1. The problem you describe re food stamps etc exists in the UK. It's not an in-principle problem of providing a benefit; it's an in-practice problem of doing so well. Those on support but who can find work are discouraged from doing so by immediately losing all their support, meaning that their effective marginal tax rate is above 100%. Those in work but who are not earning much -- like your family -- are unable to access any support at all -- again, your effective marginal tax rate is above 100%. But remember, you were arguing for (i) reducing tax rates for the rich and (ii) removing the existence of support programmes altogether, and making the assumption that charities would step in to ensure no-one starve or froze. 2. You now appear simply to be asserting American exceptionalism, which may well be the case, but does not help answer the question why low tax economies are inherently, automatically, better at eradicating poverty than high tax economies, or why either rich people or conservatives are more likely to be charitable than poor people or liberals. Those were the questions we were originally debating. It's the rich vs poor thing I was getting at when I said you need to look at *income-weighted* charitable giving per capita.
1. I know that charities are based on voluntary contributions -- I alluded to the problems that causes for programmes that as a polity, we would prefer to see funded 100% consistently previously. Many, many government programmes are cut regularly , at least here in the UK. The assertion by economists that all bureaucrats are driven by some kind of law of nature to seek to increase the size of their empire remains simply an assertion -- it's not kind of natural law, nor is it consistently backed up by the evidence. Lots of UK government departments have gone through rounds and rounds of downsizing and rightsizing. As for pay... a chief executive of an NHS Primary Care Trust, in charge of the care for say 250,000 people and a budget of 400m pounds, will have a salary of about 125k. By comparison, a CE of a private sector org of that size will have a much much larger budget. Charity CEs will have a salary somewhat lower than the PCT CE (probably) but there are very few charities of that size in the UK -- and there are 150 PCTs alone. The scale of the work they do is enormous, far far larger than any charity.
3. Following you following my numbering. The core aim of income support systems in most countries is to ensure that no-one starves or freezes to death irrespective of whether they're in work or not. There are problems with perverse incentives, but at least here in the UK, you'd have to be a right friggin' idiot to want to live off state benefits if you had an alternative -- £60 or £70 a week is typical. It's not exactly the life of Riley and the gilding on the cage is pretty bloody thin. The thing about a hand up, not a hand out -- if you're just back from Iraq with your legs blown off, you may be some time away from thinking about working again. Same is true for people who've suffered a mental breakdown, the cause of which may be noble or ignoble with the same effects.
4. Where are your years of statistics? In particular the ones showing *per capita* and *income-weighted* charitable giving by the US being head-and-shoulders above the rest? Anecdotes don't cut it, nor statistics about what people say they intend.
1) Charities who assist the poor have bureaucracy too. Some of them have admin costs that are much higher than government admin costs. Giving alms to beggars is free of admin costs but isn't terribly scalable to supporting all those people who would need help from charitable souls if the government stopped helping them.
2) What's more, we want to spend the amount on management/bureacracy that maximises bang-for-buck, not just spend the least possible. The UK NHS spends far less on both management and IT than private sector health organisations, and this is a bad thing, not a good thing. The NHS can't get the quality of managers it needs, and thus runs less effectively than it otherwise would.
3) In principle, poor people should be able to rely on income/support from government more than they can on income/support from charities. If I'm a poor person in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the local charity that caters to my needs shuts down, I'm SOL. That scenario is not going to happen with a national government programme.
4) Finally, and most obviously, you assume that people will take the rebate from the government for the theoretical $1,000 and choose to give $500 to the poor instead. But there's no obligation to do so and lots of people may choose to give $50 instead. Or $0. My contention is that the monies available would decrease dramatically. We might in principle agree we should give to charity but in practice fail to do so. Legislation is there to remove that uncertainty.
