The emperor has risen. (And I don't just mean this one example - the Executive has been ignoring congress a lot lately.)
If Obama could ignore Congress, he would have:
-closed Guantanimo (closure blocked by "bipartisan"--but mostly Republican--majority in House and Senate removing funding for any transfer, as well as forbidding the transfer to anywhere inside the US) -passed a stimulus bill that actually invested the majority of its money into job creation, rather than half into tax breaks for the rich (a "compromise" made with Republicans to keep them from stonewalling more than they already did) -given us a public healcare option (blocked by thirty-nine Republicans plus Joe Frickin' Lieberman whose state houses the headquarters of most major health insurance companies) -written a banking reform law with teeth (again, rendered toothless by forty Republicans)
Politically, our biggest problem is that we have a two-party system, where one party is totally, openly evil and corrupt, and the other is slightly less evil and corrupt, but their non-evil tendencies are easily blocked because the evil one thinks nothing of playing chicken with the budget, the government, even the entire economy in order to get what they want, which is apparently more cash giveaways for their rich campaign donors.
Yes, I'm aware of that project, but what apps would it run? Even java apps would need some tweaking, I suspect.
Most Android apps are run on the Dalvik VM; the only ones that aren't have been compiled to native code, and those from my understanding already need to be ported from machine to machine (to take advantage of the different GPUs) as it is
What would an AMD tablet run? Surely they don't think they're going to sell a lot of tablets running Windows 7? What truly mature, tablet-ready OS runs on Intel? (And I'm not talking about Parsimonious Palembang or some other future Ubuntu release -- what's available in, say, June?)
This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to AMD. AMD has already bet on x86-64 scaling down to tablet form factors; that is, after all, the entire point of the Bobcat architecture. Later this year when Bobcat transitions to 28 nm we'll see if it pans out; even if it doesn't there's always the 20nm transition in late 2012, and that's sure to lower power requirements enough to make an x86 tablet viable.
At the same time, it's obvious that there really isn't any room in the ARM SoC market for new entrants*. NVIDIA is already selling Tegra 2 SoCs for a cut-rate $25 a chip, and those are going into already too expensive Android tablets. The message is clear: the only way to make a profit with ARM chips is in volume, and there's no way a new entrant like AMD is going to ramp to significant volume to even cover production and R&D costs before their own Bobcat architecture has made the transition to 28-20nm and they're basically competing with themselves.
*- Yes, I know AMD wouldn't be entirely a new entrant, as they had an ARM license as recently as a few years ago, which they subsequently sold off, but by this point they'd essentially be new entrants all over again
How about you legalise meth? And every other bloody drug that the black economy makes so much money on.
Marijuana, or maybe even cocaine, could possibly be made legal, and it might even be a good idea. Legalizing meth or heroin, on the other hand, would be like "legalizing" ricin or anthrax. They're used as drugs, but they are really dangerous, toxic substances that have no place in general circulation.
Hell yes it's a bad thing! When a large corporation can use a shrink-wrap EULA to force you into binding arbitration (read: a "court" they have literally bought and paid for), you will never again see that corporation bother with proper customer service. Remember, according to Sony you don't actually own your PS3; by signing up for the PSN, you are effectively renting that machine from Sony. From here on out, the customer is always wrong: our kangaroo court says so!
The problem is that it is never a "well funded crime kingpin" and most often a 15-30 year old or an (ex) employee that noticed some gaping, obvious security flaw. Data breaches like this are rarely the work of huge "cyber gangs" and mostly the work of individuals who noticed some huge flaw that Sony had. The crime kingpins wouldn't bother with something like this because it is a whole lot easier to sell botnets with 3nl@rg3 y0ur p3n15 spam.
Twenty years ago you may have been right, but these days botnets are a multi-million dollar operation, underground black markets sell botnet time just like Amazon sells computer cycles, and cyber-gangs sell credit card numbers for a few dollars a pop. Cracking isn't the sole province of bored kids typing away from their parents' basement anymore; it's an industry, staffed by professionals.
