And a "taxpayer-funded farm marketing board" is not supposed to be a moralistic outpost of good government, it's supposed to be an incredibly biased industry group. The difference between the RIAA and the AEB is that egg-producers are required to pay their membership fee, and the fee collection is administered by the government; not that anyone who actually knows how the US Government works thinks they'll be nice. They're not supposed to badmouth their opponents (who are, presumably, other farm marketing boards), but that's not what they're accused of. They're accused of paying people to say nice things about them.
Frankly I have yet to read a single critique of any of this from the Hampton Creek that does not boil down to "But we don't want it to work this way!!!" Since they don't actually say how they want it to work, and (most importantly) provide some reason for Congress to change how it works, their criticism amounts to childish whining.
No Hampton Creek, you cannot name your non-egg-based product after an egg-based product, use an egg a a logo, and not be guilty of falsity in advertising. I don't care how much you paid your lawyers for rationalizations, or how much I'm supposed to like you because you precociously decided your food science company is tech, JustMayo's label is a lie. No Hampton Creek, you can't silence the trade group of the industry you are trying to disrupt, which incidentally employs Americans I actually like (farmers) rather then a group I have decided to hate (SanFran-based techies who insist on calling everything a tech startup) by calling it taxpayer-funded when it's just a Farm Marketing Board.
It may be incompetence. The product is called "Just Mayo." It has an egg on it. Mayonnaise is a very old recipe. It includes eggs.
If I looked at that box I'd assume they were selling Mayonnaise with real eggs, probably from free-range chickens, and no preservatives. JustMayo is actually vegan.
Textbook case of both false advertising, and shitty marketing.
Technically "tax-payer funded" is correct, but that's an an intellectually dishonest way to describe a US Farm Marketing board.
When you say "taxpayer-funded" people assume you mean their income taxes, sales taxes, or some other tax everyone pays. US Farm marketing boards get their funding from a tax farmers pay on each unit of product they sell. They are supposed to be the equivalent of the RIAA or MPAA for eggs, or beef, or milk, or whatever; not a policy body.
Moreover if you don't buy eggs you pay $0 a year towards the AEB.
You read anything about Deflategate? Or Politics? Publicly notable people (like Goodell/Brady in the former case, and everyone running for President) have a lot less right to control what's said about them than some chick who works at this one diner in Arkansas.
Hampton Creek is in business. In business your competitors are supposed to rip your ass to shreds. That is, quite literally, their entire job. Getting their message out, convincing your free PR to stop being your free PR, etc. is par for the course.
Question: Which peripherals could you get in USB for your PC, with it's USB port, prior to the iMac?
Answer: pretty much jack-squat. The entire first generation of USB Peripherals was in Bondi Blue because nobody actually built them for the PC market. This was because while Intel put the port on a lot of logic boards, PC Geeks didn't actually see a need to replace PS/2 or serial, so the firmware for that port was frequently all fucked up.
Then the iMac came and soon anybody who had a machine with a non-working USB port had a huge angry-ass customer issue.
I know it's heresy to admit this on Slashdot, I don't actually giva a fuck about the specs on my mobile phone. It does what I want it to do, therefore it is good enough, therefore anybody pointing out that I could get more GB is a marketing drone trying to sell me shit I do not need.
I care that with Apple one company is responsible for almost everything, and will typically take responsibility if anything goes wrong. In one case I've actually gotten them to replace a motherboard after I admitted spilling Dr. Pepper all over the damn thing. Other times I haven't been so lucky as to get free shit from them, but since they have an actual retail location with actual salesman who want me to be happy with the company, I will almost always get more support from them at the Apple Store then I could get from any other hardware company. More importantly I'm not going to have an issue where my carrier and phone manufacturer both swear they'd love to update my software but some asshole at the other party (or at google, google is also a common target in these petty little spats) won't let them.
Now if that's not what you want in a phone, maybe because you actually use up some of those specs that are so important to you, then yes Android is the logical option. But for my use-case the Apple Tax is a no-brainer.
He was a perfect visionary back then. But nothing more.
The Mac was over-priced and under-powered because you need roughly 512 KB- 1 MB of RAM to have a useful GUI on a powerful machine. And you could not do that in a reasonable price range in 1984.
He came back a) knowing how the finance end of the business operates, and b) understanding that sometimes you don;t release extremely cool tech until you get the price way down.
Prior to 1977 the case was frequently something a hobbyist made himself. Since you had to custom-build everything, including most of the boards, yourself anyway it was not hard to sell something like the Altair.
Jobs didn't really invent the concept (three or four machines released that year had cases, and apparently some earlier machines with tape output also did), but it definitely was not standard before '77 and I sincerely doubt the Woz wasted brain space figuring out whether the damn thing was pretty.
A and B are going after the same guy, therefore they'll govern fairly similarly.
IRL, of course, the design of the system is also relevant. Since both sides almost always have a veto (except for that minuscule period where Obama had a 60-vote Senate, after Franken's election was blessed by the Courts and before Scott Brown beat Coakley) generally you're limited to the most extreme version of your platform that won't make the other side go "fuck this, we're filibustering mother's day."
Note that this is how the system is supposed to work. Whereas Canada is designed to produce a government that can implement it's entire agenda so that the people know who to blame when shit fails to go right ("Responsible Government"), we're designed so that absolutely nothing can change unless the President can convince Congress to let him rule by decree ("Checks and balances").
Thus we get half-assed Health Care Reform, virtually no other real change in government, except the PATRIOT Act.
It's always amazing to me how my fellow Americans will swear up and down the Founders were the wisest, most moralistist, smartest, statesmen ever; and then decry the system for "working" precisely as they intended.
Here's a list of all references to money in Star Trek.
