Charge them around midnight, however, and the nation could see plug-ins replace more than half its 254 million existing cars without adding a single new power plant, according to a study from DOEâ(TM)s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Thatâ(TM)s because lots of 24/7 power generation resources get wasted at night, when everyone goes to bed and power demand peak drops to its minimum level. Again, however, we need technology to help us solve this problem.
There are plenty of ways to solve our commuting problem, and a combination of more walkable neighborhoods, bike-only transportation paths, better mass transit, and a more intelligent use of fossil fuels by eliminating the wasteful combination of millions of poorly maintained individual ICEs and our gas-powered supply chain. Even dumping the fuel in a less refined form during a process to make other petroleum based products would be preferable, because you'd be approaching 70-80% efficiency of energy conversion instead of the rather pathetic 30-40% of car ICEs.
That's the worst case scenario. We could follow Germany's lead and begin a serious effort to increase renewable capacity by using a combination of wind, geothermal, solar (panel and heat plants), hydro, and efficiency improvements. They powered half of their entire country on renewables last summer. Are you saying we can't do the same?
Incidentally, I don't know what is so popular about bitching endlessly as a response to any attempt to modernize the United States. It's the 21st Century. If it were 1900, you'd be arguing that electricity wasn't as safe as kerosene. It's time to join the rest of the world and stop hanging on to these meaningless bits of quickly aging tradition. Who cares if my car runs on electricity instead of gas? If it gets me to work and home five ways a week and to dinner on the weekends and we could build them in American factories and provide more jobs by converting gas stations into electric stations and at the same time probably solve the smog/asthma problems plaguing major metropolitan areas, what is the problem?
So again, private companies recording stuff is bad because *mumble mumble* the government?
When the government has immediate and easy access to Google's data, and Google is recording more and more data every day about everyone, the government will have immediate and easy access to more data. There's no mumbling involved, unless you count the gag orders the DOJ has placed on everyone about their broad wiretapping programs.
It just seems like you have a MISPLACED anger/concern. You are apparently totally fine with these corps recording whatever and whenever they want, but at the same time that they aren't powerful enough to resist government requests?
I don't believe Google Glass is required by the company to always record everything and report it back to them, but that does happen to be its function when it is being used. If a customer decides to use a device that records everything about them that is sent and then analyzed by private company, that's really not my concern unless it empowers the government to have another avenue for shredding the 4th Amendment. The reality of the NSA wiretapping scandals and the concern of overreach of the government using National Security Letters to cast a wide net using dubious forms of probable cause is well known. I shouldn't have to go over it unless you are totally incapable of using a search engine.
As for your fear about abuse of power - what the heck do you think will happen if corporations ARE powerful enough to resist government requests for video feeds? You think they are going to self regulate and make you happy? Hint: they'll throw your ass under the bus for another dollar of profit.
Corporations shouldn't have to be powerful enough to to head-to-head against the government if the government is respecting the 4th Amendment and using transparent legal means to acquire information about suspects of crimes. Getting into self-regulation is a red herring because the problem isn't with government regulation. The problem is that the government is abusing its power by pressuring private corporations to hand over data, so it's logical to assume that more data in the hands of Google -- which already releases information and account access to the government -- means more data in the hands of the government.
Over the last four years, the government's requests for electronic and physical surveillance have steadily increased after a brief decline in 2008 and 2009, with a total of 1,856 applications in 2012. However, the truly shocking number is how many times it applied for Section 215 orders, also known as business records requests, which as far as we know give the government extremely broad authority to access "any tangible thing," including sensitive information such as financial records, medical records, and even library records.
Last year, the government made 212 applications to the FISC under Section 215, over 94 percent of which the court found it necessary to modify â" 200 to be exact. This is up from 205 in 2011, which may not seem like a huge difference, but consider that in 2009 the FBI made only 21 requests and the FISC modified just 9.
When a private corporation gives in to all government demands, that's not a non-sequitor. At this point it's an accepted reality that the USG has positioned itself to access any private corporation's data on any private citizen without even applying for a warrant.
As internet accessible recording devices become more and more prevalent, there will be a literal panopticon of information available, and do you think government's won't attempt to exploit that?
Getting into the scale of things, right now I could conceivably still live without the internet at home, or know that if I turn my phone off and leave all GPS devices at home, I can take a walk without the government tracking me. As soon as there is a critical mass of Glass type devices out in public, there is practically no chance that I could walk to a location without the government being able to track me down.
