and/or dictatorship, I mean.
BTW, what's up with Slashdot javascript? I'm going to have to build a freaking/. renderfarm pretty soon, and I'll be sending my receipts to CmdrTaco.
All of the old timers know how to use adblock or we have those freebie accounts. We're a dead marketing segment, and this is part of his evil plan to push us out. The WoW add-on was cruel. But javascript...
Sarah Palin embarrasses herself far more than we could hope to accomplish. We're just jumping on her bandwagon. She's so stupid that they didn't even have to invent a persona or punch line for her for SNL - they just repeated what she said.
I really hope the evangelicals push her to the top of the GOP ticket again. They'll find out for a second time that the business party that controls the GOP can put up with a fair amount of dumb, but anyone who actually believes in literal interpretations of bronze age mythologies will not be allowed to run the country.
She may have a shot at the VP for someone younger than McCain, but they won't suffer another Bush/Cheney scenario.
Wait... how does productivity suffer when you get more screen real estate for less money? What studies have you read that show a loss in productivity due to aspect ratio?
Sorry to nitpick, but it just seems that you prefer 4:3 for aesthetics or familiarity. Which is fine, but no cause for claiming inefficiency or subsidization of 16:10/9 sales.
He's just laying the groundwork for their coming marketing campaign, centered around "trust" and "stability" messages to soothe the Windows 7 buying soul. It will probably work on the older baby boomers, but everyone else will yawn and go back to tooling around on Facebook and watching Hulu, on whatever operating system they like.
If Google creates a framework where you can locally host Google Apps that automatically sync with low horsepower terminals connected to the local network, Microsoft will be in a world of hurt. Once all you need is a browser to connect to a majority of the company resources, the support staff costs will fall by 50%. Buy a pallet of Core 2 machines, spend some decent money up front on the server, and keep some fresh spare machines to switch out for hardware failure. That setup could last for a decade.
A market without transparency is not a market. Consumers need accurate information to make informed decisions. The goal of major corporations is to deceive people as much as is legally possible for the greatest short-term profit possible. If the company in question gained more profit than they had to pay with fines, it's a win-win for them.
So, in a healthy market, astroturfing is illegal. I doubt this will effect any company behavior, since the fine was so low. They will just come up with some legal loophole like hiring contractors to conduct interviews with clients and put those up on the web. In a truly healthy market, any flagrant violations of the law by the CEO or a significant portion of the organization would result in the revoking of their corporate charter and the seizure and auction of all company property.
Buildings of the future will have to simulate what plants do, and that is live on the solar energy available within their footprint, or pay for solar energy gathered from a radius of a few hundred miles. Anything else is probably unsustainable.
The only other alternative would be solar energy beamed from something in orbit, which is probably the real winner. The amount of energy that the sun transmits to the earth is truly a drop in the bucket compared to what it generates in total. This is a naturally occurring fusion reaction that should be stable until the Andromeda galaxy wipes our solar system out. Hopefully we'll be space-faring post humans by then.
Whatever the bridge is to sustainability, it must happen before all of the super old biomass of the earth (coal, oil, natural gas) is exhausted, or the problem will be solved with the third and final world war.
You are operating under the assumption that a democracy can't be turned into a dictatorship, or that a democratic society wouldn't engage in ethnic stereotyping if fed enough propaganda.
Does anyone else get that a teenager is obviously going to use a PS3 or 360 because that's what his parents bought him?
I hate twitter as much as the next guy, but other things "passe" to a fifteen year old might include:
showing up on time white tennis shoes working outside The Beatles playing actual instruments instead of the ones with Rock Band
So, if I wanted to market a product - like a smartphone - to teenagers, I'd probably read his report with a little interest. And then I'd remember that he's not old enough to sign a contract to get one in the first place, and couldn't afford $100 a month anyway. So I'm glad he wrote a report, but let me ask the most significant question that has escaped the great minds at Morgan Stanley We-Fucked-The-Goat-When-It-Came-To-Recognizing-The-Real-Estate-Bubble: who gives a shit?