In the 60s episodes Rodenberry hadn't decided that money was verbotten. By the time of the movies it's quite clear that the Federation's core worlds have moved on from money, but still use it in dealing with non-Federation peoples (ie: everyone has money to spend at Quark's on DS9). Since the 60s episodes are set like 90 years before the movies/NextGen/etc. they haven't really addressed when money stopped being something the Federation uses internally.
I suspect what happened was the government started giving people a monthly check, eventually it got to be so big that nobody needed to work; and society's values became more Scandinavian. The Larry Ellisons of the world got shunned instead of famous. Then they just said "fuck money, we'll ration some things, but fuck money."
Sisko's family still owned the building, and equipment, and as long as he can get people to show up for work he can give people free food and call it a "Cafe." They show up for work partly because they're bored, partly because social pressure forces them to do something, and partly because his cafe has a good reputation and they want to bask in the glow.
Which do you want, the smartphone from 3 years ago, of the latest one? The old one works ok. It has Skype and you can text. It's enough. Which one will "the majority" choose if they're the same price? Do you think even 5 percent of the people will choose the one from 3 years ago?
And why is the new one more expensive?
Partly because the engineers who designed it need to get paid, and partly because it's made by new techniques that require retooling the factories.
A replicator never gets retooled, and the engineers in the Federation work for free.
If you don't like that, then consider your food example. Clearly there's limited value in having a quantity of food beyond a certain amount. That's why people don't go to all-you-can-eat restaurants for every meal. Food gets value from initial quality, preparation, and variety. When given the choice at the same price, would "the majority" ask for "enough" of this added value -- essentially ordinary preparation with limited variety and medium quality -- or more a lot more than enough -- artistic preparation, high quality, and ample variety? Do food companies advertise their food is "good enough"? If that will make "the majority" happy, why not?
Irrelevent.
The Replicator can scan your perfectly created meal, made using the finest ingredients, and then create an arbitrary number of copies.
Now if you want the special. hand-made, stuff you can still get it at Sisko's cafe in New Orleans, along with special hand-made wine from Picard's estate, but those are made by volunteer-labor, so the only cost is in getting to the Cafe/Winery.
If you think everyone would just sit on their asses and mooch off the replicators, I think you are wrong.
Current status of our welfare systems seems to disagree.
Which welfare system?
Once you specify a country, please specify what you mean by welfare system.
Never mind that in Star Trek such behaviour is looked as a mental illness and generally, it tends to be.
Actually,TNG had a heavy overtone of that. Enough that I remember reading a TV Guide early review (remember that?) which pointed out that the series' society seemed to find anything not in line with Federation thought was mental illness and the author found it a bit creepy that they seemed bent on "fixing" people.
And if it means that super-rich no longer exist, that's fine too.
Accept in ST, they never did "no longer exist". There's always been an obvious difference in life style luxury between anyone in the Fleet or the political classes and everyone else.
One of the great weaknesses of Star Trek is it generally doesn't show the lives of either the masses or the political leadership.
There are colonists with a strong ideological reason to set up separate societies, which are frequently poorer then Star Fleet; but that shouldn't be a surprise. It's not like the Amish, Hippy communes, etc. are economically richer then the newest buck-private in Uncle Sam's Army. If you had people still settling new land, they be poor too, in the short term. If it worked they'd end up rich landowners.
Sometimes you get the crew's families on rare occasions (Ezri Dax's family runs a large mining conglomerate in a non-Federation system, Sisko and Picard both have families still in the ancient family business -- a cafe in New Orleans and a winery in France respectively), and those folks seem to have access to all the luxuries Starfleet provides and then some (notably land and physical property).
You never see the political class. In TOS there was one agricultural commissioner who didn't seem particularly rich, that's it. Later on there's a small Federation Council, a President, etc. but we have no idea what the lives of these people are like. Given that their names are almost never mentioned it's likely they're a lot less important then current political leadership. t would be very hard to do a show about the RL USS Enterprise and hide the President's name.
Fans mostly assume that the average human has a house on adequate size (500 sq ft. per person is only small if you think a five-person family needs a 2600 sq ft. house), a replicator, walks most places, does work of the kind you do mostly for egoboo and not cash (ie: open software design, science or art), receives no salary for this work, does not need a food budget (replicator), has state health care, and whatever transit that can't be walked is probably through transporters.
Transporters and replicator credits may be scarce enough that there's some sort of economy around them, but given that nobody's "this is why I'm risking my life for my country" speech includes complaints about the civilian standard of living I doubt it. Spend an hour with a bunch of guys in the US Military and eventually somebody's gonna bring up the new GI Bill, the pension, the VA, etc.
A correction, the majority of people do not have "ever increasing unlimited desires and wants", only a tiny minority.
Yeah, right. Everyone wouldn't want their own starship, if they lived in a 'post-scarcity' Star Trek society.
Ever been to Sweden? Denmark? There's entire regions of the world where relatively simple social pressures keep people from having infinite, and ever-increasing wants.
Don't get me wrong, they're still human and they still have ambitions, but the Law of Jante means their societies would be fine with Star trek levels of prosperity.
You can argue the Nordics would be better off if they were more individualistic, and that Star Trek is dystopian because it encourages a society where guys like Elon Musk don't get to change the world; but if you're arguing that no human society could ever pattern itself like the Federation and survive you're simply mistaken.
People would just be lining up to be Redshirts, rather than starship captains.
Back in the real world, the left just have no imagination.
Dude, don't you get it?
It's a military organization. Just like the only way to be a General is command an infantry platoon, the only way to be the Captain is be a redshirt first.
There's no private space-going vessels bigger then a Runabout in the Federation at all.
If the Swedish Justice System was so bad why did he go to Sweden instead of some other country?
