J schools are the problem. They require no college level math or science to get a Journalism degree.
J schools are regular colleges or universities. You have to pass whatever your normal curriculum of college math/science requirements are to get a degree. More importantly, though, the same argument could be made ("why don't all journalists have to have training in...") for many topics that any given reporter may have no connection to. It would be nice to live in a world where all journalism grads have to have college-level training in math, bioscience, physics, economics, statistics, poli-sci, law, public policy, education, computer science, history, and a whole host of other things. But I can tell you from experience that journalism jobs barely pay enough to retire your loans for a regular four-year degree, not a decade-long stint to survey the whole of modern knowledge.
The burden is on newspapers to hire people who have a journalism background + some industry-relevant knowledge to report on that topic, not for all reporters to be schooled in all topics, even the ones they don't report on. At larger/better funded newspapers, you absolutely get that. At cheaper newspapers (or those like the Daily Mail where "news" is not really their main focus), you may have only one person to cover a wide range of topics, and that person may be badly out of their depth on some of them.
Bottom line: you get what you pay for, and you're far more likely to get good science reporting from the New York Times or The Economist than you will from the USA Today. Please keep this in mind when you're complaining about newspapers wanting you to pay for subscriptions and you say "I'll just get my news from someplace that doesn't charge me..."
If you can afford a $60k car, then you should be able to afford to pay for it with cash
Even if you do, you probably shouldn't pay cash. If you get a 3% APR loan on the car, and you can take the purchase money and invest it somewhere else for a 5% annual return, then it is foolish to pay cash.
Many people don't realize that sometimes, paying for things with loans even though you have the money to pay cash is the smart thing to do. Buying cars with cash is for rappers, lottery winners and other people who don't understand how to make their money work for them.
The Dead Hand, as you describe, was a semi-automatic system to protect against a decapitation first strike by the US. Basically, there was a NORAD-like bunker buried in a mountain with a hotline to the Kremlin, from which their nuclear launches were managed. Normally a nuclear launch would require separate authorizations from the head of state and a senior military commander. But if the line to the Kremlin went dead, and a network of seismic sensors detected events characteristic of nuclear detonations, control would be devolved to the bunker. To work around even a total communications disruption, they could then launch a set of rockets which would cruise over the USSR broadcasting a signal to all the surviving missile silos which they would interpret as a signal to launch.
If you're interested, read the book. It's fascinating.
The fact that you would even state such abject stupidity means you don't understand the simple, salient point that has long ago been made... so that a moron like you can stop wasting all our time in the here and now... we're here to get something done and you can take your sissy, pandering, liberal business-speak ethos and cram it into some corner that doesn't involve the rest of us.
Audiophiles? Spending half the price of what Bose charges for better quality makes one an audiophile?
I am not an "audiophile." Not even close, and I do gauche things like listen to MP3s (gasp). That being said, I have read all about how awful Bose speakers are in this thread, but I have not seen anybody offer an answer to this question:
What are the speakers that are much better than Bose and/or cheaper? I'm not trying to defend Bose, I just don't know much about "high end" audio gear and I'm curious.
Neither Walt Disney or Henry Ford are currently alive. Do their companies now stand for pro-nazi-ness?
No, but the overarching point is that if you let the opinions and views of the artist cloud your interpretation of the work, you will never enjoy anything because ultimately *everybody* out there has some belief you disagree with. You can refuse to put dollars in the pocket of someone you disagree with, fine. But in general it's like refusing to read the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson was a slaveholder.
Some of the best advice I was ever given was "trust the art, not the artist." Artists are stupid people like everyone else and will always break your heart if you expect them to be as awesome as you want them to be. Leave them out of it and you'll have a much easier time enjoying art for what it is.
having your government saying "how high" on the way up when Washington DC says "jump"
Neither the governments of Iraq or Afghanistan seem to care in the slightest what the US government wants them to do. Hamid Karzai in particular seems to take great joy in jabbing the US whenever possible. Historically speaking, the governments of other US-reconstructed countries (Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.) haven't lacked in independence either.
Clearly, nobody would seriously want to be invaded by the US and "reconstructed"... but leaving behind post-invasion puppet governments is not something the US is well known for.
Of course there is. You just need to tape a note to the laptop asking the thief to compile and install it after doing a code review to make sure it's trusted, and submitting any code patches necessary back to the developers.
You have the corporation with thousands of times your financial resources over a barrel and can dictate terms to them!
