Now it is a stable mature product. Twice as good as Safari 5. Much better than IE 8. Not quite as good as Opera 11. And Firefox should hang it's neck in shame for barely reaching 4.
When the "navigational services" spyware is off by default, when third party cookie rejection a feature that is no longer hidden, and when Flashblock is installed by default, let me know. Otherwise it is just another tool for Google to track me.
Agree with you broadly, but must add two things. First, since g-d is the almighty, it is hard and even maybe sacrilegious to actually attribute any particular intent. It is like telling other what one's spouse believes without consulting said spouse. While some may feel that this is appropriate behavior for the male, as the dominant figure, in a marriage, in the relationship with the almighty humans are certainly not the dominant figure and therefore should only talk about what we think, and not attribute our selfish desires to the almighty.
That said the church has absolutely dropped the ball on the mariage thing. For example, Newt Gringrich's well documented abandonment of his family, as well as his continuing adultery, has been blessed by evangelical and catholic churches. This is unacceptable. Just because the civil society does not function on religious, or sharia, law does not mean that the church should not feel such a duty.
Nevertheless, it traditional that one's faith is god should be matched by one's faith in the marriage to another, and that faith is the basis of love. One thing that always confused me is that games exist not only to escape reality, but also to role play common social interactions in a safer environment. We learn many of our common methods of interaction through game play practice, so the question is why don't games allow us to do this. The answer, I believe, is that sex has never been quite as taboo as we want to believe. I suspect that there has always been a lot of practice going on, and the safety is provided by innate venerability of the participants, and the knowledge of the society as a whole that we may officially want to delay sex until marriage, this is seldom possible and probably unhealthy for a civilization that requires a fair amount of reproduction to survive.
Any open admissions institutions has the problem of accepting students and then not delivering a product. It is the nature of beast, Ethically, open admission institutions have the obligation of insuring that the student can succeed within the parameters of the school. This is even the case a good private K-12 schools. Students are asked to leave if they do achieve success.
What has traditionally been the case is beyond this. ITT has been in trouble for at least 15 years because it appeared that they aggressively recruited students, encouraged the students to maximize student loans, without any regard to the ability of the student to enjoy any level of success in the program. It seems that University of Phoenix merely expanded this model of student loan harvesting from the technical school to the University. I am sure that ITT and U of Phoenix both provide a valuable educational experience. What I am not so sure of is if they should be allowed to use federal student loans to provide such services.
Here is the thing that I am sure is never told the incoming student at ITT or U of Phoenix or any of the private diploma mills. A federal student loan never goes away. The student has to pay it back. No bankruptcy, no forgiveness. And the loans are relatively high interests rates, which accrues always, even if one has a delay in payment. The 50K many of these instituions charge can easily become 100K. It is easy to argue that such institution exist solely to transfer money from the federal tax payers purse to the coffers of private corporations. I would not do so. I would only say that in a free market in which these private for-profit institutions are competing, why would we need a federal loan program if they were in fact providing value. Sure, for non profit school such things can keep things fair and allow all qualified students to get an education. But if we are not talking qualified student, and any student, I think the private market would make much more reliable decisions. At least the student would be able to declare bankruptcy, and institutions with a high rate of bankruptcies would not longer receive loans. The free market, in this case, would work.
I was in college when everyone complained about a computer fee. After all, most students had little experience with a computer, and had no understanding what it could do. Few students had computers in high school and not all that many took courses that required a computer. Needless to say I heard a lot of bitching about the fee, and a lot of bitching when jobs could not be found because of lack of computer skills. I was not in that situation since I had access to PDP-11/34 in high school, so I knew how to leverage the resources.
So it seems to that students always complain when they have to learn or pay for new things. It is the nature of the beast. But times are changing, and the time of the printed textbook and offline free time are coming to an end, just like a family mealtime without telephone interruptions. Those who learn to deal with it early on, like the business desktop computer, will profit, those who don't will not.
There are already a number of textbooks freely available for download. Many books that would be an expensive anthology are free or very cheap. Papers can be written with the added benefit that simple editors focus on content over formatting. Google Docs works well. Moodle works very well, Blackboard I hear works pretty well. Online video games no so much.
There are a few ways in which gasoline in subsidized in the US. First oil firms tend to pay a lower tax. It is not amount, but enough to knock down even Exxon profits a tick. Some distort the truth by bringing up laws that have not existed in 20 years. Such subjects are useful to consider as the repeal of such tax was a increase in subsidy, and likely did contribute to the doubling of he public debt as a percentage of GDP during he Reagan administration, from around 30% to well over almos 70%.
The tax on gasoline must be a Fox favorite fabrication, as I hear this a lot. That there is a dollar tax. That the tax is half he price. I would like see citation. My understanding is that federal tax is around 20 cents and state tax is no more than 30 or 35 cents. That is 50 cents. At $2 gallon that is 33%. At current average $3.5 this is less than 17%. This tax is to cover road wear and tear, but there is indication it does no. Another dime would end this subsidy, bringing the tax to 20%. Nowhere near 50%. Maybe in 1960, but arguing the world from 1960 is not valid.
The real subsidy is that fuel, not a critical item like food, is not subject to sales tax. This means that while in most states people pay tax on food but not fuel. This makes no sense that we would make food more expensive but not fuel.
Cigarettes are taxed from $3-$6 or so. Given what cigarettes cost in my area, this is still not 50%.