Because he hadn't committed any crimes in Sweden before he went there????
You can read whatever agenda into my posts you feel like, by admitting he didn't know what the Swedish system was like you're agreeing with every damn thing I just said.
He still doesn't, and neither do you:
Which is what my original post said before the Assange-niks started down-voting it en masse.
You mean people tired of correcting the willful stupidity of pretending the shit from the US/UK/Sweden here doesn't stink. Assange has offered to return to Sweden, if Sweden promises not to hand him over to the United States. Sweden has refused to make such a promise, which tells anyone without a hole in their head that this is not. about. rape. But that wont stop people from engaging in nonsensical hand waving:
You're delusional.
If the Swedes wanted to turn him over to the US they could do so simply by lying, and then claiming the US indictment was for something completely different then the paperwork they gave Assange.
OTOH, if you have ever actually dealt with Swedes, you know their obsession with proper rules and procedure borders on OCD (their shock when someone is so gauche as to cut in line has to be seen to be believed), and it's quite credible for them to claim they can't sign such an agreement since it would not be valid under Swedish law.
Those other suspects were questioned in a place full of cops who were ready to arrest them if the Swedish Prosecutor said to do so. Ecuador's government has announced they will not let Assange be arrested. That is what Diplomatic Asylum means. Therefore the Questioning can't happen until he's left the embassy.
Stupid nonsense. Cops interview people all the time in the U.S. without having a prosecutor and a place "full of cops" ready to arrest on a moments notice. If you want to question him.....then fucking question him.
Again, you're not understanding how it works in Sweden. Sweden is not an Anglo-Saxon country with a legal system based on Jury trials. It's its own country, based on a completely different legal tradition, which uses Swedish. The terms can be translated into English, but that doesn't mean they magically become the same English-language concept anyone who watched CSI is familiar with.
In the US an interview is just that. The arrest procedure is completely different, and actually includes a whole sub-procedure (called the "Miranda Rights") specifically informing the accused that his arrest does not mean he has to answer any questions. He can agree to an interview (and waive those rights), but that's a separate legal procedure that happens at the4 station, not the suspect's home or workplace (and most arrests take place in the home or workplace). You're assuming that means Swedish Questionings work precisely that way, which is as uniquely Anglo-Saxon combination of arrogance, ignorance, and motivated reasoning.
A Swedish Questioning is an arrest procedure, and it includes a section where the cops give you a chance to tell your side of the story. Thus the name. They actually had a long legal battle about this in the British Courts, which determined that a Swedish demand that Assange be questioned was analogous to a British Arrest warrant, and therefore he had to go to British jail in preparation for being turned over to the Swedes. The fact Assange lost this case, in Court, already, is the entire fucking reason he's stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
You don't need 283 A-10s to fight ISIS. It looks like the number engaged is more like 12. They are flying a lot of missions,but there aren't dozens of them doing it.
Remember we originally bought 700 to destroy massive Soviet tank columns in Europe. ISIS is a) much smaller, b) much less well-protected. You don't need a tank gun to take out a Toyota and (since their AA abilities are truly primitive) you can use choppers. The AF's desired number (283) is almost certainly overkill.
Coding = writing source code. Source code is the high level language representation of a program. Therefore coding = programming. Nobody calls HTML or CSS source code because they are not compiled to machine code like a program is.
That may be true in Computer Engineering terminology, but where everyone else lives anything that requires a computer to be read properly is considered code. Which means that even HTML counts, because hex values are not used in Standard American English.
You're an expert in a relatively advanced field with it's own jargon. Just because you use a term one way does not mean that a) everyone else will, or b) they are wrong for doing so. Just be glad the field's not something that can be frequently used politically, because otherwise everyone'd raid it for potential insults constantly. PoliSci guys in particular have to learn two damn definitions of every word, which are always tangentially related, but generally have completely different connotations, because some asshat politician has decided that's the perfect way to describe some poor schmuck standing between him and a juicy job.
And "coding" is not being used as a synonym for "programming"? Funny how the article that quotes her seems to think it is.
It is and it isn't. Khazan's Atlantic article seems to them interchangeably, but Fine's original Slate article doesn't use the word "program" at all. Fine is clearly not talking about shit like C++, but basically saying that anyone with an IQ above room temperature can master enough programming-style tasks to use webscripts, HTML code, etc. effectively; and that if you do you'll be able to function as the lady who translates between baby boomer MBAs and web developers. She's also saying that American white women, in particular, tend to screw themselves over career-wise by not figuring this out, and describes one breaking out in tears when she was told their first day of class they'd write "Hello World!" in HTML.
Khazan talks about programs a couple times, but she also says:
People who program video games probably need more math than the average web designer. But if you just want to code some stuff that appears on the Internet, you got all the math you’ll need when you completed the final level of Math Blaster.
1) If we've already got a perfect aircraft for CAS, and we've got several hundred of them, but we need much less CAS then we did last year because we left Afghanistan in December, why doesn't the Air Force's program to retire extra A-10s at the rate of one or two a month, make sense to you? Why are you surprised the budget guys are juicing their numbers with a little bullshit? Isn't that SOP in anything that involves money, be it military, non-military public sector, private sector, or the calorie ratings on your grandma's cookies?
2) You're really under-estimating the trouble one pilot can cause. Remember Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher? Pardon me, Captain Speicher. You see when we fought Saddam the first time he was shot down, killed, and declared dead. But they couldn't find the body, so in the run-up to the Iraq War he was declared un-dead, a PoW, and promoted to Captain (apparently undead PoWs ALWAYS pass their promotion boards, even if the most notable thing in their career is being shot-down). They found the corpse in '09. The PoW/MIA movement also started out as extremely crazy people who thought the Vietnamese kept secret US Prisoners*, most of whom were supposed to be airmen who'd been shot down. So the next A-10 will not be piloted. Period.