Good to hear you know all about what my job and industry are, but... yes, your sarcasm aside, I do work in a technology industry field where talent is differentiated. I don't have my employer over a barrel, and the company will survive just fine without me. But I have promotions and bonuses to show for my performance, and I would prefer not to trade that in for making the same wage (minus union dues) as everyone else in my group, regardless of performance. I know it's crazy and radical, but I actually *like* being paid based on my performance, and I believe that I can go work somewhere else if my company doesn't want to pay men what I'm worth. Yes, I know, crazy and fascist and so forth.
Even actors and writers are unionized... Or do SAG-AFTRA and the Writer's Guilds of America not exist in your universe?
Fair point, but I think it actually proves my point rather than yours. Speaking from the perspective of having many friends who are in those unions, 95% of actors, directors and other SAG/AFTRA/Actors' Equity members *are* undifferentiated. For example, only a tiny fraction of actors work for anything other than scale. Except for the top 1-2% of working actors (think about how many tens of thousands of film, TV and theater actors there are vs. how many Tom Cruises there are), there is no skill difference when you are playing an extra or Spear Carrier #5, so it's useful for you to have a union to prevent the employers from driving the market for extras and bit players down to "free."
ignoring the boot of the upper class on your throat
Please, PLEASE do unionize. Once that happens, I can be done once and for all with the Slashbot complaints that IT workers need to unionize... once the first downsizing comes and they realize that they're getting laid off because part of being in a union means that whoever has been there the longest will keep their jobs, regardless of whether they are any good at their jobs or not.
Unions are for people in professions in which any worker cannot be differentiated from the next based on skill, so they have no individual bargaining power and need to band together. Then they reward seniority and loyalty to the union, since skill or job performance is unimportant. If you think you work in an industry where employees have differentiated skills and have some leverage to bargain with employers, you do NOT want a union.
How come management needs nice big bonuses in order to stay when labor is supposed to accept 25-30% wage cuts without complaint?
Because the "management" in this case were (at least purportedly) experts in turning around failing companies, who were hired to try to fix Hostess, and who could easily have gone to work somewhere else. The truck drivers? Where else were they going to go?
It's sad to say, but in this case as in pretty much all cases in the real world, what you get paid is not related to how well you do your job, or what you "deserve" to get paid, but is based on how replaceable you are. And people who drive bread trucks and load or unload them are generally pretty replaceable.
So, no, the crash of 2008 wasn't due to regulation, it was due to fraud. And no one went to jail.
In my experience, any explanation for a calamity that casts blame on only one "side" is usually incomplete or overly simplistic.
The best explanation I have ever heard of the crash came in NPR's "Planet Money" reporting series on the crash, specifically their Peabody-winning show "The Giant Pool of Money." To give you the short version:
Global private investors and government-backed investment funds got greedy. They liked US treasury bills for being stable, but they hated the low interest rates. They yelled at Wall Street banks to give them some new investment option that was stable like T-bills but had a higher rate of return.
Wall Street banks got "creative." Mortgages were historically very secure (in aggregate) and people paid more money on mortgage interest than T-bills paid. So they figured out a way to split up these mortgages into collective batches and sell them to investors. Investors loved these and had an insatiable appetite to buy them from Wall Street banks - but before too long, they ran out of batches of 100% stable, well-qualified mortgages to "securitize" and sell.
Wall Street banks wanted mortgage lending rules relaxed so they had more mortgages to securitize. This coincided perfectly with the Bush Administration's desire to encourage home ownership, since homeowners tend to be more stable since they are more invested in the economy... oh, and they also tend to vote Republican. So together - no arm twisting by Wall Street needed - regulations were relaxed on lending standards, basically peeing on the grave of Glass-Steagall after it was killed (under the Clinton administration FWIW).
More people can now get mortgages, which means more people can now buy houses. More buyers for a relatively fixed commodity = everybody's house price goes up! Millions of home-owning Americans get rich on paper. Some get greedy, buying multiple houses as investments. Others get greedy by selling their current homes and buying houses they can't afford with the gains. Still other Americans consider entering the home ownership market for the first time, not because they can afford it but because they think they'll get rich by selling their house before they ever have to really pay for it. Other Americans get greedy doing big cash-out refinancings, ARMs or other dangerous mortgages because they think housing prices will never come back and bite them... long story short, there are few totally "innocent" home buyers who got badly caught in this... most who found themselves overleveraged were greedy or foolish in some way or another.
