Accordingly, we hereby agree: -that we will not transfer, export, or re-export, directly or indirectly, any Product(s) acquired from Dell to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and/or Syria, or any nationals thereof, or to any other country subject to restriction under applicable laws and regulations, and that we are not located in, under the control of, or a national or resident of any such country;
('we agree' as in 'we the person buying the product').
Found via a a google search for "re exporting dell products to iran" as the first result.
Actually it's not. In this case it's due diligence. Apple is not allowed to export to Iran then they are obliged to not export to Iran, and are supposed to make sure whatever they sell isn't ending up in Iran. If they knowingly sell product to someone who will export or re-export it to Iran that would be illegal and could land them in a lot of trouble.
You could do the same with anyone speaking Korean or arabic. (North korea and syria) it would just be relatively rare that anyone is exporting to North Korea.
When you buy the product you're agreeing to the licence agreement that says you won't export it to Iran. If there is *any* evidence that you are going to violate that agreement Apple, or just about any other electronics manufacturer cannot sell it to you. They sell it to a warehouse in Qatar where people are smart enough to not open their mouths.
You could have every single transaction an employee at any computer products seller say "Now you understand that you aren't allowed to re-sell or otherwise export this to..........." and sound off the long list of countries export is forbidden to. But most of the time that would be stupid (in the same way airport security long ago gave up on asking whether or not baggage is your own) and just a waste of everyones time. It's there in the fine print if you want to read it.
Nor, by the way is this unique to the US.
The UK page (which itself refernces the fact that the restrictions are EU wide) http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/what-we-do/services-we-deliver/export-controls-sanctions/country-listing/iran. There are so many layers of places you have to look, I don't see the value in linking them all to convey the point.
Then they're competing on hardware and maybe some custom software of their own, but on hardware they don't actually own any of the core technology that say... samsung does. They'd be buying other peoples parts and sticking them in plastic coffins, which is fine when you're a chinese maker and have minimal labour costs, but for a canadian company that would be a very difficult market to be in.
That was always their problem. Being an android maker in a sea of android makers is not a place you want to be. If WP was actually successful they could own the business end of the windows phone market (and leave the consumer space to nokia), but well... WP hasn't exactly gotten anywhere. As the business side of things they could be much more about the business solution (management etc.) and the handset is a sort of on the side public face of the company. They could try that tack with android I suppose too, but then we're back to shitty handsets competing with samsung and HTC.
They lack direction, not management. The people in charge don't seem to really like the options (become and android maker, become a WP maker, both, sell off the handset business and become purely a back end company, or transition to a software firm for mobile) because none of those are particularly good options.
Those have basically been their only options since android entered the fray, but coming to grips with the reality that your business is now second place to someone that wasn't even in the market yesterday is hard. Especially when people keep buying your antiquated product due to inertia.
If Linux had a platform share of 50% of the hardware market
That's a very interesting assertion... See linux has like 1% of the desktop market, and the server market is irrelevant in this discussion. But the GPU computing market is not. And nVIDIA and AMD are battling it out for systems with tens of thousands of high end GPU's in them, and those systems all run linux, or a variant on it.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if nVIDIA does 30 or 40% of it's high value business on linux as part of GPU computing clusters. It doesn't take a lot of customers buying 100 000 GPU's at a time to suddenly have a big market, and a big percent of total sales (of cards anyone cares about).
All the cards have firmware on them, and yes, you can flash some cards firmware and get a better card when they down bin them in the firmware, but the firmware isn't the driver.
Even then, it's pretty rare that you get a much better card down tiered to a terrible card, it's a much smaller slide than that.
Except for the notion that living wages leave people unemployed. All minimum wages have that effect, regardless of where you set the number. At some point you're better off not working, and investing your time in job training through social assistance than spending time working and trapping yourself in poverty you'll never get out of. Absent any form of social assistance sure, we could go back to peasant farmers and serfs working for just enough to not starve to death on and not having the ability to be anything more than menial labour, and then minimum wage laws would be depriving the weak peasants of any sort of work.
But that's not the world we live in, and definitely not one we want to live in.
