That's fine, but short of a biometric database indicating who has irrevocably opted out of healthcare forever (and all the attendant ethical questions associated with it), it's not possible to say a given person will never use healthcare because there all manner of scenarios where a person may actually end up using healthcare, even if it was against their wishes.
Besides an accident scenario, there's people changing their minds, the intervention of family members who may not share the convictions, etc.
My biggest problem with your "freedom" argument is that it could be extended to pretty much anything. I could decide I will never fly, so why I should have to pay for the FAA or airports? Extend that to anything people decide they want to opt out of.
I don't think you can just opt out of civilization on a cafeteria basis.
There are some extremely limited religious exemptions to Obamacare, which cover the Amish objection to insurance.
Apparently the house has even debated (but not passed yet?) an exemption for people like Christian Scientists (and you thought military intelligence was an oxymoron) totally opposed to any healthcare.
You could, of course, argue that there may be circumstances where a person who objects to healthcare or insurance getting into an accident and being rushed to the hospital. Unconscious and not identifiable as a Christian Scientist, they undergo a life-saving operation and recuperate for days in intensive care before regaining consciousness and/or being identified to loved ones.
Bam! Now they have incurred tens of thousands of dollars in health care for which they cannot (and may refuse on religious grounds?) to pay for.
Obviously there's enough ethical questions there to start a whole podcast series for, but you can make an argument that they got care that now somebody else may have to pay for.
âoeCivilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.â
â Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You could probably extend that by saying that security is a hopeless race because it depends on a posteriori knowledge of the system in order to discover weaknesses.
You can ameliorate it by making security review an iterative process of design and not releasing the technology until after it has been refined, but you still don't know what new problems may emerge until after it has been refined. Your knowledge of the system's security isn't whole until after it can be tested.
Boy, there are a lot of people who think otherwise. You can't own a Honda with 100,000 on the clock and even casually discuss selling it without getting people coming out of the woodwork asking if you're selling it. We've sold two Hondas with 100+k on them in like the same day for better than Blue Book prices. One couple wanted the Pilot so bad they tolerated our clusterfuckery for needing a replacement title.
We'd owned both cars for 11 years and while they seemed mechanically flawless, we were just kind of tired of them. I sold mine to a friend who took it to Arizona, drove it for a year and then sold it to his girlfriend's daughter who drove it for a year and a half and then sold it to someone else -- my friend says he still sees it around town, although I have no idea what kind of work its needed beyond consumables and maybe an AC recharge.
I frankly expected both cars to ultimately lose a transmission. The Pilot had AWD and the Accord transmission struck me as kind of jerky for a 4 speed automatic, but neither car showed any operational problems, especially in the motors.
Is the rebuild issue for SSD RAID-5 arrays the same stratum of risk it is for spinning rust?
I would presume not, both because of speed and because there's not nearly as much added stress from the intensive reads necessary to rebuild the array.
Double parity and/or hot spare is better, but I kind of wonder as SSDs gain write durability (or it becomes more accepted they just have it, as some endurance tests have noted) and they start popping up in more budget minded arrays if maybe RAID-5 might make a comeback due to its lower overhead and arguably less risk due to faster and less mechanically strained rebuilds.
Given the land rush for decent, original content by Netflix and Amazon and a few cable channels that haven't given in to "reality" shows featuring has-been B-listers screaming at each other, I'm surprised that this would be a business priority for Discovery.
I would think they would rather invest in decent content while they can still compete for it so they will have something to show. Jacking up the price on junk content sounds to me like the way to become irrelevant faster than they already were.
I thought topping off charges didn't completely count when judging lithium battery charge cycles. I seldom discharge my phone lower than 75% and when it's been retired after 3-some years, it still holds a decent charge.
My understanding was that topping up a lithium battery was good; it was a more complete discharge that added wear cycles to it. Obviously this isn't true forever but better than lots of charge and deep discharge cycles.