Oh come on, the guy was arguing that governments were inherently unable to spend money to protect the poor -- and that the tax dollars should stay in his (and his peers') pockets instead -- ie he wanted to share less of his money, in your phrasing. That is a clearly conservative or rightwing notion and if implemented would undoubtedly shift money from poor to rich people. It is indubitably the case that when tried elsewhere, governments with these kind of extreme limits or laissez-faire approaches have resulted in great hardships and misery for large numbers of people. The Victorians were great philanthropists, just as you believe modern conservatives to be (although you'll be hard pressed to find a set of rigorous studies to back up your claims) -- that didn't mean things were better for poor people in Victorian times than modern times. Quite the opposite -- and it killed children in the thousands and tens of thousands.
Right then, aggro-boy: you are claiming that the British economy of Victorian times was one of the following things: authoritarian, fascist, socialist or piss-poor.
Couple of tiny problems here: 1) Only an idiot could possibly believe that any of those terms apply to the Victorian British economy (or government -- we'll come on to that). Authoritarian? Taxes -- which is what idiots like you often prefer to use as a yardstick of authoritarianism -- were way way lower than those of any modern Western economy. Fascist? Who was the dictator aggrandising all power to themselves? Socialist? The Victorians would've thought Reagan was a socialist, they were so laissez-faire (please God tell me you've heard the term laissez-faire) 2) Only an idiot would apply the terms authoritarian, fascist or socialist to economies rather than governments. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt -- though frankly it doesn't make sense to do so, given your clear problems with thinking skills, comprehension and pointless aggression -- and assume you meant political economy. In which case, see (1) above.
The point is, I'm not impressed or intimidated or awed by muppets by you saying that you control all your resources and don't want to share them with anyone else. Not until you go set up your special little place (presumably not a state) where your vision holds sway -- let's see the results of the experiment. I believe that some of your mates may have tried to do just that in the wilds of Utah and Montana -- but funnily enough, they never quite escape the need to pool resources to fix some problems -- and to sanction those who won't agree to the pooling.
Yours, dreaming just like you of a world without poverty...but not such a nobber as to think it arises automatically out of self-interest.
Why does the Right's view of the world ignore both history and geography? For example, why does history so often start with FDR? Why does it so often pretend that we hadn't already tried the alternative to "government charity"? Hey, if you want to know what life was like for the poor in a world without "government charity", and just how fabulous it was, you can read all about it, thanks to the wonders of the internet. For example, a brief extract from a visit to a cholera district in Victorian England: "Continuing our course we reached "The Folly," another street so narrow that the names and trades of the shopmen were painted on boards that stretched, across the street, from the roof of their own house to that of their neighbour's. We were here stopped by our companion in front of a house "to let." The building was as narrow and as unlike a human habitation as the wooden houses in a child's box of toys. "In this house," said our friend, "when the scarlet fever was raging in the neighbourhood, the barber who was living here suffered fearfully from it; and no sooner did the man get well of this than he was seized with typhus, and scarcely had he recovered from the first attack than he was struck down a second time with the same terrible disease. Since then he has lost his child with cholera, and at this moment his wife is in the workhouse suffering from the same affliction. The only wonder is that they are not all dead, for as the man sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour's privy, sopping through the wall. At the back of the house was an open sewer, and the privies were full to the seat." Mmm, sounds lovely and what a testament to the efficacy of charity in ensuring no-one suffers basic indignity in the face of laissez-faire government. It reminds me of the Irish potato famine, which of course was another triumph of government inaction. And of course, we can look all around the world today to see dozens of examples of countries where governments haven't the will or the money to spend on the poor (or indeed they don't exist at all) and they seem like just super places to be poor. DRC? Let me in! Sudan? Ooh, yes please! Somalia (no effective government for years and years)? What's not to like?
Listen, it would really help if you guys just got honest for a minute and said: "I'm quite rich. I like being quite rich. I don't like sharing my money with anyone else. I'm going to do my damnedest to avoid it. And no, I couldn't give a hairy fuck if that means kids dropping dead in the streets from diseases of poverty, because I think it's their fault (or their parents' fault) in the first place. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to fuck off back to my gated community bolt-hole"
It's just that there's lots of quotes elsewhere on this page about batteries having been in use for 5 years in some cars and still not needing replacement. As I understand it (not very well), it all depends on the particular chemistry of the battery in question.