Look at the Boston Marathon bombings. They weren't tracked by anything other than photos taken by the public and a handful of CCTV feeds. Imagine if one quarter of people in that crowd had a Glass type device on their face, and the government continued to have the right to access our devices without our permission. What do you think will happen?
It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years
Unfortunately, in the context of the American mind this makes sense but in fact it's totally incorrect. Nights and weekends off has been lost over the last 30 years or so because corporations and governments worked together to reduce labor laws that protect workers and reward offshoring of labor as another avenue to damaging worker rights. Taking away our right to unionize did not make them enough money, so they had to exploit slave labor in Southeast Asia to have another implement to control workers: threatening not only individuals but entire communities with factory shutdowns.
And then they realized that with the militarization of our police forces they didn't have to threaten anything, so now they're just taking.They take our national wealth through tax loopholes, they drain our coffers with lucrative government contracts, and yet they continue to demand more and more money because there's no such thing as enough. Apple can't afford to pay full taxes, and they can't afford to pay Americans a living wage to build their products, but somehow they have over one hundred billion dollars in hard cash. They have so much money they haven't figured out how to spend it yet, and pretty much every corporation operates in a similar fashion.
Corporations continue to take and take and the only thing that will stop them is a popular labor movement, which may or may not be around the corner. Until Americans understand the root of the problem -- corporate power far outpacing democratic will -- corporations will continue to take our rights, our money, and the inheritance of a living planet away from our children. That's not because corporate people are evil, it's because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and despite all of their protestations to the contrary, they operate as any warlord or king or priest does when they are in centers of power. If they see something they want and they can get away with it, they will take it.
Despite public claims on behalf of the White House that no weapons are being sent to the rebels, reports that the CIA has been doing precisely that have been circulating for months, including a recent story about CIA spies smuggling 14 stinger missiles into Syria so rebels could defend themselves with ground to air technology.
The New York Times admitted in a June 21 report that the CIA was "steering" arms to Syrian rebels from the Turkish border, but claimed the weapons were paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The New York Times' decision to alter the wording of the article is another example of how NATO-aligned media outlets are concerned about overemphasizing western support for the rebels given their involvement in terrorist attacks and other acts of brutality.
I'd recommend against adding racism to your obvious ignorance, however. Even though that feeling is dependent on the possibility that you have a sense of human dignity, which is certainly slim.
There are very few products that serve needs, so manufacturing the desire for conspicuous consumption is more important than making sure the product works reliably.
In regards to IBM or other corporations building debt to foster growth, that ignores the fact that you're not spending the money on growth or profit making entities. You're spending it on welfare. Nearly all of it goes to social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment insurance, and a near endless host of various NON-profit making entities.
Part of a nation's infrastructure is the intelligence and health of their workforce. If a good portion of your society is sick or desperately poor, it's unlikely that Intel is going to be interested in educating, healing, and then training that workforce when they can scoop up more productive engineers that are ready to work today. (Your inability to grasp this basic concept is another example of why you should probably avoid discussing anything involving elementary macroeconomics.)
As to french infrastructure, the french are as bankrupt if not more so then we are so that is a silly counter argument.
Gross government debt is 90% for France, and 107% for the United States. The French people live longer, work less, and are generally happier along with being healthier and more educated.
As to our debt, you assume that tax cuts have no link to economic growth and thus tax revenue based on that growth. You forget that the tax cuts came after a financial collapse and that they were put into place to stimulate growth.
You're completely ignorant on this point. The Bush Tax Cuts were implemented before 9/11 on June 7th, 2001. There was no financial crisis at that time, and in fact the housing bubble had not yet taken off. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 1999, which destroyed Glass-Steagall, which had kept us largely collapse free for 70 years, had not begun to wreck the world economy with it's destruction of the firewalls that separated insurance, deposit banking, and investment banking.
As to Afghanistan and Iraq, what would have you response been to 9/11. I love that you people seem to forget that we were attacked not the other way around. And as to Saddam and Iraq, that was clearly a mistake. But at the same time, nearly all evidence that would argue it a mistake is hindsight with no ability for us to know that prior to that point.
The Iraq War had nothing to do with 9/11. If I were president and a terrorist group based out of Saudi Arabia funded by Gulf Arabs launched an attack on the United States with 3/4 of the terrorists being Saudi nationals, attacking their military training camp in Afghanistan is probably the last thing I would do.
