According to whom? The only people who carry that banner are the Republicans who are trying to defeat him. IMHO, he's straight down the middle, with a couple of deviations to either side. Nobody on the left really likes him because he's too conservative and won't stand up to corporate interests; nobody on the right likes him because he's a muslim communist who coddles the lazy and kills the first born of every white person (or so I've heard on talk radio).
I think he had good, reasonable ideas, and is a smart guy who can't manage independent minded people - or at least can't find sound managers. His biggest problem is that he expects other people to be as driven and focused as he is when he's really dealing with congress and government bureaucrats, who are the exact opposite.
And Android has never claimed that you would be running full Linux on your device. Microsoft's blunder wasn't that they made a tablet OS, it's that they tried to pass it off as their full fledged desktop by giving it the same name when they had already spent 8 years with their desktop software already on tablet computers, and doubled down by simultaneously releasing a looks-and-feels identical version which really did run all of Windows desktop software.
On the contrary, it will do better under light impact. Anything strong enough to damage it's integrity would crumble a steel panel, too. You know the cheapest way to fix a crumpled steel panel? Yeah, you replace it. Bondo is or dings this thing won't show.
Not that it matters - this thing is so fucking ugly a good work over with a baseball bat would be an improvement.
Yeah, until the legislators realized that this was skewing the game, and made it illegal. So now Clear Channel has bought all the stations up and does it internally for fun and profit, but legally.
ASCAP doesn't give a rat's ass about the performers - those are just monkeys making sounds. They're concerned about the big-hit, blockbuster songwriters almost exclusively. I say big-hit songwriters and not all songwriters because the pay scale for royalties is unfairly skewed to only those on the top of the radio playlists.
In a "perfect" world, everybody would get paid per play (or not at all, depending on your point of view), not based on a formula made up by the biggest names to only work in their favor. There needed to be a formula back when the accounting necessary to compensate everyone was too cumbersome; with computers and computerized play lists it isn't.
Terrestrial radio is not required to pay musicians anything, and never has. Clear Channel has cut a deal to pay them something - no doubt very little, but just enough to keep them from lobbying to get legislation which would force CC to pay a fixed rate.
IIRC, internet radio pays something like 3-10x what terrestrial radio pays to the writers.
Oh, they just wanted to double dip on ringtones. Want to record and sell a whole 3 minute song? That'll be 9.6c per track. Want to clip and distribute a 10 second clip of that song as a ringtone? That's 25c. Written into law. They just wanted to get paid a second time for when some asshole's phone rings with a clip of a song you didn't want to hear anyway.
...to pay a pittance in royalties, and nothing-nada-zilch to the recording artists, but they get all bent out of shape when you do it over this newfangled "internet" thing, even if it's basically the same (Hit 90s Pop on Pandora sounds like every other Clear Channel station out there).
ASCAP is just looking to make sure they don't lose all that money they spent lobbying to get much higher rates for internet streaming than for airwave streaming.
Heaven forbid we should have the convenience of making a reservation online. No, it's takes a bunch of assholes to game the system and screw it up. Not that it's anything new, as online ticketing for popular events has been gamed for fun and profit by scalpers for years.
If all of my family were to suddenly die in a freak accident and I was left alone with nothing to live for, I would hunt every bot maker down and shoot them for amusement. (Oh, and happy Friday everybody!)
I suspect if they removed the computers and installed windows in the offices of our local TV meteorologists we would get better short term forecasts. I've also decided that any precipitation forecast more than about 3-4 days out that doesn't involve a system as large as a hurricane is just a wild-ass guess*. Heck, even real time they're often wrong, the local guys are fond of reporting sunny all day while I'm actually looking outside at it raining.
*Well, unless you're in SoCal Mar-Dec, in which case "Sunny" is always the statistically correct answer, or Orlando/Daytona, where "It will rain at 3:45pm for 5 minutes" is always the statistically correct answer.
You clearly do not have a wife. The engine in the car could be *missing* and my wife would walk back into the house to ask me why her key wouldn't turn the engine on.
Few countries provide the kind of consumers with disposable income/available credit and an insatiable desire to buy shit like the US. You don't close the door on your biggest client. This posturing is aimed at the central and south American countries, not at Russia.
And it's unlikely that Russia will decide to take in Snowden. Remember - they have leakers and political refugees, too. We (the US and Russia) are fare more similar than dissimilar. Like flirting with the waiter/waitress at a restaurant in front of your significant other, it's being done for amusement, and everybody gets their jollies out of it. Getting the phone number of your server and then shacking up isn't on the menu for either side in this dysfunctional but stable relationship.