Excellent point! Truly, there is nothing new under the sun -- and of course, you'd have no clue whether the horses you were getting at the staging post were good or not -- and there'd be no sealed microprocessor unit to tell you.... I wonder if there's a historian or two who could tell us what other problems occurred and how they were solved in the stagecoach world.
You have it exactly right when you say that car ownership doesn't really work well for people like you (or me). We are perfect fodder for car-share services, however, and car-share services are perfect fodder for battery-swap technologies. In London, car-share is expanding substantially (Whizzgo has 21 locations in Camden alone, targeted at fairly wealthy but not super-rich areas for the most part).
You're ignoring things that you (apparently) don't value but many consumers do: to take just three examples, the white macbook has a latchless clamshell that means there are no fiddly catches which look ugly and are prone to breaking; the powercord is held in place magnetically and thus does not break; the laptop goes immediately and reliably to sleep when the lid is closed and wakes up immediately and reliably when the lid is opened. None of that is true for the HP. There are lots of other similar small but important differences that just make the experience better.
I think for many users there are some pretty basic advantages as well. For example, my work laptop is a PC, my home laptop is a MacBook. If I've finished using my MacBook for a while, I just shut the lid and it goes to sleep. When I want to work again, I open the lid and it's ready. I can't use the lid to trigger that behaviour on my work laptop -- oh, sure, the option is there to go into standby mode when I shut the lid -- but it doesn't work reliably. Sometimes it goes into standby, sometimes it doesn't. When it does go into standby, it takes a long while to do so, and I have to wait for visual confirmation that it's really done what I was expecting. And of course, just because closing the lid puts the laptop into standby, that doesn't mean that opening the lid wakes the computer up. Oh no. You have to press a button for that. It's this kind of wobbly, unreliable behaviour that makes PC laptops a pain in the arse. And for those of you tempted to reply by telling me that it's my fault for having the wrong PC laptop or having it wrongly configured or for being an idiot -- I say you are just deluding yourselves. It's a problem with out-of-the-box behaviour -- a mentality on the part of Microsoft + the manufacturer that a few hoops for the user to jump through are no big deal, vs a mentality at Apple that says "by and large, we'll try to eliminate hoops for users where we can".
I don't know about the OP, but I was wiling to install Silverlight (although at a loss to understand why I had to -- it seems a bit pointless given that I've never seen any file anywhere else that's required it). But when I tried to, I found my system wasn't compatible. I run a bog-standard PC from work. This is why people complain about Microsoft and formats: they make it painful for no good reason. What does "no good reason" look like? It looks like a quick google and oh yes, there's the video on a gazillion other sites in a format that automatically plays on my laptop without installing anything.
It may be clear that there is market demand for a lower-cost version of Apple laptops, but it's also clear that Apple doesn't think the market is large enough to be worth catering to. Your post suggests ("there's no reason they should have to") that Apple is doing something morally obnoxious in not providing this option. Which is frankly bizarre.
Erm... I've just followed the handy-dandy link to the draft Bill and it appears that we may be able to hold fire just slightly on all our angry rants because the Bill contains some important constraints. The Bill does not make it an offence to have a pornographic image of a child (cartoon or otherwise). It makes it an offence to have a prohibited image. Prohibited images are defined to have *three* characteristics in the Bill: 1. pornographic, 2. focused on the perianal area or depicting various sexual acts, and 3. grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character.
1. is taken to mean "designed to make the reader horny" (I paraphrase). Who's going to argue in court that the picture of a young Rorschach stumbling on his mother having sex with a john was drawn with this intention? Especially when 1. is further qualified to say that the test has to be applied in the context of the narrative.
3. may be annoyingly vague, but it's pretty clear that it's intended to be a fairly high bar and that some images will pass the bar of both 1 and 2 and yet not 3.
Now you know all this, please feel free to go on being jolly cross about the Bill. Perhaps you'll find the time to get cross about the data-sharing provisions and the secret inquest provisions, both of which are much more worrying to me at least, even though they've both been narrowed somewhat from the original lunacy.