As to the placeholder that is money, it is also something one owns. It signifies value that you've earned. When you devalue my money to pay for your mistakes you steal from me. You're a thief that believes everything everyone else has belongs to him if he can take it. It's disgusting and if you're allowed to keep running rampant in our society you will destroy not only us but yourselves. You've done it before. It's happened many times.
If I'm allowed to keep running rampant? You do realize that the capitalists you worship just blew up the world economy so they could literally steal trillions of dollars from your government, don't you? Or maybe not. You seem to be more of a regurgitator of certain media outlets than a person who can read with a modicum of skepticism and thought.
First, you want to compare the US government, an organization that has bee around for hundreds of years to a start up? If you want to compare us to something, then compare us to an old blue chip. And guess how much debt those old corps run up? Oh that's right, they tend to run massive cash reserves because they're not stupid.
Apple does, sure. But old dogs like IBM have had periods of high (or volatile) debt to equity ratios specifically for the purposes of financing... wait for it... growth. Since the dollar is a fiat currency, there's no reason for the United States to care too much about how much "money" there is. Keep in mind that when the US dollar doesn't buy a loaf of bread, gold won't either. The only thing that will matter at that point is who has the guns to protect their food supply. No amount of pretend hard currencies are going to change that. So, if you're a doomsday libertarian, which it looks like you are, I'd recommend guns, ammo, and arable land instead of krugerrands.
Third, I love that you think the problem in the US is a lack of infrustructure. You honestly think that if we had a few more bridges or roads or a couple extra solar power planets all our problems would be solved. You think that somehow the economy would be good. Because in your mind, the reason US businesses are failing is because they don't have enough roads. Really? Wake up...
Ten years ago I traveled on a TGV while in France. If you're unaware, that's a nuclear powered electric bullet train that travels 500 miles in 3 hours and twenty minutes, and is rarely late. That kind of infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the United States, because all of our money is poured down the drain of car commuting instead of mass transportation. Even our airports are overloaded because there are no shorthaul trains as an alternative, and this ends up filling airports with unnecessary traffic.
Also: "We investigate the long run consequences of infrastructure provision on per capita income in a panel of countries over the period 1950-1992. Simple panel based tests are developed which enable us to isolate the sign and direction of the long run effect of infrastructure on income in a manner that is robust to the presence of unknown heterogeneous short run causal relationships. Our results provide clear evidence that in the vast majority of cases infrastructure does induce long run growth effects. But we also find a great deal of variation in the results across individual countries. Taken as a whole, the results demonstrate that telephones, electricity generating capacity and paved roads are provided at close to the growth maximizing level on average, but are under-supplied in some countries and over-supplied in others. These results also help to explain why cross section and time series studies have in the past found contradictory results regarding a causal link between infrastructure provision and long run growth."
Fourth, I love how you think we're in debt because there were some tax breaks. Yes there were tax breaks and it caused US tax revenue to decrease by what percentage? Okay... and by what percentage did US spending go up? Exactly. I'll admit that if we didn't lower taxes our debt would be better but not by much. It is the spending that went up by the most and continues to go up by the most. That isn't an opinion. It's a mathematical fact. You agree or be wrong.
"The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has estimated the 10-year revenue loss from extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts beyond 2010 at $2.9 trillion, with an additional $606 billion in debt service costs (interest), for a combined total of $3.5 trillio
You're not going to get hate mail. But you will be told you are wrong, because using the simplistic idea that "debt is bad" to plan an economy is ridiculous How would you explain how startups are successful? When they start, their income to debt levels are completely off the mark, but with investment of capital to improve efficiency and drive sales, eventually they can be profitable regardless of how much their debt to income ratio was.
With large economies, the principles are the same. If you borrow money to fight wars, there's very little chance of receiving a return on the initial investment, as the Iraq War has proved: over three trillion dollars spent, and nothing but one million veterans with a lifetime of expensive treatments to care for it. If America had instead spent that money on infrastructure improvements, like renewable energy, fiber-to-the-home, or even an improved commuter rail network and efforts to modernize the government itself, we would all be doing very well just as we did during the Space Race. Even making common sense changes, like decriminalizing harmless drugs and ending our for-profit prison system and replacing it with a reasonable mental health infrastructure would not only save us money through simple budget changes, but it would also have extensive monetary effects by reducing recidivism, which frees up police to focus on actual crimes instead of trying to continue functioning as a moral goon squad.
If you want to understand why America is in such deep trouble financially, all you have to understand is that we lowered taxes for everyone, especially the super wealthy, at a time when we also spent three trillion dollars we did not have on unnecessary wars.
