Trying to embrace and extinguish your competition (like what they're trying to do with linux as we speak) is only going to encourage the creation of yet other new alternatives to your authoritarian garbage OS.
This sounds like something out of a movie, not real life. In real life, we've had Linux for over 20 years now, yet almost no one uses it unfortunately. In fact, desktop Linux usage seems to have dropped significantly in the last 5 years or so, with a lot of people going to Apple.
Seems to me that MS is doing the right thing: figuring out new ways of milking more revenue out of Windows users, who aren't decreasing in number at all.
All ventures must end, and Microsoft is no exception. They are only hastening their own demise.
How so? From what I've read, MS's financials are very, very good. Seems like they're doing the right thing for their profitability. Maybe you don't like it, maybe it's Orwellian, but too bad. *No one* is being forced to use MS and their spyware-laden OS; everyone who uses it does so voluntarily. If people don't like their OS being intrusive and authoritarian, then they should stop using it, but I just don't see that happening, ever. People are too short-sighted and stupid. MS might as well take advantage of that.
Wow, you're really a loon if you think that's a winning strategy: have Hillary pick a Republican running mate? That might pick up some R voters who don't like Trump, but it'll also cause tons of D voters (including everyone who considers themselves a progressive) to sit out the race or vote third-party. This strategy actually would have been great for getting the Green Party a lot more votes than they got with her crappy pick of Kaine.
Sanders *was* a qualified Democrat. He ran as one, and that's all you have to do. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Democrat Party faithful think that only long-time Party members should be allowed to play in their party. No wonder they have such a hard time getting progressives to turn out to vote for them, by pushing partisan politics over ideals and doing the right thing. Honestly, if there's any good to come out of this crazy election, it'll be the utter destruction of the Democratic Party. At least the Republicans are somewhat honest about their intentions and who they work for.
And Trump absolutely *is* unpopular. Countless polls have proven this. Just because people voted for him doesn't mean they actually liked him, same as Hillary.
Many younger individuals can't seem to get the concept that paying over and over for "borrowing" something is a bad deal.
We're talking about movies here, not music. I don't know about you, but there aren't very many movies I really care to watch over and over again. This is the whole reason that video rental stores (like the ill-fated Blockbuster) were such a success as soon as VCRs became commonplace; most of us just want to pay a fee and watch a movie *once*, and that's it. Once in a while we'll see a movie that's so great we might want to watch it multiple times (like Aliens from 1986), but that's rare, and even there it's not like I want to watch it that often.
Music is entirely different, and I agree with you on that: I really don't understand the current phenomenon where so many people want to pay for streaming music access, and my best guess is that it's mostly people who don't care that much about music and just want some crappy filler playing in the background all the time. Personally I have very specific music I want to listen to, so I keep it in Ogg form on all my devices (phone, laptop, car) and play from my library constantly. But I listen to music a fair amount: pretty much any time I'm in the car, for instance, plus frequently when I'm using my computer at home, plus frequently when I'm at work (with headphones). I don't watch movies that often, and it just isn't very often that I re-watch a movie.
Oh, and what if you wish to watch something that's older than last year? (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, Pacific Rim) or even within the last year (Star Wars 7) These are all available to me, to watch any time.
Right, and how much did all those cost you? How many dozens of movies do you have to make a decent collection so you aren't watching the same 3 movies over and over? The total cost there is significant. With Netflix, you pay a cheap monthly fee (less than $10) and can watch all you want at any time, out of a truly enormous catalog. If you really like a particular movie a lot and want the higher quality (and lack of worries about problems with access) that a physical disc offers, you can certainly buy that too; it's not either-or.
Exactly. Download it on BT, and now you have a reasonable-size file that you can just play in any decent media player at your convenience. No messing around with stupid easily-scratched optical discs, no messing around with your Blu-Ray player needing a firmware update because of some encryption keys on the disc, no messing around with slow internet connections and streaming problems (esp. with FF/REW), it "just works". The main problem with the BT stuff is that a lot of it is transcoded to smaller resolutions or bitrates to save space, so it won't have the ultimate quality of a true Blu-Ray. But it's still a lot better than DVD quality usually, thanks to much more modern codecs. The h265 stuff is great.
No, that's not an open question at all. Sanders would have won, easily.
Hillary wasn't that far behind Trump, she won the popular vote, but she screwed up (among other ways) by not campaigning in key states like PA that the DNC thought were "safe". Bernie was always much better about campaigning in places like that. Hillary's campaign was totally full of hubris; they really thought they couldn't possibly lose, especially to Trump. Her campaign was also full of condescension, esp. to the Bernie voters, and of course to anyone on the right. A lot of Trump voters were just sick of mainstream, incumbent politicians and voted for him out of spite for that and her. Many would have actually voted for Bernie. Bernie brought a lot of enthusiasm from the under-30 crowd. Obama himself won largely because he got young people to get out and vote. Hillary didn't: young people didn't like her, and her campaign didn't care much to court them either. It didn't help that she and her followers specifically told the Bernie crowd that "we don't need you". It also didn't help that she and the DNC were seen by the Bernie voters as having knifed his campaign in the back with dirty tricks, as shown in the leaked Podesta emails.