*Note to crazy POW-MIA people: if an evil dictatorship has a group of prisoners it can't actively use because they're secret, and can't risk being exposed (because we'd have to go crazy on them), they aren't gonna keep those poor schmucks alive.
We don't actually need several hundred A-10s because we don't have a hundred thousand guys in need of CAS in either sandbox anymore, so we'll probably be fine for the foreseeable future (say, 5-10 years) even if the Air Force's planned A-10 drawdown continues. And after 5-10 years, F-35 will likely have performed some missions, and done fine, and just like F-22 will magically stop being that overly-expensive-piece-of-shit and start being a point of national pride.
Then, when F-35's budget future is guaranteed, you ask for a new drone paid for by new money. If we do end up in a combat situation where we actually need hundreds and hundreds of CAS aircraft, before F-35 has become said point of national pride, the budget mavens at the AF will utter the words "deficit-financed supplemental," and get it.
but as an American I have to say 13 or 14 centuries is a pretty damn long time to occupy a piece of land.
I am sure that there are many American "Indians" who would agree with you, and look back at their hundred-odd centuries of inhabiting the Americans before being kicked out by white-skinned Europeans.
Read some Native American history.
Yes, they were here on the continent before us, but they were always moving around on the continent. Take the Crow. They were driven West several time, ending up on the Great Plains. By the early 1800s they owned a significant tract of land centered on Montana. In 1851 they lost that land to the Sioux. They have technically never ceded an acre to the white man because by the time the white advance caught up to them they were homeless.
The Pueblo are pretty unique in being able to stretch their historic occupation of some of their land to 700, which is 70 years after the Malays dominated their northernmost Malaysian state.
Hell, even if you take white people out and ask "Who was on the same piece of land from 200 AD- 1500AD? You won't find many examples. US Native Americans were hunter-gatherers, and had to be quite mobile.
This is an American site.
I thought that the American site is slashdot.us, and that this is the international site. There were no passport checks on entry.
The vast majority of people on this site are Americans. You get the occasional Brit, Canadian, Australian, Kiwi, or European. Very rarely a Latin American or Asian.
Arguments about shit that happened in 630 are even worse in front of a Brit or European audience, because the whole point of the EU is that such debates are stupid and one should focus more on a) the individual rights of people currently living in the country, and b) certain (but not all) elements of their group rights (mostly language rights, even this is considered an extension of the individual right to speak in the language you actually understand). Heck, even if arguing ancient maps was still in vogue 630 is actually roughly the time the Anglo-Saxons finished conquering England.
So by that guys standard the UKIP is not only racist but incredibly bad at history, because the English have only a foreigner's right to England.
Your criticism of their eliminating other programs applies to piloted combat aircraft. Which the next A-10 will not be.
Specifically, the next A-10 will not be piloted. It will be a drone. This is because aircraft in the A-10s close air support role have extremely high casualty rates, and the country really hates it when a pilot gets shot down. Not do much when they die, but when they either a) get captured, or b) do not have a findable corpse.You may remember back in the early 90s a deranged minority was convinced that the North Vietnamese had secret US PoWs, mostly supposedly pilots; despite the very idea being ridiculous. When Bush was running up to the Iraq War the Navy actually declared a pilot whose body they'd been unable to find un-dead and a prisoner of Saddam. they actually promoted him a couple times (because if he was MIA clearly he would have passed his promotion boards), and didn't admit that the entire idea was stupid until they found the corpse in '09.
Since Close Air Support against modern missiles is very high loss (the A-10 works because the Russkies aren't smuggling Strella in large numbers, they start doing that and the A-10 is a death trap), no we are not gonna put a pilot in the next A-10.
I've made this point before, but I'll try again: The reason the Air Force does not to replace the A-10 with a piloted aircraft is that in any situation where the enemy still has an air defense system you lose a lot of A-10s. Their armor makes them better at surviving blast waves, shrapnel, and all the other things that happen when a missile hits you then another aircraft; but that's kinda like saying Floyd Mayweather is the human who is best at surviving a direct hit from an Abrams 120 mm gun.
And a CAS plane is flying low, slow, and in VFR; which means an enemy with air defense missiles is gonna hit it. Period. OTOH, F-35, which will be hated by ground-pouinders for flying too high to see what they're talking about, and zooming across the battlefield at 1000 MPH so it can't try again if it misses; should be basically invisible to anyone who doesn't have a pristine Air Defense system run by technicians smarter then ones we can hire. And it will also be high, and fast, giving it time to respond to missiles by dodging, and (depending on the angle and the amount of rocket fuel the missile has) perhaps even allowing a very good pilot to lose a missile that has gotten lock on him despite his stealth.
Which means that a piloted CAS aircraft is a deathtrap unless the F-35s and Strategic Bombers (and to a lesser extent the F-22s) have managed to knock the local air defense system totally off-line. And by totally off-line I mean 100%, not 99.997%. Even an "air defense system" consisted of a bunch of illiterate guys with 1980s shoulder-fired missile managed to nail a dozen or so Su-25s, and the Soviets only deployed 50 of the damn things to the theater.
So, to the extent the A-10 gets replaced, it will almost certainly be by drones. Even the Army has been going away from live-person-piloted CAS aircraft because their helicopter fleet is actually slightly worse on the deathtrap scale then the A-10. Since the AF has a knight-of-the-skies complex leading them to obsess about everything but tactical air support, I strongly suspect that the "next A-10" will be a fixed-wing drone operated by the Army.
And given the choice I'd take a Commodore with 4 GB of RAM over a PC any day. But that isn't the choice. There is no 4 GB Commodore.