And the cheating is so institutionalized that it has to be egregious before it becomes a problem.
Most team sports have this thing called a "penalty" or a "foul" where the offending team gets some small penalty or the offended team some small advantage -- fouls in basketball, the yellow flag in football, penalty box in hockey, balk in baseball.
There's just so much attempted cheating they've just made it part of the game -- intentional fouls are part of the late-minute strategy in basketball to stop the clock. In hockey, it's actually against the rules to beat the shit out of an opposing player yet it too is (although less so now) part of the game, down to "the enforcer" each team hires to intimidate members of the other team, up to and including beating the shit out of them once in a while.
In those sports only the most outrageous cheating becomes a scandal, like illegal hits in hockey that put someone in the hospital, hard fouls in basketball that result in an ejection or deflating the football (which, IMHO, couldn't have provided the advantage relative to the BFD it caused).
Native VGA is pointless if you can convert DP or HDMI to VGA with a dongle. I do have gripes about the proliferation of Mini-DP as it seems more fragile than full size DP and full size HDMI fits on an ultrabook fine.
I'd never call native ethernet pointless, but it's kind of debatable if you have USB3. I've been using USB3 gigabit dongles on a surface book pro for a couple of years and haven't really felt like I've been missing much besides the slight hassle of having to use a dongle.
That being said, it sure doesn't look like my Asus would need more than a 1-2 mm of thickness to accommodate one. One idea might be some kind of pop-up or pop out RJ45 jack that could be collapsed back into the case. Way back in the PCMCIA days I remember both modems and ethernet adapters that had like little rectangular tabs that popped out that would accept a plug vertically.
Any such scheme would, of course, be prone to breaking and other reliability problems, but I've found that not uncommon in laptops with built-in RJ45s. I've personally owned two laptops that have had their RJ45 jacks go bad and I think both required mainboard replacement. I know for a fact that was required on a 2 year old Dell Latitude 14" laptop at a client location.
So overall, the USB3 dongle option doesn't seem to be that huge of a sacrifice. It's got more than enough speed for whatever portable use you might need and the USB-A type jack is probably better engineered for frequent insert/remove cycles than the RJ45 is, possibly even in terms of internal attachment and reinforcement, which I think was some of the problem with my other laptop jack failures.
The most an onboard RJ45 would really give you is just sheer convenience and maybe superior LAN chipset support, but if your use matters that much then maybe you do need a big laptop or even a desktop.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the Powershell functionality, it's that the GUI has been rendered featureless *and* clumsy to use.
What really puzzles me is that Microsoft puts so much effort into creating *new* GUIs (whether it's Exchange or Windows Server) but creates them with less functionality. It's like they could have spent the same energy just updating an existing GUI with the new product features or functionality without losing the old GUI functionality or visually redesigning the entire thing.
Part of me thinks they've made Powershell a big deal as kind of a me-too attempt to be CLI elite. And another part of me thinks they're doing it to cut their development costs -- roll out new features and just don't create a GUI for them. And then there's the idea that they do it just to make it harder to use to drive the lower end of the market into forever-pay cloud services.
I think it's all crazy. I'm pretty sure the GUI was invented because (when done well) it made interfacing with computers easier and more efficient. And a lot of tasks benefit from a visual presentation of information beyond what you can get in ASCII tables and lists.
It's not that CLI and scripting aren't valuable, either -- it's not an either or thing, but a case where a decent GUI is a huge improvement and it seems odd to make the GUI worse on purpose.
I'm not sure what the challenges of the third world have to do with a technical discussion of the portability of computers, but apparently that's your version of "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah I can't hear you."
Every time the concept of censorship comes up, someone like you decides to conflate the principal of free speech with the legal limitations of the constitutional right to free speech. Really all you're doing is standing up for censorship, since you seem eager to act as an apologist for restricting speech.