If h.264 stays cheap forever, then Google has won. If People switch to WebM, then Google has won. Either way, their investment pays back; and people wonder how anybody can ever make money with free software.
For argument's sake, Facebook has 500 million active users and the NY Times, supposedly the grand-daddy of all (American) newspapers has: 100k? Hahahahahahahahaha.....
Facebook is free. I'm sure there are more than 100k people going to the free NYT site.
Unfortunately, the courts do not agree with you. It specifically said that congress did not give the FCC authority over the internet in the way that net neutrality is concerned. Don't confuse a life guard who has authority over a pool areas with the cops who have authority over the city or county. They are not the same.
But it does; it just didn't have the power under Title I, where the Bush FCC decided to place the ISPs. See, the FCC decided almost a decade ago that ISPs weren't Title II common carriers, like phones or mail carriers, which require a certain level of scrutiny to prevent the company from interfering with the communications of private individuals in violation of the First Amendment. They instead decided to regulate ISPs as Title I information providers, like a newspaper or a TV station, who are free to do whatever they want on "their" networks because they're not handling other people's communications so much as distributing information to people. In other words, the FCC decided that the Internet is not a network of people talking to each other, but rather a content distribution network where the ISP gives information to its customers.
Back in 2004 this was appealed, and it was ruled that the FCC can choose to do this (even if IMO it makes no sense), but that they were free to change their minds at any time. Now they have done so, and have decided to grant First Amendment protections to people who access the Internet through private networks (that is, everyone). This is what Republicans object to, because in their mind the FCC should keep thinking of ISPs as top-down information distribution nodes rather than neutral information carriers.
Linux doesn't have to beat proprietary software on the desktop any more, because the desktop has become largely irrelevant. "This thing you want to do only works on Windows/proprietary environment" has become almost anachronistic.
So you're saying Steam is irrelevant and anachronistic?
It's about a constitutional power given to congress specifically being usurped by the executive and the one thing that congress usually unites on no matter what's at stake, is the retention of their powers.
Congress created the FCC in order to regulate telecommunications which cross state lines, which does in fact include the internet. Under the Bush administration, the FCC moved to reclassify ISPs as largely unregulated companies, because the Bush administration loved its AT&T campaign contributions and wanted more.
The Obama campaign, however, was paid for far more by small donors (read: not corporations), so he is much less beholden to them (even if he does seem to have a love affair with the banking sector, mostly due to Goldman Sachs being his second-biggest donor). This is why he is willing to go to bat for the people more often, like trying to extend First Amendment protections to the Internet, than Bush was.
Republicans, of course, are not funded by the people, and so they have no interest in what is best for the country. Their funding comes from large, multinational corporations, so they will do what is best for those corporations and assist them in squeezing money from US pockets via tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation of large corporations, and funneling the profit overseas via "free trade" agreements with countries with nothing to offer but cheap labor, like China.
HP dmz1 I believe is basically a netbook. Uses the AMD Fusion processor.
I have one of these, and I love it. It cost less than half what my brother paid for his Envy 14, and it does almost everything I want it to while I'm on the bus or traveling around. 3.5 pounds, 11.6-inch screen, surprisingly comfortable keyboard, all for around $400.
IMO the real reason netbooks have lost is because Atom sucks so hard that it needs separate dedicated hardware to even play HD video. Netbooks were being compared to real computers, and kept coming up short. The new AMD Zacate-based netbooks (or notbooks or whatever you want to call them) are what netbooks should have been in 2009-2010: usable performance, paired with superior battery life and mobility. Nobody expects something that looks like a laptop from 2011 but performs like a laptop from 2002; it just feels slow.
In contrast, the iPad could get away with dirt-poor performance because everyone was comparing it to a smartphone or an iPod Touch. These devices also have dirt-poor performance, but that's okay because it's what you expected from something so small. It's all about managing expectations and expected markets: if you think of the iPad as a really small and lightweight computer then you'll be disappointed by how slow and limited it is, but if you think of it as a giant iPod then it comes out looking pretty good. The difference between netbooks and iPads basically comes down to the former trying to buy a laptop and being disappointed by the Atom's sluggishness, and the later trying to buy an mp3 player and being surprised at everything else it can do.