That's why it's so frustrating to see rambling nonsense like yours modded as insightful. Debt it not scary. It's a concept that we have invented and one that we can redefine or simply do away with using a debt jubilee, or a national reorganization as done by Iceland. Paper money only causes anarchic collapse when people go hungry. And even when there is a massive economic collapse, like the Great Depression, America did not devolve into cruelty. FDR told the rich to pay back the money they swallowed up, and they did, and our economy was further assisted by a massive government spending program, including complete takeovers of private industry for a brief period of time. And that's fine because private enterprises are usually massively inefficient hierarchies controlled by internal politics rather than innovation (see: Microsoft).
Nowhere in your diatribe against debt do you make any coherent points with supporting evidence from reality. But that's just libertarian economics in a nutshell, I guess.
This is the stupidity of capitalism in a nutshell: as long as the Q4 before earth ceases supporting human life is "profitable", it's a win-win for everybody!
For most people, the connection they have is about the lyrics and the memories associated with the song anyway. There's magic in lo-fi recording like this rehearsal, and zero magic in some perfectly recorded crud step (though I do enjoy many electronic artists.) I think the main thing is the yearning in the recording itself.
I'd check out Grohl's keynote at SxSW in any event. He makes some very good points about artists who wouldn't survive American Idol that are a hell of a lot better than anyone who wins it. Music is about expression, about documenting loss and love and joy, and the "karaoke dictatorship" of talent shows that rob people of their voice and replace it with meaningless corporate pablum designed to sell products... well, it's horrible and empty and it doesn't matter what the bit rate is because it's not worth wasting time for.
You need a system that uses real dollars or the results are meaningless. Let people donate to the ACLU or EFF or any other supporters of a free (as in soeech) Internet with the proceeds.
I'd love to help create a real market without stuffing money in the pockets of marketing departments and other corporations that contribute little or nothing positive to my life. Let me know where to sign up.
That's because you are confusing operating systems with desktop environments... It is not a failure of the operating system to allow users the freedom to run what desktop environment they want on it.
I'm not saying it's a failure of the individual programs... the tools exist to build for one narrow purpose (like one or two versions of the same distro). I'm saying the "Linux Desktop" as a concept and as a platform is a failure. It is designed to fail.
With any other operating system, there's a major and and a minor version number that is pretty much all the information you need as a target platform. There's a default GUI setup that is exactly the same across all new installs, and that's a platform that can be tested and built upon. Since "Linux Desktop" can mean so many things it is meaningless.
I'm not talking about just the location of the control panel. I'm talking about how services are started and maintained. I'm talking about what directories programs are installed in. I'm talking about different security models. I think there is actually consensus that the term "Linux Desktop" is a useless phrase, so if that's understandable, accepting the fact that it isn't anything resembling a stable target platform shouldn't be far behind.
You are reframing the question in a disingenuous manner. You may try again, but don't apologize to me unless you're going to apologize for your nonsense.
In the world of mature adults, documentation and backwards compatibility are the most essential parts to platform success. As a software vendor, if I have the choice of including Linux and having to write documentation and deal with bugs for dozens of distros or ignore the platform entirely, which business case do you think wins out? Keep in mind that end-user desktop Linux usage is the equivalent of a statistical error. Also keep in mind that I'm not talking about end user training alone. I'm talking about training the support staff that deals with end user support, automating testing suites for usability and bug tracking, unit testing, how to pass software updates, how to maintain backwards compatibility between distro upgrades... the Linux desktop ecosystem is a sea of poorly documented unknowns. That's just the reality.
At this point there isn't even a sane way to come up with use cases for desktops that will work between Ubuntu 12.04 and 11.04, or between Xubuntu and Kubuntu and Lubuntu. What happens when you make the move from Debian to Centos to Slackware to Arch to Mint to SuSE?
The excuses ideological die hards make are pathetic, and they have been for the fifteen years I have been a Linux user and hearing about the age of the Linux Desktop. Despite all the noise, the situation remains exactly the same: come up with a standardized interface for the Linux Desktop -- including all the software tools to test, update, and maintain software across the vast majority of Linux platforms -- or continue to lose. Those are the two choices.
If you want that success for the Linux desktop, you need to push for standards and quit making excuses.
No one has ever proven or even credibly suggested that Windows or OSX is easier to use than Linux, especially Android.