They're doing just fine. What the congress did is to make them fully fund the defined benefit retirement plan for all workers over a very, very short period of time (I'm actually not up on the details, but that's the broad version). The result is that they've got billions of dollars a year in costs which magically appeared over night, and the congress - who sets the postal rates - will not increase the rates to cover the shortfall. The USPS isn't funded by the government, but is a stand-alone, semi-private organization with governmental oversight.
Understand that Postal Workers in the US have a very good union, and kick ass benefits for a position which doesn't require a college degree. I worked in the government for a while and the postal service health and retirement plans were far better than the mainstream civil servant (which, btw, are pretty good). By squeezing the USPS, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is intentionally setting the service up for failure so that they can point to how the federal government is incompetent at what they do.
The fact that no other corporation or government in the world are funding their retirement benefits is perhaps one of the most monstrous, immoral things this generation is doing to its public servants and future generations.
Fixed that for you. Nobody funds retirement the way the USPS is being required to. It's a political ploy. That's not to say that defined benefit plans shouldn't be properly funded, but under the rules imposed its effectively impractical to do so.
MBA is a pretty big chuck of apple computer sales, while ultrabooks are currently a curious sideline for the Windows world. It's somewhat of an iconic part of Jobs legacy - they were thin and light when thin and light wasn't cool. That is expected to change this fall as prices to put a Haswell powered ultrabook into the sub $500 territory, and major players really start vying for more sales in the lightweight category.
Though, to be honest, MBA may still end up with the segment mostly to itself - a larger percentage of a shrinking form factor. Many manufacturers are seeing the thin-and-light ultrabook segment as a place to go with convertibles which will act as both laptop and tablet. With W8 being able to function as a touch-centered OS, the tablet functionality adds a second dimension to the device. The move may not be for people to replace their computers with tablets, but for their computers to become tablets and cannibalize the dedicated tablet market. So far, nobody has come up with a really elegant hinge condition that allows this, but I expect it to be just a matter of time. And at the high end of the ultraportable market, the MBA is generally outclassed - though also outpriced - by high end options such as more memory, larger SSDs, higher screen resolutions, and better screen technology (IPS variants). Battery life is in favor of MBA at the moment, but that's primarily due to better - or less configurable - OS performance, and the MBA running Windows in "performance" mode results in much shorter battery life than OSX. Since the hardware is the same, it means that OSX is better at throttling back the system components to perform slower when it feels performance isn't needed. Kudos to Apple for baking that into the OS better, and they can be thankful that MS is (apparently) ignoring much of the power saving abilities since they don't have to worry about selling hardware (Surface excluded, and - lets face it - barely a niche).
When you need to put forty million butts into paying seats just to make back your investment, it's going to be a hard sell to stray from what everyone knows works. Great films, in this world, can't really be blockbusters -they are almost mutually exclusive because of the high bar that modern blockbusters have set for effects and top shelf talent. The rigid form of the blockbuster precludes exploration of more interesting styles.
In a way, it actually helps set those who do stray apart that much more, and makes the experience that much more refreshing.
There will be good an bad teachers in every school. It's a simple fact of life - half of the practitioners in every field are below average. And teaching - with summers off and vacations, and the chance to keep track of your kids before and after school, offers an attractive target for some who aren't exceptionally motivated. There are bad teachers everywhere just like there are bad doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It's still the top 10% that make teaching fabulous. But no matter who you have, if you don't have support at home from the parents, you will never make any headway on education. 5 hours a day for 180 days a year will never make up for the 90% of the time the kids will spend in the rest of their young life.
Um...you do realize the irony of that statement, right?
In private school they're still a commodity - there's just competition for that commodity involved. Around me, there are relatively few private schools, and while there are some innovative programs in some places (as there are in some public schools), mostly it's the same stuff. And more drugs as a bonus. See, with Jimmy bored after school, nobody around, and lots of disposable cash drugs is the ideal idle activity. Oh, he's less likely to get knifed over a drug bust like the worst inner city schools, so most people pretend it isn't happening. But you ask the cops in the area and you'll find there are *more* drugs in the private schools than public. It's just that those kids can always come up with the money to pay their pushers, so there's less to kill someone over.
I'm not sure you understand how the internet works. You see, you send a *request* for something, and the reply contains that information. You don't turn the computer on and it just starts streaming porn to your desktop*. There are already inexpensive packages you can install on your machine to filter most pornographic sites which reach your computer.
*for all I know, there's an inexpensive package for that, too.
Slashdot Mirror
"Obama is/was supposed to be on the left wing"
According to whom? The only people who carry that banner are the Republicans who are trying to defeat him. IMHO, he's straight down the middle, with a couple of deviations to either side. Nobody on the left really likes him because he's too conservative and won't stand up to corporate interests; nobody on the right likes him because he's a muslim communist who coddles the lazy and kills the first born of every white person (or so I've heard on talk radio).