Your use of property rights as a defense for limiting freedom of speech is technically correct, but in a world of increasingly many public spaces that are technically privately owned you should be wary of supporting the censorship of speech in privately owned public spaces. The owners of these places have political agendas and won't be afraid to use this ownership to restrict speech in places that nearly everyone would agree are public spaces.
Raed much? I said traditional laptops are too heavy relative to an iPad.
By ditching legacy ports like VGA, ultrabooks are actually competitive with tablets in size and weight and (IMHO) with tablets. If the ultrabook style of laptop didn't exist, I would have bought another iPad for those times when I wanted portability more than functionality.
You can add damn near anything via USB3 and my Asus has 3 plus mini-DP and HDMI. In an ideal world, I might lose the full size HDMI and upgrade the mini-DP to a full-size DP since I could always convert DP to HDMI and DP supports hubs, so I could do multi-monitor off one DP.
Some people want a fuller-sized laptop with more of whatever it is they want, but they do get clunky to travel with.
I guess it depends on your definition of "at scale". With some planning, it seems fairly easy to get decent scaling and availability. DAGs work pretty well. The thing that seems to get harder is the planning and licensing.
IMHO, Exchange 2013 has been a big step backwards in reliability and management. My conspiracist opinion is that Microsoft is deliberately trying to make it less appealing for SMBs to run in house because they want them hooked in as a permanent revenue stream to O365. The UI has lost even more common tasks and is really sluggish.
2010 was really pretty reliable and seems to run well even with ridiculously low resource allocations -- I've run 5 user servers in as little as 3 GB of RAM. The console UI is almost unusable due to swapping, but client operations don't really seem impacted on an ongoing basis.
What's kind of funny is that 2016 is back to being the unitary server role, completing the collapse of server roles that started in 2013, basically going back to the same model they had in 2003.
Maybe the whole market moves that way because demand moved that way?
I've owned a couple of iPads and when the iPad 3 became intolerably slow, I decided to get an ultrabook as a replacement. The iPad was really handy to take on day trip or even multi-day trips, mostly because its size and weight made it handy.
Modern ultrabooks now can get down to the iPad weight while having a better screen, keyboard and overall computing experience. I have 3 USB ports, mini-DP and HDMI -- if what I want to do can't be done natively, there's an adapter, and if that doesn't cut I should be using a desktop anyway.
giving billionaire Carl Icahn three board seats in the settlement
Is Corporate Governance actually supposed to work this way? It sounds like there will be three board members appointed, none of which are independent and who all just do the bidding of Icahn.
Why not just cut two seats and give Carl's new seat 3 votes?
Maybe someone better versed in business and economics can explain this, but there's something about American(?) business that abhors a business that stays at 2% of the market and isn't constantly growing. Obviously you have to *hold* 2% of the market (ie, gain as many new customers as you lose) even as the market changes.
But that being said, there sure seems to be an awful lot of businesses or products that when they don't end up grabbing a majority of the market or even a plurality of the market, dump those products or fold those businesses.
Yet at a smaller, local scale, there seem to be plenty of businesses that manage to survive for years or even generations with a small slice of a market by providing a unique product or service or some kind of superior quality without the need to grow into some kind of dominating behemoth.
A marketing droid I'm friends with on Facebook is a major cheerleader for client involvement with Periscope, so it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook felt it had to get in on this, too.
Do you think at this point Shkrelli has used some of his money to hire private security?
He's been an asshole to people who can generally be lumped into the category of "more dangerous to fuck with than other groups"
Jacking up the price of life saving drugs -- falls into the category of "people who could die before they could ever get convicted for homicide" and the parallel category of "pissed off loved ones of people who were denied lifesaving drugs".
Stealing money from rich people -- falls into the category of "people who can afford to hire other people to kill people that steal from them"
Offending guys named Ghostface Killah -- falls into the category of "people who are named killah might actually have a predilection for violence"
Does anyone have real complaints about Netgate's cashing in?
