Actually I am a bit surprised by the number. These are luxury items after all, and I'd suspect at least 25% of American just can't afford them even if they wanted them. The survey shows 13% of older Americans have the phones which should be the largest group in the demographics (or else my social security is safe after all). Thus numbers just don't feel right. Maybe they're defining "smart phone" in a simple way; ie any mobile phone that has any application at all, which includes what most kids would call dumb phones?
Just because they can't afford it, doesn't mean they can't have it. That's the beauty of credit.
It's made it harder for people to recognize what is a luxury.
Likely many people don't have enough income to justify paying $80/month (or whatever it is) for a smartphone. But that doesn't doesn't stop people from doing it.
My experience from talking to a teacher involved in the process is they were not allowed to analyze the books, they were given "intern jobs" like count by hand the racial distribution of the characters in "story problems" as a major selection criteria.
That's interesting and doesn't sound like a very useful process.
I know at least one of my teachers had full control over the choice of books in his class - and he took the time to tell us why he selected the books as well as pointing out common flaws in the alternatives. I had assumed the others had similar levels of control. But I suppose it's more likely he was the exception rather than the rule.
PS: It's not "most teachers". Most teachers don't get any input into which books their district (hell, their state[1]) uses. That was a cheap dig, and politically motivated; OP is contemptible.
[1] Lots of states will just use whatever California uses, or whatever Texas uses.
In my high school, the teachers were involved in selecting books. At least the experienced teachers were. The newer teachers had to go with the decision made by the others.
Then the district started phasing out the older teachers and began adopting "whatever California uses".
In four years, the district went from being in the top 5% of the state to barely being in the top 50%.
I suspect it was more due to the change in teachers rather than the change in textbooks.
products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful
Why are companies allowed to get away with bribing teachers into choosing their textbook?
This article seems to be focused on K-12. So in the US at least, in many cases the money for those textbooks is public money. How is this any different than bribing an elected official to give your company a contract?
So we just had a remote controlled drone go out of control and crash (which may or may not have been due to intentional signal jamming)... and the solution is: let make more, only this time we'll arm them with nukes?
I think nuclear bombs are important enough to justify having a pilot riding along to keep an eye on things.
This has been standard practice in many places for years. And not just when travelling to China.
Even if you're not working with high value information, there's usually not any justification for taking equipment full of company information abroad.
Probably a lot of normal people's reaction to Reddit's policy change is "You mean sexual imagery of children wasn't already against the rules? How is that not firmly established from day one?"
That was absolutely my first reaction.
Unfortumately, the Reddit admins' bizarre six-year acceptance of child porn on its site is reflective of an overall lax attitude in online geek communities. Rather than seeing themselves as what they actually are--just nerds running computers--they like to perceive themselves as freedom fighters battling all forms of censorship in the world.
I don't think I've ever seen "an overall lax attitude" towards child porn in the geek community. I think most geeks understand that opposing censorship doesn't require supporting child porn. The few who believe otherwise are typically already regarded nutjobs due to their various other opinions.
Knowing the DHS scrapes all of the social sites and sites like Slashdot, I would like to say that the DHS can 'blow me'.
So there...
You're doing it wrong. You're not supposed to tell DHS to blow you, you've got to threaten to blow them.
But either way, just remember that you're on their watch list now. So if a guy solicits you in a bathroom, you'll have to assume it's a DHS agent.
But I'd really like to see the exact contents of the original text, as opposed to him giving us a vague description about how it mentioned "blowing away" the competition.
Are you kidding? They're not going to release the actual text. We can't afford to let dangerous information like that fall into the wrong hands. There would be copycat texters all over the place.
Thanks for the clarification. Excuse my ignorance, I am not a US citizen and don't know so much about this. I'm curious though: what difference does it make when the Congress declares war, other than symbolic?
Apparently not a whole lot in practical terms. As you noted, we've attacked lots of countries without declaring war.
The U.S. Constitution gives only Congress the power to declare war, but it doesn't specify the means of doing so or the effect of that declaration. So that's not particularly helpful. Since the early 1970s, there are strict limits on how long the president can commit forces without a declaration of war or 'authorization of force'. In the time since that law was passed, Congress has always opted for the authorization. There is a diplomatic difference as an authorization of force is perceived as less extreme. Whether there is any function difference, I don't know. An authorization of force has certainly been sufficient for us to attack a bunch of countries.