Right, and no job at all may actually be better than a very low paying job, that's why we have social welfare and assistance, so that people who are not ever going to be self sustaining can get the training they need to be something more than a serf their entire lives. (And so that people who won't ever be able to work won't starve to death and won't pose more dangers to society than they already do).
And if your business can't sustain itself on paying people a reasonable wage (not necessarily a living wage) then you probably shouldn't be in business.
If you want to work for a dollar an hour feel free to hop on a boat to china or somalia. I'm sure you'll do just fine. If you don't want to work for a dollar an hour then your choices are trying to get training for a job (which requires money) or making a go of it at minimum wage.
But if you're paying an employee and you want them to be self sustaining (i.e. you want them to be able to make a career out of working for you) this sort of data tells you a lot.
If you don't want them to be self sustaining and you don't want them to make a career of it you pay less than minimum wage. Which is what apple is doing and why their average turnover is 2 and a half years as per the article. They don't want people making a career as sales clerks. They do however view genius bar as a viable career and pay accordingly.
It contributes to discussions of the minimum wage, because you need to know where you're setting one number relative to the other. If a living wage is 25 an hour and minimum wage is 5 then you can reasonably conclude that no one making minimum wage will be self sustaining. If the gap is 12 dollars and 10 dollars well then you're within the margins of error on your numbers. You can also start to factor in costs of eduction or other factors that would produce labour mobility and so on.
It's not that you can't survive for the short term. it's that such low wages aren't sustainable. Someone that low on the economic ladder is, in the long run, going to be a burden to society because they're going to need government sponsored pensions etc. and they'll never pay any meaningful amount of taxes. It's a job not a career so to speak.
Now if you invest in people early enough (public education for example) they become worth a lot more than if you don't, being able to read and do basic math is tremendously valuable, we just don't always see it because effectively everyone in western society meets those standards. The question for living wages and so on is whether or not you are going to have people trapped at that economic reality for ever, or if it's just a temporary gig that has students rotating through.
It's not slavery. It's serfdom. You may not be the property of someone else, but you have no labour mobility to ever become anything other than a low wage minion. Low wages really can and really do trap people in low economic tiers, they don't have enough money to save anything, nor can they borrow money to invest in a better business/education etc because they don't have enough money. It takes a huge amount of effort to get people out of that trap. But it can be done.
Also, again, depends where you are. 1000 bucks a month in new york or silicon valley wouldn't go very far. In Mississippi that's not a huge problem.
Intel are also not competing on high end. They're competing on simple, integrated and low power. If someone could, in the worst case, duplicate an Intel GPU it wouldn't really hurt intel. nVIDIA on the other hand...
Or would give away something about how their hardware, or hardware development works that they don't want anyone to know too much about. Or at least not to wave around in public. I'm sure AMD know, enough staff move back and forth, but some random chinese hardware maker, that I'd be worried about.
Remember nVIDIA sells it's 'first silicon' runs, they don't usually prototype, they do simulations first, and from the simulations that are used to design the hardware they go straight to manufacturing. It's possible some of their driver support would have some hooks (or parts) of their simulation tools in it that they don't really want to be broadcasting around.
But broadly ya, for whatever reason, if their higher ups don't want to be telling the world how their drivers work, and so they won't. Hell for all we know it could be entirely paranoia from an MBA type who just doesn't understand and doesn't want his ass fired if something goes wrong.
So you're basically trapped then unless you can change jobs or move your job somewhere else.
What the TFA isn't great at explaining is what the average salary growth profile looks like for an apple store employee. It mentions a guy who got a 49 cent raise one year, and then 2.82 the next year. It does say the average tenure is 2 and a half years, so it seems like the retail side is mostly intended for people trying to sustain themselves minimally until they move on to a real job that can be a career.
In your case there aren't a lot of choices. Corrections officer is generally a career gig, not a temp gig. Apple store retail monkey is more of a temp job anyway.
That and actually spending 28k a year is a lot. That's equivalent to about 40k/year in before tax income (which is 20 bucks an hour).
The two on research grants only get 12k but they don't and aren't expected to be building a pension or unemployment for example. Nor would they be able to build equity in a property at that rate. On and if they're on research grants they probably have health care through their institutions, and they're living that badly (with no meaningful savings towards retirement) as an investment. It's not sustainable, but it's certainly viable short term.