Sorry, you're falling flat on your face for this one. Here's why:
When I ask the question, "How do change the screen resolution?" Windows: Control Panel Mac: System Preferences Linux: It depends
"Where do I change my network settings?" Windows: Control Panel Mac: System Preferences Linux: It depends
The reason Windows and Mac and Android are dominating user devices is because they have standardized a GUI environment, and GUI failure is considered operating system failure.
many instances of people within organizations agreeing not to reveal something they have a legal duty to reveal in order to gain some advantage.
The word you're looking for is "conspire."
Yes, the banks who benefitted from the removal of some regulatory barriers probably lobbied for those barriers' removal, because it would allow them to make more money. No collusion required.
Oh, so they didn't have meetings about it before they bought half of congress? That's an interesting point of view.
Banks, who thought it was a good idea, as well as a way to make lots of money. Actually, securitization of mortgages is a good idea because it increases liquidity and hence availability of funds, and also because it allows risk to be spread. What caused problems was widespread misestimation of the risk. Basically, people foolishly assumed that the risk was close to zero (as is the case with high-quality mortgages), even though the packages included many low-quality mortgages -- and in fact lower-quality mortgages than even existed before the securitization facilitated the availability of a lot more funds. And the reason everyone assumed risk was so low was because the sellers of the securities claimed it was, and everyone assumed regulators wouldn't let them say it if it weren't true.
Again you're working diligently not to use the word conspire. When a ratings agency and a financial firm work together to sell shitty loans as good loans they are conspiring. Here's how it happened according to Stiglitz:
[The] securitization process itself is what fed the bubble, which in fact made it inevitable almost that there would be this problem of a large fraction of them collapsing, going into default at the same time. So they created the problem that actually brought them down. â¦
You needed to have the investment banks that would put these together,... the CDOs and complex products. Now if you had thousands of mortgages in a product, no one could inspect to see whether each mortgage was a good one. It was all based on trust.... So you created a system in which incentives were such as to make sure that the system failed.
Then you had the rating agencies being part of... I would almost say a conspiracy. The rating agencies would look at these bundles -- they obviously couldn't look at each of the mortgages -- and they would say if you put together large numbers of mortgages that ought to have been graded each F, by putting them together they blessed them as if it was financial alchemy that converted lead into gold. In this case, it converted F-rated subprime mortgages into an A-rated security.
Why was that important? Because then you could sell this to a pension fund or to lots of other people who could only buy A-rated securities.
I think you're picturing black helicopters and secret meetings.
I'm talking about is secret meetings -- which happen on a daily basis -- and the plans that were executed at those meetings. Who benefited from the wholesale destruction of financial regulations, and paid the lobbyists who had a direct hand in getting that accomplished? Who created a financial instrument to leverage invented assets and make billions of dollars in the process? Who fought regulators tooth and nail to prevent them from investigating those financial instruments? Who forced a deal with the US Government leveraging their former employees to secure 250 billion dollars worth of cash and eventually 7.7 trillion dollars in guarantees to protect themselves from the fallout of their idiotic financial schemes?
When literally every major banking house in the world is caught conspiring in one way or another to commit fraud, why would you take the position that conspiracy wasn't a central component of the financial crisis?
Kareem Serageldin, a 39-year-old U.S. citizen who lives in London, is accused of distorting the value of mortgage securities in 2007. U.S. authorities say actions by Serageldin and two others contributed to a $2.7 billion writedown in Credit Suisse's results for 2007.
In February, a grand jury in New York indicted Serageldin on three charges of conspiracy, false record-keeping and wire fraud. Former colleagues David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui each pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count and agreed to cooperate with investigators.
E-mails from former Washington Mutual Inc CEO Kerry Killinger read aloud during a congressional hearing this week illustrated clients' concerns about working with Goldman.
In 2007, Killinger discussed hiring Goldman or another investment bank to help Washington Mutual find ways to reduce its credit risk or raise new capital, according to one of the e-mails, which Michigan Democratic Sen Carl Levin read during the hearing.
"I don't trust Goldie on this," Levin quoted one of Killinger's e-mails as saying. "They are smart, but this is swimming with the sharks. They were shorting mortgages big-time while they were giving (Countrywide Financial Corp) advice."
The entire world economy recently fell apart because information was kept secret through collusion and conspiracy. LIBOR was a conspiracy. Nearly very major tech company was caught engaging in "no poaching" employment rules. Corporations invested in fossil fuel infrastructure spend massive amounts of money buying lawmakers and inventing political movements so they can block the push for alternative technologies that would devalue their corporate asset sheets. Empires spent the better portion of the last few thousand years exploiting people to death for the benefit of a handful of individuals.