My God, some people are deluded. The GP is not implying that Apple is doing something Spectacular, Heroic or Noble by being a market-maker, which is the only interpretation I can think of that makes your assertion "you've taken Apple zealotry to a new level" make sense. The GP is simply describing the fact that this is what Apple is doing. Market making is just another mundane commercial exercise that takes place on very large scales like stock exchanges, rather smaller scales like Ebay and Apple's App Store, and much smaller scales still, like many estate agents.
So this is the bit where I start to get worried. It's a very Not Nice thing to have happened to her... but some of the descriptions of how awful it was lack any sense of proportion. Two adults forced her to show herself naked to them for a short time (presumably a few seconds). In a world where there are children being raped every day of their lives, where other children are soldiers and are seeing and being forced to commit butchery on the most horrific scale, we need to adjust the tone of our voices of condemnation to an appropriate volume. A humiliation of this order should not alone require therapy to recover from.
How do I do a conference call on my blackberry (ie add a second party into a call)? That's a pretty useful business function and I don't think it exists on a blackberry
Re:Warning to all mods: joke alert
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
It certainly should be -- it's much better than Watchmen. The latter is superb, but the former is a towering creation, a work of monumental quiet genius. It is as devastating to read as "The Last of the Just"
Proust wrote about cake. Joyce wrote about the pleasures of a good turd. Kafka wrote about a giant spider. There's no received wisdom about "acceptably literary topics".
I'm having difficulty following your post. You say you've seen "this argument before" but it's not clear which argument you mean.
You make a number of assertions with nothing to back them up eg climatology is more like economics, or more like weather. You mention chaos theory but it's not clear what the relevance is -- I infer that you are saying that the climate is a chaotic system and thus cannot be predicted with any accuracy, yet that's a clear misreading of chaos theory, as another poster points out in more detail.
You say that the comparison between predictive modelling of the positions of the stars (which you mischaracterise twice, first by describing this as Newtonian orbital mechanics, and second by talking about "planets [sic] orbits") and climate is invalid because predictive models of star movements can be checked quickly by comparison with climate model predictions. But this is to misunderstand the range of star movement models that exist, which cover both planetary orbits (for which, incidentally, Newtonian orbital mechanics provides only a reasonable approximation of movements) and models of galaxy formation making predictions that range billions of years into the future and deal with chaotic and highly complex systems.
Your comparison of climate and weather seems to be almost a deliberate faux-naive misunderstanding of the difference between the two, and boils down to an admission that you don't get why it is possible to be unable to predict the detail of a short-term event while being able to spot long-term trends. But this is fundamental to the whole of science. Quantum mechanics, statistics etc are all based on the concept that while individual events are unpredictable, the summed effect of those events is somewhat predictable.
Finally, your assertion that politics is insisting on AGW being C02 driven and real is just bizarre, the equivalent of saying politics is insisting that tobacco causes cancer. In case you hadn't noticed, political opinion is a long way from being monolithic, and there's quite a lot more rich and politically powerful people and companies whose short-term interests are best served by denying AGW than the converse. A few noisy NGOs and campaign groups don't really begin to compare with the power and wealth wielded by Exxon, for example.
It is simply delusional to assert that private enterprise is responsible for all technological developments and government always and everywhere holds it back. It is delusional because it doesn't recognise the facts. Take WWII for example: penicillin and the atom bomb were the largest scale scientific projects of the era (penicillin being the larger of the two) and they were both the outputs of a joint effort between government and private organisations. Oil exploration has worked in much the same way; many energy companies are either de facto or de jure parts of nation states.
Of course governments can balls things up. But so can private enterprises, and on just as colossal a scale. Or are you going to argue that the financial crisis were are currently experiencing would have been no worse (or perhaps better) if government had not regulated enterprise at all? If so, I'll leave you to your adulterated gin and bread and your 2lbs of carrots that turned out to actually weigh only 1lb and to be doused in carcinogenic pesticides. And your fabulous financial investments too.