I am not sure how Oil is overly taxed. Exxon paid no income taxes in 2009. Oil companies are hugely profitable so the taxes are not interfering with that.
I think it would be much better to have a blacklist of known infected apps. The phone can check against this lis, and, just like other malware detectors, note that it is dangerous, and why, and then prompt the user for removal.
Of course no one, not even the OHC, believes the user owns the mobile device and as such should have complete control over what happens on it. So, as expected, Google does as it pleases when it pleases, even when here is a genter and equally effective alternative.
Parents and students are a single unit. A student behaves, mostly, as the parent does, even if the parent claims otherwise. If a student calls a teachers a pedophile, I would guess the parent regularly calls their boss a terrorist and the medical staff that takes care of the kids murders. There is no point adking about the parents, as the behavior of the child most likley illustrates the behavior.
In any case the response of the parent has done more damage to the child than the suspension. By telling the news outlets, and this is not something any school official would have done, they have invoked the Streisand effect. Now anytime this students wants to get into a top school, a top grant opportunity, a top summer program, a top college, a simple search will show that this kid does not respect teachers. Top schools don't want teachers worrying about disciplining students. They want the teachers to teach. Furthermore, competative parents are always looking for way to cut the competition facing their kids.
By putting this on the news, the parent has condemned the kid to be known as the kid who called their teacher a pedophile, and who wants such a kid in the school. This is likely not the first kid to call the teacher a pedophile on facebook, and probably not the first to be suspended over it. Other parents were probably intelligent enough to take it as a learning opportunity, with no real damage done. At the very least they could move and get into another good school who did not know of the incident. It is too bad these parents were not as rational.
I saw Star Wars when it first came out. I saw the sequels. I saw Star Wats when it was remastered. Seeing the old characters and the new effects was worth the money. There was no point in seeing the other two remastered because, frankly, if you see a new effect once then what is the point. In any case, at least in my mind, Star Wars was the only movie that had any really real humanity. We can all relate to the longing of Luke Skywalker and the the classic cad of Han Solo, without the annoying good side that everyone wants to add. Really it was the additional the Han Solo good side that made me not see the remaining remakes. It was good though that people who wanted to got to see them on the big screen.
I understood The Phantom Menace to be made for a new generation and therefore had little to do with Star Wars or the sequels. I dutifully went to see them, and the disappointment was less the story than the fact that throwing money at a slew of well known actors would solve the problem. It did not solve any problem in The Empire Strikes Back. The f/x was good, but again they can only go so far. In Return of the Jedi it seemed that there was a new appreciation of a combination of practical and special effects. Not more.
I think the the fact the prequels are pretty much animated stories with a bit of live acting thrown in will make them a very good 3D experience. Star Wars and the sequels will be less so because of the human element. It will certainly allow the kids who enjoyed the prequels to see them as adults and reflect on the story.
I think many people are missing the point of this completely. I can imagine some parents buy the iPad with the understanding that they can control content. The tradeoff is that a kid can use the iPad, like the mac, because certain things about use are controlled. Safari as the iPad browser has built in controls(as seen in the restrictions on the iPad control panel). Opera does not. Therefore Opera is in some sense a tool to circumvent the control of Safari, and therefore gets a 17+ rating.
The 17+ rating has nothing little to do with age of the user. I imagine that if a parent bought an iPad for their graduating high school senior, the parent could enable restrictions and Opera would be inaccesible. OTOH, a parent might choose not enable those restrictions for a student younger child, or allow the child to install Opera in spite of the 17+ rating. It is the owner of the iPad to choose what '17+' means.
Of course it is in the nature of child to rebel against those restrictions, and claim they don't need them to be responsible. Just like it is in the nature of some/. commenters to talk about things they know little about. Certainly we are not talking about Apple preventing the owner of the iPad from installing Opera. Most iPad owners simply ignore the 17+ warning. The only complaint I have the subject is that Apple does not provide a means of turning off the warning for people who really don't care.
To many people having hundred ports, 30 access ports, and a 20" screen is what makes a computer. For those people Apple is not the choice. I don't often need all these ports that everyone else does. I usually only hook up my computer to zero or one monitors, and if I do use a monitor I usually leave the dongle attached to the monitor. I don't need more than two USB ports, and the only thing I miss on the some macs is the FireWire port so that I can connect high speed devices.
The real problem with the iPad is the lack of a file system that can be used to transfer documents between computers and the tablet. This is going to be a big problem. Basically, as on a Mac, the iPad should be able to synch with an WebDav server. For those us who use this, the USB and the like are much less critical.
I don't know if this is new. Hollywood, it seems, has always been about brands, it is just the brands change. At one point it seems it was about the actors. Each studio owned certain people, and people would pay see those properties. Cluade Raines, Jane Russel, Charle Chapman. TV provided no competition nor means of advertising the product, real theater was and is expensive, so people just went to the moving picture show. We hear people say how much they like John Wayne, not that anything interesting happened in the movies.
Then the actors were able to move around freely, and TV provided a competitive environment and a means of advertising, and technology advanced, so there may have a short time when movies were made to be original and entertaining, maybe early 60's to late 80's. This was when the full potential of the medium was once again used, which I think had not happened since the silent films. The thing with films after the silent is I think they became obsessed with the dialogue, or the color, and forgot that film was a multi sensory experience.We see this today with movies that are overly visual. I think the classic films, the ones we use to compare to the contemporary films, completely use the medium. Gone with the wind and the burning of atlanta. Casa Blanca and the use of the black and white film as an asset. The use of contemporary f/x in Star Wars.