I didn't understand when I was his age, but I do now. And that is, get a job and an apartment - without mommy and daddy's help - and then we'll talk. By the way, my youngest sister, who's still a teenager, types on her non-smart phone all the time, and so do all her friends, even when they are playing video games. Why? Because it works, they don't have to be at a computer or a game console, and since their parents have somewhat of a clue, it's free with an extra $10 a month on their cell bill.
I suspect I have to enter the caveats that the propaganda wings of genocidal maniacs and dictatorships disqualify themselves if they don't follow the laws stating they cannot participate in hate speech.
Is there anything else I can help you with? Perhaps stating, to help people who can't understand, that laws against murder don't work unless the police aren't themselves allowed to murder. Of course I probably shouldn't do that, because it's so obvious that it would be embarrassing for you to not understand that in the first place, and doubly so if it has to be pointed out to you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but this is a matter of fact and not opinion.
You haven't studied every religion that has ever existed - this would be impossible. So you cannot have come up with some empirical way to arrive at the Bible as your answer, and I'm doubtful if you've even examined the many variations of the bible that have been claimed as the word of God for the last two thousand years. Your faith in Jesus has no rational basis to be held above the faith in Ra or Baal or Mohammed or the Great Spirit or Shiva or tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of other imagined supernatural beings.
You claim to have found the book, out of tens of thousands of holy texts, that reveals the mind of God, based on your opinion on what the mind of God is. This is a fantastic claim, supported only by hearsay and conjecture, which is an untenable position at best. Every argument you can possibly make can also be made for a number of other religions. Christianity has no unique qualities apart from any other mystical belief system, so regardless of what you claim, you are in the same boat with other cults, large and small, that have come and gone throughout our human history.
Your personal, anecdotal experience, untouchable by hypothesis or repeatable and verifiable experiment, is the only thing you have. Therefore, it has no connection to science, and must be forever separated from it.
So, assuming you're not a Christian, why are you offended?
If you are a Christian, and you claim to know the mind and will of God, who is being arrogant?
You make some interesting points, but your prematurely drawn conclusions about me and my motivation and your replies to points I didn't make do put me off.
The Bible and science are not mutually exclusive.
I don't think my guesses were misplaced. And unfortunately, unless you interpret the bible entirely as allegory, it is totally incompatible with science. Ideas that are faith based cannot be scientific, because they cannot be falsified. And believing that water can be turned into wine or that you can take two fish and five loaves of bread and feed 5000 people are ideas that would be ridiculed if they were not part of the Bible, because without any further information, everyone's experience informs them that it is impossible.
Slightly offtopic, but many people don't know Orwell's original introduction to the Animal Farm was censored because it was anti-Soviet. It's a telling sign of how easy it is to get the entire media to wholly invest in obvious lies at the order of government and business interests. The enemy of my enemy...
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html
The important question which I've never seen the math for is how much CO2 is output by random natural events during a certain time period versus how much we output currently.
We are taking a few hundred million years worth of biomass and burning it up in a about a hundred and fifty. Perhaps this has no effect on the environment, but I think it's prudent to make sure that we don't send the climate into a self-feedback loop that destroys our way of life. It's not as if riding around in traffic or having an iPod is worth giving up food and water.
I've read the bible all the way through, right after I got saved. Once I finished it, I quit the church, and religions in general, because they kept asking me to accept it on faith instead of what it actually said.
I don't believe in a God who could ever justify any number of things in the old testament. I don't believe the world is 6000 years old, because Shell does not bet it's billion dollars on some ideas from stupendously uneducated peasants in the Middle East. I know I wouldn't consider a person good and moral if they ever punished me for not liking them, and I don't make exceptions for God just because some person claims he is above my judgement.