Saying he 'lives' on 28k a year when he makes 90 is silly. He's only spending 28k a year (which is still more than his two roommates combined) but much of his 'not spent' income is actually going to be spent, when he buys a house, a car, or retires. 24k a year would not leave him much room to do that. Depending on where you live naturally.
actually it's a fairly good description of the process you would use to determine the lowest possible wage someone can be self sustaining on. That's a useful metric for governments when setting minimum wages, and for employers looking to hire people who are just barely at that level.
That doesn't necessarily apply to Apple stores though, nor is starting salary reflective of average salary, or salary after a year or the like.
If (for sake of argument) the living wage was 20 dollars an hour, and you were paying 10, then you were clearly telling future employees that this isn't a job where you're expected to be independent at early on. You're looking to hire students mostly, or people otherwise fresh out of school looking for whatever until they get something better.
Now as someone above said, the genius bar gig paying 29 an hour is a big step up from a living wage. But your average teller monkey can't do genius bar level work, that might be a training gap, that might be experience, and it might be that training gets you into the genius bar, and then experience will promote you up to that point.
But calculations like living wage are really important. They tell both the government and employers what lifestyle their employees will be in. 24k a year before taxes doesn't get you a whole lot, but what it does get you depends a lot on where you live. Where I am 24K/year would get you your own apartment, public transit to work, and food. You'd really struggle to have enough money to go to school additionally or that sort of thing (car for example), but you at least wouldn't starve to death and could afford internet access to troll/.. You'd just have to have a way out already, because 12 bucks an hour might trap you at equivalent to that rate for life.
Touch works fine on my 5 year old HP tablet. In Vista no less. Actually, it works basically the same as an iPad. Also, it has pen input if you want it.
Not sure what you're getting at with your 2nd line. Hardware is hardware. If you want x86 hardware you buy x86 hardware. It gets the job done fine.
Never had any problem with inputs using touch or the pen, but sure, they weren't designed to be fully touch slates. that's sort of a stupid observation, they weren't designed to be slates so they didn't behave like slates.
Again not sure what you're getting at with being able to substitute a library to change the look and feel. that's a stupid idea for consumers.
Sure, again, manufacturers made laptops not slates. Although my HP can easily be carried around, insofar as any laptop can be.
It was (is actually) a fully functional notebook and I can write on it. It is obviously not a slate however. But I can do a lot of stuff with it I can't do with an ipad.
It was sold at the same price as comparably specced notebooks so... not intended to be a factual statement?
Sure, the convertible screen could break. Again, manufacturers didn't step up to the plate, although I don't know anyone personally who ever broke one I can see how it would fail easily enough.
Ya absolutely. Apple is successful because everyone needs access to the web and the vast majority of people have no fucking clue what their computer does or how to find software for it. Even the concept of a web page is beyond a lot of people.
That has nearly happened to france several times in the last century (WW1, WW2, Suez crisis). Republicanism is an inherently weak and flawed form of government, and always will be.
In the event of a major catastrophe in any country the UN or surviving great powers stepping in to provide temporary administration would be perfectly sensible.
Or as you say simply extending british north america to included areas under republican occupation would be perfectly viable.
The problem is that people still believe it's a fallacy.
But that's beside the point, this argument has been hashed out before. People who are unemployed are either being paid to do nothing (unemployment/welfare) or they're just not contributing to the economy.
Giving them jobs at all would create jobs and would boost spending and demand. Which is good. Imagine throwing a few billion dollars at NASA for example. The problem with a massive security apparatus like I described is that it wouldn't actually be sustainable. Security events are so rare most of the people employed wouldn't actually do much, and those jobs would be cut immediately when private sector employment starts to pick up and needs labour.
For examples of how the broken window not actually a fallacy works feel free to look at all NASA spending, WW2 for the US and Canada, the Japanese Tsunami etc.
How people are still living in pre -depression era economic theory and thinking that the flow of wealth isn't the economy is fascinating, and pathetic.
Just a comment from a Brit, but isn't the important thing to/know/ who will succeed, so as to avoid the possibility of conflicting claims?
You could say that this is where a monarchy scores. We/know/ who succeeds whom.
Not really no.