But comparing a selective group top films to a whole contemporary population is unfair. I would guess that most of the films from even 30 years ago are mostly unwatched by moder audiences, even the ones that we top. Xanadu was very popular, and where is it now? I don't know if Raging Bull is a top netflix choice. I have never heard of Where the Buffalo roams and the less said about Flash Gordon the better.
Which is to say that I think film is alive and well, and with ability to make films less expensively, and to distribute them, I think we will see an increase in good films, not less. They just may be showing at your local metroplex, or maybe. The Kings Speech, Black Swan, True Grit, were all top grossing film and all original and good work.. Which is why we have to support out local local small film houses. We lost one and it sucks. If you have one, and like good films that are not repetitive drivel, go once in a while.
We must follow the rule of law, and that means we do no presume a person guilty. He is subject to military law as he disclosed the information while in uniform instead of forcing a discharge prior to the leak, which might have lead to some ambiguity.
But his guilt of innocence is still yet to be determined. For instance, it is very arguable that the acts of General Petraeus reach this level, especially given his high postion, yet the military powers did not give him even a dishonorable discharge. It might be reasonable to believe that not enforcing suitable consequences on the high ranking officials that violate the chain of command is the reason why lower ranking person feel they can arbitrarily break said chain.
Therefore, any significant penalty can only be seen as retaliation. It can only be seen as corruption in which we punish the low ranking with the full force fo the law, but let the higher ranking officials walk scott free.
PC manufacturers really lost consumer confidence by putting "high end" components in a machine that real was not designed to take full advantage of them. Anyone can put a arbitrarily high speed processor, for which the marginal cost will be small, or a huge number of USB ports, again with small additional marginal costs. The problem is that if one does not put a high speed FSB, what have you done?
For android the question is can it run Flash. Do the batteries last a long time. These is where iOS is venerable.
The only pressure that Google has placed on Apple is to prematurely an updated iPad. If not for the Android devices, we would have likely gotten a full update late summer with retina screen, 128 GB. The only notable upgrade here is the two cameras. The processor speed bump is for people who want to use the iPad more like a desktop. I am not sure if the iPad iWork apps, for example, are equal to Mac applications, but as far as I have seen they are not.
Not to say that competition is bad, simply that Google is growing the market for these devices, not competing with Apple products.
MS has a cash cow in office. Like so many other companies they are going to have to risk the cash cow to insure future relevance. Just imagine what would have happened if American car companies would have moved on from gas guzzling cars of the 70's and innovated instead of basking in their multi-hundred-million dollar profits. Reagan would not have had to give them 1.5 billion, in 1980, tax dollars that althout repaid represented a failure of the free market. Likewise Bush would not again have put 13.4 billion of tax payer money into Chrysler and GM, at a time when all such money was deficiet spending and we all were allegedly worried about the debt.
The point is that corporations tend to equate profits with health. This is a fallacy as we have seen profits evaporate in a couple quarters on a number of occasions. The MS Software model is quickly becoming obsolete. The closed proprietary OS integrated by a third party is an experiment that has failed, particularly in smart phones. For iOS, for Android, for Symbian, the system builder has full acess to code and the ability to do with as they wish. It is failingThe hardware people do not have go to the software people and beg for fixes, nor do they have to pay crippling license fees.
More people expect to pay for innovative products, but not to keep paying for legacy products. MS Office will eventually be replaced by Google Docs or OpenOffice.org or the like that run on whatever hardware a company want to buy. This is as sure as MS products replaced IBM integrated products. No one want to be stuck in a single vendor situattion, and anyone who thinks MS is not a single vendor situation is delusional.
Bing evidently has some good features. One reason people don't use bing is because MS does not provide an integrated environment like Google does. Google rewards with real product form using the search engine. MS could do this, in many ways much better than Google, but they wold have to sacrifice near term profits. They could put office online, and let anyone use it on any OS, but then why would people buy Windows machine when maybe an Android tablet might suit their needs at half the cost? They would lose the MS Windows OEM sales that cover so much of their fixed costs. They are stuck. They can't be innovative without risking short term profits.
And the entry to the search market is huge now given the data centers that have to be built. I am not one to think of Apple when thinking of innovative internet strategies. They are creative by never had have a real internet product. However, with the data center, and the iOS, they may be able to leverage me.com into something that can compete with google. The google search and google maps seem so last decade. Apple has money to invest in products that rival Google, and if they did they could take a large chunk of the search market, and create an entry point to business, all in one go.
It is sad when you have to bribe employees to develop for in house devices. It is even sadder when your vaulted cadre of third party developers refuse to develop for a new device. We are told that due to restrictions on the iPhone, developers are leaving in troves to develop on other devices. Maybe that is true for Android, but the android boosters also admit that developers are largely not being paid by the end user for their work,, so I wonder how many of those apps are ads or simple portals to paid services.
Compare MS desperation to RIM, which is only interested in serious developers delivering serious apps. They are not focused on numbers, but, even more so than Apple, want useful Apps.
If MS wants apps, do what apple does. Offer one button on the web site that will download a complete, unencumbered, and free as in beer development kit. Do not play games such as 'students get it for free' or 'you have to develop for us because we are the best' Just give us the tools.
What we do see from the chart is that everyone won because it appeared that many made a choice, and when they did over half of them went with a browser that was not MS.