Slashdot Mirror
1. The problem you describe re food stamps etc exists in the UK. It's not an in-principle problem of providing a benefit; it's an in-practice problem of doing so well. Those on support but who can find work are discouraged from doing so by immediately losing all their support, meaning that their effective marginal tax rate is above 100%. Those in work but who are not earning much -- like your family -- are unable to access any support at all -- again, your effective marginal tax rate is above 100%. But remember, you were arguing for (i) reducing tax rates for the rich and (ii) removing the existence of support programmes altogether, and making the assumption that charities would step in to ensure no-one starve or froze.
2. You now appear simply to be asserting American exceptionalism, which may well be the case, but does not help answer the question why low tax economies are inherently, automatically, better at eradicating poverty than high tax economies, or why either rich people or conservatives are more likely to be charitable than poor people or liberals. Those were the questions we were originally debating. It's the rich vs poor thing I was getting at when I said you need to look at *income-weighted* charitable giving per capita.
1. I know that charities are based on voluntary contributions -- I alluded to the problems that causes for programmes that as a polity, we would prefer to see funded 100% consistently previously. Many, many government programmes are cut regularly , at least here in the UK. The assertion by economists that all bureaucrats are driven by some kind of law of nature to seek to increase the size of their empire remains simply an assertion -- it's not kind of natural law, nor is it consistently backed up by the evidence. Lots of UK government departments have gone through rounds and rounds of downsizing and rightsizing. As for pay... a chief executive of an NHS Primary Care Trust, in charge of the care for say 250,000 people and a budget of 400m pounds, will have a salary of about 125k. By comparison, a CE of a private sector org of that size will have a much much larger budget. Charity CEs will have a salary somewhat lower than the PCT CE (probably) but there are very few charities of that size in the UK -- and there are 150 PCTs alone. The scale of the work they do is enormous, far far larger than any charity.
3. Following you following my numbering. The core aim of income support systems in most countries is to ensure that no-one starves or freezes to death irrespective of whether they're in work or not. There are problems with perverse incentives, but at least here in the UK, you'd have to be a right friggin' idiot to want to live off state benefits if you had an alternative -- £60 or £70 a week is typical. It's not exactly the life of Riley and the gilding on the cage is pretty bloody thin. The thing about a hand up, not a hand out -- if you're just back from Iraq with your legs blown off, you may be some time away from thinking about working again. Same is true for people who've suffered a mental breakdown, the cause of which may be noble or ignoble with the same effects.
4. Where are your years of statistics? In particular the ones showing *per capita* and *income-weighted* charitable giving by the US being head-and-shoulders above the rest? Anecdotes don't cut it, nor statistics about what people say they intend.
1) Charities who assist the poor have bureaucracy too. Some of them have admin costs that are much higher than government admin costs. Giving alms to beggars is free of admin costs but isn't terribly scalable to supporting all those people who would need help from charitable souls if the government stopped helping them.
2) What's more, we want to spend the amount on management/bureacracy that maximises bang-for-buck, not just spend the least possible. The UK NHS spends far less on both management and IT than private sector health organisations, and this is a bad thing, not a good thing. The NHS can't get the quality of managers it needs, and thus runs less effectively than it otherwise would.
3) In principle, poor people should be able to rely on income/support from government more than they can on income/support from charities. If I'm a poor person in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the local charity that caters to my needs shuts down, I'm SOL. That scenario is not going to happen with a national government programme.
4) Finally, and most obviously, you assume that people will take the rebate from the government for the theoretical $1,000 and choose to give $500 to the poor instead. But there's no obligation to do so and lots of people may choose to give $50 instead. Or $0. My contention is that the monies available would decrease dramatically. We might in principle agree we should give to charity but in practice fail to do so. Legislation is there to remove that uncertainty.
Oh come on, the guy was arguing that governments were inherently unable to spend money to protect the poor -- and that the tax dollars should stay in his (and his peers') pockets instead -- ie he wanted to share less of his money, in your phrasing. That is a clearly conservative or rightwing notion and if implemented would undoubtedly shift money from poor to rich people. It is indubitably the case that when tried elsewhere, governments with these kind of extreme limits or laissez-faire approaches have resulted in great hardships and misery for large numbers of people. The Victorians were great philanthropists, just as you believe modern conservatives to be (although you'll be hard pressed to find a set of rigorous studies to back up your claims) -- that didn't mean things were better for poor people in Victorian times than modern times. Quite the opposite -- and it killed children in the thousands and tens of thousands.