In this case the choice is drones or nothing.
A-10s are death traps against any opponent with an air defense system because their armor's no good against missiles. Therefore they are not being replaced. There will be no 2020 version of the A-10 to provide you support.
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And a "taxpayer-funded farm marketing board" is not supposed to be a moralistic outpost of good government, it's supposed to be an incredibly biased industry group. The difference between the RIAA and the AEB is that egg-producers are required to pay their membership fee, and the fee collection is administered by the government; not that anyone who actually knows how the US Government works thinks they'll be nice. They're not supposed to badmouth their opponents (who are, presumably, other farm marketing boards), but that's not what they're accused of. They're accused of paying people to say nice things about them.
Frankly I have yet to read a single critique of any of this from the Hampton Creek that does not boil down to "But we don't want it to work this way!!!" Since they don't actually say how they want it to work, and (most importantly) provide some reason for Congress to change how it works, their criticism amounts to childish whining.
No Hampton Creek, you cannot name your non-egg-based product after an egg-based product, use an egg a a logo, and not be guilty of falsity in advertising. I don't care how much you paid your lawyers for rationalizations, or how much I'm supposed to like you because you precociously decided your food science company is tech, JustMayo's label is a lie. No Hampton Creek, you can't silence the trade group of the industry you are trying to disrupt, which incidentally employs Americans I actually like (farmers) rather then a group I have decided to hate (SanFran-based techies who insist on calling everything a tech startup) by calling it taxpayer-funded when it's just a Farm Marketing Board.
It may be incompetence. The product is called "Just Mayo." It has an egg on it. Mayonnaise is a very old recipe. It includes eggs.
If I looked at that box I'd assume they were selling Mayonnaise with real eggs, probably from free-range chickens, and no preservatives. JustMayo is actually vegan.
Textbook case of both false advertising, and shitty marketing.
Technically "tax-payer funded" is correct, but that's an an intellectually dishonest way to describe a US Farm Marketing board.
When you say "taxpayer-funded" people assume you mean their income taxes, sales taxes, or some other tax everyone pays. US Farm marketing boards get their funding from a tax farmers pay on each unit of product they sell. They are supposed to be the equivalent of the RIAA or MPAA for eggs, or beef, or milk, or whatever; not a policy body.
Moreover if you don't buy eggs you pay $0 a year towards the AEB.
Really?
You read anything about Deflategate? Or Politics? Publicly notable people (like Goodell/Brady in the former case, and everyone running for President) have a lot less right to control what's said about them than some chick who works at this one diner in Arkansas.
Hampton Creek is in business. In business your competitors are supposed to rip your ass to shreds. That is, quite literally, their entire job. Getting their message out, convincing your free PR to stop being your free PR, etc. is par for the course.
Question:
Which peripherals could you get in USB for your PC, with it's USB port, prior to the iMac?
Answer: pretty much jack-squat. The entire first generation of USB Peripherals was in Bondi Blue because nobody actually built them for the PC market. This was because while Intel put the port on a lot of logic boards, PC Geeks didn't actually see a need to replace PS/2 or serial, so the firmware for that port was frequently all fucked up.
Then the iMac came and soon anybody who had a machine with a non-working USB port had a huge angry-ass customer issue.
I know it's heresy to admit this on Slashdot, I don't actually giva a fuck about the specs on my mobile phone. It does what I want it to do, therefore it is good enough, therefore anybody pointing out that I could get more GB is a marketing drone trying to sell me shit I do not need.
I care that with Apple one company is responsible for almost everything, and will typically take responsibility if anything goes wrong. In one case I've actually gotten them to replace a motherboard after I admitted spilling Dr. Pepper all over the damn thing. Other times I haven't been so lucky as to get free shit from them, but since they have an actual retail location with actual salesman who want me to be happy with the company, I will almost always get more support from them at the Apple Store then I could get from any other hardware company. More importantly I'm not going to have an issue where my carrier and phone manufacturer both swear they'd love to update my software but some asshole at the other party (or at google, google is also a common target in these petty little spats) won't let them.
Now if that's not what you want in a phone, maybe because you actually use up some of those specs that are so important to you, then yes Android is the logical option. But for my use-case the Apple Tax is a no-brainer.
He was a perfect visionary back then. But nothing more.
The Mac was over-priced and under-powered because you need roughly 512 KB- 1 MB of RAM to have a useful GUI on a powerful machine. And you could not do that in a reasonable price range in 1984.
He came back a) knowing how the finance end of the business operates, and b) understanding that sometimes you don;t release extremely cool tech until you get the price way down.
Not really.
Prior to 1977 the case was frequently something a hobbyist made himself. Since you had to custom-build everything, including most of the boards, yourself anyway it was not hard to sell something like the Altair.
Jobs didn't really invent the concept (three or four machines released that year had cases, and apparently some earlier machines with tape output also did), but it definitely was not standard before '77 and I sincerely doubt the Woz wasted brain space figuring out whether the damn thing was pretty.
"Median Voter Theory."
A and B are going after the same guy, therefore they'll govern fairly similarly.
IRL, of course, the design of the system is also relevant. Since both sides almost always have a veto (except for that minuscule period where Obama had a 60-vote Senate, after Franken's election was blessed by the Courts and before Scott Brown beat Coakley) generally you're limited to the most extreme version of your platform that won't make the other side go "fuck this, we're filibustering mother's day."
Note that this is how the system is supposed to work. Whereas Canada is designed to produce a government that can implement it's entire agenda so that the people know who to blame when shit fails to go right ("Responsible Government"), we're designed so that absolutely nothing can change unless the President can convince Congress to let him rule by decree ("Checks and balances").