Uh, yeah, except the hedge has so many holes in it that people can continue coming in to drink the lemonade for free. If the Times notices that someone has had too many drinks this visit, they just have to change their hat and they can start drinking again.
And yet people still give out free samples at supermarkets (and especially Costco).
Look, the point of this isn't to get the 0.1-1% of people who will go into the garden attempting to steal the lawn ornaments; it's to entice the other 99% to maybe kick in a few bucks for a membership, and make some extra money that way, while still not keeping people out who just want to visit. It's an intriguing idea, and I'd love to see data over the next few months/year about how well it does. If it goes well, the NYTimes may have just found the ideal balance for attracting customers and still getting a critical mass of those people to pay; if not, well, they've still got the ad revenue.
As I've linked above, Obama has kept far more promises than he's broken
That's the most depressing part of all. Obama can keep most of his campaign promises and STILL have a negligible effect on the course of the country. The take home message from this is: It doesn't matter who you vote for. It doesn't matter what they promise. The rich will keep getting richer, and the poor will keep getting poorer. The justice system will continue to favor the rich and powerful, and your representatives will continue to advance interests other than your own.
The take home message is this:
1) The first thing we need to do to allow any possibility of reform in this country is to remove all the Republicans from office. 2) The second thing we need to do to allow any meaningful reform to be passed is to remove many, maybe even most, of the Democrats from office. 3) The third thing we need to do to allow meaningful reform laws to remain in force is to keep 1) and 2) up until Samuel Alito and the rest of the five-member conservative activist bloc of the Supreme Court to die of old age and be replaced by judges who actually plan on following the Constitution and making the world a better place.
Congress has forbidden Obama from releasing Guantanimo detainees in the US
Good thing Guantanamo isn't in the US. Nothing stopping us from saying "Fuck it, they're Castro's problem now."
Oh, yes, really smart move: release some of the most dangerous, radically anti-American masters of asymmetric warfare into an anti-American country a few miles off our Gulf coast. Brilliant idea.
Amazing how all that isn't enough to make any sort of significant difference. Obama campaigned on hope and change, but he just ended up proving how broken American politics are.
And, concerning Guantanamo, it doesn't cost anything to just unlock the doors and shut off the lights.
As I've linked above, Obama has kept far more promises than he's broken, and of the ones he's broken the majority of those are because either the Legislature or the Supreme Court has intervened on behalf of the special interests.
And it does in fact cost money to unlock the doors and shut off the lights at Guantanimo. First off you have to do something with the prisoners: either you have to move them to another prison (which only perpetuates the problem) or you have to release them. Congress has forbidden Obama from releasing Guantanimo detainees in the US, and they have largely prevented him from releasing them to other countries. Even worse, Congress has even forbidden Obama from relocating Guantanimo detainees to other prisons; in other words, Congress has basically forbidden Obama from doing anything with the detainees other than keep them at Guantanimo forever.
What is sad is the GOP on the candidate and national level is still so inept and scared of being called racist they don't look good to beat the most blatantly corrupt president of post-WW2 America.
No, it's clear that, when it comes to Democrats and Republicans, the Republicans are far more corrupt, and are more apt to sell out to corporate influence; at least Democrats take money from--and listen to--worker groups, environmentalists and scientists on occasion. Of course, that's sort of like saying that a black hole is denser than a neutron star; sure, it's technically an accurate statement, but I sure wouldn't want to try to live on either one.
Both parties are to blame for this mess; the Democrats just put a better spin on their corruption. You'll notice fuck-all was done about Wall Street during the two years the Democrats had control of the White House _and_ both houses of Congress.
The financial regulatory bill exists, and was in fact passed into law. Like the health care bill, however, it was fillabustered into near-ineffectiveness; most of the big reforms were bargained out of the bill in order to get a single Republican to agree to not fillabuster.