Right then, aggro-boy: you are claiming that the British economy of Victorian times was one of the following things: authoritarian, fascist, socialist or piss-poor.
Couple of tiny problems here:
1) Only an idiot could possibly believe that any of those terms apply to the Victorian British economy (or government -- we'll come on to that). Authoritarian? Taxes -- which is what idiots like you often prefer to use as a yardstick of authoritarianism -- were way way lower than those of any modern Western economy. Fascist? Who was the dictator aggrandising all power to themselves? Socialist? The Victorians would've thought Reagan was a socialist, they were so laissez-faire (please God tell me you've heard the term laissez-faire)
2) Only an idiot would apply the terms authoritarian, fascist or socialist to economies rather than governments. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt -- though frankly it doesn't make sense to do so, given your clear problems with thinking skills, comprehension and pointless aggression -- and assume you meant political economy. In which case, see (1) above.
The point is, I'm not impressed or intimidated or awed by muppets by you saying that you control all your resources and don't want to share them with anyone else. Not until you go set up your special little place (presumably not a state) where your vision holds sway -- let's see the results of the experiment. I believe that some of your mates may have tried to do just that in the wilds of Utah and Montana -- but funnily enough, they never quite escape the need to pool resources to fix some problems -- and to sanction those who won't agree to the pooling.
Yours, dreaming just like you of a world without poverty...but not such a nobber as to think it arises automatically out of self-interest.
Why does the Right's view of the world ignore both history and geography? For example, why does history so often start with FDR? Why does it so often pretend that we hadn't already tried the alternative to "government charity"? Hey, if you want to know what life was like for the poor in a world without "government charity", and just how fabulous it was, you can read all about it, thanks to the wonders of the internet. For example, a brief extract from a visit to a cholera district in Victorian England:
"Continuing our course we reached "The Folly," another street so narrow that the names and trades of the shopmen were painted on boards that stretched, across the street, from the roof of their own house to that of their neighbour's. We were here stopped by our companion in front of a house "to let." The building was as narrow and as unlike a human habitation as the wooden houses in a child's box of toys. "In this house," said our friend, "when the scarlet fever was raging in the neighbourhood, the barber who was living here suffered fearfully from it; and no sooner did the man get well of this than he was seized with typhus, and scarcely had he recovered from the first attack than he was struck down a second time with the same terrible disease. Since then he has lost his child with cholera, and at this moment his wife is in the workhouse suffering from the same affliction. The only wonder is that they are not all dead, for as the man sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour's privy, sopping through the wall. At the back of the house was an open sewer, and the privies were full to the seat."
Mmm, sounds lovely and what a testament to the efficacy of charity in ensuring no-one suffers basic indignity in the face of laissez-faire government. It reminds me of the Irish potato famine, which of course was another triumph of government inaction. And of course, we can look all around the world today to see dozens of examples of countries where governments haven't the will or the money to spend on the poor (or indeed they don't exist at all) and they seem like just super places to be poor. DRC? Let me in! Sudan? Ooh, yes please! Somalia (no effective government for years and years)? What's not to like?
Listen, it would really help if you guys just got honest for a minute and said: "I'm quite rich. I like being quite rich. I don't like sharing my money with anyone else. I'm going to do my damnedest to avoid it. And no, I couldn't give a hairy fuck if that means kids dropping dead in the streets from diseases of poverty, because I think it's their fault (or their parents' fault) in the first place. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to fuck off back to my gated community bolt-hole"
It's just that there's lots of quotes elsewhere on this page about batteries having been in use for 5 years in some cars and still not needing replacement. As I understand it (not very well), it all depends on the particular chemistry of the battery in question.
What if the inductive part were built into the wheel? That might bring the parts close enough to each other to retain efficiency.