Thus we get half-assed Health Care Reform, virtually no other real change in government, except the PATRIOT Act.
It's always amazing to me how my fellow Americans will swear up and down the Founders were the wisest, most moralistist, smartest, statesmen ever; and then decry the system for "working" precisely as they intended.
Here's a list of all references to money in Star Trek.
In the 60s episodes Rodenberry hadn't decided that money was verbotten. By the time of the movies it's quite clear that the Federation's core worlds have moved on from money, but still use it in dealing with non-Federation peoples (ie: everyone has money to spend at Quark's on DS9). Since the 60s episodes are set like 90 years before the movies/NextGen/etc. they haven't really addressed when money stopped being something the Federation uses internally.
I suspect what happened was the government started giving people a monthly check, eventually it got to be so big that nobody needed to work; and society's values became more Scandinavian. The Larry Ellisons of the world got shunned instead of famous. Then they just said "fuck money, we'll ration some things, but fuck money."
Sisko's family still owned the building, and equipment, and as long as he can get people to show up for work he can give people free food and call it a "Cafe." They show up for work partly because they're bored, partly because social pressure forces them to do something, and partly because his cafe has a good reputation and they want to bask in the glow.
That's not really what post-scarcity means.
Post-scarcity refers to the goods an ordinary human in the current economy could want, not large-scale industrial goods.
Which do you want, the smartphone from 3 years ago, of the latest one? The old one works ok. It has Skype and you can text. It's enough. Which one will "the majority" choose if they're the same price? Do you think even 5 percent of the people will choose the one from 3 years ago?
And why is the new one more expensive?
Partly because the engineers who designed it need to get paid, and partly because it's made by new techniques that require retooling the factories.
A replicator never gets retooled, and the engineers in the Federation work for free.
If you don't like that, then consider your food example. Clearly there's limited value in having a quantity of food beyond a certain amount. That's why people don't go to all-you-can-eat restaurants for every meal. Food gets value from initial quality, preparation, and variety. When given the choice at the same price, would "the majority" ask for "enough" of this added value -- essentially ordinary preparation with limited variety and medium quality -- or more a lot more than enough -- artistic preparation, high quality, and ample variety? Do food companies advertise their food is "good enough"? If that will make "the majority" happy, why not?
Irrelevent.
The Replicator can scan your perfectly created meal, made using the finest ingredients, and then create an arbitrary number of copies.
Now if you want the special. hand-made, stuff you can still get it at Sisko's cafe in New Orleans, along with special hand-made wine from Picard's estate, but those are made by volunteer-labor, so the only cost is in getting to the Cafe/Winery.
Current status of our welfare systems seems to disagree.
Which welfare system?
Once you specify a country, please specify what you mean by welfare system.
Actually,TNG had a heavy overtone of that. Enough that I remember reading a TV Guide early review (remember that?) which pointed out that the series' society seemed to find anything not in line with Federation thought was mental illness and the author found it a bit creepy that they seemed bent on "fixing" people.
Accept in ST, they never did "no longer exist". There's always been an obvious difference in life style luxury between anyone in the Fleet or the political classes and everyone else.
One of the great weaknesses of Star Trek is it generally doesn't show the lives of either the masses or the political leadership.
There are colonists with a strong ideological reason to set up separate societies, which are frequently poorer then Star Fleet; but that shouldn't be a surprise. It's not like the Amish, Hippy communes, etc. are economically richer then the newest buck-private in Uncle Sam's Army. If you had people still settling new land, they be poor too, in the short term. If it worked they'd end up rich landowners.
Sometimes you get the crew's families on rare occasions (Ezri Dax's family runs a large mining conglomerate in a non-Federation system, Sisko and Picard both have families still in the ancient family business -- a cafe in New Orleans and a winery in France respectively), and those folks seem to have access to all the luxuries Starfleet provides and then some (notably land and physical property).
You never see the political class. In TOS there was one agricultural commissioner who didn't seem particularly rich, that's it. Later on there's a small Federation Council, a President, etc. but we have no idea what the lives of these people are like. Given that their names are almost never mentioned it's likely they're a lot less important then current political leadership. t would be very hard to do a show about the RL USS Enterprise and hide the President's name.
Fans mostly assume that the average human has a house on adequate size (500 sq ft. per person is only small if you think a five-person family needs a 2600 sq ft. house), a replicator, walks most places, does work of the kind you do mostly for egoboo and not cash (ie: open software design, science or art), receives no salary for this work, does not need a food budget (replicator), has state health care, and whatever transit that can't be walked is probably through transporters.
Transporters and replicator credits may be scarce enough that there's some sort of economy around them, but given that nobody's "this is why I'm risking my life for my country" speech includes complaints about the civilian standard of living I doubt it. Spend an hour with a bunch of guys in the US Military and eventually somebody's gonna bring up the new GI Bill, the pension, the VA, etc.
A correction, the majority of people do not have "ever increasing unlimited desires and wants", only a tiny minority.
Yeah, right. Everyone wouldn't want their own starship, if they lived in a 'post-scarcity' Star Trek society.
Ever been to Sweden? Denmark? There's entire regions of the world where relatively simple social pressures keep people from having infinite, and ever-increasing wants.
Don't get me wrong, they're still human and they still have ambitions, but the Law of Jante means their societies would be fine with Star trek levels of prosperity.
You can argue the Nordics would be better off if they were more individualistic, and that Star Trek is dystopian because it encourages a society where guys like Elon Musk don't get to change the world; but if you're arguing that no human society could ever pattern itself like the Federation and survive you're simply mistaken.
People would just be lining up to be Redshirts, rather than starship captains.
Back in the real world, the left just have no imagination.
Dude, don't you get it?