The essential problem in American politics is that most of the money comes from large donors, eg. corporations and the very wealthy. Small donations from individuals are so rare that it's actually historically relevant that Barak Obama received fully half his 2008 campaign money from small donors, making him one of the first presidents in recent memory actually bought and paid for, at least halfway, by the people. This explains why he has to date kept more than three times the number of campaign promises than he's broken (though he would have been able to keep more of them if Congress didn't, for example, block funding for the closing of Guantanimo) which for an American politician is shockingly true to his word.
We should coin a law about this: The products competitiveness and usefulness for the consumer in the United States is directly proportional to the number of lawsuits filed against it to keep it off the market.
Er, wait, doesn't that mean that i4i's suit against Microsoft makes OOXML a "good" thing?
One positive impact of the tablet market is the potential for better screen options for netbooks and low-end devices. Netbooks almost universally have cheap, low-quality screens, but tablet do not, largely because they require support for the high viewing angles that IPS screens can offer. With any luck the millions of IPS-or-higher quality screens on these tablets will drive down prices for IPS panels, and we'll see options for decent netbook screens filtering into the low- to midrange netbook market.
During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
During the earthquake, four trains derailed, killing hundreds of people. One of them is still missing, vanished without a trace. Dozens of bridges collapsed, killing thousands. Miles of beachfront property was washed away, causing billions in damage and possibly killing tens of thousands. In contrast, so far the nuclear situation hasn't resulted in a single death.
And yet the media and all of you fearmongering blowhards are clamoring for a nuclear dark age, but nobody is suggesting we abolish trains or bridges, or mandate all houses be built ten miles inland. The reason is because of the public's disproportionate, irrational fear of nuclear radiation, and almost nothing to do with the current situation at Fukushima.
There have been hydrogen explosions in a plant that has uncooled, exposed nuclear waste directly next to the explosions. 30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal. The workers have been evacuated more than twice due to obscenely high radiation levels. I think you need to do your research.
1) The hydrogen explosions occurred outside the reinforced pressure vessels, where the nuclear fuel is. Essentially what happened was that the hydrogen was created because of the cooling failure; it was vented from the pressure vessels into the surrounding building, and since the building's own ventillation systems were nonfunctional the hydrogen basically blew the roof off. It was loud and impressive-looking, and will certainly be something safety engineers will look at in the future, but the hydrogen explosions themselves never threatened to cause a nuclear release in and of themselves, and have actually proven to be good because it provided a more direct way to deliver cooling water into the spent fuel pools.
2) Yes, radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant, 1/10 a lethal dose, which is really bad). As of today, radiation levels are down in the microsievarts range, which is less than you get from eating a few bananas. The "radiation cloud" barely contains any significant amount of radioactive material, probably so little that it will take specialized equipment to even detect any.
3) At the same time, four trains were derailed as a result of the earthquake, one of which appears to have vanished without a trace. Tens of thousands of people are dead; many times that number are injured or missing. But you don't hear about that; all you hear about is the "evil nucular meltdown". If the media weren't hyped up on nuclear fearmongering, this would rightly be a story about how well nuclear safety engineers are doing: despite two disasters which were both literally ten times worse than they were ordered to prepare for, there has not been a single death, and little to no release of radioactive material (radiation yes, radioactive contamination for the most part no.)
Actually, evolution is not a theory.. It is just still called "theory of evolution" to appease all of the religitards
It is a Theory. The important thing is that a scientific theory, which is a combination of confirmed facts with reasoned and supported generalizations, is completely different from what a layperson thinks of when he hears the word "theory."
Gravity is "just a theory"; it's still stupid to believe that you can jump off a forty-foot ledge and fly by flapping your wings.
Slashdot Mirror
The emperor has risen. (And I don't just mean this one example - the Executive has been ignoring congress a lot lately.)