The line of succession is only reasonable so long as whomever is next in line is actually reasonably capable of doing the job. And that needs to be determined at the time of succession.
The 8th in line to the Throne is James Mountbatten-Windsor, Viscount Severn, who is 5. Knowing he is now officially the monarch wouldn't actually help much, because you'd need to figure out who the regent is.
If HRH Prince Charles and The Duke of Cambridge are both murdered by an a lunatic in front of Prince Harry of Wales he may on paper be next in line, but expecting him to accomplish any useful leadership might be unlikely in the short term. The same basic problem afflicts our republican 'friends' who don't face the problem of children or the infirm elderly particularly, but someone who in the midst of whatever catastrophe we're talking about suffers a mental breakdown doesn't really make for a good leader.
Sure, conflicting claims would pose long term problems, but if two people are alive and capable of claiming leadership and are serious about squabbling over it all the laws in the world won't stop them.
So little that most countries can organize them without much effort on 6-8 weeks notice.
If you never had elections at all, then yes, organizing the first election is a pain. But when you had an election less than 2 or 4 years ago, assuming most of the polling places and so on still exist it's really not very hard.
If most of the polling places don't exist, you have bigger problems than who is your congressman.
We're stuck with them for that long too, if they can maintain a majority, which, in a two party system, they will.
You don't really want the ungodly hodgepodge alliances that the israeli's or the germans have. Those can be far more disastrous than the two party system you do have, because then a relatively moderate party will have to acquiesce so some fringe demands to get anything done.
And I was thinking more in the extreme case of a state of the union getting blown up and everyone killed. You're into a special election to replace senators and congress people (potentially to finish terms) but there's no particular reason that couldn't be organized quickly. Trying to do so as part of your regular political process is unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
despite my inability to type I do, in fact despise apple.
1. I despite apple.
2. apologies for the horrid link but here it is
http://partnerdirect.dell.com/sites/channel/Terms%20and%20Conditions/Dell%20-%20PartnerDirect%20Terms%20and%20Conditions%20EN%20EMERGING%20COUNTRY.pdf
to quote that document from Dell
Accordingly, we hereby agree: -that we will not transfer, export, or re-export, directly or
indirectly, any Product(s) acquired from Dell to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and/or Syria, or
any nationals thereof, or to any other country subject to restriction under applicable laws and
regulations, and that we are not located in, under the control of, or a national or resident of any
such country;
('we agree' as in 'we the person buying the product').
Found via a a google search for "re exporting dell products to iran" as the first result.
Given the sanctions regime on iran it's more likely the first than second.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/programs/pages/iran.aspx
It's very very limited in what you can sell to iran and even things that might support their technology sector are banned, and have been for years.
Actually it's not. In this case it's due diligence. Apple is not allowed to export to Iran then they are obliged to not export to Iran, and are supposed to make sure whatever they sell isn't ending up in Iran. If they knowingly sell product to someone who will export or re-export it to Iran that would be illegal and could land them in a lot of trouble.
You could do the same with anyone speaking Korean or arabic. (North korea and syria) it would just be relatively rare that anyone is exporting to North Korea.
When you buy the product you're agreeing to the licence agreement that says you won't export it to Iran. If there is *any* evidence that you are going to violate that agreement Apple, or just about any other electronics manufacturer cannot sell it to you. They sell it to a warehouse in Qatar where people are smart enough to not open their mouths.
You could have every single transaction an employee at any computer products seller say "Now you understand that you aren't allowed to re-sell or otherwise export this to ..........." and sound off the long list of countries export is forbidden to. But most of the time that would be stupid (in the same way airport security long ago gave up on asking whether or not baggage is your own) and just a waste of everyones time. It's there in the fine print if you want to read it.
Nor, by the way is this unique to the US.
The UK page (which itself refernces the fact that the restrictions are EU wide) http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/what-we-do/services-we-deliver/export-controls-sanctions/country-listing/iran. There are so many layers of places you have to look, I don't see the value in linking them all to convey the point.
if only.
Then they're competing on hardware and maybe some custom software of their own, but on hardware they don't actually own any of the core technology that say... samsung does. They'd be buying other peoples parts and sticking them in plastic coffins, which is fine when you're a chinese maker and have minimal labour costs, but for a canadian company that would be a very difficult market to be in.