The product AFAICT remains free to use. About the worst it has gotten might be the "Gold" menu that shows up in the UI.
I guess at some point it's not hard to see why there's some level of monetization of these projects and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. It might maintain some development focus and quality and semblance of stability, especially if it staves off some of the fragmentation and forking into a half-dozen similar projects, all of which end up sucking.
Obviously it can be a bad thing if the free product ends up sucking and being, well, not free.
I think the church taxes in many European countries are one of the surprisingly illiberal things many people don't know about supposedly liberal Europe.
The only one I've read much about is the one in Germany and my understanding is unless you self-identify as a member of an eligible church community, you don't have to pay it.
A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for church taxes makes it seem more or less only a function of self-identified religious community membership, with some variation (ie, in Italy you pay the tax anyway, although you can designate the Italian State as your beneficiary).
I think it's a bizarre system overall and I would protest its very existence -- even if I didn't have to pay it -- if I was a citizen of one of those countries as I do not believe that the state should be involved in the business of religion at all, and yes, I would think less of anyone who believed that the state had an obligation to fund religion at all.
The bottom line, though, is that for most Europeans their state-sponsored religious funding is little different in practice from a voluntary tithe other than the state acting as a middle man. It is, by and large, not a mandatory system that forces anyone to support a specific religion or an official state religion.
This is my biggest gripe with this kind of "plan". It's bad enough that the city sold access to an ISP to blanket the city with 802.11 (which they do on multiple channels), adding in wireline providers doing it everywhere will just reduce the usability of wireless for everyone by polluting the spectrum.
Yeah, they are just not like us, with their murky skin and garlic-breath, is that what you are saying? Why would they have to abandon their identity? That is an absurd and shameful thing to demand, and it is designed solely to ensure that muslims understand that you think they are somehow lower than you. We in the West would hardly feel it was reasonable to have to abandon our culture and identity in a similar situation. You are simply being mean and rather despicable.
No, it's their wholesale repression of women, genital mutilation, honor killings, repression of homosexuals, lack of belief in separation of church and state, the use of amputation and execution for the punishment of religious crimes.
On those subjects, you're absolutely right -- anyone who believes women are second class citizens, essentially property, I do believe is lower than me. Those are medieval beliefs.
I also value the separation of religion and state and believe that religion has NO role in the operation of the state, and I hold anyone who would believe that fantasy beliefs in a mystical being should play a role in governance to be lower than me, especially when said beliefs are to be backed with the killing authority of the state. Again, this is a medieval mindset, a primitive outlook on par with gladiatorial contests, crucifixion and human sacrifice which has NO PLACE in the modern world.
Those are the beliefs and attitudes I expect to be abandoned when adopting citizenship in the modern, liberal west.
yes, it can be a burden to integrate newcomers into society, no one's denying it. In the long term, though, these people become strong contributors to society, at least if we allow them.
I think that's the rub, though, and in particular with Muslim immigrants. They hang onto a religiously-driven cultural conservatism and reject the more liberal cultural values of their host country, self-sorting into ghettos. There's an expectation the country to which they have immigrated needs to change its norms and laws to accommodate their religious and cultural preferences. They see the host country's lack of willingness to change for their sake as discrimination. This leads to unemployment, poverty and lately, a tendency to be attracted to radicalization.
Your process would work more like you expect with immigrants who were either willing to abandon their cultural and religious practices that were incompatible with their host country or already had a culture and values similar to the host country. Even then I recognize that it's not easy, but at least you obtain a relatively rapid integration that results in the economic gains.
But even then what you're arguing for is that Scandinavia needs and wants is economic expansion via labor pool expansion, not that there's something missing from it socially and culturally that the contributions of conservative Islam. By and large those qualities tend to result in conflict and social schisms which are counter-productive to economic growth and social stability.