If Obama could ignore Congress, he would have:
-closed Guantanimo (closure blocked by "bipartisan"--but mostly Republican--majority in House and Senate removing funding for any transfer, as well as forbidding the transfer to anywhere inside the US)
-passed a stimulus bill that actually invested the majority of its money into job creation, rather than half into tax breaks for the rich (a "compromise" made with Republicans to keep them from stonewalling more than they already did)
-given us a public healcare option (blocked by thirty-nine Republicans plus Joe Frickin' Lieberman whose state houses the headquarters of most major health insurance companies)
-written a banking reform law with teeth (again, rendered toothless by forty Republicans)
Politically, our biggest problem is that we have a two-party system, where one party is totally, openly evil and corrupt, and the other is slightly less evil and corrupt, but their non-evil tendencies are easily blocked because the evil one thinks nothing of playing chicken with the budget, the government, even the entire economy in order to get what they want, which is apparently more cash giveaways for their rich campaign donors.
Yes, I'm aware of that project, but what apps would it run? Even java apps would need some tweaking, I suspect.
Most Android apps are run on the Dalvik VM; the only ones that aren't have been compiled to native code, and those from my understanding already need to be ported from machine to machine (to take advantage of the different GPUs) as it is
What would an AMD tablet run? Surely they don't think they're going to sell a lot of tablets running Windows 7? What truly mature, tablet-ready OS runs on Intel? (And I'm not talking about Parsimonious Palembang or some other future Ubuntu release -- what's available in, say, June?)
Well, it might run Android...
This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to AMD. AMD has already bet on x86-64 scaling down to tablet form factors; that is, after all, the entire point of the Bobcat architecture. Later this year when Bobcat transitions to 28 nm we'll see if it pans out; even if it doesn't there's always the 20nm transition in late 2012, and that's sure to lower power requirements enough to make an x86 tablet viable.
At the same time, it's obvious that there really isn't any room in the ARM SoC market for new entrants*. NVIDIA is already selling Tegra 2 SoCs for a cut-rate $25 a chip, and those are going into already too expensive Android tablets. The message is clear: the only way to make a profit with ARM chips is in volume, and there's no way a new entrant like AMD is going to ramp to significant volume to even cover production and R&D costs before their own Bobcat architecture has made the transition to 28-20nm and they're basically competing with themselves.
*- Yes, I know AMD wouldn't be entirely a new entrant, as they had an ARM license as recently as a few years ago, which they subsequently sold off, but by this point they'd essentially be new entrants all over again
How about you legalise meth? And every other bloody drug that the black economy makes so much money on.
Marijuana, or maybe even cocaine, could possibly be made legal, and it might even be a good idea. Legalizing meth or heroin, on the other hand, would be like "legalizing" ricin or anthrax. They're used as drugs, but they are really dangerous, toxic substances that have no place in general circulation.
Unfortunately, yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that one can not seek Class Action status for cases involving Products or Services.
See AT&T MOBILITY LLC v. CONCEPCION, Slip Opinion No. 09–893 (PDF)
You think this is a bad thing?!
Hell yes it's a bad thing! When a large corporation can use a shrink-wrap EULA to force you into binding arbitration (read: a "court" they have literally bought and paid for), you will never again see that corporation bother with proper customer service. Remember, according to Sony you don't actually own your PS3; by signing up for the PSN, you are effectively renting that machine from Sony. From here on out, the customer is always wrong: our kangaroo court says so!
The problem is that it is never a "well funded crime kingpin" and most often a 15-30 year old or an (ex) employee that noticed some gaping, obvious security flaw. Data breaches like this are rarely the work of huge "cyber gangs" and mostly the work of individuals who noticed some huge flaw that Sony had. The crime kingpins wouldn't bother with something like this because it is a whole lot easier to sell botnets with 3nl@rg3 y0ur p3n15 spam.
Twenty years ago you may have been right, but these days botnets are a multi-million dollar operation, underground black markets sell botnet time just like Amazon sells computer cycles, and cyber-gangs sell credit card numbers for a few dollars a pop. Cracking isn't the sole province of bored kids typing away from their parents' basement anymore; it's an industry, staffed by professionals.
If h.264 stays cheap forever, then Google has won. If People switch to WebM, then Google has won. Either way, their investment pays back; and people wonder how anybody can ever make money with free software.
...even after Google, apparently, just did?
For argument's sake, Facebook has 500 million active users and the NY Times, supposedly the grand-daddy of all (American) newspapers has: 100k? Hahahahahahahahaha.....