It also appears that over time the share of non-MS browser stayed pretty consistent. This indicates that we are going to have a healthy standards based market as no firm is going to develop specifically for MS, or Chrome, given that they will automatically lose a majority of their potential customers.
It also appears that Chrome growth might be limited. Google has the money to pull people away from IE, but not other browsers. This and other evidence shows that, despite, or perhaps due to Chrome legitimizing non-IE browsers, Firefox has market share that would be considered outlandish a year ago, and other browsers are holding their own. Therefore Google is competing for the 60% of the market or so that IE controlled when Chrome came on the scene Given that other browsers are still growing, some of which will be consumed by them.
We see, again, it is unlikely a fully dominant browser wil emerge. MS has the money to keep Google from taking over the market. It may be in a year Firefox will be the top browser, albeit with minority market share, with Google and MS fighting to be #2. Safari and Opera would fighting for a distant place 4 and 5.
Of course downloads does not a user make. I have many browsers in my computer. I mostly use Camino,but launch others for particular sites.
Alta Vista was not able to save themselves by complaining that web sites were not being honest about keywords. They were not able to whine and get people to stop using perfectly legal practices.
Market forces will insure that firms will continue to hack the google algorithm. If Google fights back too much firms will begin to use and promote other advertisers, like Bing. This is a typical case where the end user is not the customer. The customer is the firms that pay Google to advertiser. Then search engine only serves to collect views that raise the value of those ads. Therefore the only issue is if the 'low quality' search results causes substantially fewer people to view ads.
In fact I don't see Google doing anything to make the search results better. All the link farms with Google ads appear to perpetually stay high in the ranks. The only time that anything seems to be done is when a firm fails to pay Google for ads and instead pays other firms to manipulate the rankings. I can imagine that Google, who will doing anything, ethical or not, to be the only ad agency on the web, would find that to be a very bad thing.
The US Constitution is not as formally human right center as some other constitutions, but the one thing it does do is solidly center the rule on a civilian government. The only standing military force that has any constitutional legitimacy is the Navy. The president controls all military operations, and the military essentially has no rights at all. All military rights are centered on the people, who have the freedom to defend themselves from a a priori corrupt military.
The civilian government is defined by three co-equal branches of government, which, many forget, incudes the judiciary who have all rights to govern as any other branch of government. They may not be directly elected, but so was the case of the executive branch when the Constitution was written.
The problem is that the Military has become too big for it's britches. They think they matter, they think that they can throw temper tantrums and not follow orders and directive from the civil rulers simply because they do not want to. They think that somehow their confort is more important than the comfort of the taxpayers that fund their livelihoods. Sure they have a tough and dangerous jobs, but they made a choice. Many of us had made equivalent choices. The military is voluntary, if one person is not willing to the job they are paid to do, then some one else will. Hell, we have people who are willing to earn the money they are paid but are prevented to do so due to bigotry.
We have to fund the people who protect us. The fact that we have a tax cut exactly when our solider were dying due to lack of equipment is something this country is never going to live down. Anyone who voted to send our troops into battle then voted to not fund them has an issue with basic human decency. OTOH, the military has to respect civilian rule even if they don't agree with it. They do not have the freedoms of a civilians to effect rules.
If that is the right laptop for you, then there is no reason to have any remorse. There was no story because it is just anther Windows machine designed to put maximum features to make it buzzword compliant. Blu ray, HDMI, SSD, backlit keyboard, name brand speakers. There is no indication that any real thought was put into design, just marketing and achieving a price point. This is what some people want, to say they have a particular feature, even if it is not used.
Which does not mean that Apple is not guilty of buzz word compliance. It just tends to make it's own, such as back lit keyboard. But I prefer a engineered and efficient machine. For instance, I do carry my machine around and use it without a power source. The rated 7 hours instead of 3.77 is a benefit. Even my old Powerbook gets almost 4. Low mass and thickness is also a benefit for a portable machine. Obviously a machine such as this is a compromise between mass and features, and that compromise is a personal choice. For me I have been carrying my 13" machine much more than my 17" because the 13" screen size is good enough. Carrying around 10+ pounds would not be what I want to do.
These are commit comments, which I can hardly see worth the effort to curse. Maybe C++ and Ruby developers are more rule based than others so they are more dedicated to making entertaining commit messages?
It may be the best search engine, but that does not mean it is good enough. I just did a search looking up generic topic that has to do with utilities and government permitting. On all search keywords, the top links were advertising spaces with no information, and the most of the rest were ad pages set up individual companies, though related to the search. Somewhat relavent information was half way down the page, but the search did not turn up any good results. This has happened to me a lot lately.
In the spreadsheet the graph still does not have trendlines on scatterplots. That is not a critical feature, but it has been in every spreadsheet since the 90's.
Maps still do not have directions for highway travel primarily. On some trips the side roads can be dangerous, and it would be good to avoid them. Likewise, there is not social option to review roads as Google now allows us to review services. Obviously no profit in it.
This is what the article is saying. It is not being biased, it is stating fact. Google is fat and happy so innovation is not going to happen. Stating this fact is bullshit negative stories. It is a problem. If Google search is not going to work, then who is going to make it? If Google is not going to innovate as MS innovated MS Office during the 90's, then who will? If Google social services are primarily to support the primary ad business, is that value to consumers?