So, if you believe that a person should be joyous when they dash an infants head against a rock, or a female slave is less valuable then a male slave, or that Jews are better than Amalachites, or God suspended the order of the universe to allow his followers to slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal (but saving the virgins for themselves) in a rival village, or that a woman can give birth without having sex, or that Diabolical Mimicry is the devil at work, or that you can cure leprosy by killing a bird in a certain way, please continue being a Christian. I'll continue to pity what they have done to your reasoning skills.
You don't believe in Ra, Zeus, Dionysus, Mithras, Zoroaster, or any other flight of fancy from other cultures, though they are all sons of God, born of a virgin, who died and rose to save their followers. You've developed a blind spot for Christ because it's convenient to your worldview, not because it's true.
Every culture has moral reasoning for treating people with respect, loving each other, and being kind to the unfortunate. This does not prove that religions provided us with these values, but it does show that the only good portions of religion are borrowed from evolutionary morality everyone already possesses. A social group that doesn't support it's members when they need help getting back on their feet does not last.
Think about what does a "sound banking system" actually means. It means that old money stays that way. It means that generation after generation, the same banks gain more and more power and get to call more and more of the agenda. Stable banking systems are good for people who are already wealthy and powerful. Wiping out unwisely invested wealth punishes the greedy and gives the have-nots a new opportunity.
Booms and busts always benefit the wealthy. When the booms come, they are making money hand over fist. When the bust arrives, they pick up competitors and assets for pennies on the dollar.
They had a spectacular run for a decade
Give me a few billion dollars, and I can make money. It's easy. In an economic boom it's even easier, and anyone with cash invested will usually see a huge gain.
Why should Harvard remain the wealthiest and most powerful university in perpetuity? What would be so good about a system in which, once you accumulate wealth, you, your family, or your organization just keeps it forever?
I'm all for death and estate taxes. The problem is the guys who can't even manage a college trust keep telling us to let them do whatever they want without oversight in our financial markets. People are afraid that if taxed enough, these are the people who will leave the country. I say, jack up their taxes, and if they leave, we still win.
Change and shaking things up are good. We need financial crises and recessions if we don't want stagnate or accumulate a de-facto nobility.
Again, you operate under the assumption that inflation and busts are bad for the wealthy. Look at the middle class after the Great Depression up until 1980, before Reaganomics. A thriving, well paid, blue and white collar middle class that only needed one spouse to work and could still send their kids to college. Now look at all of the bank panics since 1980, and what's happened to the middle class? What's happened to the top 3%? The numbers are plain enough.
Greed built on the naivete and faux-pious nature of blind followers, who will do whatever you ask as long as you pretend to believe in their ancient mysticism. People who are taught not to ask questions are the easiest to manipulate and control, which is why the GOP found religion in the 90s. In reality they found a voting bloc dumb enough to vote against their own interests, which, for the business party that runs both aisles, is a truly spiritual experience.
The root problem of religion is that it kills minds by telling them they're not allowed to think beyond the scope of a few hundred pages of complete bullshit. To submit to the will of master, and become a slave. It's voluntary lobotomy and self-inflicted never-ending bondage rolled into one.
The real problem is that people have lost their heads in the United States. The return of evangelicals has led to an atmosphere that is literally opposed to science. So, you get exactly what you expect. Opinions that are based on anecdote and wish thinking instead of data. The reason science works is because you start with the assumption that you don't know something until you can prove that you probably know it, with repeatable, verifiable results. When you start trusting the word of pill junkies and homophobic college dropouts versus the entire scientific community and their reams of data, get ready for some wide-reaching and catastrophic fuckups.
Canada kept the rules. The Canadian banking system is still the most sound. Every time we take cops off the financial beat, we end up with a banking crisis. These realities can be arrived at by simply reading about the last 30 years of panics, and the hundred years of bank panics that existed before the FDIC and sensible Great Depression legislation.