Of course, the mortgage brokers who sold these loans (and the real estate agents selling the houses) were greedy too. They had their own incentives to bend the rules as much as possible to put all these people into houses who wanted to be in them.
Then it all falls apart. The best minds on Wall Street had built statistical models - based on historical data - saying "well qualified home owners only default on X% of mortgages, even these more relaxed mortgage buyers should only default Y% of the time... so we package up mostly good mortgages with some of the iffy ones and the investment as a whole is still very secure." Oops. It turns out that as prices peaked, many of these iffy mortgages showed up as way more risky than expected, and they began to default at several times higher than the historical maximum ratios.
Big banks held LOTS of these securitized mortgages which seemed safe according to their best data modelling but had failed to account for the highly relaxed standards PLUS the effects of a housing bubble where you had people getting into the market who never should have.
The shit REALLY hits the fan. Big banks - like the ones who have all my money and your
he was making real complaints pointing out real problems and people thought it was funny.
And - as much as I loved George Carlin - it was also real bullshit. George would have been the first to admit that he was just a comedian and didn't really lift a finger to try to effect real change - it wasn't his expertise or his interest. It's much easier to make fun of the world's absurdities than it is to actually wrangle them into real-world change.
If you never vote for anyone, then you can just complain about everyone forever. That's a chickenshit stance. If you want a real moral high ground to fight from, start with the person(s) you actually did something to get elected, and complain about the delta from there.
All apps should run on all devices OS agnostic... With rare exceptions everything should run.
I guess what you're saying is that all mobile or desktop OSes should include emulators for all other OSes. While that's an admirable if fanciful goal for desktop OSes, it is absolutely a non-starter for mobile devices.
Imagine an iOS device (or vice versa) that has Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Bada and Symbian compatibility. First, the cost to license all these OSes will be prohibitive. Second, there is the consideration of eating up your precious ROM space with hundreds of MB or GB with additional OSes that a consumer may never need. Oh, and do you really want to spend the time testing and certifying all the new OS updates from other OS vendors on your device?
After all that, let's start talking about the differences between mobile OSes. An Android app will let the app send a SMS in the background without the user having to approve it manually; an iOS app will not. If I emulate Android on iOS, what happens? An Android app can access the name of the wireless carrier on the device and decide whether to function or not, or which features to provide; an iOS app will not - what happens here?
Even then we start to get into differences in mobile devices. iOS devices have drivers only for certain mobile chipsets and baseband/firmware versions - you can't abstract those via VM/emulators to other devices or vice versa.
P.S. you suggested that all mobile devices should run CP/M applications. Congratulations on being the first person in the history of the Internet to ask for that. I agree with you. Also, I should have a pony but for some reason nobody has made that happen either.
It shouldn't surprise anyone, it's simple supply and demand: which of these fluids is most profitable to produce?
If gas was $.50 per gallon at the pump and milk was $6.00 per gallon, ExxonMobil would be busy shutting down oil wells and planting them over with cattle feed. If potable water ever becomes expensive and natural gas is cheap, expect to see these same companies "fracking" water out of subterranean aquifers. That's just how a free market works, for better or worse.
I can see that what you're saying comes from the right place. But the way you say it is far too broad and doesn't admit for the possibility of meaningful distinctions between types or degrees of social "problems" or that some issues are personal "issues" rather than "disabilities."
For example, we can probably agree that society should assist or support those with severe personality disorders. But what about different degrees of antisocial behavior that result in a person having no social contacts? In its most extreme case, does that mean that I'm entitled to welfare checks for being an asshole with no friends? And where do you draw the line?
I've never found a problem sending pictures to people, even groups of people. Why do you feel you need to surrender all your privacy instead of just emailing a photo?
This is something a lot of Slashdotters - especially the "privacy" tinfoil hat crowd, not that I'm saying that includes you - fail to grasp about the popularity of Facebook. The fundamental tradeoff of social networking sites is that you willingly give up some of your privacy - on the information you choose to make public - in exchange for making the information you consume from others less obtrusive.
For example: I use Facebook and have accumulated around 200+ friends, ranging from best friends to interesting people I met at a conference or my child's preschool. If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos. I would blacklist them all from my mailbox to avoid hundreds of spams a day and would only communicate with my very closest friends.