We the people have no vested interest in any corporation. We want stuff and only care about who is providing the best good enough stuff. If a company stops providing the best good enough stuff, they will be less relavent. It is in the interest of the people to ridicule companies that have stopped innovating, since that will either cause them to start innovating or open up the door to competition. No one gets a free ride just because you did something interesting last week. Ask myspace, ask AOL, ask general motors(well, if you employ enough high school dropouts you do get a federal grant). But really, if my search does not return good result, what good is Google to me?
Yes, we know how very well that strategy played out for Apple in the past, when they were the leaders and competing with cheaper but open and standard alternatives...
The thing is that it depends on what one calls cheaper and open and standard...
If you are talking about standard, Apple did not compete with standards, they used standards while other standards evolved around them to compete with Apple. For instance Apple used the RS242 standard for many interconnects. It was well understood and easy to implement with software using widely available hardware. Compare the random and non standard connects of the mid-1980s. Apple also used SCSI. Some did not like it, because it was expensive, but it provided and elegant standards based solution to a complicated problem. It was easy to plug and play in a time when such things did not often exist. USB was fully implemented again provided standards based plug and play connectivity. Using standards based protocols for printers, cameras, scanners, it is not neccesary to create and configure a driver for every device. Just plug and play.
The standards for Mail, iCal, iDisk, iTunes, iBooks are open and, outside of annoying DRM, can interact with any compliant standard setup.
What many complain about is that the Mac is not an 'open' hackers machine. But neither is the PC. Hacking is not replacing one hard drive with another. Hard hacks are hardly every done anymore, and hard hacks not involving the machine itself no longer requires access to the internals of the machine. I remember my Apples never had a lid on because i was in and out of them due tot he fact that to get speed, you had to access the mother board. Now I can get a universal chip programmer or under $100 and hook it up to my USB port.
Now if all you want is cheaper, that is another story. My opinion is this 30% fee is really going to push the market for Android. Right now iBooks is a complete dud and anyone who wants an ereader has an Amazon.
Apple did right in creating a device based with open standard interfaces. The month by month for 3g is good, and the no free for WifI is good. They corrected the mistake of the newton with a fully integrated product offering between all devices. For what I use the devices for, they serve my purpose and I really can live or not live with the subscriptions services. I do not really see myself depending on SaaS, especially since Apple products run so many OS products. I either can pay for a product once and use it on all my machines, or simply get the product for free. None of the complications of so-called 'open' proprietary products.
On *nix boxes, Admins are expected to clever enough to actually fix problems so they do not happen again. The structure of *nix makes such fixes feasible, often without a reboot.
On Windows bosex, the Admin are not allowed to fix problems, so problems persist. To temporarily solve the problem until MS fixes the code robot the computer. It doesn't matter because the computer is going to have be rebooted anyway when MS issues an update.
To be fair, the main reason I don't reboot my *nix partitions is that I am never sure they will come back up. Say what you will, the nice thing about Windows is that no matter how it is damaged and how bad the situation is, it will attempt to come back up in something resembling a working state. Probably not a known state. Probably not a secure state. But usually a workable state.
I think "Out of Gas" is pretty bad. It is not the writing, but what looked liked an Elevator Episode, not really advancing the series, seemed like a case of having to produce a certain number of shows but not really having the resources/reativity to do so. This is a problem with have a limited number of shows producing 20+ eps a years rather than a larger number of shows producing 6-13 eps a year. Imagine if we tripled the shows on TV, each with fewer eps. We could have 6-12 Firefly, 6-12 SGU, 6-12 Happy Towns a year. No elevator eps, no clip shows.
I also don't know if an episode like 'Ariel' were really earned. The 80's montage A-Team thing worked very well when with BA, but not so well since them. That would have been much better off focusing on the tension between Jayne and the Tams rather than focusing on the job.
Slashdot Mirror
So why was chrome not effected if the bug was in Webkit?
When the "navigational services" spyware is off by default, when third party cookie rejection a feature that is no longer hidden, and when Flashblock is installed by default, let me know. Otherwise it is just another tool for Google to track me.
That said the church has absolutely dropped the ball on the mariage thing. For example, Newt Gringrich's well documented abandonment of his family, as well as his continuing adultery, has been blessed by evangelical and catholic churches. This is unacceptable. Just because the civil society does not function on religious, or sharia, law does not mean that the church should not feel such a duty.
Nevertheless, it traditional that one's faith is god should be matched by one's faith in the marriage to another, and that faith is the basis of love. One thing that always confused me is that games exist not only to escape reality, but also to role play common social interactions in a safer environment. We learn many of our common methods of interaction through game play practice, so the question is why don't games allow us to do this. The answer, I believe, is that sex has never been quite as taboo as we want to believe. I suspect that there has always been a lot of practice going on, and the safety is provided by innate venerability of the participants, and the knowledge of the society as a whole that we may officially want to delay sex until marriage, this is seldom possible and probably unhealthy for a civilization that requires a fair amount of reproduction to survive.
What has traditionally been the case is beyond this. ITT has been in trouble for at least 15 years because it appeared that they aggressively recruited students, encouraged the students to maximize student loans, without any regard to the ability of the student to enjoy any level of success in the program. It seems that University of Phoenix merely expanded this model of student loan harvesting from the technical school to the University. I am sure that ITT and U of Phoenix both provide a valuable educational experience. What I am not so sure of is if they should be allowed to use federal student loans to provide such services.