Pretending that people with a shitload of money, time, and power don't collude for their own self interest is one of the dumbest ideas that a person can have in the 21st Century. Since the dawn of hierarchical organizations there has been abuse and secrecy at the upper portions of those hierarchies. From khans to queens to popes this has been a self-evident fact of human psychology.
Where do you think the phrase "cui bono" came from?
Who claimed the NK didn't launch the weapon? You don't understand what a false flag operation is. I'd advise you to read about the Gulf of Tonkin affair, but you'd probably walk away wondering why we fought Vietnam over little toy trucks.
The Administration recently announced that America would focus their projection of power to the Asian-Pacific region. My guess is that the claims of a long range NK missile are either the allowance of idiotic intelligence assessments to further propaganda goals, or the outright fabrication of assessments for the same purpose.
China will squash NK like a gnat if they threaten regional stability in any real sense, but the if the United States allows that to happen, it will be a blow to perceived US power in that area. There has to be an open ended excuse for a strike or an invasion to avoid that possibility.
How many people think earning billions of dollars of income is not enough reward in and of itself for hard work? Why should Schmidt and his corporation pay less tax by ratio than the people in my neighborhood who actually perform valuable functions within our economy?
Depraved materialists like Schmidt wouldn't have a dime if it were not for the efforts of American public research funded by taxes. Schmidt is probably smart enough to understand that he wouldn't be here without publicly funded research, but he has the ethical acuity of a fucking viral infection. Actually, that's a perfect analogy, because he's so blinded by his own limitless greed that he'd gladly kill his host as long as the digits in his bank account go up. Even a rat has enough empathy to help another one out, but Schmidt only aspires to be a rat. He would rather watch the American middle class sink while he talks about what a super guy he is and how it's justified that Google keep a few extra billion to piss away on his failed social media network while others fight for food stamps, safe neighborhoods, and the most basic educational programs.
Fuck Schmidt and every other hopeless asshole who thinks like him. The only way he could make the world a better place is if he stopped doing business altogether. And he should.
And to answer your question, no one earning under 250K has the time or the resources to game the system quite like multinational corporations. They are the only people, and I use that term loosely, with the resources and the absence of human dignity to suck money out of the economies they depend on so a few random shitheads can have nicer paintings in the bathrooms of their yachts. But according to capitalist fundamentalists, a ten million dollar panting hanging over a solid gold shitter has more economic value than a few thousand people getting assistance with a college education, or 20,000 families receiving nutritious food for a month. It's transparently a lie, and everyone knows it. It's too bad Schmidt lacks the integrity and/or the intelligence to say otherwise.
Astro turfing isn't going to solve the problem, and neither are integrations of third party utilities by end users desperate to avoid the crap interface that has been crudely bolted on to the Windows kernel. I notice that you're unable to explain how introducing two poorly integrated paradigms helps businesses accomplish their computing tasks.
Not only does Metro completely suck, but it breaks the definition of what a Windows application is. Microsoft has managed to create an operating system worse than Vista by breaking backwards compatibility going one generation back and forcing developers to choose a platform within a platform, or write for both and waste time and resources so Steve Balmer can consider himself an innovator. It's an accomplishment, but not the kind you'd want to put on a resume.
It's sad but true. Much of the developed world operates under the radical assumption that human rights are more important than the unrestricted pursuit of capital by corporations. It appears to be a cultural defect we inherited from the British Empire.
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There are plenty of ways to solve our commuting problem, and a combination of more walkable neighborhoods, bike-only transportation paths, better mass transit, and a more intelligent use of fossil fuels by eliminating the wasteful combination of millions of poorly maintained individual ICEs and our gas-powered supply chain. Even dumping the fuel in a less refined form during a process to make other petroleum based products would be preferable, because you'd be approaching 70-80% efficiency of energy conversion instead of the rather pathetic 30-40% of car ICEs.
That's the worst case scenario. We could follow Germany's lead and begin a serious effort to increase renewable capacity by using a combination of wind, geothermal, solar (panel and heat plants), hydro, and efficiency improvements. They powered half of their entire country on renewables last summer. Are you saying we can't do the same?
Incidentally, I don't know what is so popular about bitching endlessly as a response to any attempt to modernize the United States. It's the 21st Century. If it were 1900, you'd be arguing that electricity wasn't as safe as kerosene. It's time to join the rest of the world and stop hanging on to these meaningless bits of quickly aging tradition. Who cares if my car runs on electricity instead of gas? If it gets me to work and home five ways a week and to dinner on the weekends and we could build them in American factories and provide more jobs by converting gas stations into electric stations and at the same time probably solve the smog/asthma problems plaguing major metropolitan areas, what is the problem?