Hillary lost an election to the 2nd-most unpopular candidate in history. That's because she was the most unpopular candidate ever. There's really no way Bernie could have done worse. People actually *liked* Bernie, he had the support of the youth, and he wasn't hamstruck by scandal after scandal. The only arguments against Bernie were from Hillary supporters inventing nonsense to try to back their queen (like, "the Republicans would have found dirt on him too!" Except that they didn't.).
Just look at the election numbers. There were millions more votes in the 2008 election than in November's, even though the population is a little bigger now. Lots of people simply sat at home. Obama was famous and acknowledged for getting a lot of people out to vote, particularly younger people who are infamous for not turning out to vote; Bernie had the same effect, but Hillary had the opposite effect. Assume that Bernie would get those several million people out to vote unlike Hillary, add in all of Hillary's voters (because they sure as hell aren't going to vote for Trump, and they're generally older so they're more reliable about both turning out and voting along party lines even if they aren't enthused about the candidate), plus definitely more swing voters since he didn't have Hillary's baggage, and it's quite clear that Bernie would have won.
It's just too bad the DNC and their lapdogs in the media will never admit to itself that this is the case, and Trump being president is really all their fault for doing everything they could to keep Bernie from winning their nomination. (Remember the day when Washington Post published almost 20 hit pieces on Bernie in a single day?)
For the ICMP thing, I can't imagine how going along with that order from a high-up manager would be "criminally negligent". In fact (I am not a networking engineer BTW), according to my quick research on stackoverflow, networks absolutely *can* work with ICMP blocked, just not well, and it makes it hard to debug some things. A lot of corporate networks seem to be partly broken anyway, and corporate computers running McAfee software are broken but sorta-working too, so running a network this way wouldn't be the end of the world.
Now I should hope that it didn't seem that I was advocating being actually *criminally negligent* in going along with managers' orders. That's an entirely different level. Going along with the company shooting itself in the foot (after documenting it well so you can CYA when the SHTF, and after raising an initial objection but caving after management insists) is entirely different from going along with orders to do something outright criminal. I only advocate not going to heroic lengths to help the company avoid shooting itself in the foot when its own high-up management is insisting on it, because most likely it's just going to result in your termination. If they're ordering you to do criminal things, you need to go to the police or other government authorities, and simultaneously start looking for a new job.
States' rights? I guess you don't care about cities' rights. The NC law was passed specifically because of an anti-discriminatory law passed in an NC city, to override that law. It's no different than the Federal government passing a law to override a state law.
You're a moron. The electorate in Charlotte didn't ask for a law that overrode their own city law, and was aimed specifically at that. Apparently, conservative morons like you are all for Big Centralized Government when it means they get hateful morality laws passed. On top of that, the voters of NC apparently *didn't* want this law because they immediately voted McCrory out of office as a result of the flap.
I disagree about the physical clutter bit; I actually like having the real CDs for my music. I buy stuff on CD, then rip it to Ogg to be used on my various devices. However, there's some giant differences from cassettes:
1) CDs actually have excellent sound quality, better even than the MP3 digital downloads sold at places like Amazon. 2) CDs don't degrade when you play them. 3) CDs come with booklets that frequently have the lyrics, artwork, etc. Of course, cassettes do too, but theirs suck because the format is different. CD booklets are a nice format that's about 1/4 the size of an old LP booklet, and has a nice square aspect ratio. Cassette inserts have a terrible aspect ratio and (at least back in the 80s/90s when I used to see stuff sold both ways and was able to compare) is usually missing a lot of stuff compared to the CD version.
But you're absolutely right that there's no rational reason to use cassettes. There's absolutely nothing better about them compared to other formats. They're awful; the size is terrible, the sound quality is terrible (it was terrible even when they were current; I remember well the tape hiss problem), they wear out, you can't skip tracks, you have to rewind them, etc. This truly is a case of simple retro hipsterism, nothing more.
and user replaceable batteries (justified by water resistance features very few people demanded, though I'm one of theach few who actually needed it).
This is flat wrong.
1) User-replaceable batteries do not make it impossible to make a phone water resistant. My Samsung Galaxy S5 is proof of this.
2) LOTS of people demanded this; so many, in fact, that Apple was finally forced to give in and make their latest iPhones water-resistant.
The only reasons to eliminate user-replaceable batteries are to save cost, and maybe to profit from expensive battery-replacement services.
Some design choices anymore are due to technological progress, most these days are to make more money. This is due to a consumer market that seems to adopt almost anything thrown at them.
This is mostly true, but Apple's adoption of water-resistance in their iPhones does show that consumers still exercise some power. Apple could easily have continued to tell their cultist customers that they don't need that feature, but since it was being offered in several other high-end phones for several years, they could only get away with that for so long.
What part of my statement implied I thought Trump was going to do any better?
You didn't, but you implied that the people could vote for someone who would do better.
My assertion is that they can't. The system is too broken for that to happen. It simply isn't feasible to get someone who will do better, with the way our election systems work.
they'll base their entire vote based if there's an R or a D at the end of the name.