But with Facebook (or Google+ if anyone else I knew actually used it), people can post as much or as little as they like and I can consume that content as much or as little as I like. For you, the experience all depends on how often you want to check your social networking site. Many of my friends are Facebook-obsessed zombies, and they can check and post to FB all day, commenting back and forth all day on each others' cute cat pictures. For me, I check FB every week or so when I'm bored, and it will only show me updates from the friends I correspond with the most - but if I have time to kill and want to see what my freshman year roommate is doing, I can keep reading to see. Or if I'm going to meet a friend I haven't seen in a while, I can skim through their profile to catch up. At any rate, I have a feed of "social" information that I can pay as much or as little attention to as I like, and can easily keep in touch with a much broader range of people than I otherwise would have if I had to restrict the list to just the people I wanted to get regular e-mails from.
Clearly COBOL will never die. As I recall, the civilization of Battelstar Galactica had an entire religion devoted to the "Lords of COBOL." Not just the colonists, but I'm pretty sure I saw in one of the deleted scenes an older-model Cylon Raider trailing punch cards from a hull breach.
An appropriate system would have narrowly defined reasons for requiring proof, not a blanket requirement of everyone.
I don't understand. How do you verify that anyone has a right to work in the US without getting them to provide proof? Do you only ask people for proof if they have an accent or something?
i realize wired networks cost money to maintain but cell towers don't cost as much as they used to
[Citation needed]
I'm not arguing that most cellular contracts aren't overpriced but your assertion above has no basis in reality. Cellular companies (at least in the US) have to spend billions of dollars on new spectrum to deploy new technologies - e.g. the combined $12B AT&T and Verizon spent on 700 MHz frequencies for LTE, or the $2.2B Sprint is planning to spend on buying ClearWire's 2.5 GHz spectrum. On top of that, 2G => 3G => 4G means that you have to buy more wired backhaul to every single cell site - all thousands of them per carrier - to support the higher data rates.
Cell carriers definitely make more money on smartphones - but it's because you're using voice less (= higher margin) + data more (= bad margin on most unlimited plans but great margins on metered plans), not because the cost of their infrastructures have gone down at all.
RMS lost his credibility in trying to define anybody else's lexicon with his irritating, self-aggrandizing "GNU/Linux" campaign. You can use his approved NewSpeak if you'd like, but I think the arrogance of anyone trying to tell me "Words to Avoid" is more likely to make me reject their suggestions out of hand.
Well, thank goodness we finally have that sorted out. Has anyone informed the Supreme Court that "walterbyrd" on Slashdot has determined the root of this multinational, multi-claim nest of lawsuits involving hundreds of patents between Google/Motorola, Samsung and Apple is that "only Apple is to blame?" I'm pretty sure we can just put this whole thing to bed now.
Are you sure it's 200 billion? The author you cite seems to have thought it was $30 billion. Wait, no, it was $200 billion. Ah, sorry, now it's $300 billion. Maybe it's inflation?
Not saying that the American public wasn't shortchanged by the Baby Bells - back in the day when they actually existed, I never encountered a more anticompetitive group of oligarchists in all my career. But let's not necessarily keep repeating this "OMG telcos stole $200 billion" meme without a little more quantification and justification.
Slashdot Mirror
J schools are the problem. They require no college level math or science to get a Journalism degree.
J schools are regular colleges or universities. You have to pass whatever your normal curriculum of college math/science requirements are to get a degree. More importantly, though, the same argument could be made ("why don't all journalists have to have training in...") for many topics that any given reporter may have no connection to. It would be nice to live in a world where all journalism grads have to have college-level training in math, bioscience, physics, economics, statistics, poli-sci, law, public policy, education, computer science, history, and a whole host of other things. But I can tell you from experience that journalism jobs barely pay enough to retire your loans for a regular four-year degree, not a decade-long stint to survey the whole of modern knowledge.
The burden is on newspapers to hire people who have a journalism background + some industry-relevant knowledge to report on that topic, not for all reporters to be schooled in all topics, even the ones they don't report on. At larger/better funded newspapers, you absolutely get that. At cheaper newspapers (or those like the Daily Mail where "news" is not really their main focus), you may have only one person to cover a wide range of topics, and that person may be badly out of their depth on some of them.
Bottom line: you get what you pay for, and you're far more likely to get good science reporting from the New York Times or The Economist than you will from the USA Today. Please keep this in mind when you're complaining about newspapers wanting you to pay for subscriptions and you say "I'll just get my news from someplace that doesn't charge me..."