When the government has immediate and easy access to Google's data, and Google is recording more and more data every day about everyone, the government will have immediate and easy access to more data. There's no mumbling involved, unless you count the gag orders the DOJ has placed on everyone about their broad wiretapping programs.
I don't believe Google Glass is required by the company to always record everything and report it back to them, but that does happen to be its function when it is being used. If a customer decides to use a device that records everything about them that is sent and then analyzed by private company, that's really not my concern unless it empowers the government to have another avenue for shredding the 4th Amendment. The reality of the NSA wiretapping scandals and the concern of overreach of the government using National Security Letters to cast a wide net using dubious forms of probable cause is well known. I shouldn't have to go over it unless you are totally incapable of using a search engine.
Corporations shouldn't have to be powerful enough to to head-to-head against the government if the government is respecting the 4th Amendment and using transparent legal means to acquire information about suspects of crimes. Getting into self-regulation is a red herring because the problem isn't with government regulation. The problem is that the government is abusing its power by pressuring private corporations to hand over data, so it's logical to assume that more data in the hands of Google -- which already releases information and account access to the government -- means more data in the hands of the government.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/theyre-watching-fbi-business-records-requests-jump-900
When a private corporation gives in to all government demands, that's not a non-sequitor. At this point it's an accepted reality that the USG has positioned itself to access any private corporation's data on any private citizen without even applying for a warrant.
As internet accessible recording devices become more and more prevalent, there will be a literal panopticon of information available, and do you think government's won't attempt to exploit that?
Getting into the scale of things, right now I could conceivably still live without the internet at home, or know that if I turn my phone off and leave all GPS devices at home, I can take a walk without the government tracking me. As soon as there is a critical mass of Glass type devices out in public, there is practically no chance that I could walk to a location without the government being able to track me down.
Look at the Boston Marathon bombings. They weren't tracked by anything other than photos taken by the public and a handful of CCTV feeds. Imagine if one quarter of people in that crowd had a Glass type device on their face, and the government continued to have the right to access our devices without our permission. What do you think will happen?
Expecting the government to abuse their power is a rational position, especially involving a company that the government routinely forces information from.
Unfortunately, in the context of the American mind this makes sense but in fact it's totally incorrect. Nights and weekends off has been lost over the last 30 years or so because corporations and governments worked together to reduce labor laws that protect workers and reward offshoring of labor as another avenue to damaging worker rights. Taking away our right to unionize did not make them enough money, so they had to exploit slave labor in Southeast Asia to have another implement to control workers: threatening not only individuals but entire communities with factory shutdowns.
And then they realized that with the militarization of our police forces they didn't have to threaten anything, so now they're just taking.They take our national wealth through tax loopholes, they drain our coffers with lucrative government contracts, and yet they continue to demand more and more money because there's no such thing as enough. Apple can't afford to pay full taxes, and they can't afford to pay Americans a living wage to build their products, but somehow they have over one hundred billion dollars in hard cash. They have so much money they haven't figured out how to spend it yet, and pretty much every corporation operates in a similar fashion.
Corporations continue to take and take and the only thing that will stop them is a popular labor movement, which may or may not be around the corner. Until Americans understand the root of the problem -- corporate power far outpacing democratic will -- corporations will continue to take our rights, our money, and the inheritance of a living planet away from our children. That's not because corporate people are evil, it's because absolute power corrupts absolutely, and despite all of their protestations to the contrary, they operate as any warlord or king or priest does when they are in centers of power. If they see something they want and they can get away with it, they will take it.
Smartphones don't have much to do with it.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/ny-times-scrubs-mention-of-cia-arming-syrian-rebels/5302360
I'd recommend against adding racism to your obvious ignorance, however. Even though that feeling is dependent on the possibility that you have a sense of human dignity, which is certainly slim.
There are very few products that serve needs, so manufacturing the desire for conspicuous consumption is more important than making sure the product works reliably.
Part of a nation's infrastructure is the intelligence and health of their workforce. If a good portion of your society is sick or desperately poor, it's unlikely that Intel is going to be interested in educating, healing, and then training that workforce when they can scoop up more productive engineers that are ready to work today. (Your inability to grasp this basic concept is another example of why you should probably avoid discussing anything involving elementary macroeconomics.)
Gross government debt is 90% for France, and 107% for the United States. The French people live longer, work less, and are generally happier along with being healthier and more educated.