Facebook is free. I'm sure there are more than 100k people going to the free NYT site.
Unfortunately, the courts do not agree with you. It specifically said that congress did not give the FCC authority over the internet in the way that net neutrality is concerned. Don't confuse a life guard who has authority over a pool areas with the cops who have authority over the city or county. They are not the same.
But it does; it just didn't have the power under Title I, where the Bush FCC decided to place the ISPs. See, the FCC decided almost a decade ago that ISPs weren't Title II common carriers, like phones or mail carriers, which require a certain level of scrutiny to prevent the company from interfering with the communications of private individuals in violation of the First Amendment. They instead decided to regulate ISPs as Title I information providers, like a newspaper or a TV station, who are free to do whatever they want on "their" networks because they're not handling other people's communications so much as distributing information to people. In other words, the FCC decided that the Internet is not a network of people talking to each other, but rather a content distribution network where the ISP gives information to its customers.
Back in 2004 this was appealed, and it was ruled that the FCC can choose to do this (even if IMO it makes no sense), but that they were free to change their minds at any time. Now they have done so, and have decided to grant First Amendment protections to people who access the Internet through private networks (that is, everyone). This is what Republicans object to, because in their mind the FCC should keep thinking of ISPs as top-down information distribution nodes rather than neutral information carriers.
Linux doesn't have to beat proprietary software on the desktop any more, because the desktop has become largely irrelevant. "This thing you want to do only works on Windows/proprietary environment" has become almost anachronistic.
So you're saying Steam is irrelevant and anachronistic?
It's about a constitutional power given to congress specifically being usurped by the executive and the one thing that congress usually unites on no matter what's at stake, is the retention of their powers.
Congress created the FCC in order to regulate telecommunications which cross state lines, which does in fact include the internet. Under the Bush administration, the FCC moved to reclassify ISPs as largely unregulated companies, because the Bush administration loved its AT&T campaign contributions and wanted more.
The Obama campaign, however, was paid for far more by small donors (read: not corporations), so he is much less beholden to them (even if he does seem to have a love affair with the banking sector, mostly due to Goldman Sachs being his second-biggest donor). This is why he is willing to go to bat for the people more often, like trying to extend First Amendment protections to the Internet, than Bush was.
Republicans, of course, are not funded by the people, and so they have no interest in what is best for the country. Their funding comes from large, multinational corporations, so they will do what is best for those corporations and assist them in squeezing money from US pockets via tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation of large corporations, and funneling the profit overseas via "free trade" agreements with countries with nothing to offer but cheap labor, like China.
Choose your shipping method:
[ ] Ground
[ ] Air
[X] Semiballistic
When you need it halfway around the world in less than an hour, choose SpaceX Freight!
HP dmz1 I believe is basically a netbook. Uses the AMD Fusion processor.
I have one of these, and I love it. It cost less than half what my brother paid for his Envy 14, and it does almost everything I want it to while I'm on the bus or traveling around. 3.5 pounds, 11.6-inch screen, surprisingly comfortable keyboard, all for around $400.
IMO the real reason netbooks have lost is because Atom sucks so hard that it needs separate dedicated hardware to even play HD video. Netbooks were being compared to real computers, and kept coming up short. The new AMD Zacate-based netbooks (or notbooks or whatever you want to call them) are what netbooks should have been in 2009-2010: usable performance, paired with superior battery life and mobility. Nobody expects something that looks like a laptop from 2011 but performs like a laptop from 2002; it just feels slow.
In contrast, the iPad could get away with dirt-poor performance because everyone was comparing it to a smartphone or an iPod Touch. These devices also have dirt-poor performance, but that's okay because it's what you expected from something so small. It's all about managing expectations and expected markets: if you think of the iPad as a really small and lightweight computer then you'll be disappointed by how slow and limited it is, but if you think of it as a giant iPod then it comes out looking pretty good. The difference between netbooks and iPads basically comes down to the former trying to buy a laptop and being disappointed by the Atom's sluggishness, and the later trying to buy an mp3 player and being surprised at everything else it can do.