That was always their problem. Being an android maker in a sea of android makers is not a place you want to be. If WP was actually successful they could own the business end of the windows phone market (and leave the consumer space to nokia), but well... WP hasn't exactly gotten anywhere. As the business side of things they could be much more about the business solution (management etc.) and the handset is a sort of on the side public face of the company. They could try that tack with android I suppose too, but then we're back to shitty handsets competing with samsung and HTC.
They lack direction, not management. The people in charge don't seem to really like the options (become and android maker, become a WP maker, both, sell off the handset business and become purely a back end company, or transition to a software firm for mobile) because none of those are particularly good options.
Those have basically been their only options since android entered the fray, but coming to grips with the reality that your business is now second place to someone that wasn't even in the market yesterday is hard. Especially when people keep buying your antiquated product due to inertia.
If Linux had a platform share of 50% of the hardware market
That's a very interesting assertion... See linux has like 1% of the desktop market, and the server market is irrelevant in this discussion. But the GPU computing market is not. And nVIDIA and AMD are battling it out for systems with tens of thousands of high end GPU's in them, and those systems all run linux, or a variant on it.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if nVIDIA does 30 or 40% of it's high value business on linux as part of GPU computing clusters. It doesn't take a lot of customers buying 100 000 GPU's at a time to suddenly have a big market, and a big percent of total sales (of cards anyone cares about).
All the cards have firmware on them, and yes, you can flash some cards firmware and get a better card when they down bin them in the firmware, but the firmware isn't the driver.
Even then, it's pretty rare that you get a much better card down tiered to a terrible card, it's a much smaller slide than that.
I think I mentioned all of those things.
Except for the notion that living wages leave people unemployed. All minimum wages have that effect, regardless of where you set the number. At some point you're better off not working, and investing your time in job training through social assistance than spending time working and trapping yourself in poverty you'll never get out of. Absent any form of social assistance sure, we could go back to peasant farmers and serfs working for just enough to not starve to death on and not having the ability to be anything more than menial labour, and then minimum wage laws would be depriving the weak peasants of any sort of work.
But that's not the world we live in, and definitely not one we want to live in.
Right, and no job at all may actually be better than a very low paying job, that's why we have social welfare and assistance, so that people who are not ever going to be self sustaining can get the training they need to be something more than a serf their entire lives. (And so that people who won't ever be able to work won't starve to death and won't pose more dangers to society than they already do).
And if your business can't sustain itself on paying people a reasonable wage (not necessarily a living wage) then you probably shouldn't be in business.
If you want to work for a dollar an hour feel free to hop on a boat to china or somalia. I'm sure you'll do just fine. If you don't want to work for a dollar an hour then your choices are trying to get training for a job (which requires money) or making a go of it at minimum wage.
I didn't say it equates to the minimum wage.
But if you're paying an employee and you want them to be self sustaining (i.e. you want them to be able to make a career out of working for you) this sort of data tells you a lot.
If you don't want them to be self sustaining and you don't want them to make a career of it you pay less than minimum wage. Which is what apple is doing and why their average turnover is 2 and a half years as per the article. They don't want people making a career as sales clerks. They do however view genius bar as a viable career and pay accordingly.
It contributes to discussions of the minimum wage, because you need to know where you're setting one number relative to the other. If a living wage is 25 an hour and minimum wage is 5 then you can reasonably conclude that no one making minimum wage will be self sustaining. If the gap is 12 dollars and 10 dollars well then you're within the margins of error on your numbers. You can also start to factor in costs of eduction or other factors that would produce labour mobility and so on.
They do in many cases. Around here is 2 bucks an hour chipped in from the government on a 10 dollar minimum wage.
It's not that you can't survive for the short term. it's that such low wages aren't sustainable. Someone that low on the economic ladder is, in the long run, going to be a burden to society because they're going to need government sponsored pensions etc. and they'll never pay any meaningful amount of taxes. It's a job not a career so to speak.
Now if you invest in people early enough (public education for example) they become worth a lot more than if you don't, being able to read and do basic math is tremendously valuable, we just don't always see it because effectively everyone in western society meets those standards. The question for living wages and so on is whether or not you are going to have people trapped at that economic reality for ever, or if it's just a temporary gig that has students rotating through.