But leave it to the same fuckers from Harvard, who apparently can't even manage a college trust without running it into the ground.
The pro-market propaganda will continue, and probably destroy our economy beyond repair. And then some wise ass will say that it shows that the market does work, by wiping itself out.
Beacon Power is an American corporation specializing in flywheel based energy storage headquartered in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. Beacon designs and develops products aimed at utility frequency regulation for power grid operations. The storage systems are designed to help utilities match supply with varying demand by storing excess power in arrays of 2,800-pound (1,300 kg) flywheels at off-peak times for use during peak demand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_Power
The people who keep saying we can't find ways to be more efficient should stop wasting oxygen.
Like your significant other giving you dagger eyes when you mention picking up a $300 video game. It's okay though. I still have Enemy Territory. I mean, those guys who it happens to still have Enemy Territory.
No, honey, I'm not on slashdot again. Yes, I'm updating my resume. What don't... what, is that a baseball bat? What are you... OH JESUS, MY LEGS! WHY ARE YOU DOI
!#&^!$#^(&*) NO CARRIER
Actually, quite a few products are made by well paid people in western countries, precisely because they have unions. Not all unions are good, but many are.
Corporations don't lower their prices when they reduce their costs. They just pocket the money. That's why Apple has tens of billions of dollars in the bank - they moved their manufacturing to China and didn't lower their prices in line with the reduction in manufacturing costs. That's why the middle class in America has been making less money for nearly thirty years, and corporate profits continue to rise, and union membership has declined. America is the only modern western nation where the middle class is worse off than in 1980, and the only nation that has a broken union movement. This is not a coincidence.
You live in a fantasy land where somehow giving all the power in a corporation to a board that's nothing more than a modern royal court is good for anyone but the royal court. Do you think for one minute that one of these guys thinks twice about pocketing extra cash for a second vacation home over offering a good paying job to someone they don't know?
Give me a fucking break.
You sort of have a point, except that no one has been tortured to death or hung by a government or church official because they participated in hate speech.
Hate speech is outlawed under the guise of protecting people from persecution and abuse, especially groups who are regularly assaulted after verbal confrontations. Blasphemy is outlawed so we don't offend Invisible Dad. Who is apparently omniscient, omnipresent, and a totally whiny pussy if you claim he doesn't exist.
I know which position I find more ridiculous.
Actually, I believe a vast majority of US assets are owned by international corporations. But that's a nice thought - we destroy your homeland, you can come over and run a Jiffy Stop. Sounds like a deal to me! If you live through the bombing and/or dictatorship, I mean.
Remember that when there's a Starbucks and a strip mall in the Sea of Tranquility.
BTW, what's up with Slashdot javascript? I'm going to have to build a freaking /. renderfarm pretty soon, and I'll be sending my receipts to CmdrTaco.
All of the old timers know how to use adblock or we have those freebie accounts. We're a dead marketing segment, and this is part of his evil plan to push us out. The WoW add-on was cruel. But javascript...
The horror. The horror.
Sarah Palin embarrasses herself far more than we could hope to accomplish. We're just jumping on her bandwagon. She's so stupid that they didn't even have to invent a persona or punch line for her for SNL - they just repeated what she said.
I really hope the evangelicals push her to the top of the GOP ticket again. They'll find out for a second time that the business party that controls the GOP can put up with a fair amount of dumb, but anyone who actually believes in literal interpretations of bronze age mythologies will not be allowed to run the country.
She may have a shot at the VP for someone younger than McCain, but they won't suffer another Bush/Cheney scenario.
Wait... how does productivity suffer when you get more screen real estate for less money? What studies have you read that show a loss in productivity due to aspect ratio?
Sorry to nitpick, but it just seems that you prefer 4:3 for aesthetics or familiarity. Which is fine, but no cause for claiming inefficiency or subsidization of 16:10/9 sales.