If you can afford a $60k car, then you should be able to afford to pay for it with cash
Even if you do, you probably shouldn't pay cash. If you get a 3% APR loan on the car, and you can take the purchase money and invest it somewhere else for a 5% annual return, then it is foolish to pay cash.
Many people don't realize that sometimes, paying for things with loans even though you have the money to pay cash is the smart thing to do. Buying cars with cash is for rappers, lottery winners and other people who don't understand how to make their money work for them.
The Dead Hand, as you describe, was a semi-automatic system to protect against a decapitation first strike by the US. Basically, there was a NORAD-like bunker buried in a mountain with a hotline to the Kremlin, from which their nuclear launches were managed. Normally a nuclear launch would require separate authorizations from the head of state and a senior military commander. But if the line to the Kremlin went dead, and a network of seismic sensors detected events characteristic of nuclear detonations, control would be devolved to the bunker. To work around even a total communications disruption, they could then launch a set of rockets which would cruise over the USSR broadcasting a signal to all the surviving missile silos which they would interpret as a signal to launch.
If you're interested, read the book. It's fascinating.
The fact that you would even state such abject stupidity means you don't understand the simple, salient point that has long ago been made ... so that a moron like you can stop wasting all our time in the here and now ... we're here to get something done and you can take your sissy, pandering, liberal business-speak ethos and cram it into some corner that doesn't involve the rest of us.
Linus?
I used to have a boss who would say "shut up" and "you're fired" in meetings ... He was a great guy actually. Brilliant and not mean.
Please do explain further.
Audiophiles? Spending half the price of what Bose charges for better quality makes one an audiophile?
I am not an "audiophile." Not even close, and I do gauche things like listen to MP3s (gasp). That being said, I have read all about how awful Bose speakers are in this thread, but I have not seen anybody offer an answer to this question:
What are the speakers that are much better than Bose and/or cheaper? I'm not trying to defend Bose, I just don't know much about "high end" audio gear and I'm curious.
Neither Walt Disney or Henry Ford are currently alive. Do their companies now stand for pro-nazi-ness?
No, but the overarching point is that if you let the opinions and views of the artist cloud your interpretation of the work, you will never enjoy anything because ultimately *everybody* out there has some belief you disagree with. You can refuse to put dollars in the pocket of someone you disagree with, fine. But in general it's like refusing to read the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson was a slaveholder.
Some of the best advice I was ever given was "trust the art, not the artist." Artists are stupid people like everyone else and will always break your heart if you expect them to be as awesome as you want them to be. Leave them out of it and you'll have a much easier time enjoying art for what it is.
having your government saying "how high" on the way up when Washington DC says "jump"
Neither the governments of Iraq or Afghanistan seem to care in the slightest what the US government wants them to do. Hamid Karzai in particular seems to take great joy in jabbing the US whenever possible. Historically speaking, the governments of other US-reconstructed countries (Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc.) haven't lacked in independence either.
Clearly, nobody would seriously want to be invaded by the US and "reconstructed" ... but leaving behind post-invasion puppet governments is not something the US is well known for.
No, there's no good Linux HW tracking software
Of course there is. You just need to tape a note to the laptop asking the thief to compile and install it after doing a code review to make sure it's trusted, and submitting any code patches necessary back to the developers.
You have the corporation with thousands of times your financial resources over a barrel and can dictate terms to them!
Good to hear you know all about what my job and industry are, but... yes, your sarcasm aside, I do work in a technology industry field where talent is differentiated. I don't have my employer over a barrel, and the company will survive just fine without me. But I have promotions and bonuses to show for my performance, and I would prefer not to trade that in for making the same wage (minus union dues) as everyone else in my group, regardless of performance. I know it's crazy and radical, but I actually *like* being paid based on my performance, and I believe that I can go work somewhere else if my company doesn't want to pay men what I'm worth. Yes, I know, crazy and fascist and so forth.
Even actors and writers are unionized ... Or do SAG-AFTRA and the Writer's Guilds of America not exist in your universe?