And they have to, because of first-past-the-post voting. It's simply mathematically impossible to have anything besides two dominant parties with such a voting system, so we're stuck with it until we somehow manage to get the Rs and Ds to pass a constitutional amendment reducing their power by changing the voting system to something else.
And we have NO WAY to change that trajectory anyhow.
Sure we do, or at least we would if we invested some resources into the project. If we spotted city-killers like this far out enough (with enough warning time), it's entirely possible to change their trajectory through various means: solar sails, painting them white, strapping a rocket engine to the side, etc. But we need to know about it well, well in advance so we can accurately predict whether it's a threat, and then work on modifying its trajectory over the course of years to reduce that threat. That can't be done if we're too stupid to invest some resources into looking for these NEOs and also developing measures to redirect them safely. But if we as a species are so dumb we'd rather invest all our resources into making nuclear weapons to bully each other with instead of making ways to protect ourselves from cosmic threats to our species, then maybe we deserve to get wiped out by an asteroid like the dinosaurs.
Pedantic note: The bomb dropped on Hiroshima wasn't "nuclear", it was "atomic". "Nuclear" (in the context of bombs) is short for "thermonuclear", which is a type of bomb that uses nuclear fusion to achieve most of its yield. They accomplish this using a smaller fission bomb to set off the fusion part of the bomb. "Atomic" bombs are fission-only devices with generally much smaller yields.
If you would like to see the DoJ throw more CEOs in prison for wrong doing of their companies, demand it of your elected officials and vote them out if the refuse.
The DoJ under Obama hasn't been very strong on this, and people have now voted for Trump. If you think Trump's DoJ is going to do any better, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
No, it doesn't, that's just you trying to push an agenda. The debate here is who's a worse CEO. "Worse" isn't defined here, but I'm assuming that "incompetence" is the measure of "worse", and by that measure Carly is the worst of the lot. Fraudsters aren't incompetent (unless they incompetently perpetrate their fraud of course).
And if you're trying to argue ethicality, I fail to see how Fiorina or Mayer are any more ethical than Theranos. They're all morally bankrupt people. People who become CEOs generally are.
My point is that I have more respect for someone who is able to build something, even if it's fraudulent, than someone who takes a perfectly good company and runs it into the ground.
We're discussing female tech CEOs here (with the discussion starter being "who's worst?"), so obviously it's going to be a comparison between various female tech CEOs to argue which one is worst. Male CEOs can't be compared here because we're talking about females.
Maybe you should leave adult discussions like this to us college-educated folks since this seems to be a hard concept for you.
But since you allege sexism, there's no shortage of shitty male tech CEOs (and male CEOs in general). Stephen Elop is a good example here from recent years. Steve Ballmer of MS is another one. Tim Cook I think is a great example; he's really running Apple into the ground it seems. In the last decade and outside of tech, Home Depot's ex-CEO Bob Nardelli was widely reviled as running that company into the ground.
As for Hillary, yes, she absolutely did do a terrible job, as did the entire Democratic Party. That's why they lost to the second most unpopular candidate in history (she's the most). They stuck a knife in the back of Bernie's campaign (as shown by the leaked emails), and pushed a horribly unpopular and flawed candidate at all costs, and didn't even bother campaigning in a bunch of states they thought were "safe" (e.g. Pennsylvania), and as a result, a bunch of people voted 3rd-party and a bunch more just sat at home (see the turnout numbers in comparison to 2008). They completely failed to learn from recent history: Democratic presidential candidates have lost election after election in the past several decades because they were uncharismatic and unpopular: Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. They won with Bill Clinton and Obama, and what do those two have in common? They're both highly charismatic. Obama also did a masterful job of campaigning, and he energized the under-30 vote, getting them to turn out in record numbers. It was obvious early on that Hillary just couldn't do that, and had no love from the Millennials, but Bernie did (despite being even older). Even worse, Hillary and her campaign were outright condescending to young people, telling people it was their duty to vote for her because "it's her turn", "I'm with her" (not exactly a message that tells you why the candidate is worth voting for), that you're a sexist if you don't vote for her, etc. It was no surprise that she lost, and ultra-liberal filmmaker Michael Moore even predicted it long before the election. It wasn't bigotry that cost Hillary the election, it was the fact that she was a terrible candidate who reeked of corruption and seemed to be a warmonger, and this just wasn't enough to get people to get up and get out to the polls to vote for her. Meanwhile, a significant part of the country has been left behind by economic changes and they really thought a crappy businessman could actually fix things for them because he spoke their language and told them what they wanted to hear, so he actually had a lot of enthusiasm on his side. No one was enthusiastic about Hillary, except for a few idiotic sycophants like you; the vast majority of people who voted for her did so out of fear of the "worse evil", and historically that strategy has not gone well for Democrats. It works fine for the Republicans because conservative voters will happily go vote for someone just because of a single issue, whether it's gay marriage or guns or abortion or whatever. That doesn't work with liberal voters; they need to be inspired to vote for someone they believe in, because apparently they have higher standards (and of course more idealism). Too bad the DNC is too incompetent and stupid to understand this and back the candidate who actually does inspire people, rather than the corporate whore.