Uh, yeah, except the hedge has so many holes in it that people can continue coming in to drink the lemonade for free. If the Times notices that someone has had too many drinks this visit, they just have to change their hat and they can start drinking again.
And yet people still give out free samples at supermarkets (and especially Costco).
Look, the point of this isn't to get the 0.1-1% of people who will go into the garden attempting to steal the lawn ornaments; it's to entice the other 99% to maybe kick in a few bucks for a membership, and make some extra money that way, while still not keeping people out who just want to visit. It's an intriguing idea, and I'd love to see data over the next few months/year about how well it does. If it goes well, the NYTimes may have just found the ideal balance for attracting customers and still getting a critical mass of those people to pay; if not, well, they've still got the ad revenue.
As I've linked above, Obama has kept far more promises than he's broken
That's the most depressing part of all. Obama can keep most of his campaign promises and STILL have a negligible effect on the course of the country. The take home message from this is: It doesn't matter who you vote for. It doesn't matter what they promise. The rich will keep getting richer, and the poor will keep getting poorer. The justice system will continue to favor the rich and powerful, and your representatives will continue to advance interests other than your own.
The take home message is this:
1) The first thing we need to do to allow any possibility of reform in this country is to remove all the Republicans from office.
2) The second thing we need to do to allow any meaningful reform to be passed is to remove many, maybe even most, of the Democrats from office.
3) The third thing we need to do to allow meaningful reform laws to remain in force is to keep 1) and 2) up until Samuel Alito and the rest of the five-member conservative activist bloc of the Supreme Court to die of old age and be replaced by judges who actually plan on following the Constitution and making the world a better place.
Congress has forbidden Obama from releasing Guantanimo detainees in the US
Good thing Guantanamo isn't in the US. Nothing stopping us from saying "Fuck it, they're Castro's problem now."
Oh, yes, really smart move: release some of the most dangerous, radically anti-American masters of asymmetric warfare into an anti-American country a few miles off our Gulf coast. Brilliant idea.
Amazing how all that isn't enough to make any sort of significant difference. Obama campaigned on hope and change, but he just ended up proving how broken American politics are.
And, concerning Guantanamo, it doesn't cost anything to just unlock the doors and shut off the lights.
As I've linked above, Obama has kept far more promises than he's broken, and of the ones he's broken the majority of those are because either the Legislature or the Supreme Court has intervened on behalf of the special interests.
And it does in fact cost money to unlock the doors and shut off the lights at Guantanimo. First off you have to do something with the prisoners: either you have to move them to another prison (which only perpetuates the problem) or you have to release them. Congress has forbidden Obama from releasing Guantanimo detainees in the US, and they have largely prevented him from releasing them to other countries. Even worse, Congress has even forbidden Obama from relocating Guantanimo detainees to other prisons; in other words, Congress has basically forbidden Obama from doing anything with the detainees other than keep them at Guantanimo forever.
What is sad is the GOP on the candidate and national level is still so inept and scared of being called racist they don't look good to beat the most blatantly corrupt president of post-WW2 America.
Barak Obama got more than half his 2008 campaign money from small donors, and, probably as a result, has kept more than three times the number of campaign promises as he's broken (and could have kept many more if, for example, Congress hadn't gone out of its way to defund the closing of Guantanimo.) Compare to .
No, it's clear that, when it comes to Democrats and Republicans, the Republicans are far more corrupt, and are more apt to sell out to corporate influence; at least Democrats take money from--and listen to--worker groups, environmentalists and scientists on occasion. Of course, that's sort of like saying that a black hole is denser than a neutron star; sure, it's technically an accurate statement, but I sure wouldn't want to try to live on either one.
Both parties are to blame for this mess; the Democrats just put a better spin on their corruption. You'll notice fuck-all was done about Wall Street during the two years the Democrats had control of the White House _and_ both houses of Congress.
The financial regulatory bill exists, and was in fact passed into law. Like the health care bill, however, it was fillabustered into near-ineffectiveness; most of the big reforms were bargained out of the bill in order to get a single Republican to agree to not fillabuster.