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That's fine, but short of a biometric database indicating who has irrevocably opted out of healthcare forever (and all the attendant ethical questions associated with it), it's not possible to say a given person will never use healthcare because there all manner of scenarios where a person may actually end up using healthcare, even if it was against their wishes.
Besides an accident scenario, there's people changing their minds, the intervention of family members who may not share the convictions, etc.
My biggest problem with your "freedom" argument is that it could be extended to pretty much anything. I could decide I will never fly, so why I should have to pay for the FAA or airports? Extend that to anything people decide they want to opt out of.
I don't think you can just opt out of civilization on a cafeteria basis.
Mark Watney's response to that was to sprinkle his potatoes with crushed vicodin.
Let me try that with lettuce and get back to you.
There are some extremely limited religious exemptions to Obamacare, which cover the Amish objection to insurance.
Apparently the house has even debated (but not passed yet?) an exemption for people like Christian Scientists (and you thought military intelligence was an oxymoron) totally opposed to any healthcare.
You could, of course, argue that there may be circumstances where a person who objects to healthcare or insurance getting into an accident and being rushed to the hospital. Unconscious and not identifiable as a Christian Scientist, they undergo a life-saving operation and recuperate for days in intensive care before regaining consciousness and/or being identified to loved ones.
Bam! Now they have incurred tens of thousands of dollars in health care for which they cannot (and may refuse on religious grounds?) to pay for.
Obviously there's enough ethical questions there to start a whole podcast series for, but you can make an argument that they got care that now somebody else may have to pay for.
âoeCivilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.â
â Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You could probably extend that by saying that security is a hopeless race because it depends on a posteriori knowledge of the system in order to discover weaknesses.
You can ameliorate it by making security review an iterative process of design and not releasing the technology until after it has been refined, but you still don't know what new problems may emerge until after it has been refined. Your knowledge of the system's security isn't whole until after it can be tested.
Boy, there are a lot of people who think otherwise. You can't own a Honda with 100,000 on the clock and even casually discuss selling it without getting people coming out of the woodwork asking if you're selling it. We've sold two Hondas with 100+k on them in like the same day for better than Blue Book prices. One couple wanted the Pilot so bad they tolerated our clusterfuckery for needing a replacement title.
We'd owned both cars for 11 years and while they seemed mechanically flawless, we were just kind of tired of them. I sold mine to a friend who took it to Arizona, drove it for a year and then sold it to his girlfriend's daughter who drove it for a year and a half and then sold it to someone else -- my friend says he still sees it around town, although I have no idea what kind of work its needed beyond consumables and maybe an AC recharge.
I frankly expected both cars to ultimately lose a transmission. The Pilot had AWD and the Accord transmission struck me as kind of jerky for a 4 speed automatic, but neither car showed any operational problems, especially in the motors.
Is the rebuild issue for SSD RAID-5 arrays the same stratum of risk it is for spinning rust?
I would presume not, both because of speed and because there's not nearly as much added stress from the intensive reads necessary to rebuild the array.
Double parity and/or hot spare is better, but I kind of wonder as SSDs gain write durability (or it becomes more accepted they just have it, as some endurance tests have noted) and they start popping up in more budget minded arrays if maybe RAID-5 might make a comeback due to its lower overhead and arguably less risk due to faster and less mechanically strained rebuilds.
Given the land rush for decent, original content by Netflix and Amazon and a few cable channels that haven't given in to "reality" shows featuring has-been B-listers screaming at each other, I'm surprised that this would be a business priority for Discovery.
I would think they would rather invest in decent content while they can still compete for it so they will have something to show. Jacking up the price on junk content sounds to me like the way to become irrelevant faster than they already were.
I thought topping off charges didn't completely count when judging lithium battery charge cycles. I seldom discharge my phone lower than 75% and when it's been retired after 3-some years, it still holds a decent charge.
My understanding was that topping up a lithium battery was good; it was a more complete discharge that added wear cycles to it. Obviously this isn't true forever but better than lots of charge and deep discharge cycles.