Holmes managed to build up a company from nothing into something hugely valuable. It of course turned out to be a giant fraud in the end, but she did at least manage to turn nothing into something for a while.
Pao? I'm not sure I see how she was ever bad at all. She ran an internet forum site for a while, and due to the nature of Reddit and all its hugely diverse discussion groups, it's a lot like herding cats and she ran into some big problems and finally left. Maybe she could have done better, I don't know. Either way, Reddit is still just fine today and still hugely popular, so she certainly didn't run it into the ground.
Neither of these rise to the level of destruction that Carly accomplished by pushing for a merger of HP and Compaq, destroying the great company that was HP and turning it into a purveyor of shitty laptops. She took a solid, excellent company and ran it into the ground, leaving it much worse off than it was before. That, to me, makes her the worst female tech CEO of all time. Mayer doesn't deserve this distinction; the company she took over was already a shitty has-been and it's unlikely anyone could have done anything great with it. She certainly didn't do anything good with it, but it's just not comparable to Carly and the way she ruined HP.
That's not that debatable, in my opinion. Carly is worse, much worse.
Mayer took over a company that was already a big has-been, and ran it into the ground. It's doubtful anyone else would have succeeded in really turning it around, it's just a question of whether they could have done a better job extracting value from it (at the point that she took over) or turning into something that performed better by excising the stale parts.
Carly took over a great company that made great products (HP) and ran it into the ground, splitting off the parts that made excellent T&M gear and medical equipment, and keeping the part that made crappy computing gear to compete with low-cost Asian companies. She did this largely by forcing an expensive merger with Compaq, which at that point was a lot like Yahoo: a big has-been.
Also, before Carly took over HP, she helped run Lucent (a successful telecom equipment maker) into the ground.
Mayer wasn't a good CEO by any stretch, but let's at least be fair: she took over a company that had serious problems, and then failed at doing much good with this bad hand of cards. This just isn't the case with Carly and HP. There was no good reason for HP to merge with Compaq, but she forced it and it really destroyed what made HP a great company.
The problem isn't that, it's people throwing a hissyfit about someone using a bathroom they think shouldn't. If you'd just mind your business and not worry about what genitals people have under their clothes, this wouldn't even be an issue. Even Donald Trump didn't think it was an important problem, because there weren't any actual problems with trans people abusing this and committing crimes. The only people who do are religious morons, because religionists are always wanting to tell other people how to live their lives. This whole issue didn't come up because of Millennials, it came up because a bunch of religious morons threw a fit and turned it into a national issue.
To play devil's advocate here, what if the alternative was simply allowing Vector to go bankrupt and fold? Then all the employees would be out of work and the end result for Vector customers would be the same: no more support for their products. Why should Fitbit be expected to pick up this expense?
The real lesson you should be learning here is to not buy a product which absolutely depends on continual support from the manufacturer, unless you're reasonably sure that manufacturer is going to be around for a long time, or you're prepared to lose that money on a useless brick if the manufacturer can't stay in business.
"That country", in this case, is the US. Knowingly filing a frivolous police report in the US is not "perfectly acceptable" or something you just "get away with".
How do you know this? Can you prove that there have never been any cases of someone filing a frivolous police report, anywhere in the US, without punishment?
f course, on the flip-side of that, no doubt you can provide an on-the-record statement by the "actual legal authorities" of Las Vegas saying they consider wasting their time as a PR stunt just peachy-keen?
They're not going to say that. But they may very well decline to investigate or prosecute. And how do you know for sure that this really was a frivolous police report (publicity stunt) when the police themselves say it's not?
A corrupt country is far from perfect, and most of the time is not acceptable.
Show me one, just one, completely non-corrupt country in the world.
If it was, we wouldn't look to segregate and punish those perpetuating corruption.
We only do this so that the populace doesn't completely lose faith in the government. It's not like those efforts actually succeed in rooting out all the corruption, only the most obvious examples, and also the corrupt people who get on the wrong person's shit-list.
If you do something that is against the law, then it is by definition illegal,
So what? What difference does it make if something is "illegal" if you get away with it because the law isn't enforced? I'm sure you've done all kinds of illegal things in the past year alone. Did you get punished for them? With so many laws on the books, it's impossible to not do something illegal at some point.
A system that is defined as corrupt or broken is by definition fucking broken.
Again, show me just one country that doesn't have any corruption in it somewhere.
Because ethics exist.
No, they don't. They're an ideology, made up by people trying to enforce their morality on others. There are lots of ethical systems, many of which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Do you think it's OK to murder people for being in the "wrong" religion, or abandoning their religion? There are billions of people who do think this way. And in countries where this thinking is normal and commonplace, these people include the actual legal authorities in those nations, and the laws reflect this morality.
If a legal authority chooses to ignore the shit out of that relevant factor, it does not automatically make them right.
And what makes *you* right, rather than the actual legal authority, who *according to you* is "ignoring" the action/crime?
It only defines how broken a system is.
Who made you the authority for determining what system is or isn't broken? Why should I listen to you instead of the actual authorities in that system, who say their system is not broken and is working mostly fine?
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to embrace and extinguish your competition (like what they're trying to do with linux as we speak) is only going to encourage the creation of yet other new alternatives to your authoritarian garbage OS.