Are you sure about your cycle number? Everything in your economics calc depends on that number being right.
Excellent point! Truly, there is nothing new under the sun -- and of course, you'd have no clue whether the horses you were getting at the staging post were good or not -- and there'd be no sealed microprocessor unit to tell you.... I wonder if there's a historian or two who could tell us what other problems occurred and how they were solved in the stagecoach world.
You have it exactly right when you say that car ownership doesn't really work well for people like you (or me). We are perfect fodder for car-share services, however, and car-share services are perfect fodder for battery-swap technologies. In London, car-share is expanding substantially (Whizzgo has 21 locations in Camden alone, targeted at fairly wealthy but not super-rich areas for the most part).
That would be why they're tackling small countries like Israel and Denmark first, then.
You're ignoring things that you (apparently) don't value but many consumers do: to take just three examples, the white macbook has a latchless clamshell that means there are no fiddly catches which look ugly and are prone to breaking; the powercord is held in place magnetically and thus does not break; the laptop goes immediately and reliably to sleep when the lid is closed and wakes up immediately and reliably when the lid is opened. None of that is true for the HP. There are lots of other similar small but important differences that just make the experience better.
I think for many users there are some pretty basic advantages as well. For example, my work laptop is a PC, my home laptop is a MacBook. If I've finished using my MacBook for a while, I just shut the lid and it goes to sleep. When I want to work again, I open the lid and it's ready. I can't use the lid to trigger that behaviour on my work laptop -- oh, sure, the option is there to go into standby mode when I shut the lid -- but it doesn't work reliably. Sometimes it goes into standby, sometimes it doesn't. When it does go into standby, it takes a long while to do so, and I have to wait for visual confirmation that it's really done what I was expecting. And of course, just because closing the lid puts the laptop into standby, that doesn't mean that opening the lid wakes the computer up. Oh no. You have to press a button for that. It's this kind of wobbly, unreliable behaviour that makes PC laptops a pain in the arse. And for those of you tempted to reply by telling me that it's my fault for having the wrong PC laptop or having it wrongly configured or for being an idiot -- I say you are just deluding yourselves. It's a problem with out-of-the-box behaviour -- a mentality on the part of Microsoft + the manufacturer that a few hoops for the user to jump through are no big deal, vs a mentality at Apple that says "by and large, we'll try to eliminate hoops for users where we can".
I don't know about the OP, but I was wiling to install Silverlight (although at a loss to understand why I had to -- it seems a bit pointless given that I've never seen any file anywhere else that's required it). But when I tried to, I found my system wasn't compatible. I run a bog-standard PC from work. This is why people complain about Microsoft and formats: they make it painful for no good reason. What does "no good reason" look like? It looks like a quick google and oh yes, there's the video on a gazillion other sites in a format that automatically plays on my laptop without installing anything.
It may be clear that there is market demand for a lower-cost version of Apple laptops, but it's also clear that Apple doesn't think the market is large enough to be worth catering to. Your post suggests ("there's no reason they should have to") that Apple is doing something morally obnoxious in not providing this option. Which is frankly bizarre.
Erm... I've just followed the handy-dandy link to the draft Bill and it appears that we may be able to hold fire just slightly on all our angry rants because the Bill contains some important constraints. The Bill does not make it an offence to have a pornographic image of a child (cartoon or otherwise). It makes it an offence to have a prohibited image. Prohibited images are defined to have *three* characteristics in the Bill: 1. pornographic, 2. focused on the perianal area or depicting various sexual acts, and 3. grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character.
1. is taken to mean "designed to make the reader horny" (I paraphrase). Who's going to argue in court that the picture of a young Rorschach stumbling on his mother having sex with a john was drawn with this intention? Especially when 1. is further qualified to say that the test has to be applied in the context of the narrative.
3. may be annoyingly vague, but it's pretty clear that it's intended to be a fairly high bar and that some images will pass the bar of both 1 and 2 and yet not 3.
Now you know all this, please feel free to go on being jolly cross about the Bill. Perhaps you'll find the time to get cross about the data-sharing provisions and the secret inquest provisions, both of which are much more worrying to me at least, even though they've both been narrowed somewhat from the original lunacy.