Here is the thing that I am sure is never told the incoming student at ITT or U of Phoenix or any of the private diploma mills. A federal student loan never goes away. The student has to pay it back. No bankruptcy, no forgiveness. And the loans are relatively high interests rates, which accrues always, even if one has a delay in payment. The 50K many of these instituions charge can easily become 100K. It is easy to argue that such institution exist solely to transfer money from the federal tax payers purse to the coffers of private corporations. I would not do so. I would only say that in a free market in which these private for-profit institutions are competing, why would we need a federal loan program if they were in fact providing value. Sure, for non profit school such things can keep things fair and allow all qualified students to get an education. But if we are not talking qualified student, and any student, I think the private market would make much more reliable decisions. At least the student would be able to declare bankruptcy, and institutions with a high rate of bankruptcies would not longer receive loans. The free market, in this case, would work.
So it seems to that students always complain when they have to learn or pay for new things. It is the nature of the beast. But times are changing, and the time of the printed textbook and offline free time are coming to an end, just like a family mealtime without telephone interruptions. Those who learn to deal with it early on, like the business desktop computer, will profit, those who don't will not.
There are already a number of textbooks freely available for download. Many books that would be an expensive anthology are free or very cheap. Papers can be written with the added benefit that simple editors focus on content over formatting. Google Docs works well. Moodle works very well, Blackboard I hear works pretty well. Online video games no so much.
The tax on gasoline must be a Fox favorite fabrication, as I hear this a lot. That there is a dollar tax. That the tax is half he price. I would like see citation. My understanding is that federal tax is around 20 cents and state tax is no more than 30 or 35 cents. That is 50 cents. At $2 gallon that is 33%. At current average $3.5 this is less than 17%. This tax is to cover road wear and tear, but there is indication it does no. Another dime would end this subsidy, bringing the tax to 20%. Nowhere near 50%. Maybe in 1960, but arguing the world from 1960 is not valid.
The real subsidy is that fuel, not a critical item like food, is not subject to sales tax. This means that while in most states people pay tax on food but not fuel. This makes no sense that we would make food more expensive but not fuel.
Cigarettes are taxed from $3-$6 or so. Given what cigarettes cost in my area, this is still not 50%.
I am not sure how Oil is overly taxed. Exxon paid no income taxes in 2009. Oil companies are hugely profitable so the taxes are not interfering with that.
Of course no one, not even the OHC, believes the user owns the mobile device and as such should have complete control over what happens on it. So, as expected, Google does as it pleases when it pleases, even when here is a genter and equally effective alternative.
In any case the response of the parent has done more damage to the child than the suspension. By telling the news outlets, and this is not something any school official would have done, they have invoked the Streisand effect. Now anytime this students wants to get into a top school, a top grant opportunity, a top summer program, a top college, a simple search will show that this kid does not respect teachers. Top schools don't want teachers worrying about disciplining students. They want the teachers to teach. Furthermore, competative parents are always looking for way to cut the competition facing their kids.
By putting this on the news, the parent has condemned the kid to be known as the kid who called their teacher a pedophile, and who wants such a kid in the school. This is likely not the first kid to call the teacher a pedophile on facebook, and probably not the first to be suspended over it. Other parents were probably intelligent enough to take it as a learning opportunity, with no real damage done. At the very least they could move and get into another good school who did not know of the incident. It is too bad these parents were not as rational.
I understood The Phantom Menace to be made for a new generation and therefore had little to do with Star Wars or the sequels. I dutifully went to see them, and the disappointment was less the story than the fact that throwing money at a slew of well known actors would solve the problem. It did not solve any problem in The Empire Strikes Back. The f/x was good, but again they can only go so far. In Return of the Jedi it seemed that there was a new appreciation of a combination of practical and special effects. Not more.
I think the the fact the prequels are pretty much animated stories with a bit of live acting thrown in will make them a very good 3D experience. Star Wars and the sequels will be less so because of the human element. It will certainly allow the kids who enjoyed the prequels to see them as adults and reflect on the story.
The 17+ rating has nothing little to do with age of the user. I imagine that if a parent bought an iPad for their graduating high school senior, the parent could enable restrictions and Opera would be inaccesible. OTOH, a parent might choose not enable those restrictions for a student younger child, or allow the child to install Opera in spite of the 17+ rating. It is the owner of the iPad to choose what '17+' means.
Of course it is in the nature of child to rebel against those restrictions, and claim they don't need them to be responsible. Just like it is in the nature of some /. commenters to talk about things they know little about. Certainly we are not talking about Apple preventing the owner of the iPad from installing Opera. Most iPad owners simply ignore the 17+ warning. The only complaint I have the subject is that Apple does not provide a means of turning off the warning for people who really don't care.
The real problem with the iPad is the lack of a file system that can be used to transfer documents between computers and the tablet. This is going to be a big problem. Basically, as on a Mac, the iPad should be able to synch with an WebDav server. For those us who use this, the USB and the like are much less critical.
Then the actors were able to move around freely, and TV provided a competitive environment and a means of advertising, and technology advanced, so there may have a short time when movies were made to be original and entertaining, maybe early 60's to late 80's. This was when the full potential of the medium was once again used, which I think had not happened since the silent films. The thing with films after the silent is I think they became obsessed with the dialogue, or the color, and forgot that film was a multi sensory experience.We see this today with movies that are overly visual. I think the classic films, the ones we use to compare to the contemporary films, completely use the medium. Gone with the wind and the burning of atlanta. Casa Blanca and the use of the black and white film as an asset. The use of contemporary f/x in Star Wars.