So why the hang up over an actual declaration? I assume it's mostly a political issue. Undeclared conflicts have always been controversial, but lately it is being brought up more often due to Ron Paul trying to make it an issue in the upcoming presidental election. Americans who are tired of being at war - or tired of spending money to be at war - are picking up on it as well.
The government response to any other private "too big to secure" event consists of "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event". So, following your (entirely true) statement, the government should simply ban the superbowl.
Out of curiosity, do you have any examples of the government saying: "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event"?
I'm assuming you're a guy marrying a girl... so what does your fiance want to do for invites?
Yeah, do that.
You can spend a lot of time coming up with the most clever idea out there, but if your bride-to-be doesn't like it, you're fucked (and not in the good way). By all means suggest something geeky, but if she balks, back down and accept that you're not the star of this particular show.
No, you're not the only one. There should be an option to let us choose whether we want to have the results "optimized" for our area. I can see how a search focussed on local results is useful in a lot of cases, but there are just as many times when it's not. Giving the a prominant "include local results" checkbox next to the search seems like it would be a simple and effective compromise.
I think it's more likely that someone tried to explain "the cloud" to some CEO and he completely misunderstood then ordered a bunch of these cloud panels made. After he realized his mistake, he had some people make up these productivity claims so he can avoid the embarrassment of admitting his mistake while simultaneously looking like an innovator.
The only thing that matters is the number of delegates the canidates won. Romney, Santorum and Paul each won 7 delegates. Gingrich and Perry each won 2 delegates.
Actually that's completey wrong. None of them got any delegates from Iowa. The Iowa Caucus doesn't assign national delegates, it elects local delegates which go on to the county meeting where state delegates are elected. Those state delegates then meet to elect national delegates. After all of that, then those national delgates go to the convention to vote. Iowa is actually one of the very last states to choose delegates. And they are not bound by the vote of the caucus.
The caucus numbers are for show and are not even used to decide the 1st set of local delegates. That's a separate vote made after people have chosen their favorite candidate. Some sources say Ron Paul is the real winner in terms of delegates because they had people sticking around volunteering to be delegates.
Hopefully they'll do both. The other big flight sim program, X-Plane, has both community created free addons and commercial addons at additional cost from third parties. There's a big community around that and it adds a lot to the program. As people might expect, the stuff you pay for is usually better quality, althrough there is some really great free stuff out there.
It'd be nice if Microsoft encourages others to make content and provides tools to help with that. But I'm not sure that's part of their business model for this release.
Lets say they manage to get people to report stuff they see. How are they going to deal with the influx of all the reported sites? Presumably the people reading terrorist sites support those views, so there's not going to be a lot reports of them. Meanwhile slashdot, facebook, etc are going to have tons of people reporting them. You can't just filter out those sites because there is so much user content that could potentially be from a terrorist.
So how are you going to find the 1 report for bob.terrorshack.com among the 1500 reports of facebook comments that someone didn't like? There's just going to be so much noise that the analysis is going to be a massive waste of man hours. And it seems like the easier they make the reporting process, the more noise there will be. The whole thing sounds like a good idea... until you start thinking about it.
Seems pretty trivial to write a firefox plugin to add a "report terrorist" option to the right click menu. It's pretty much guaranteed to be simpler and more effective than whatever their committee came up with in their "draft manifesto".
This could be up and running before anyone even gets around to reading their proposal.
The Qader missile is said to be capable of striking warships at a range of about 125 miles, a distance that would include some American forces in the Gulf region as Iran is about 140 miles at its nearest point from Bahrain.
So the missiles have a range of 125 miles and the closest part of the target is 140 miles...
I don't want to downplay the significance of the situation, but from 15 miles outside the missile's effective range, you wouldn't even be able to see it when it splashes harmlessly into the water.
The article was even claiming they could hit isreal at 625 miles away. What am i missing?
I agree that people shouldn't be threatening his wife and kid... whether that's actually happened remains to be seen. It's a claim that the jerk repeatedly made, but he's proven himself to be untrustworthy.