I think he had good, reasonable ideas, and is a smart guy who can't manage independent minded people - or at least can't find sound managers. His biggest problem is that he expects other people to be as driven and focused as he is when he's really dealing with congress and government bureaucrats, who are the exact opposite.
And Android has never claimed that you would be running full Linux on your device. Microsoft's blunder wasn't that they made a tablet OS, it's that they tried to pass it off as their full fledged desktop by giving it the same name when they had already spent 8 years with their desktop software already on tablet computers, and doubled down by simultaneously releasing a looks-and-feels identical version which really did run all of Windows desktop software.
So the LDA is OTS at SFO and the FAA published RNAV PRM for SOIA. TTL that ATC stepped in or EVA28 would have been SOL and all passengers DOA.
On the contrary, it will do better under light impact. Anything strong enough to damage it's integrity would crumble a steel panel, too. You know the cheapest way to fix a crumpled steel panel? Yeah, you replace it. Bondo is or dings this thing won't show.
Not that it matters - this thing is so fucking ugly a good work over with a baseball bat would be an improvement.
How is fiberglass? It's basically the same thing, but with stronger, stiffer fibers. The matrix material is what you worry about.
Yeah, until the legislators realized that this was skewing the game, and made it illegal. So now Clear Channel has bought all the stations up and does it internally for fun and profit, but legally.
ASCAP doesn't give a rat's ass about the performers - those are just monkeys making sounds. They're concerned about the big-hit, blockbuster songwriters almost exclusively. I say big-hit songwriters and not all songwriters because the pay scale for royalties is unfairly skewed to only those on the top of the radio playlists.
In a "perfect" world, everybody would get paid per play (or not at all, depending on your point of view), not based on a formula made up by the biggest names to only work in their favor. There needed to be a formula back when the accounting necessary to compensate everyone was too cumbersome; with computers and computerized play lists it isn't.
If they could figure out a way to determine the number of active receivers and charge per receiver to radio stations, you can bet they would!
Terrestrial radio is not required to pay musicians anything, and never has. Clear Channel has cut a deal to pay them something - no doubt very little, but just enough to keep them from lobbying to get legislation which would force CC to pay a fixed rate.
IIRC, internet radio pays something like 3-10x what terrestrial radio pays to the writers.
Oh, they just wanted to double dip on ringtones. Want to record and sell a whole 3 minute song? That'll be 9.6c per track. Want to clip and distribute a 10 second clip of that song as a ringtone? That's 25c. Written into law. They just wanted to get paid a second time for when some asshole's phone rings with a clip of a song you didn't want to hear anyway.
...to pay a pittance in royalties, and nothing-nada-zilch to the recording artists, but they get all bent out of shape when you do it over this newfangled "internet" thing, even if it's basically the same (Hit 90s Pop on Pandora sounds like every other Clear Channel station out there).
ASCAP is just looking to make sure they don't lose all that money they spent lobbying to get much higher rates for internet streaming than for airwave streaming.
Heaven forbid we should have the convenience of making a reservation online. No, it's takes a bunch of assholes to game the system and screw it up. Not that it's anything new, as online ticketing for popular events has been gamed for fun and profit by scalpers for years.
If all of my family were to suddenly die in a freak accident and I was left alone with nothing to live for, I would hunt every bot maker down and shoot them for amusement. (Oh, and happy Friday everybody!)
I'd just like to be there to see the blank stare.
I suspect if they removed the computers and installed windows in the offices of our local TV meteorologists we would get better short term forecasts. I've also decided that any precipitation forecast more than about 3-4 days out that doesn't involve a system as large as a hurricane is just a wild-ass guess*. Heck, even real time they're often wrong, the local guys are fond of reporting sunny all day while I'm actually looking outside at it raining.
*Well, unless you're in SoCal Mar-Dec, in which case "Sunny" is always the statistically correct answer, or Orlando/Daytona, where "It will rain at 3:45pm for 5 minutes" is always the statistically correct answer.
You clearly do not have a wife. The engine in the car could be *missing* and my wife would walk back into the house to ask me why her key wouldn't turn the engine on.
Few countries provide the kind of consumers with disposable income/available credit and an insatiable desire to buy shit like the US. You don't close the door on your biggest client. This posturing is aimed at the central and south American countries, not at Russia.
And it's unlikely that Russia will decide to take in Snowden. Remember - they have leakers and political refugees, too. We (the US and Russia) are fare more similar than dissimilar. Like flirting with the waiter/waitress at a restaurant in front of your significant other, it's being done for amusement, and everybody gets their jollies out of it. Getting the phone number of your server and then shacking up isn't on the menu for either side in this dysfunctional but stable relationship.