But comparing a selective group top films to a whole contemporary population is unfair. I would guess that most of the films from even 30 years ago are mostly unwatched by moder audiences, even the ones that we top. Xanadu was very popular, and where is it now? I don't know if Raging Bull is a top netflix choice. I have never heard of Where the Buffalo roams and the less said about Flash Gordon the better.
Which is to say that I think film is alive and well, and with ability to make films less expensively, and to distribute them, I think we will see an increase in good films, not less. They just may be showing at your local metroplex, or maybe. The Kings Speech, Black Swan, True Grit, were all top grossing film and all original and good work.. Which is why we have to support out local local small film houses. We lost one and it sucks. If you have one, and like good films that are not repetitive drivel, go once in a while.
But his guilt of innocence is still yet to be determined. For instance, it is very arguable that the acts of General Petraeus reach this level, especially given his high postion, yet the military powers did not give him even a dishonorable discharge. It might be reasonable to believe that not enforcing suitable consequences on the high ranking officials that violate the chain of command is the reason why lower ranking person feel they can arbitrarily break said chain.
Therefore, any significant penalty can only be seen as retaliation. It can only be seen as corruption in which we punish the low ranking with the full force fo the law, but let the higher ranking officials walk scott free.
For android the question is can it run Flash. Do the batteries last a long time. These is where iOS is venerable.
The only pressure that Google has placed on Apple is to prematurely an updated iPad. If not for the Android devices, we would have likely gotten a full update late summer with retina screen, 128 GB. The only notable upgrade here is the two cameras. The processor speed bump is for people who want to use the iPad more like a desktop. I am not sure if the iPad iWork apps, for example, are equal to Mac applications, but as far as I have seen they are not.
Not to say that competition is bad, simply that Google is growing the market for these devices, not competing with Apple products.
The point is that corporations tend to equate profits with health. This is a fallacy as we have seen profits evaporate in a couple quarters on a number of occasions. The MS Software model is quickly becoming obsolete. The closed proprietary OS integrated by a third party is an experiment that has failed, particularly in smart phones. For iOS, for Android, for Symbian, the system builder has full acess to code and the ability to do with as they wish. It is failingThe hardware people do not have go to the software people and beg for fixes, nor do they have to pay crippling license fees.
More people expect to pay for innovative products, but not to keep paying for legacy products. MS Office will eventually be replaced by Google Docs or OpenOffice.org or the like that run on whatever hardware a company want to buy. This is as sure as MS products replaced IBM integrated products. No one want to be stuck in a single vendor situattion, and anyone who thinks MS is not a single vendor situation is delusional.
Bing evidently has some good features. One reason people don't use bing is because MS does not provide an integrated environment like Google does. Google rewards with real product form using the search engine. MS could do this, in many ways much better than Google, but they wold have to sacrifice near term profits. They could put office online, and let anyone use it on any OS, but then why would people buy Windows machine when maybe an Android tablet might suit their needs at half the cost? They would lose the MS Windows OEM sales that cover so much of their fixed costs. They are stuck. They can't be innovative without risking short term profits.
And the entry to the search market is huge now given the data centers that have to be built. I am not one to think of Apple when thinking of innovative internet strategies. They are creative by never had have a real internet product. However, with the data center, and the iOS, they may be able to leverage me.com into something that can compete with google. The google search and google maps seem so last decade. Apple has money to invest in products that rival Google, and if they did they could take a large chunk of the search market, and create an entry point to business, all in one go.
Compare MS desperation to RIM, which is only interested in serious developers delivering serious apps. They are not focused on numbers, but, even more so than Apple, want useful Apps.
If MS wants apps, do what apple does. Offer one button on the web site that will download a complete, unencumbered, and free as in beer development kit. Do not play games such as 'students get it for free' or 'you have to develop for us because we are the best' Just give us the tools.
It also appears that over time the share of non-MS browser stayed pretty consistent. This indicates that we are going to have a healthy standards based market as no firm is going to develop specifically for MS, or Chrome, given that they will automatically lose a majority of their potential customers.
It also appears that Chrome growth might be limited. Google has the money to pull people away from IE, but not other browsers. This and other evidence shows that, despite, or perhaps due to Chrome legitimizing non-IE browsers, Firefox has market share that would be considered outlandish a year ago, and other browsers are holding their own. Therefore Google is competing for the 60% of the market or so that IE controlled when Chrome came on the scene Given that other browsers are still growing, some of which will be consumed by them.
We see, again, it is unlikely a fully dominant browser wil emerge. MS has the money to keep Google from taking over the market. It may be in a year Firefox will be the top browser, albeit with minority market share, with Google and MS fighting to be #2. Safari and Opera would fighting for a distant place 4 and 5.
Of course downloads does not a user make. I have many browsers in my computer. I mostly use Camino,but launch others for particular sites.
Market forces will insure that firms will continue to hack the google algorithm. If Google fights back too much firms will begin to use and promote other advertisers, like Bing. This is a typical case where the end user is not the customer. The customer is the firms that pay Google to advertiser. Then search engine only serves to collect views that raise the value of those ads. Therefore the only issue is if the 'low quality' search results causes substantially fewer people to view ads.
In fact I don't see Google doing anything to make the search results better. All the link farms with Google ads appear to perpetually stay high in the ranks. The only time that anything seems to be done is when a firm fails to pay Google for ads and instead pays other firms to manipulate the rankings. I can imagine that Google, who will doing anything, ethical or not, to be the only ad agency on the web, would find that to be a very bad thing.