This sounds like something out of a movie, not real life. In real life, we've had Linux for over 20 years now, yet almost no one uses it unfortunately. In fact, desktop Linux usage seems to have dropped significantly in the last 5 years or so, with a lot of people going to Apple.
Seems to me that MS is doing the right thing: figuring out new ways of milking more revenue out of Windows users, who aren't decreasing in number at all.
All ventures must end, and Microsoft is no exception. They are only hastening their own demise.
How so? From what I've read, MS's financials are very, very good. Seems like they're doing the right thing for their profitability. Maybe you don't like it, maybe it's Orwellian, but too bad. *No one* is being forced to use MS and their spyware-laden OS; everyone who uses it does so voluntarily. If people don't like their OS being intrusive and authoritarian, then they should stop using it, but I just don't see that happening, ever. People are too short-sighted and stupid. MS might as well take advantage of that.
Wow, you're really a loon if you think that's a winning strategy: have Hillary pick a Republican running mate? That might pick up some R voters who don't like Trump, but it'll also cause tons of D voters (including everyone who considers themselves a progressive) to sit out the race or vote third-party. This strategy actually would have been great for getting the Green Party a lot more votes than they got with her crappy pick of Kaine.
Sanders *was* a qualified Democrat. He ran as one, and that's all you have to do. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Democrat Party faithful think that only long-time Party members should be allowed to play in their party. No wonder they have such a hard time getting progressives to turn out to vote for them, by pushing partisan politics over ideals and doing the right thing. Honestly, if there's any good to come out of this crazy election, it'll be the utter destruction of the Democratic Party. At least the Republicans are somewhat honest about their intentions and who they work for.
And Trump absolutely *is* unpopular. Countless polls have proven this. Just because people voted for him doesn't mean they actually liked him, same as Hillary.
Many younger individuals can't seem to get the concept that paying over and over for "borrowing" something is a bad deal.
We're talking about movies here, not music. I don't know about you, but there aren't very many movies I really care to watch over and over again. This is the whole reason that video rental stores (like the ill-fated Blockbuster) were such a success as soon as VCRs became commonplace; most of us just want to pay a fee and watch a movie *once*, and that's it. Once in a while we'll see a movie that's so great we might want to watch it multiple times (like Aliens from 1986), but that's rare, and even there it's not like I want to watch it that often.
Music is entirely different, and I agree with you on that: I really don't understand the current phenomenon where so many people want to pay for streaming music access, and my best guess is that it's mostly people who don't care that much about music and just want some crappy filler playing in the background all the time. Personally I have very specific music I want to listen to, so I keep it in Ogg form on all my devices (phone, laptop, car) and play from my library constantly. But I listen to music a fair amount: pretty much any time I'm in the car, for instance, plus frequently when I'm using my computer at home, plus frequently when I'm at work (with headphones). I don't watch movies that often, and it just isn't very often that I re-watch a movie.
Oh, and what if you wish to watch something that's older than last year? (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, Pacific Rim) or even within the last year (Star Wars 7) These are all available to me, to watch any time.
Right, and how much did all those cost you? How many dozens of movies do you have to make a decent collection so you aren't watching the same 3 movies over and over? The total cost there is significant. With Netflix, you pay a cheap monthly fee (less than $10) and can watch all you want at any time, out of a truly enormous catalog. If you really like a particular movie a lot and want the higher quality (and lack of worries about problems with access) that a physical disc offers, you can certainly buy that too; it's not either-or.
Exactly. Download it on BT, and now you have a reasonable-size file that you can just play in any decent media player at your convenience. No messing around with stupid easily-scratched optical discs, no messing around with your Blu-Ray player needing a firmware update because of some encryption keys on the disc, no messing around with slow internet connections and streaming problems (esp. with FF/REW), it "just works". The main problem with the BT stuff is that a lot of it is transcoded to smaller resolutions or bitrates to save space, so it won't have the ultimate quality of a true Blu-Ray. But it's still a lot better than DVD quality usually, thanks to much more modern codecs. The h265 stuff is great.
No, that's not an open question at all. Sanders would have won, easily.
Hillary wasn't that far behind Trump, she won the popular vote, but she screwed up (among other ways) by not campaigning in key states like PA that the DNC thought were "safe". Bernie was always much better about campaigning in places like that. Hillary's campaign was totally full of hubris; they really thought they couldn't possibly lose, especially to Trump. Her campaign was also full of condescension, esp. to the Bernie voters, and of course to anyone on the right. A lot of Trump voters were just sick of mainstream, incumbent politicians and voted for him out of spite for that and her. Many would have actually voted for Bernie. Bernie brought a lot of enthusiasm from the under-30 crowd. Obama himself won largely because he got young people to get out and vote. Hillary didn't: young people didn't like her, and her campaign didn't care much to court them either. It didn't help that she and her followers specifically told the Bernie crowd that "we don't need you". It also didn't help that she and the DNC were seen by the Bernie voters as having knifed his campaign in the back with dirty tricks, as shown in the leaked Podesta emails.