It's a military organization. Just like the only way to be a General is command an infantry platoon, the only way to be the Captain is be a redshirt first.
There's no private space-going vessels bigger then a Runabout in the Federation at all.
Because he hadn't committed any crimes in Sweden before he went there????
You can read whatever agenda into my posts you feel like, by admitting he didn't know what the Swedish system was like you're agreeing with every damn thing I just said.
He still doesn't, and neither do you:
You mean people tired of correcting the willful stupidity of pretending the shit from the US/UK/Sweden here doesn't stink. Assange has offered to return to Sweden, if Sweden promises not to hand him over to the United States. Sweden has refused to make such a promise, which tells anyone without a hole in their head that this is not. about. rape. But that wont stop people from engaging in nonsensical hand waving:
You're delusional.
If the Swedes wanted to turn him over to the US they could do so simply by lying, and then claiming the US indictment was for something completely different then the paperwork they gave Assange.
OTOH, if you have ever actually dealt with Swedes, you know their obsession with proper rules and procedure borders on OCD (their shock when someone is so gauche as to cut in line has to be seen to be believed), and it's quite credible for them to claim they can't sign such an agreement since it would not be valid under Swedish law.
Stupid nonsense. Cops interview people all the time in the U.S. without having a prosecutor and a place "full of cops" ready to arrest on a moments notice. If you want to question him.....then fucking question him.
Again, you're not understanding how it works in Sweden. Sweden is not an Anglo-Saxon country with a legal system based on Jury trials. It's its own country, based on a completely different legal tradition, which uses Swedish. The terms can be translated into English, but that doesn't mean they magically become the same English-language concept anyone who watched CSI is familiar with.
In the US an interview is just that. The arrest procedure is completely different, and actually includes a whole sub-procedure (called the "Miranda Rights") specifically informing the accused that his arrest does not mean he has to answer any questions. He can agree to an interview (and waive those rights), but that's a separate legal procedure that happens at the4 station, not the suspect's home or workplace (and most arrests take place in the home or workplace). You're assuming that means Swedish Questionings work precisely that way, which is as uniquely Anglo-Saxon combination of arrogance, ignorance, and motivated reasoning.
A Swedish Questioning is an arrest procedure, and it includes a section where the cops give you a chance to tell your side of the story. Thus the name. They actually had a long legal battle about this in the British Courts, which determined that a Swedish demand that Assange be questioned was analogous to a British Arrest warrant, and therefore he had to go to British jail in preparation for being turned over to the Swedes. The fact Assange lost this case, in Court, already, is the entire fucking reason he's stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
You don't need 283 A-10s to fight ISIS. It looks like the number engaged is more like 12. They are flying a lot of missions,but there aren't dozens of them doing it.
Remember we originally bought 700 to destroy massive Soviet tank columns in Europe. ISIS is a) much smaller, b) much less well-protected. You don't need a tank gun to take out a Toyota and (since their AA abilities are truly primitive) you can use choppers. The AF's desired number (283) is almost certainly overkill.
Coding = writing source code. Source code is the high level language representation of a program. Therefore coding = programming. Nobody calls HTML or CSS source code because they are not compiled to machine code like a program is.
That may be true in Computer Engineering terminology, but where everyone else lives anything that requires a computer to be read properly is considered code. Which means that even HTML counts, because hex values are not used in Standard American English.
You're an expert in a relatively advanced field with it's own jargon. Just because you use a term one way does not mean that a) everyone else will, or b) they are wrong for doing so. Just be glad the field's not something that can be frequently used politically, because otherwise everyone'd raid it for potential insults constantly. PoliSci guys in particular have to learn two damn definitions of every word, which are always tangentially related, but generally have completely different connotations, because some asshat politician has decided that's the perfect way to describe some poor schmuck standing between him and a juicy job.
And "coding" is not being used as a synonym for "programming"? Funny how the article that quotes her seems to think it is.
It is and it isn't. Khazan's Atlantic article seems to them interchangeably, but Fine's original Slate article doesn't use the word "program" at all. Fine is clearly not talking about shit like C++, but basically saying that anyone with an IQ above room temperature can master enough programming-style tasks to use webscripts, HTML code, etc. effectively; and that if you do you'll be able to function as the lady who translates between baby boomer MBAs and web developers. She's also saying that American white women, in particular, tend to screw themselves over career-wise by not figuring this out, and describes one breaking out in tears when she was told their first day of class they'd write "Hello World!" in HTML.
Khazan talks about programs a couple times, but she also says:
People who program video games probably need more math than the average web designer. But if you just want to code some stuff that appears on the Internet, you got all the math you’ll need when you completed the final level of Math Blaster.
Two points:
1) If we've already got a perfect aircraft for CAS, and we've got several hundred of them, but we need much less CAS then we did last year because we left Afghanistan in December, why doesn't the Air Force's program to retire extra A-10s at the rate of one or two a month, make sense to you? Why are you surprised the budget guys are juicing their numbers with a little bullshit? Isn't that SOP in anything that involves money, be it military, non-military public sector, private sector, or the calorie ratings on your grandma's cookies?
2) You're really under-estimating the trouble one pilot can cause. Remember Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher? Pardon me, Captain Speicher. You see when we fought Saddam the first time he was shot down, killed, and declared dead. But they couldn't find the body, so in the run-up to the Iraq War he was declared un-dead, a PoW, and promoted to Captain (apparently undead PoWs ALWAYS pass their promotion boards, even if the most notable thing in their career is being shot-down). They found the corpse in '09. The PoW/MIA movement also started out as extremely crazy people who thought the Vietnamese kept secret US Prisoners*, most of whom were supposed to be airmen who'd been shot down. So the next A-10 will not be piloted. Period.