My God, some people are deluded. The GP is not implying that Apple is doing something Spectacular, Heroic or Noble by being a market-maker, which is the only interpretation I can think of that makes your assertion "you've taken Apple zealotry to a new level" make sense. The GP is simply describing the fact that this is what Apple is doing. Market making is just another mundane commercial exercise that takes place on very large scales like stock exchanges, rather smaller scales like Ebay and Apple's App Store, and much smaller scales still, like many estate agents.
So this is the bit where I start to get worried. It's a very Not Nice thing to have happened to her... but some of the descriptions of how awful it was lack any sense of proportion. Two adults forced her to show herself naked to them for a short time (presumably a few seconds). In a world where there are children being raped every day of their lives, where other children are soldiers and are seeing and being forced to commit butchery on the most horrific scale, we need to adjust the tone of our voices of condemnation to an appropriate volume. A humiliation of this order should not alone require therapy to recover from.
Very helpful, thank you
How do I do a conference call on my blackberry (ie add a second party into a call)? That's a pretty useful business function and I don't think it exists on a blackberry
It certainly should be -- it's much better than Watchmen. The latter is superb, but the former is a towering creation, a work of monumental quiet genius. It is as devastating to read as "The Last of the Just"
Proust wrote about cake. Joyce wrote about the pleasures of a good turd. Kafka wrote about a giant spider. There's no received wisdom about "acceptably literary topics".
I'm having difficulty following your post. You say you've seen "this argument before" but it's not clear which argument you mean.
You make a number of assertions with nothing to back them up eg climatology is more like economics, or more like weather. You mention chaos theory but it's not clear what the relevance is -- I infer that you are saying that the climate is a chaotic system and thus cannot be predicted with any accuracy, yet that's a clear misreading of chaos theory, as another poster points out in more detail.
You say that the comparison between predictive modelling of the positions of the stars (which you mischaracterise twice, first by describing this as Newtonian orbital mechanics, and second by talking about "planets [sic] orbits") and climate is invalid because predictive models of star movements can be checked quickly by comparison with climate model predictions. But this is to misunderstand the range of star movement models that exist, which cover both planetary orbits (for which, incidentally, Newtonian orbital mechanics provides only a reasonable approximation of movements) and models of galaxy formation making predictions that range billions of years into the future and deal with chaotic and highly complex systems.
Your comparison of climate and weather seems to be almost a deliberate faux-naive misunderstanding of the difference between the two, and boils down to an admission that you don't get why it is possible to be unable to predict the detail of a short-term event while being able to spot long-term trends. But this is fundamental to the whole of science. Quantum mechanics, statistics etc are all based on the concept that while individual events are unpredictable, the summed effect of those events is somewhat predictable.
Finally, your assertion that politics is insisting on AGW being C02 driven and real is just bizarre, the equivalent of saying politics is insisting that tobacco causes cancer. In case you hadn't noticed, political opinion is a long way from being monolithic, and there's quite a lot more rich and politically powerful people and companies whose short-term interests are best served by denying AGW than the converse. A few noisy NGOs and campaign groups don't really begin to compare with the power and wealth wielded by Exxon, for example.
It is simply delusional to assert that private enterprise is responsible for all technological developments and government always and everywhere holds it back. It is delusional because it doesn't recognise the facts. Take WWII for example: penicillin and the atom bomb were the largest scale scientific projects of the era (penicillin being the larger of the two) and they were both the outputs of a joint effort between government and private organisations. Oil exploration has worked in much the same way; many energy companies are either de facto or de jure parts of nation states.
Of course governments can balls things up. But so can private enterprises, and on just as colossal a scale. Or are you going to argue that the financial crisis were are currently experiencing would have been no worse (or perhaps better) if government had not regulated enterprise at all? If so, I'll leave you to your adulterated gin and bread and your 2lbs of carrots that turned out to actually weigh only 1lb and to be doused in carcinogenic pesticides. And your fabulous financial investments too.