And the cheating is so institutionalized that it has to be egregious before it becomes a problem.
Most team sports have this thing called a "penalty" or a "foul" where the offending team gets some small penalty or the offended team some small advantage -- fouls in basketball, the yellow flag in football, penalty box in hockey, balk in baseball.
There's just so much attempted cheating they've just made it part of the game -- intentional fouls are part of the late-minute strategy in basketball to stop the clock. In hockey, it's actually against the rules to beat the shit out of an opposing player yet it too is (although less so now) part of the game, down to "the enforcer" each team hires to intimidate members of the other team, up to and including beating the shit out of them once in a while.
In those sports only the most outrageous cheating becomes a scandal, like illegal hits in hockey that put someone in the hospital, hard fouls in basketball that result in an ejection or deflating the football (which, IMHO, couldn't have provided the advantage relative to the BFD it caused).
Native VGA is pointless if you can convert DP or HDMI to VGA with a dongle. I do have gripes about the proliferation of Mini-DP as it seems more fragile than full size DP and full size HDMI fits on an ultrabook fine.
I'd never call native ethernet pointless, but it's kind of debatable if you have USB3. I've been using USB3 gigabit dongles on a surface book pro for a couple of years and haven't really felt like I've been missing much besides the slight hassle of having to use a dongle.
That being said, it sure doesn't look like my Asus would need more than a 1-2 mm of thickness to accommodate one. One idea might be some kind of pop-up or pop out RJ45 jack that could be collapsed back into the case. Way back in the PCMCIA days I remember both modems and ethernet adapters that had like little rectangular tabs that popped out that would accept a plug vertically.
Any such scheme would, of course, be prone to breaking and other reliability problems, but I've found that not uncommon in laptops with built-in RJ45s. I've personally owned two laptops that have had their RJ45 jacks go bad and I think both required mainboard replacement. I know for a fact that was required on a 2 year old Dell Latitude 14" laptop at a client location.
So overall, the USB3 dongle option doesn't seem to be that huge of a sacrifice. It's got more than enough speed for whatever portable use you might need and the USB-A type jack is probably better engineered for frequent insert/remove cycles than the RJ45 is, possibly even in terms of internal attachment and reinforcement, which I think was some of the problem with my other laptop jack failures.
The most an onboard RJ45 would really give you is just sheer convenience and maybe superior LAN chipset support, but if your use matters that much then maybe you do need a big laptop or even a desktop.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the Powershell functionality, it's that the GUI has been rendered featureless *and* clumsy to use.
What really puzzles me is that Microsoft puts so much effort into creating *new* GUIs (whether it's Exchange or Windows Server) but creates them with less functionality. It's like they could have spent the same energy just updating an existing GUI with the new product features or functionality without losing the old GUI functionality or visually redesigning the entire thing.
Part of me thinks they've made Powershell a big deal as kind of a me-too attempt to be CLI elite. And another part of me thinks they're doing it to cut their development costs -- roll out new features and just don't create a GUI for them. And then there's the idea that they do it just to make it harder to use to drive the lower end of the market into forever-pay cloud services.
I think it's all crazy. I'm pretty sure the GUI was invented because (when done well) it made interfacing with computers easier and more efficient. And a lot of tasks benefit from a visual presentation of information beyond what you can get in ASCII tables and lists.
It's not that CLI and scripting aren't valuable, either -- it's not an either or thing, but a case where a decent GUI is a huge improvement and it seems odd to make the GUI worse on purpose.
I'm not sure what the challenges of the third world have to do with a technical discussion of the portability of computers, but apparently that's your version of "nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah I can't hear you."
Every time the concept of censorship comes up, someone like you decides to conflate the principal of free speech with the legal limitations of the constitutional right to free speech. Really all you're doing is standing up for censorship, since you seem eager to act as an apologist for restricting speech.