Hillary lost an election to the 2nd-most unpopular candidate in history. That's because she was the most unpopular candidate ever. There's really no way Bernie could have done worse. People actually *liked* Bernie, he had the support of the youth, and he wasn't hamstruck by scandal after scandal. The only arguments against Bernie were from Hillary supporters inventing nonsense to try to back their queen (like, "the Republicans would have found dirt on him too!" Except that they didn't.).
Just look at the election numbers. There were millions more votes in the 2008 election than in November's, even though the population is a little bigger now. Lots of people simply sat at home. Obama was famous and acknowledged for getting a lot of people out to vote, particularly younger people who are infamous for not turning out to vote; Bernie had the same effect, but Hillary had the opposite effect. Assume that Bernie would get those several million people out to vote unlike Hillary, add in all of Hillary's voters (because they sure as hell aren't going to vote for Trump, and they're generally older so they're more reliable about both turning out and voting along party lines even if they aren't enthused about the candidate), plus definitely more swing voters since he didn't have Hillary's baggage, and it's quite clear that Bernie would have won.
It's just too bad the DNC and their lapdogs in the media will never admit to itself that this is the case, and Trump being president is really all their fault for doing everything they could to keep Bernie from winning their nomination. (Remember the day when Washington Post published almost 20 hit pieces on Bernie in a single day?)
For the ICMP thing, I can't imagine how going along with that order from a high-up manager would be "criminally negligent". In fact (I am not a networking engineer BTW), according to my quick research on stackoverflow, networks absolutely *can* work with ICMP blocked, just not well, and it makes it hard to debug some things. A lot of corporate networks seem to be partly broken anyway, and corporate computers running McAfee software are broken but sorta-working too, so running a network this way wouldn't be the end of the world.
Now I should hope that it didn't seem that I was advocating being actually *criminally negligent* in going along with managers' orders. That's an entirely different level. Going along with the company shooting itself in the foot (after documenting it well so you can CYA when the SHTF, and after raising an initial objection but caving after management insists) is entirely different from going along with orders to do something outright criminal. I only advocate not going to heroic lengths to help the company avoid shooting itself in the foot when its own high-up management is insisting on it, because most likely it's just going to result in your termination. If they're ordering you to do criminal things, you need to go to the police or other government authorities, and simultaneously start looking for a new job.
States' rights? I guess you don't care about cities' rights. The NC law was passed specifically because of an anti-discriminatory law passed in an NC city, to override that law. It's no different than the Federal government passing a law to override a state law.
But I guess you don't care about cities' rights.
You're a moron. The electorate in Charlotte didn't ask for a law that overrode their own city law, and was aimed specifically at that. Apparently, conservative morons like you are all for Big Centralized Government when it means they get hateful morality laws passed. On top of that, the voters of NC apparently *didn't* want this law because they immediately voted McCrory out of office as a result of the flap.
I disagree about the physical clutter bit; I actually like having the real CDs for my music. I buy stuff on CD, then rip it to Ogg to be used on my various devices. However, there's some giant differences from cassettes:
1) CDs actually have excellent sound quality, better even than the MP3 digital downloads sold at places like Amazon.
2) CDs don't degrade when you play them.
3) CDs come with booklets that frequently have the lyrics, artwork, etc. Of course, cassettes do too, but theirs suck because the format is different. CD booklets are a nice format that's about 1/4 the size of an old LP booklet, and has a nice square aspect ratio. Cassette inserts have a terrible aspect ratio and (at least back in the 80s/90s when I used to see stuff sold both ways and was able to compare) is usually missing a lot of stuff compared to the CD version.
But you're absolutely right that there's no rational reason to use cassettes. There's absolutely nothing better about them compared to other formats. They're awful; the size is terrible, the sound quality is terrible (it was terrible even when they were current; I remember well the tape hiss problem), they wear out, you can't skip tracks, you have to rewind them, etc. This truly is a case of simple retro hipsterism, nothing more.
I'm using a Galaxy S5. Works great.
and user replaceable batteries (justified by water resistance features very few people demanded, though I'm one of theach few who actually needed it).
This is flat wrong.
1) User-replaceable batteries do not make it impossible to make a phone water resistant. My Samsung Galaxy S5 is proof of this.
2) LOTS of people demanded this; so many, in fact, that Apple was finally forced to give in and make their latest iPhones water-resistant.
The only reasons to eliminate user-replaceable batteries are to save cost, and maybe to profit from expensive battery-replacement services.
Some design choices anymore are due to technological progress, most these days are to make more money. This is due to a consumer market that seems to adopt almost anything thrown at them.
This is mostly true, but Apple's adoption of water-resistance in their iPhones does show that consumers still exercise some power. Apple could easily have continued to tell their cultist customers that they don't need that feature, but since it was being offered in several other high-end phones for several years, they could only get away with that for so long.
What part of my statement implied I thought Trump was going to do any better?
You didn't, but you implied that the people could vote for someone who would do better.
My assertion is that they can't. The system is too broken for that to happen. It simply isn't feasible to get someone who will do better, with the way our election systems work.
they'll base their entire vote based if there's an R or a D at the end of the name.