Fair point, but I think it actually proves my point rather than yours. Speaking from the perspective of having many friends who are in those unions, 95% of actors, directors and other SAG/AFTRA/Actors' Equity members *are* undifferentiated. For example, only a tiny fraction of actors work for anything other than scale. Except for the top 1-2% of working actors (think about how many tens of thousands of film, TV and theater actors there are vs. how many Tom Cruises there are), there is no skill difference when you are playing an extra or Spear Carrier #5, so it's useful for you to have a union to prevent the employers from driving the market for extras and bit players down to "free."
ignoring the boot of the upper class on your throat
Please, PLEASE do unionize. Once that happens, I can be done once and for all with the Slashbot complaints that IT workers need to unionize... once the first downsizing comes and they realize that they're getting laid off because part of being in a union means that whoever has been there the longest will keep their jobs, regardless of whether they are any good at their jobs or not.
Unions are for people in professions in which any worker cannot be differentiated from the next based on skill, so they have no individual bargaining power and need to band together. Then they reward seniority and loyalty to the union, since skill or job performance is unimportant. If you think you work in an industry where employees have differentiated skills and have some leverage to bargain with employers, you do NOT want a union.
How come management needs nice big bonuses in order to stay when labor is supposed to accept 25-30% wage cuts without complaint?
Because the "management" in this case were (at least purportedly) experts in turning around failing companies, who were hired to try to fix Hostess, and who could easily have gone to work somewhere else. The truck drivers? Where else were they going to go?
It's sad to say, but in this case as in pretty much all cases in the real world, what you get paid is not related to how well you do your job, or what you "deserve" to get paid, but is based on how replaceable you are. And people who drive bread trucks and load or unload them are generally pretty replaceable.
So, no, the crash of 2008 wasn't due to regulation, it was due to fraud. And no one went to jail.
In my experience, any explanation for a calamity that casts blame on only one "side" is usually incomplete or overly simplistic.
The best explanation I have ever heard of the crash came in NPR's "Planet Money" reporting series on the crash, specifically their Peabody-winning show "The Giant Pool of Money." To give you the short version:
he was making real complaints pointing out real problems and people thought it was funny.
And - as much as I loved George Carlin - it was also real bullshit. George would have been the first to admit that he was just a comedian and didn't really lift a finger to try to effect real change - it wasn't his expertise or his interest. It's much easier to make fun of the world's absurdities than it is to actually wrangle them into real-world change.
If you never vote for anyone, then you can just complain about everyone forever. That's a chickenshit stance. If you want a real moral high ground to fight from, start with the person(s) you actually did something to get elected, and complain about the delta from there.
All apps should run on all devices OS agnostic ... With rare exceptions everything should run.
I guess what you're saying is that all mobile or desktop OSes should include emulators for all other OSes. While that's an admirable if fanciful goal for desktop OSes, it is absolutely a non-starter for mobile devices.
Imagine an iOS device (or vice versa) that has Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Bada and Symbian compatibility. First, the cost to license all these OSes will be prohibitive. Second, there is the consideration of eating up your precious ROM space with hundreds of MB or GB with additional OSes that a consumer may never need. Oh, and do you really want to spend the time testing and certifying all the new OS updates from other OS vendors on your device?
After all that, let's start talking about the differences between mobile OSes. An Android app will let the app send a SMS in the background without the user having to approve it manually; an iOS app will not. If I emulate Android on iOS, what happens? An Android app can access the name of the wireless carrier on the device and decide whether to function or not, or which features to provide; an iOS app will not - what happens here?
Even then we start to get into differences in mobile devices. iOS devices have drivers only for certain mobile chipsets and baseband/firmware versions - you can't abstract those via VM/emulators to other devices or vice versa.
P.S. you suggested that all mobile devices should run CP/M applications. Congratulations on being the first person in the history of the Internet to ask for that. I agree with you. Also, I should have a pony but for some reason nobody has made that happen either.
It shouldn't surprise anyone, it's simple supply and demand: which of these fluids is most profitable to produce?
If gas was $.50 per gallon at the pump and milk was $6.00 per gallon, ExxonMobil would be busy shutting down oil wells and planting them over with cattle feed. If potable water ever becomes expensive and natural gas is cheap, expect to see these same companies "fracking" water out of subterranean aquifers. That's just how a free market works, for better or worse.
Social problems *are* disabilities.
I can see that what you're saying comes from the right place. But the way you say it is far too broad and doesn't admit for the possibility of meaningful distinctions between types or degrees of social "problems" or that some issues are personal "issues" rather than "disabilities."