*Note to crazy POW-MIA people: if an evil dictatorship has a group of prisoners it can't actively use because they're secret, and can't risk being exposed (because we'd have to go crazy on them), they aren't gonna keep those poor schmucks alive.
More likely delay it.
We don't actually need several hundred A-10s because we don't have a hundred thousand guys in need of CAS in either sandbox anymore, so we'll probably be fine for the foreseeable future (say, 5-10 years) even if the Air Force's planned A-10 drawdown continues. And after 5-10 years, F-35 will likely have performed some missions, and done fine, and just like F-22 will magically stop being that overly-expensive-piece-of-shit and start being a point of national pride.
Then, when F-35's budget future is guaranteed, you ask for a new drone paid for by new money. If we do end up in a combat situation where we actually need hundreds and hundreds of CAS aircraft, before F-35 has become said point of national pride, the budget mavens at the AF will utter the words "deficit-financed supplemental," and get it.
I am sure that there are many American "Indians" who would agree with you, and look back at their hundred-odd centuries of inhabiting the Americans before being kicked out by white-skinned Europeans.
Read some Native American history.
Yes, they were here on the continent before us, but they were always moving around on the continent. Take the Crow. They were driven West several time, ending up on the Great Plains. By the early 1800s they owned a significant tract of land centered on Montana. In 1851 they lost that land to the Sioux. They have technically never ceded an acre to the white man because by the time the white advance caught up to them they were homeless.
The Pueblo are pretty unique in being able to stretch their historic occupation of some of their land to 700, which is 70 years after the Malays dominated their northernmost Malaysian state.
Hell, even if you take white people out and ask "Who was on the same piece of land from 200 AD- 1500AD? You won't find many examples. US Native Americans were hunter-gatherers, and had to be quite mobile.
I thought that the American site is slashdot.us, and that this is the international site. There were no passport checks on entry.
The vast majority of people on this site are Americans. You get the occasional Brit, Canadian, Australian, Kiwi, or European. Very rarely a Latin American or Asian.
Arguments about shit that happened in 630 are even worse in front of a Brit or European audience, because the whole point of the EU is that such debates are stupid and one should focus more on a) the individual rights of people currently living in the country, and b) certain (but not all) elements of their group rights (mostly language rights, even this is considered an extension of the individual right to speak in the language you actually understand). Heck, even if arguing ancient maps was still in vogue 630 is actually roughly the time the Anglo-Saxons finished conquering England.
So by that guys standard the UKIP is not only racist but incredibly bad at history, because the English have only a foreigner's right to England.
Your criticism of their eliminating other programs applies to piloted combat aircraft. Which the next A-10 will not be.
Specifically, the next A-10 will not be piloted. It will be a drone. This is because aircraft in the A-10s close air support role have extremely high casualty rates, and the country really hates it when a pilot gets shot down. Not do much when they die, but when they either a) get captured, or b) do not have a findable corpse.You may remember back in the early 90s a deranged minority was convinced that the North Vietnamese had secret US PoWs, mostly supposedly pilots; despite the very idea being ridiculous. When Bush was running up to the Iraq War the Navy actually declared a pilot whose body they'd been unable to find un-dead and a prisoner of Saddam. they actually promoted him a couple times (because if he was MIA clearly he would have passed his promotion boards), and didn't admit that the entire idea was stupid until they found the corpse in '09.
Since Close Air Support against modern missiles is very high loss (the A-10 works because the Russkies aren't smuggling Strella in large numbers, they start doing that and the A-10 is a death trap), no we are not gonna put a pilot in the next A-10.
I've made this point before, but I'll try again:
The reason the Air Force does not to replace the A-10 with a piloted aircraft is that in any situation where the enemy still has an air defense system you lose a lot of A-10s. Their armor makes them better at surviving blast waves, shrapnel, and all the other things that happen when a missile hits you then another aircraft; but that's kinda like saying Floyd Mayweather is the human who is best at surviving a direct hit from an Abrams 120 mm gun.
And a CAS plane is flying low, slow, and in VFR; which means an enemy with air defense missiles is gonna hit it. Period. OTOH, F-35, which will be hated by ground-pouinders for flying too high to see what they're talking about, and zooming across the battlefield at 1000 MPH so it can't try again if it misses; should be basically invisible to anyone who doesn't have a pristine Air Defense system run by technicians smarter then ones we can hire. And it will also be high, and fast, giving it time to respond to missiles by dodging, and (depending on the angle and the amount of rocket fuel the missile has) perhaps even allowing a very good pilot to lose a missile that has gotten lock on him despite his stealth.
Which means that a piloted CAS aircraft is a deathtrap unless the F-35s and Strategic Bombers (and to a lesser extent the F-22s) have managed to knock the local air defense system totally off-line. And by totally off-line I mean 100%, not 99.997%. Even an "air defense system" consisted of a bunch of illiterate guys with 1980s shoulder-fired missile managed to nail a dozen or so Su-25s, and the Soviets only deployed 50 of the damn things to the theater.
So, to the extent the A-10 gets replaced, it will almost certainly be by drones. Even the Army has been going away from live-person-piloted CAS aircraft because their helicopter fleet is actually slightly worse on the deathtrap scale then the A-10. Since the AF has a knight-of-the-skies complex leading them to obsess about everything but tactical air support, I strongly suspect that the "next A-10" will be a fixed-wing drone operated by the Army.
And given the choice I'd take a Commodore with 4 GB of RAM over a PC any day. But that isn't the choice. There is no 4 GB Commodore.
In this case the choice is drones or nothing.
A-10s are death traps against any opponent with an air defense system because their armor's no good against missiles. Therefore they are not being replaced. There will be no 2020 version of the A-10 to provide you support.
You are going to have drones for that.