He's just laying the groundwork for their coming marketing campaign, centered around "trust" and "stability" messages to soothe the Windows 7 buying soul. It will probably work on the older baby boomers, but everyone else will yawn and go back to tooling around on Facebook and watching Hulu, on whatever operating system they like.
If Google creates a framework where you can locally host Google Apps that automatically sync with low horsepower terminals connected to the local network, Microsoft will be in a world of hurt. Once all you need is a browser to connect to a majority of the company resources, the support staff costs will fall by 50%. Buy a pallet of Core 2 machines, spend some decent money up front on the server, and keep some fresh spare machines to switch out for hardware failure. That setup could last for a decade.
I still wonder today why I can't buy a large non-widescreen format LCD monitor for < an arm and a leg...
Get a widescreen that pivots. 1200x1920 is spectacular for spreadsheets, reading, and code, and you can get used ones for less than $200.
A market without transparency is not a market. Consumers need accurate information to make informed decisions. The goal of major corporations is to deceive people as much as is legally possible for the greatest short-term profit possible. If the company in question gained more profit than they had to pay with fines, it's a win-win for them.
So, in a healthy market, astroturfing is illegal. I doubt this will effect any company behavior, since the fine was so low. They will just come up with some legal loophole like hiring contractors to conduct interviews with clients and put those up on the web. In a truly healthy market, any flagrant violations of the law by the CEO or a significant portion of the organization would result in the revoking of their corporate charter and the seizure and auction of all company property.
Buildings of the future will have to simulate what plants do, and that is live on the solar energy available within their footprint, or pay for solar energy gathered from a radius of a few hundred miles. Anything else is probably unsustainable.
The only other alternative would be solar energy beamed from something in orbit, which is probably the real winner. The amount of energy that the sun transmits to the earth is truly a drop in the bucket compared to what it generates in total. This is a naturally occurring fusion reaction that should be stable until the Andromeda galaxy wipes our solar system out. Hopefully we'll be space-faring post humans by then.
Whatever the bridge is to sustainability, it must happen before all of the super old biomass of the earth (coal, oil, natural gas) is exhausted, or the problem will be solved with the third and final world war.
You are operating under the assumption that a democracy can't be turned into a dictatorship, or that a democratic society wouldn't engage in ethnic stereotyping if fed enough propaganda.
Your assumption is incorrect.
Does anyone else get that a teenager is obviously going to use a PS3 or 360 because that's what his parents bought him?
I hate twitter as much as the next guy, but other things "passe" to a fifteen year old might include:
showing up on time
white tennis shoes
working outside
The Beatles
playing actual instruments instead of the ones with Rock Band
So, if I wanted to market a product - like a smartphone - to teenagers, I'd probably read his report with a little interest. And then I'd remember that he's not old enough to sign a contract to get one in the first place, and couldn't afford $100 a month anyway. So I'm glad he wrote a report, but let me ask the most significant question that has escaped the great minds at Morgan Stanley We-Fucked-The-Goat-When-It-Came-To-Recognizing-The-Real-Estate-Bubble: who gives a shit?
I didn't understand when I was his age, but I do now. And that is, get a job and an apartment - without mommy and daddy's help - and then we'll talk. By the way, my youngest sister, who's still a teenager, types on her non-smart phone all the time, and so do all her friends, even when they are playing video games. Why? Because it works, they don't have to be at a computer or a game console, and since their parents have somewhat of a clue, it's free with an extra $10 a month on their cell bill.
I suspect I have to enter the caveats that the propaganda wings of genocidal maniacs and dictatorships disqualify themselves if they don't follow the laws stating they cannot participate in hate speech.
Is there anything else I can help you with? Perhaps stating, to help people who can't understand, that laws against murder don't work unless the police aren't themselves allowed to murder. Of course I probably shouldn't do that, because it's so obvious that it would be embarrassing for you to not understand that in the first place, and doubly so if it has to be pointed out to you.