Knowing what you do about the internet, is there really any doubt in your mind that people on the internet threatened his wife and kid?
However, I don't have a problem with people flooding his wife with friend-requests on facebook. At least they've made her aware that her husband's an asshole at work, and not the genius he has probably snowed her into thinking he is.
Odd thing to say given your previous statement. How many of those requests do you think came from people who really wanted to be her friend? Flooding her facebook with requests was harassment, pure and simple. You think harassment is OK, but threats go too far? The line separating them is pretty thin. And neither one would qualify as civilized social interaction.
N-Gadget would have never taken notice if they hadn't seen this hitting them in the bank-account. The fact is that they hired an asshole. Either they were too incompetent to be able to determine he was an asshole, or they thought it was a good idea to hire assholes. Their former marketing firm (The Hand Media, I think?) pulled out because this guy was an asshole. They told N-gadget the guy was an asshole. So, the obvious conclusion is that N-Gadget thought it was a good idea to hire assholes.
They hired him because he rattled off a list of places where he had "contacts" that would get their product in stores, magazines, and websites. They saw a potential to make a lot of money from that. No doubt they recognized that he was an ass, but the lure of money is pretty strong. If this incident hadn't happened and his "contacts" had worked out, they'd be congratulating themselves on the smart decision to keep him around.
Hopefully, N-Gadget will serve as an example to other companies, and the general quantity of assholes being hired will go down across the board.
We can hope. I doubt it will be a major change, but small steps in the right direction are good too.
It really is a goldmine, i love that his actions just keep adding to the comedy. This is my favorite line (from the 1up.com article):
Christoforo's Ocean Marketing Twitter account has had its name changed from the misspelled "oceanmarketting" to "oceanstratagy," despite the fact that "oceanstrategy" (a name devoid of any misspellings) was available
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I am a bit surprised by the number. These are luxury items after all, and I'd suspect at least 25% of American just can't afford them even if they wanted them. The survey shows 13% of older Americans have the phones which should be the largest group in the demographics (or else my social security is safe after all). Thus numbers just don't feel right. Maybe they're defining "smart phone" in a simple way; ie any mobile phone that has any application at all, which includes what most kids would call dumb phones?
Just because they can't afford it, doesn't mean they can't have it. That's the beauty of credit. It's made it harder for people to recognize what is a luxury.
Likely many people don't have enough income to justify paying $80/month (or whatever it is) for a smartphone. But that doesn't doesn't stop people from doing it.
M$ still sucks ass!
Just another reason for the separation of Corporation and State.
More relevant to the OP's comment is the equally important separation of mouth and ass.
My experience from talking to a teacher involved in the process is they were not allowed to analyze the books, they were given "intern jobs" like count by hand the racial distribution of the characters in "story problems" as a major selection criteria.
That's interesting and doesn't sound like a very useful process.
I know at least one of my teachers had full control over the choice of books in his class - and he took the time to tell us why he selected the books as well as pointing out common flaws in the alternatives. I had assumed the others had similar levels of control. But I suppose it's more likely he was the exception rather than the rule.
PS: It's not "most teachers". Most teachers don't get any input into which books their district (hell, their state[1]) uses. That was a cheap dig, and politically motivated; OP is contemptible.
[1] Lots of states will just use whatever California uses, or whatever Texas uses.
In my high school, the teachers were involved in selecting books. At least the experienced teachers were. The newer teachers had to go with the decision made by the others.
Then the district started phasing out the older teachers and began adopting "whatever California uses". In four years, the district went from being in the top 5% of the state to barely being in the top 50%. I suspect it was more due to the change in teachers rather than the change in textbooks.
products that make their lives easier and that come with free meals and gifts are the most successful
Why are companies allowed to get away with bribing teachers into choosing their textbook? This article seems to be focused on K-12. So in the US at least, in many cases the money for those textbooks is public money. How is this any different than bribing an elected official to give your company a contract?
So we just had a remote controlled drone go out of control and crash (which may or may not have been due to intentional signal jamming) ... and the solution is: let make more, only this time we'll arm them with nukes?