And they have to, because of first-past-the-post voting. It's simply mathematically impossible to have anything besides two dominant parties with such a voting system, so we're stuck with it until we somehow manage to get the Rs and Ds to pass a constitutional amendment reducing their power by changing the voting system to something else.
And we have NO WAY to change that trajectory anyhow.
Sure we do, or at least we would if we invested some resources into the project. If we spotted city-killers like this far out enough (with enough warning time), it's entirely possible to change their trajectory through various means: solar sails, painting them white, strapping a rocket engine to the side, etc. But we need to know about it well, well in advance so we can accurately predict whether it's a threat, and then work on modifying its trajectory over the course of years to reduce that threat. That can't be done if we're too stupid to invest some resources into looking for these NEOs and also developing measures to redirect them safely. But if we as a species are so dumb we'd rather invest all our resources into making nuclear weapons to bully each other with instead of making ways to protect ourselves from cosmic threats to our species, then maybe we deserve to get wiped out by an asteroid like the dinosaurs.
Pedantic note: The bomb dropped on Hiroshima wasn't "nuclear", it was "atomic". "Nuclear" (in the context of bombs) is short for "thermonuclear", which is a type of bomb that uses nuclear fusion to achieve most of its yield. They accomplish this using a smaller fission bomb to set off the fusion part of the bomb. "Atomic" bombs are fission-only devices with generally much smaller yields.
If you would like to see the DoJ throw more CEOs in prison for wrong doing of their companies, demand it of your elected officials and vote them out if the refuse.
The DoJ under Obama hasn't been very strong on this, and people have now voted for Trump. If you think Trump's DoJ is going to do any better, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
No, it doesn't, that's just you trying to push an agenda. The debate here is who's a worse CEO. "Worse" isn't defined here, but I'm assuming that "incompetence" is the measure of "worse", and by that measure Carly is the worst of the lot. Fraudsters aren't incompetent (unless they incompetently perpetrate their fraud of course).
And if you're trying to argue ethicality, I fail to see how Fiorina or Mayer are any more ethical than Theranos. They're all morally bankrupt people. People who become CEOs generally are.
My point is that I have more respect for someone who is able to build something, even if it's fraudulent, than someone who takes a perfectly good company and runs it into the ground.
Wow, this is a stupid post.
We're discussing female tech CEOs here (with the discussion starter being "who's worst?"), so obviously it's going to be a comparison between various female tech CEOs to argue which one is worst. Male CEOs can't be compared here because we're talking about females.
Maybe you should leave adult discussions like this to us college-educated folks since this seems to be a hard concept for you.
But since you allege sexism, there's no shortage of shitty male tech CEOs (and male CEOs in general). Stephen Elop is a good example here from recent years. Steve Ballmer of MS is another one. Tim Cook I think is a great example; he's really running Apple into the ground it seems. In the last decade and outside of tech, Home Depot's ex-CEO Bob Nardelli was widely reviled as running that company into the ground.
As for Hillary, yes, she absolutely did do a terrible job, as did the entire Democratic Party. That's why they lost to the second most unpopular candidate in history (she's the most). They stuck a knife in the back of Bernie's campaign (as shown by the leaked emails), and pushed a horribly unpopular and flawed candidate at all costs, and didn't even bother campaigning in a bunch of states they thought were "safe" (e.g. Pennsylvania), and as a result, a bunch of people voted 3rd-party and a bunch more just sat at home (see the turnout numbers in comparison to 2008). They completely failed to learn from recent history: Democratic presidential candidates have lost election after election in the past several decades because they were uncharismatic and unpopular: Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. They won with Bill Clinton and Obama, and what do those two have in common? They're both highly charismatic. Obama also did a masterful job of campaigning, and he energized the under-30 vote, getting them to turn out in record numbers. It was obvious early on that Hillary just couldn't do that, and had no love from the Millennials, but Bernie did (despite being even older). Even worse, Hillary and her campaign were outright condescending to young people, telling people it was their duty to vote for her because "it's her turn", "I'm with her" (not exactly a message that tells you why the candidate is worth voting for), that you're a sexist if you don't vote for her, etc. It was no surprise that she lost, and ultra-liberal filmmaker Michael Moore even predicted it long before the election. It wasn't bigotry that cost Hillary the election, it was the fact that she was a terrible candidate who reeked of corruption and seemed to be a warmonger, and this just wasn't enough to get people to get up and get out to the polls to vote for her. Meanwhile, a significant part of the country has been left behind by economic changes and they really thought a crappy businessman could actually fix things for them because he spoke their language and told them what they wanted to hear, so he actually had a lot of enthusiasm on his side. No one was enthusiastic about Hillary, except for a few idiotic sycophants like you; the vast majority of people who voted for her did so out of fear of the "worse evil", and historically that strategy has not gone well for Democrats. It works fine for the Republicans because conservative voters will happily go vote for someone just because of a single issue, whether it's gay marriage or guns or abortion or whatever. That doesn't work with liberal voters; they need to be inspired to vote for someone they believe in, because apparently they have higher standards (and of course more idealism). Too bad the DNC is too incompetent and stupid to understand this and back the candidate who actually does inspire people, rather than the corporate whore.
No. Carly is the worst.