It's not slavery. It's serfdom. You may not be the property of someone else, but you have no labour mobility to ever become anything other than a low wage minion. Low wages really can and really do trap people in low economic tiers, they don't have enough money to save anything, nor can they borrow money to invest in a better business/education etc because they don't have enough money. It takes a huge amount of effort to get people out of that trap. But it can be done.
Also, again, depends where you are. 1000 bucks a month in new york or silicon valley wouldn't go very far. In Mississippi that's not a huge problem.
Intel are also not competing on high end. They're competing on simple, integrated and low power. If someone could, in the worst case, duplicate an Intel GPU it wouldn't really hurt intel. nVIDIA on the other hand...
Or would give away something about how their hardware, or hardware development works that they don't want anyone to know too much about. Or at least not to wave around in public. I'm sure AMD know, enough staff move back and forth, but some random chinese hardware maker, that I'd be worried about.
Remember nVIDIA sells it's 'first silicon' runs, they don't usually prototype, they do simulations first, and from the simulations that are used to design the hardware they go straight to manufacturing. It's possible some of their driver support would have some hooks (or parts) of their simulation tools in it that they don't really want to be broadcasting around.
But broadly ya, for whatever reason, if their higher ups don't want to be telling the world how their drivers work, and so they won't. Hell for all we know it could be entirely paranoia from an MBA type who just doesn't understand and doesn't want his ass fired if something goes wrong.
very bleak outlook in the way of raises.
So you're basically trapped then unless you can change jobs or move your job somewhere else.
What the TFA isn't great at explaining is what the average salary growth profile looks like for an apple store employee. It mentions a guy who got a 49 cent raise one year, and then 2.82 the next year. It does say the average tenure is 2 and a half years, so it seems like the retail side is mostly intended for people trying to sustain themselves minimally until they move on to a real job that can be a career.
In your case there aren't a lot of choices. Corrections officer is generally a career gig, not a temp gig. Apple store retail monkey is more of a temp job anyway.
Two roomates pretty much sums it up.
That and actually spending 28k a year is a lot. That's equivalent to about 40k/year in before tax income (which is 20 bucks an hour).
The two on research grants only get 12k but they don't and aren't expected to be building a pension or unemployment for example. Nor would they be able to build equity in a property at that rate. On and if they're on research grants they probably have health care through their institutions, and they're living that badly (with no meaningful savings towards retirement) as an investment. It's not sustainable, but it's certainly viable short term.
Saying he 'lives' on 28k a year when he makes 90 is silly. He's only spending 28k a year (which is still more than his two roommates combined) but much of his 'not spent' income is actually going to be spent, when he buys a house, a car, or retires. 24k a year would not leave him much room to do that. Depending on where you live naturally.
actually it's a fairly good description of the process you would use to determine the lowest possible wage someone can be self sustaining on. That's a useful metric for governments when setting minimum wages, and for employers looking to hire people who are just barely at that level.
That doesn't necessarily apply to Apple stores though, nor is starting salary reflective of average salary, or salary after a year or the like.
If (for sake of argument) the living wage was 20 dollars an hour, and you were paying 10, then you were clearly telling future employees that this isn't a job where you're expected to be independent at early on. You're looking to hire students mostly, or people otherwise fresh out of school looking for whatever until they get something better.
Now as someone above said, the genius bar gig paying 29 an hour is a big step up from a living wage. But your average teller monkey can't do genius bar level work, that might be a training gap, that might be experience, and it might be that training gets you into the genius bar, and then experience will promote you up to that point.
But calculations like living wage are really important. They tell both the government and employers what lifestyle their employees will be in. 24k a year before taxes doesn't get you a whole lot, but what it does get you depends a lot on where you live. Where I am 24K/year would get you your own apartment, public transit to work, and food. You'd really struggle to have enough money to go to school additionally or that sort of thing (car for example), but you at least wouldn't starve to death and could afford internet access to troll /.. You'd just have to have a way out already, because 12 bucks an hour might trap you at equivalent to that rate for life.
Touch works fine on my 5 year old HP tablet. In Vista no less. Actually, it works basically the same as an iPad. Also, it has pen input if you want it.