I think nuclear bombs are important enough to justify having a pilot riding along to keep an eye on things.
This has been standard practice in many places for years. And not just when travelling to China. Even if you're not working with high value information, there's usually not any justification for taking equipment full of company information abroad.
Probably a lot of normal people's reaction to Reddit's policy change is "You mean sexual imagery of children wasn't already against the rules? How is that not firmly established from day one?"
That was absolutely my first reaction.
Unfortumately, the Reddit admins' bizarre six-year acceptance of child porn on its site is reflective of an overall lax attitude in online geek communities. Rather than seeing themselves as what they actually are--just nerds running computers--they like to perceive themselves as freedom fighters battling all forms of censorship in the world.
I don't think I've ever seen "an overall lax attitude" towards child porn in the geek community. I think most geeks understand that opposing censorship doesn't require supporting child porn. The few who believe otherwise are typically already regarded nutjobs due to their various other opinions.
Knowing the DHS scrapes all of the social sites and sites like Slashdot, I would like to say that the DHS can 'blow me'.
So there...
You're doing it wrong. You're not supposed to tell DHS to blow you, you've got to threaten to blow them. But either way, just remember that you're on their watch list now. So if a guy solicits you in a bathroom, you'll have to assume it's a DHS agent.
But I'd really like to see the exact contents of the original text, as opposed to him giving us a vague description about how it mentioned "blowing away" the competition.
Are you kidding? They're not going to release the actual text. We can't afford to let dangerous information like that fall into the wrong hands. There would be copycat texters all over the place.
Thanks for the clarification. Excuse my ignorance, I am not a US citizen and don't know so much about this. I'm curious though: what difference does it make when the Congress declares war, other than symbolic?
Apparently not a whole lot in practical terms. As you noted, we've attacked lots of countries without declaring war.
The U.S. Constitution gives only Congress the power to declare war, but it doesn't specify the means of doing so or the effect of that declaration. So that's not particularly helpful. Since the early 1970s, there are strict limits on how long the president can commit forces without a declaration of war or 'authorization of force'. In the time since that law was passed, Congress has always opted for the authorization. There is a diplomatic difference as an authorization of force is perceived as less extreme. Whether there is any function difference, I don't know. An authorization of force has certainly been sufficient for us to attack a bunch of countries.
So why the hang up over an actual declaration? I assume it's mostly a political issue. Undeclared conflicts have always been controversial, but lately it is being brought up more often due to Ron Paul trying to make it an issue in the upcoming presidental election. Americans who are tired of being at war - or tired of spending money to be at war - are picking up on it as well.
The government response to any other private "too big to secure" event consists of "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event". So, following your (entirely true) statement, the government should simply ban the superbowl.
Out of curiosity, do you have any examples of the government saying: "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event"?
I assume he defines an "actual war" as one that involved Congress declaring war, which hasn't happened since WWII.
I'm assuming you're a guy marrying a girl... so what does your fiance want to do for invites?
Yeah, do that.
You can spend a lot of time coming up with the most clever idea out there, but if your bride-to-be doesn't like it, you're fucked (and not in the good way). By all means suggest something geeky, but if she balks, back down and accept that you're not the star of this particular show.
No, you're not the only one. There should be an option to let us choose whether we want to have the results "optimized" for our area. I can see how a search focussed on local results is useful in a lot of cases, but there are just as many times when it's not. Giving the a prominant "include local results" checkbox next to the search seems like it would be a simple and effective compromise.
So should we expect that six weeks later firefox 4 support ends? followed six weeks later by the end of firefox 5 support? etc...? etc...?
I think it's more likely that someone tried to explain "the cloud" to some CEO and he completely misunderstood then ordered a bunch of these cloud panels made. After he realized his mistake, he had some people make up these productivity claims so he can avoid the embarrassment of admitting his mistake while simultaneously looking like an innovator.
The only thing that matters is the number of delegates the canidates won. Romney, Santorum and Paul each won 7 delegates. Gingrich and Perry each won 2 delegates.
Actually that's completey wrong. None of them got any delegates from Iowa. The Iowa Caucus doesn't assign national delegates, it elects local delegates which go on to the county meeting where state delegates are elected. Those state delegates then meet to elect national delegates. After all of that, then those national delgates go to the convention to vote. Iowa is actually one of the very last states to choose delegates. And they are not bound by the vote of the caucus.