Your use of property rights as a defense for limiting freedom of speech is technically correct, but in a world of increasingly many public spaces that are technically privately owned you should be wary of supporting the censorship of speech in privately owned public spaces. The owners of these places have political agendas and won't be afraid to use this ownership to restrict speech in places that nearly everyone would agree are public spaces.
Raed much? I said traditional laptops are too heavy relative to an iPad.
By ditching legacy ports like VGA, ultrabooks are actually competitive with tablets in size and weight and (IMHO) with tablets. If the ultrabook style of laptop didn't exist, I would have bought another iPad for those times when I wanted portability more than functionality.
You can add damn near anything via USB3 and my Asus has 3 plus mini-DP and HDMI. In an ideal world, I might lose the full size HDMI and upgrade the mini-DP to a full-size DP since I could always convert DP to HDMI and DP supports hubs, so I could do multi-monitor off one DP.
Some people want a fuller-sized laptop with more of whatever it is they want, but they do get clunky to travel with.
I guess it depends on your definition of "at scale". With some planning, it seems fairly easy to get decent scaling and availability. DAGs work pretty well. The thing that seems to get harder is the planning and licensing.
IMHO, Exchange 2013 has been a big step backwards in reliability and management. My conspiracist opinion is that Microsoft is deliberately trying to make it less appealing for SMBs to run in house because they want them hooked in as a permanent revenue stream to O365. The UI has lost even more common tasks and is really sluggish.
2010 was really pretty reliable and seems to run well even with ridiculously low resource allocations -- I've run 5 user servers in as little as 3 GB of RAM. The console UI is almost unusable due to swapping, but client operations don't really seem impacted on an ongoing basis.
What's kind of funny is that 2016 is back to being the unitary server role, completing the collapse of server roles that started in 2013, basically going back to the same model they had in 2003.
Maybe the whole market moves that way because demand moved that way?
I've owned a couple of iPads and when the iPad 3 became intolerably slow, I decided to get an ultrabook as a replacement. The iPad was really handy to take on day trip or even multi-day trips, mostly because its size and weight made it handy.
Modern ultrabooks now can get down to the iPad weight while having a better screen, keyboard and overall computing experience. I have 3 USB ports, mini-DP and HDMI -- if what I want to do can't be done natively, there's an adapter, and if that doesn't cut I should be using a desktop anyway.
From the fine summary:
giving billionaire Carl Icahn three board seats in the settlement
Is Corporate Governance actually supposed to work this way? It sounds like there will be three board members appointed, none of which are independent and who all just do the bidding of Icahn.
Why not just cut two seats and give Carl's new seat 3 votes?
Maybe someone better versed in business and economics can explain this, but there's something about American(?) business that abhors a business that stays at 2% of the market and isn't constantly growing. Obviously you have to *hold* 2% of the market (ie, gain as many new customers as you lose) even as the market changes.
But that being said, there sure seems to be an awful lot of businesses or products that when they don't end up grabbing a majority of the market or even a plurality of the market, dump those products or fold those businesses.
Yet at a smaller, local scale, there seem to be plenty of businesses that manage to survive for years or even generations with a small slice of a market by providing a unique product or service or some kind of superior quality without the need to grow into some kind of dominating behemoth.
A marketing droid I'm friends with on Facebook is a major cheerleader for client involvement with Periscope, so it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook felt it had to get in on this, too.
Do you think at this point Shkrelli has used some of his money to hire private security?
He's been an asshole to people who can generally be lumped into the category of "more dangerous to fuck with than other groups"
Jacking up the price of life saving drugs -- falls into the category of "people who could die before they could ever get convicted for homicide" and the parallel category of "pissed off loved ones of people who were denied lifesaving drugs".
Stealing money from rich people -- falls into the category of "people who can afford to hire other people to kill people that steal from them"
Offending guys named Ghostface Killah -- falls into the category of "people who are named killah might actually have a predilection for violence"
Does anyone have real complaints about Netgate's cashing in?