Not sure what you're getting at with your 2nd line. Hardware is hardware. If you want x86 hardware you buy x86 hardware. It gets the job done fine.
Never had any problem with inputs using touch or the pen, but sure, they weren't designed to be fully touch slates. that's sort of a stupid observation, they weren't designed to be slates so they didn't behave like slates.
Again not sure what you're getting at with being able to substitute a library to change the look and feel. that's a stupid idea for consumers.
Sure, again, manufacturers made laptops not slates. Although my HP can easily be carried around, insofar as any laptop can be.
It was (is actually) a fully functional notebook and I can write on it. It is obviously not a slate however. But I can do a lot of stuff with it I can't do with an ipad.
It was sold at the same price as comparably specced notebooks so... not intended to be a factual statement?
Sure, the convertible screen could break. Again, manufacturers didn't step up to the plate, although I don't know anyone personally who ever broke one I can see how it would fail easily enough.
Ya absolutely. Apple is successful because everyone needs access to the web and the vast majority of people have no fucking clue what their computer does or how to find software for it. Even the concept of a web page is beyond a lot of people.
That has nearly happened to france several times in the last century (WW1, WW2, Suez crisis). Republicanism is an inherently weak and flawed form of government, and always will be.
In the event of a major catastrophe in any country the UN or surviving great powers stepping in to provide temporary administration would be perfectly sensible.
Or as you say simply extending british north america to included areas under republican occupation would be perfectly viable.
The problem is that people still believe it's a fallacy.
But that's beside the point, this argument has been hashed out before. People who are unemployed are either being paid to do nothing (unemployment/welfare) or they're just not contributing to the economy.
Giving them jobs at all would create jobs and would boost spending and demand. Which is good. Imagine throwing a few billion dollars at NASA for example. The problem with a massive security apparatus like I described is that it wouldn't actually be sustainable. Security events are so rare most of the people employed wouldn't actually do much, and those jobs would be cut immediately when private sector employment starts to pick up and needs labour.
For examples of how the broken window not actually a fallacy works feel free to look at all NASA spending, WW2 for the US and Canada, the Japanese Tsunami etc.
How people are still living in pre -depression era economic theory and thinking that the flow of wealth isn't the economy is fascinating, and pathetic.
Just a comment from a Brit, but isn't the important thing to /know/ who will succeed, so as to avoid the possibility of conflicting claims?
You could say that this is where a monarchy scores. We /know/ who succeeds whom.
Not really no.
The line of succession is only reasonable so long as whomever is next in line is actually reasonably capable of doing the job. And that needs to be determined at the time of succession.
The 8th in line to the Throne is James Mountbatten-Windsor, Viscount Severn, who is 5. Knowing he is now officially the monarch wouldn't actually help much, because you'd need to figure out who the regent is.
If HRH Prince Charles and The Duke of Cambridge are both murdered by an a lunatic in front of Prince Harry of Wales he may on paper be next in line, but expecting him to accomplish any useful leadership might be unlikely in the short term. The same basic problem afflicts our republican 'friends' who don't face the problem of children or the infirm elderly particularly, but someone who in the midst of whatever catastrophe we're talking about suffers a mental breakdown doesn't really make for a good leader.
Sure, conflicting claims would pose long term problems, but if two people are alive and capable of claiming leadership and are serious about squabbling over it all the laws in the world won't stop them.
So little that most countries can organize them without much effort on 6-8 weeks notice.
If you never had elections at all, then yes, organizing the first election is a pain. But when you had an election less than 2 or 4 years ago, assuming most of the polling places and so on still exist it's really not very hard.
If most of the polling places don't exist, you have bigger problems than who is your congressman.
We're stuck with them for that long too, if they can maintain a majority, which, in a two party system, they will.
You don't really want the ungodly hodgepodge alliances that the israeli's or the germans have. Those can be far more disastrous than the two party system you do have, because then a relatively moderate party will have to acquiesce so some fringe demands to get anything done.
And I was thinking more in the extreme case of a state of the union getting blown up and everyone killed. You're into a special election to replace senators and congress people (potentially to finish terms) but there's no particular reason that couldn't be organized quickly. Trying to do so as part of your regular political process is unlikely.