The caucus numbers are for show and are not even used to decide the 1st set of local delegates. That's a separate vote made after people have chosen their favorite candidate. Some sources say Ron Paul is the real winner in terms of delegates because they had people sticking around volunteering to be delegates.
Hopefully they'll do both. The other big flight sim program, X-Plane, has both community created free addons and commercial addons at additional cost from third parties. There's a big community around that and it adds a lot to the program. As people might expect, the stuff you pay for is usually better quality, althrough there is some really great free stuff out there.
It'd be nice if Microsoft encourages others to make content and provides tools to help with that. But I'm not sure that's part of their business model for this release.
Lets say they manage to get people to report stuff they see. How are they going to deal with the influx of all the reported sites? Presumably the people reading terrorist sites support those views, so there's not going to be a lot reports of them. Meanwhile slashdot, facebook, etc are going to have tons of people reporting them. You can't just filter out those sites because there is so much user content that could potentially be from a terrorist.
... until you start thinking about it.
So how are you going to find the 1 report for bob.terrorshack.com among the 1500 reports of facebook comments that someone didn't like? There's just going to be so much noise that the analysis is going to be a massive waste of man hours. And it seems like the easier they make the reporting process, the more noise there will be. The whole thing sounds like a good idea
Seems pretty trivial to write a firefox plugin to add a "report terrorist" option to the right click menu. It's pretty much guaranteed to be simpler and more effective than whatever their committee came up with in their "draft manifesto".
This could be up and running before anyone even gets around to reading their proposal.
The Qader missile is said to be capable of striking warships at a range of about 125 miles, a distance that would include some American forces in the Gulf region as Iran is about 140 miles at its nearest point from Bahrain.
So the missiles have a range of 125 miles and the closest part of the target is 140 miles... I don't want to downplay the significance of the situation, but from 15 miles outside the missile's effective range, you wouldn't even be able to see it when it splashes harmlessly into the water. The article was even claiming they could hit isreal at 625 miles away. What am i missing?
Sounds like a lot of direct PR stuff is involved...
Perfect! I happen to know a recently out of work PR guy. I'll have to foward this opportunity to him.
I agree that people shouldn't be threatening his wife and kid ... whether that's actually happened remains to be seen. It's a claim that the jerk repeatedly made, but he's proven himself to be untrustworthy.
Knowing what you do about the internet, is there really any doubt in your mind that people on the internet threatened his wife and kid?
However, I don't have a problem with people flooding his wife with friend-requests on facebook. At least they've made her aware that her husband's an asshole at work, and not the genius he has probably snowed her into thinking he is.
Odd thing to say given your previous statement. How many of those requests do you think came from people who really wanted to be her friend? Flooding her facebook with requests was harassment, pure and simple. You think harassment is OK, but threats go too far? The line separating them is pretty thin. And neither one would qualify as civilized social interaction.
N-Gadget would have never taken notice if they hadn't seen this hitting them in the bank-account. The fact is that they hired an asshole. Either they were too incompetent to be able to determine he was an asshole, or they thought it was a good idea to hire assholes. Their former marketing firm (The Hand Media, I think?) pulled out because this guy was an asshole. They told N-gadget the guy was an asshole. So, the obvious conclusion is that N-Gadget thought it was a good idea to hire assholes.
They hired him because he rattled off a list of places where he had "contacts" that would get their product in stores, magazines, and websites. They saw a potential to make a lot of money from that. No doubt they recognized that he was an ass, but the lure of money is pretty strong. If this incident hadn't happened and his "contacts" had worked out, they'd be congratulating themselves on the smart decision to keep him around.
Hopefully, N-Gadget will serve as an example to other companies, and the general quantity of assholes being hired will go down across the board.
We can hope. I doubt it will be a major change, but small steps in the right direction are good too.
Christoforo's Ocean Marketing Twitter account has had its name changed from the misspelled "oceanmarketting" to "oceanstratagy," despite the fact that "oceanstrategy" (a name devoid of any misspellings) was available