Well, except for the fact that cluster boxes are always keyed, and roadside and house boxes are almost never keyed.
They're doing just fine. What the congress did is to make them fully fund the defined benefit retirement plan for all workers over a very, very short period of time (I'm actually not up on the details, but that's the broad version). The result is that they've got billions of dollars a year in costs which magically appeared over night, and the congress - who sets the postal rates - will not increase the rates to cover the shortfall. The USPS isn't funded by the government, but is a stand-alone, semi-private organization with governmental oversight.
Understand that Postal Workers in the US have a very good union, and kick ass benefits for a position which doesn't require a college degree. I worked in the government for a while and the postal service health and retirement plans were far better than the mainstream civil servant (which, btw, are pretty good). By squeezing the USPS, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is intentionally setting the service up for failure so that they can point to how the federal government is incompetent at what they do.
The fact that no other corporation or government in the world are funding their retirement benefits is perhaps one of the most monstrous, immoral things this generation is doing to its public servants and future generations.
Fixed that for you. Nobody funds retirement the way the USPS is being required to. It's a political ploy. That's not to say that defined benefit plans shouldn't be properly funded, but under the rules imposed its effectively impractical to do so.
MBA is a pretty big chuck of apple computer sales, while ultrabooks are currently a curious sideline for the Windows world. It's somewhat of an iconic part of Jobs legacy - they were thin and light when thin and light wasn't cool. That is expected to change this fall as prices to put a Haswell powered ultrabook into the sub $500 territory, and major players really start vying for more sales in the lightweight category.
Though, to be honest, MBA may still end up with the segment mostly to itself - a larger percentage of a shrinking form factor. Many manufacturers are seeing the thin-and-light ultrabook segment as a place to go with convertibles which will act as both laptop and tablet. With W8 being able to function as a touch-centered OS, the tablet functionality adds a second dimension to the device. The move may not be for people to replace their computers with tablets, but for their computers to become tablets and cannibalize the dedicated tablet market. So far, nobody has come up with a really elegant hinge condition that allows this, but I expect it to be just a matter of time. And at the high end of the ultraportable market, the MBA is generally outclassed - though also outpriced - by high end options such as more memory, larger SSDs, higher screen resolutions, and better screen technology (IPS variants). Battery life is in favor of MBA at the moment, but that's primarily due to better - or less configurable - OS performance, and the MBA running Windows in "performance" mode results in much shorter battery life than OSX. Since the hardware is the same, it means that OSX is better at throttling back the system components to perform slower when it feels performance isn't needed. Kudos to Apple for baking that into the OS better, and they can be thankful that MS is (apparently) ignoring much of the power saving abilities since they don't have to worry about selling hardware (Surface excluded, and - lets face it - barely a niche).
When you need to put forty million butts into paying seats just to make back your investment, it's going to be a hard sell to stray from what everyone knows works. Great films, in this world, can't really be blockbusters -they are almost mutually exclusive because of the high bar that modern blockbusters have set for effects and top shelf talent. The rigid form of the blockbuster precludes exploration of more interesting styles.
In a way, it actually helps set those who do stray apart that much more, and makes the experience that much more refreshing.
*ding*ding*ding* We have a winner!
There will be good an bad teachers in every school. It's a simple fact of life - half of the practitioners in every field are below average. And teaching - with summers off and vacations, and the chance to keep track of your kids before and after school, offers an attractive target for some who aren't exceptionally motivated. There are bad teachers everywhere just like there are bad doctors, lawyers, and engineers. It's still the top 10% that make teaching fabulous. But no matter who you have, if you don't have support at home from the parents, you will never make any headway on education. 5 hours a day for 180 days a year will never make up for the 90% of the time the kids will spend in the rest of their young life.
Um...you do realize the irony of that statement, right?
In private school they're still a commodity - there's just competition for that commodity involved. Around me, there are relatively few private schools, and while there are some innovative programs in some places (as there are in some public schools), mostly it's the same stuff. And more drugs as a bonus. See, with Jimmy bored after school, nobody around, and lots of disposable cash drugs is the ideal idle activity. Oh, he's less likely to get knifed over a drug bust like the worst inner city schools, so most people pretend it isn't happening. But you ask the cops in the area and you'll find there are *more* drugs in the private schools than public. It's just that those kids can always come up with the money to pay their pushers, so there's less to kill someone over.
I'm not sure you understand how the internet works. You see, you send a *request* for something, and the reply contains that information. You don't turn the computer on and it just starts streaming porn to your desktop*. There are already inexpensive packages you can install on your machine to filter most pornographic sites which reach your computer.
*for all I know, there's an inexpensive package for that, too.
It's just blonde, brunette, redhead...