The product AFAICT remains free to use. About the worst it has gotten might be the "Gold" menu that shows up in the UI.
I guess at some point it's not hard to see why there's some level of monetization of these projects and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. It might maintain some development focus and quality and semblance of stability, especially if it staves off some of the fragmentation and forking into a half-dozen similar projects, all of which end up sucking.
Obviously it can be a bad thing if the free product ends up sucking and being, well, not free.
I think the church taxes in many European countries are one of the surprisingly illiberal things many people don't know about supposedly liberal Europe.
The only one I've read much about is the one in Germany and my understanding is unless you self-identify as a member of an eligible church community, you don't have to pay it.
A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for church taxes makes it seem more or less only a function of self-identified religious community membership, with some variation (ie, in Italy you pay the tax anyway, although you can designate the Italian State as your beneficiary).
I think it's a bizarre system overall and I would protest its very existence -- even if I didn't have to pay it -- if I was a citizen of one of those countries as I do not believe that the state should be involved in the business of religion at all, and yes, I would think less of anyone who believed that the state had an obligation to fund religion at all.
The bottom line, though, is that for most Europeans their state-sponsored religious funding is little different in practice from a voluntary tithe other than the state acting as a middle man. It is, by and large, not a mandatory system that forces anyone to support a specific religion or an official state religion.
This is my biggest gripe with this kind of "plan". It's bad enough that the city sold access to an ISP to blanket the city with 802.11 (which they do on multiple channels), adding in wireline providers doing it everywhere will just reduce the usability of wireless for everyone by polluting the spectrum.
Yeah, they are just not like us, with their murky skin and garlic-breath, is that what you are saying? Why would they have to abandon their identity? That is an absurd and shameful thing to demand, and it is designed solely to ensure that muslims understand that you think they are somehow lower than you. We in the West would hardly feel it was reasonable to have to abandon our culture and identity in a similar situation. You are simply being mean and rather despicable.
No, it's their wholesale repression of women, genital mutilation, honor killings, repression of homosexuals, lack of belief in separation of church and state, the use of amputation and execution for the punishment of religious crimes.
On those subjects, you're absolutely right -- anyone who believes women are second class citizens, essentially property, I do believe is lower than me. Those are medieval beliefs.
I also value the separation of religion and state and believe that religion has NO role in the operation of the state, and I hold anyone who would believe that fantasy beliefs in a mystical being should play a role in governance to be lower than me, especially when said beliefs are to be backed with the killing authority of the state. Again, this is a medieval mindset, a primitive outlook on par with gladiatorial contests, crucifixion and human sacrifice which has NO PLACE in the modern world.
Those are the beliefs and attitudes I expect to be abandoned when adopting citizenship in the modern, liberal west.
yes, it can be a burden to integrate newcomers into society, no one's denying it. In the long term, though, these people become strong contributors to society, at least if we allow them.
I think that's the rub, though, and in particular with Muslim immigrants. They hang onto a religiously-driven cultural conservatism and reject the more liberal cultural values of their host country, self-sorting into ghettos. There's an expectation the country to which they have immigrated needs to change its norms and laws to accommodate their religious and cultural preferences. They see the host country's lack of willingness to change for their sake as discrimination. This leads to unemployment, poverty and lately, a tendency to be attracted to radicalization.
Your process would work more like you expect with immigrants who were either willing to abandon their cultural and religious practices that were incompatible with their host country or already had a culture and values similar to the host country. Even then I recognize that it's not easy, but at least you obtain a relatively rapid integration that results in the economic gains.
But even then what you're arguing for is that Scandinavia needs and wants is economic expansion via labor pool expansion, not that there's something missing from it socially and culturally that the contributions of conservative Islam. By and large those qualities tend to result in conflict and social schisms which are counter-productive to economic growth and social stability.