For example, we can probably agree that society should assist or support those with severe personality disorders. But what about different degrees of antisocial behavior that result in a person having no social contacts? In its most extreme case, does that mean that I'm entitled to welfare checks for being an asshole with no friends? And where do you draw the line?
I've never found a problem sending pictures to people, even groups of people. Why do you feel you need to surrender all your privacy instead of just emailing a photo?
This is something a lot of Slashdotters - especially the "privacy" tinfoil hat crowd, not that I'm saying that includes you - fail to grasp about the popularity of Facebook. The fundamental tradeoff of social networking sites is that you willingly give up some of your privacy - on the information you choose to make public - in exchange for making the information you consume from others less obtrusive.
For example: I use Facebook and have accumulated around 200+ friends, ranging from best friends to interesting people I met at a conference or my child's preschool. If each one of those people e-mailed me every time they had a photo to share of their lunch, or some cause they wanted to support, or some other piece of datum they felt like sharing with the world, it would be chaos. I would blacklist them all from my mailbox to avoid hundreds of spams a day and would only communicate with my very closest friends.
But with Facebook (or Google+ if anyone else I knew actually used it), people can post as much or as little as they like and I can consume that content as much or as little as I like. For you, the experience all depends on how often you want to check your social networking site. Many of my friends are Facebook-obsessed zombies, and they can check and post to FB all day, commenting back and forth all day on each others' cute cat pictures. For me, I check FB every week or so when I'm bored, and it will only show me updates from the friends I correspond with the most - but if I have time to kill and want to see what my freshman year roommate is doing, I can keep reading to see. Or if I'm going to meet a friend I haven't seen in a while, I can skim through their profile to catch up. At any rate, I have a feed of "social" information that I can pay as much or as little attention to as I like, and can easily keep in touch with a much broader range of people than I otherwise would have if I had to restrict the list to just the people I wanted to get regular e-mails from.
Clearly COBOL will never die. As I recall, the civilization of Battelstar Galactica had an entire religion devoted to the "Lords of COBOL." Not just the colonists, but I'm pretty sure I saw in one of the deleted scenes an older-model Cylon Raider trailing punch cards from a hull breach.
An appropriate system would have narrowly defined reasons for requiring proof, not a blanket requirement of everyone.
I don't understand. How do you verify that anyone has a right to work in the US without getting them to provide proof? Do you only ask people for proof if they have an accent or something?
i realize wired networks cost money to maintain but cell towers don't cost as much as they used to
[Citation needed]
I'm not arguing that most cellular contracts aren't overpriced but your assertion above has no basis in reality. Cellular companies (at least in the US) have to spend billions of dollars on new spectrum to deploy new technologies - e.g. the combined $12B AT&T and Verizon spent on 700 MHz frequencies for LTE, or the $2.2B Sprint is planning to spend on buying ClearWire's 2.5 GHz spectrum. On top of that, 2G => 3G => 4G means that you have to buy more wired backhaul to every single cell site - all thousands of them per carrier - to support the higher data rates.
Cell carriers definitely make more money on smartphones - but it's because you're using voice less (= higher margin) + data more (= bad margin on most unlimited plans but great margins on metered plans), not because the cost of their infrastructures have gone down at all.
Then see Words to Avoid [gnu.org]
RMS lost his credibility in trying to define anybody else's lexicon with his irritating, self-aggrandizing "GNU/Linux" campaign. You can use his approved NewSpeak if you'd like, but I think the arrogance of anyone trying to tell me "Words to Avoid" is more likely to make me reject their suggestions out of hand.
What airline has a dress code for First Class? I have flown in the First cabin on United plenty of times wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
No, only Apple is to blame.
Well, thank goodness we finally have that sorted out. Has anyone informed the Supreme Court that "walterbyrd" on Slashdot has determined the root of this multinational, multi-claim nest of lawsuits involving hundreds of patents between Google/Motorola, Samsung and Apple is that "only Apple is to blame?" I'm pretty sure we can just put this whole thing to bed now.
They kept the 200 billion we gave them
Are you sure it's 200 billion? The author you cite seems to have thought it was $30 billion. Wait, no, it was $200 billion. Ah, sorry, now it's $300 billion. Maybe it's inflation?
Not saying that the American public wasn't shortchanged by the Baby Bells - back in the day when they actually existed, I never encountered a more anticompetitive group of oligarchists in all my career. But let's not necessarily keep repeating this "OMG telcos stole $200 billion" meme without a little more quantification and justification.