The civilian government is defined by three co-equal branches of government, which, many forget, incudes the judiciary who have all rights to govern as any other branch of government. They may not be directly elected, but so was the case of the executive branch when the Constitution was written.
The problem is that the Military has become too big for it's britches. They think they matter, they think that they can throw temper tantrums and not follow orders and directive from the civil rulers simply because they do not want to. They think that somehow their confort is more important than the comfort of the taxpayers that fund their livelihoods. Sure they have a tough and dangerous jobs, but they made a choice. Many of us had made equivalent choices. The military is voluntary, if one person is not willing to the job they are paid to do, then some one else will. Hell, we have people who are willing to earn the money they are paid but are prevented to do so due to bigotry.
We have to fund the people who protect us. The fact that we have a tax cut exactly when our solider were dying due to lack of equipment is something this country is never going to live down. Anyone who voted to send our troops into battle then voted to not fund them has an issue with basic human decency. OTOH, the military has to respect civilian rule even if they don't agree with it. They do not have the freedoms of a civilians to effect rules.
Which does not mean that Apple is not guilty of buzz word compliance. It just tends to make it's own, such as back lit keyboard. But I prefer a engineered and efficient machine. For instance, I do carry my machine around and use it without a power source. The rated 7 hours instead of 3.77 is a benefit. Even my old Powerbook gets almost 4. Low mass and thickness is also a benefit for a portable machine. Obviously a machine such as this is a compromise between mass and features, and that compromise is a personal choice. For me I have been carrying my 13" machine much more than my 17" because the 13" screen size is good enough. Carrying around 10+ pounds would not be what I want to do.
These are commit comments, which I can hardly see worth the effort to curse. Maybe C++ and Ruby developers are more rule based than others so they are more dedicated to making entertaining commit messages?
In the spreadsheet the graph still does not have trendlines on scatterplots. That is not a critical feature, but it has been in every spreadsheet since the 90's.
Maps still do not have directions for highway travel primarily. On some trips the side roads can be dangerous, and it would be good to avoid them. Likewise, there is not social option to review roads as Google now allows us to review services. Obviously no profit in it.
This is what the article is saying. It is not being biased, it is stating fact. Google is fat and happy so innovation is not going to happen. Stating this fact is bullshit negative stories. It is a problem. If Google search is not going to work, then who is going to make it? If Google is not going to innovate as MS innovated MS Office during the 90's, then who will? If Google social services are primarily to support the primary ad business, is that value to consumers?
We the people have no vested interest in any corporation. We want stuff and only care about who is providing the best good enough stuff. If a company stops providing the best good enough stuff, they will be less relavent. It is in the interest of the people to ridicule companies that have stopped innovating, since that will either cause them to start innovating or open up the door to competition. No one gets a free ride just because you did something interesting last week. Ask myspace, ask AOL, ask general motors(well, if you employ enough high school dropouts you do get a federal grant). But really, if my search does not return good result, what good is Google to me?
If you are talking about standard, Apple did not compete with standards, they used standards while other standards evolved around them to compete with Apple. For instance Apple used the RS242 standard for many interconnects. It was well understood and easy to implement with software using widely available hardware. Compare the random and non standard connects of the mid-1980s. Apple also used SCSI. Some did not like it, because it was expensive, but it provided and elegant standards based solution to a complicated problem. It was easy to plug and play in a time when such things did not often exist. USB was fully implemented again provided standards based plug and play connectivity. Using standards based protocols for printers, cameras, scanners, it is not neccesary to create and configure a driver for every device. Just plug and play.
The standards for Mail, iCal, iDisk, iTunes, iBooks are open and, outside of annoying DRM, can interact with any compliant standard setup.
What many complain about is that the Mac is not an 'open' hackers machine. But neither is the PC. Hacking is not replacing one hard drive with another. Hard hacks are hardly every done anymore, and hard hacks not involving the machine itself no longer requires access to the internals of the machine. I remember my Apples never had a lid on because i was in and out of them due tot he fact that to get speed, you had to access the mother board. Now I can get a universal chip programmer or under $100 and hook it up to my USB port.
Now if all you want is cheaper, that is another story. My opinion is this 30% fee is really going to push the market for Android. Right now iBooks is a complete dud and anyone who wants an ereader has an Amazon.
Apple did right in creating a device based with open standard interfaces. The month by month for 3g is good, and the no free for WifI is good. They corrected the mistake of the newton with a fully integrated product offering between all devices. For what I use the devices for, they serve my purpose and I really can live or not live with the subscriptions services. I do not really see myself depending on SaaS, especially since Apple products run so many OS products. I either can pay for a product once and use it on all my machines, or simply get the product for free. None of the complications of so-called 'open' proprietary products.
On Windows bosex, the Admin are not allowed to fix problems, so problems persist. To temporarily solve the problem until MS fixes the code robot the computer. It doesn't matter because the computer is going to have be rebooted anyway when MS issues an update.
To be fair, the main reason I don't reboot my *nix partitions is that I am never sure they will come back up. Say what you will, the nice thing about Windows is that no matter how it is damaged and how bad the situation is, it will attempt to come back up in something resembling a working state. Probably not a known state. Probably not a secure state. But usually a workable state.
I also don't know if an episode like 'Ariel' were really earned. The 80's montage A-Team thing worked very well when with BA, but not so well since them. That would have been much better off focusing on the tension between Jayne and the Tams rather than focusing on the job.