The essential problem in American politics is that most of the money comes from large donors, eg. corporations and the very wealthy. Small donations from individuals are so rare that it's actually historically relevant that Barak Obama received fully half his 2008 campaign money from small donors, making him one of the first presidents in recent memory actually bought and paid for, at least halfway, by the people. This explains why he has to date kept more than three times the number of campaign promises than he's broken (though he would have been able to keep more of them if Congress didn't, for example, block funding for the closing of Guantanimo) which for an American politician is shockingly true to his word.
Funny how much people think Andriod is winning here like Charlie Sheen.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/03/iphone-os-still-dominates-mobile-web-android-on-the-way-up.ars
shows iOS still King...and andriod is still a long way off even with so many second ratr phone makers and fragmented store ....
much bias here?
Here's an update from the same website:
Android tops everyone in 2010 market share; 2011 may be different
We should coin a law about this: The products competitiveness and usefulness for the consumer in the United States is directly proportional to the number of lawsuits filed against it to keep it off the market.
Er, wait, doesn't that mean that i4i's suit against Microsoft makes OOXML a "good" thing?
I think this "law" needs some refinement.
One positive impact of the tablet market is the potential for better screen options for netbooks and low-end devices. Netbooks almost universally have cheap, low-quality screens, but tablet do not, largely because they require support for the high viewing angles that IPS screens can offer. With any luck the millions of IPS-or-higher quality screens on these tablets will drive down prices for IPS panels, and we'll see options for decent netbook screens filtering into the low- to midrange netbook market.
During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
During the earthquake, four trains derailed, killing hundreds of people. One of them is still missing, vanished without a trace. Dozens of bridges collapsed, killing thousands. Miles of beachfront property was washed away, causing billions in damage and possibly killing tens of thousands. In contrast, so far the nuclear situation hasn't resulted in a single death.
And yet the media and all of you fearmongering blowhards are clamoring for a nuclear dark age, but nobody is suggesting we abolish trains or bridges, or mandate all houses be built ten miles inland. The reason is because of the public's disproportionate, irrational fear of nuclear radiation, and almost nothing to do with the current situation at Fukushima.
There have been hydrogen explosions in a plant that has uncooled, exposed nuclear waste directly next to the explosions. 30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal. The workers have been evacuated more than twice due to obscenely high radiation levels. I think you need to do your research.
1) The hydrogen explosions occurred outside the reinforced pressure vessels, where the nuclear fuel is. Essentially what happened was that the hydrogen was created because of the cooling failure; it was vented from the pressure vessels into the surrounding building, and since the building's own ventillation systems were nonfunctional the hydrogen basically blew the roof off. It was loud and impressive-looking, and will certainly be something safety engineers will look at in the future, but the hydrogen explosions themselves never threatened to cause a nuclear release in and of themselves, and have actually proven to be good because it provided a more direct way to deliver cooling water into the spent fuel pools.
2) Yes, radiation levels were high (at one point they hit 500 milisievarts at one plant, 1/10 a lethal dose, which is really bad). As of today, radiation levels are down in the microsievarts range, which is less than you get from eating a few bananas. The "radiation cloud" barely contains any significant amount of radioactive material, probably so little that it will take specialized equipment to even detect any.
3) At the same time, four trains were derailed as a result of the earthquake, one of which appears to have vanished without a trace. Tens of thousands of people are dead; many times that number are injured or missing. But you don't hear about that; all you hear about is the "evil nucular meltdown". If the media weren't hyped up on nuclear fearmongering, this would rightly be a story about how well nuclear safety engineers are doing: despite two disasters which were both literally ten times worse than they were ordered to prepare for, there has not been a single death, and little to no release of radioactive material (radiation yes, radioactive contamination for the most part no.)
Actually, evolution is not a theory.. It is just still called "theory of evolution" to appease all of the religitards
It is a Theory. The important thing is that a scientific theory, which is a combination of confirmed facts with reasoned and supported generalizations, is completely different from what a layperson thinks of when he hears the word "theory."
Gravity is "just a theory"; it's still stupid to believe that you can jump off a forty-foot ledge and fly by flapping your wings.