Holmes managed to build up a company from nothing into something hugely valuable. It of course turned out to be a giant fraud in the end, but she did at least manage to turn nothing into something for a while.
Pao? I'm not sure I see how she was ever bad at all. She ran an internet forum site for a while, and due to the nature of Reddit and all its hugely diverse discussion groups, it's a lot like herding cats and she ran into some big problems and finally left. Maybe she could have done better, I don't know. Either way, Reddit is still just fine today and still hugely popular, so she certainly didn't run it into the ground.
Neither of these rise to the level of destruction that Carly accomplished by pushing for a merger of HP and Compaq, destroying the great company that was HP and turning it into a purveyor of shitty laptops. She took a solid, excellent company and ran it into the ground, leaving it much worse off than it was before. That, to me, makes her the worst female tech CEO of all time. Mayer doesn't deserve this distinction; the company she took over was already a shitty has-been and it's unlikely anyone could have done anything great with it. She certainly didn't do anything good with it, but it's just not comparable to Carly and the way she ruined HP.
That's not that debatable, in my opinion. Carly is worse, much worse.
Mayer took over a company that was already a big has-been, and ran it into the ground. It's doubtful anyone else would have succeeded in really turning it around, it's just a question of whether they could have done a better job extracting value from it (at the point that she took over) or turning into something that performed better by excising the stale parts.
Carly took over a great company that made great products (HP) and ran it into the ground, splitting off the parts that made excellent T&M gear and medical equipment, and keeping the part that made crappy computing gear to compete with low-cost Asian companies. She did this largely by forcing an expensive merger with Compaq, which at that point was a lot like Yahoo: a big has-been.
Also, before Carly took over HP, she helped run Lucent (a successful telecom equipment maker) into the ground.
Mayer wasn't a good CEO by any stretch, but let's at least be fair: she took over a company that had serious problems, and then failed at doing much good with this bad hand of cards. This just isn't the case with Carly and HP. There was no good reason for HP to merge with Compaq, but she forced it and it really destroyed what made HP a great company.
Not according to the article; they ran out of money.
The problem isn't that, it's people throwing a hissyfit about someone using a bathroom they think shouldn't. If you'd just mind your business and not worry about what genitals people have under their clothes, this wouldn't even be an issue. Even Donald Trump didn't think it was an important problem, because there weren't any actual problems with trans people abusing this and committing crimes. The only people who do are religious morons, because religionists are always wanting to tell other people how to live their lives. This whole issue didn't come up because of Millennials, it came up because a bunch of religious morons threw a fit and turned it into a national issue.
To play devil's advocate here, what if the alternative was simply allowing Vector to go bankrupt and fold? Then all the employees would be out of work and the end result for Vector customers would be the same: no more support for their products. Why should Fitbit be expected to pick up this expense?
The real lesson you should be learning here is to not buy a product which absolutely depends on continual support from the manufacturer, unless you're reasonably sure that manufacturer is going to be around for a long time, or you're prepared to lose that money on a useless brick if the manufacturer can't stay in business.
"That country", in this case, is the US. Knowingly filing a frivolous police report in the US is not "perfectly acceptable" or something you just "get away with".
How do you know this? Can you prove that there have never been any cases of someone filing a frivolous police report, anywhere in the US, without punishment?
f course, on the flip-side of that, no doubt you can provide an on-the-record statement by the "actual legal authorities" of Las Vegas saying they consider wasting their time as a PR stunt just peachy-keen?
They're not going to say that. But they may very well decline to investigate or prosecute. And how do you know for sure that this really was a frivolous police report (publicity stunt) when the police themselves say it's not?
A corrupt country is far from perfect, and most of the time is not acceptable.
Show me one, just one, completely non-corrupt country in the world.
If it was, we wouldn't look to segregate and punish those perpetuating corruption.
We only do this so that the populace doesn't completely lose faith in the government. It's not like those efforts actually succeed in rooting out all the corruption, only the most obvious examples, and also the corrupt people who get on the wrong person's shit-list.
If you do something that is against the law, then it is by definition illegal,
So what? What difference does it make if something is "illegal" if you get away with it because the law isn't enforced? I'm sure you've done all kinds of illegal things in the past year alone. Did you get punished for them? With so many laws on the books, it's impossible to not do something illegal at some point.
A system that is defined as corrupt or broken is by definition fucking broken.
Again, show me just one country that doesn't have any corruption in it somewhere.
Because ethics exist.
No, they don't. They're an ideology, made up by people trying to enforce their morality on others. There are lots of ethical systems, many of which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Do you think it's OK to murder people for being in the "wrong" religion, or abandoning their religion? There are billions of people who do think this way. And in countries where this thinking is normal and commonplace, these people include the actual legal authorities in those nations, and the laws reflect this morality.
If a legal authority chooses to ignore the shit out of that relevant factor, it does not automatically make them right.
And what makes *you* right, rather than the actual legal authority, who *according to you* is "ignoring" the action/crime?
It only defines how broken a system is.
Who made you the authority for determining what system is or isn't broken? Why should I listen to you instead of the actual authorities in that system, who say their system is not broken and is working mostly fine?