You're completely ignorant on this point. The Bush Tax Cuts were implemented before 9/11 on June 7th, 2001. There was no financial crisis at that time, and in fact the housing bubble had not yet taken off. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 1999, which destroyed Glass-Steagall, which had kept us largely collapse free for 70 years, had not begun to wreck the world economy with it's destruction of the firewalls that separated insurance, deposit banking, and investment banking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Growth_and_Tax_Relief_Reconciliation_Act_of_2001
The Iraq War had nothing to do with 9/11. If I were president and a terrorist group based out of Saudi Arabia funded by Gulf Arabs launched an attack on the United States with 3/4 of the terrorists being Saudi nationals, attacking their military training camp in Afghanistan is probably the last thing I would do.
If I'm allowed to keep running rampant? You do realize that the capitalists you worship just blew up the world economy so they could literally steal trillions of dollars from your government, don't you? Or maybe not. You seem to be more of a regurgitator of certain media outlets than a person who can read with a modicum of skepticism and thought.
Apple does, sure. But old dogs like IBM have had periods of high (or volatile) debt to equity ratios specifically for the purposes of financing... wait for it... growth. Since the dollar is a fiat currency, there's no reason for the United States to care too much about how much "money" there is. Keep in mind that when the US dollar doesn't buy a loaf of bread, gold won't either. The only thing that will matter at that point is who has the guns to protect their food supply. No amount of pretend hard currencies are going to change that. So, if you're a doomsday libertarian, which it looks like you are, I'd recommend guns, ammo, and arable land instead of krugerrands.
Ten years ago I traveled on a TGV while in France. If you're unaware, that's a nuclear powered electric bullet train that travels 500 miles in 3 hours and twenty minutes, and is rarely late. That kind of infrastructure simply doesn't exist in the United States, because all of our money is poured down the drain of car commuting instead of mass transportation. Even our airports are overloaded because there are no shorthaul trains as an alternative, and this ends up filling airports with unnecessary traffic.
Also: "We investigate the long run consequences of infrastructure provision on per capita income in a panel of countries over the period 1950-1992. Simple panel based tests are developed which enable us to isolate the sign and direction of the long run effect of infrastructure on income in a manner that is robust to the presence of unknown heterogeneous short run causal relationships. Our results provide clear evidence that in the vast majority of cases infrastructure does induce long run growth effects. But we also find a great deal of variation in the results across individual countries. Taken as a whole, the results demonstrate that telephones, electricity generating capacity and paved roads are provided at close to the growth maximizing level on average, but are under-supplied in some countries and over-supplied in others. These results also help to explain why cross section and time series studies have in the past found contradictory results regarding a causal link between infrastructure provision and long run growth."
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/pedroniinfrastructure.pdf
"The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has estimated the 10-year revenue loss from extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts beyond 2010 at $2.9 trillion, with an additional $606 billion in debt service costs (interest), for a combined total of $3.5 trillio
You're not going to get hate mail. But you will be told you are wrong, because using the simplistic idea that "debt is bad" to plan an economy is ridiculous How would you explain how startups are successful? When they start, their income to debt levels are completely off the mark, but with investment of capital to improve efficiency and drive sales, eventually they can be profitable regardless of how much their debt to income ratio was.
With large economies, the principles are the same. If you borrow money to fight wars, there's very little chance of receiving a return on the initial investment, as the Iraq War has proved: over three trillion dollars spent, and nothing but one million veterans with a lifetime of expensive treatments to care for it. If America had instead spent that money on infrastructure improvements, like renewable energy, fiber-to-the-home, or even an improved commuter rail network and efforts to modernize the government itself, we would all be doing very well just as we did during the Space Race. Even making common sense changes, like decriminalizing harmless drugs and ending our for-profit prison system and replacing it with a reasonable mental health infrastructure would not only save us money through simple budget changes, but it would also have extensive monetary effects by reducing recidivism, which frees up police to focus on actual crimes instead of trying to continue functioning as a moral goon squad.
If you want to understand why America is in such deep trouble financially, all you have to understand is that we lowered taxes for everyone, especially the super wealthy, at a time when we also spent three trillion dollars we did not have on unnecessary wars.
That's why it's so frustrating to see rambling nonsense like yours modded as insightful. Debt it not scary. It's a concept that we have invented and one that we can redefine or simply do away with using a debt jubilee, or a national reorganization as done by Iceland. Paper money only causes anarchic collapse when people go hungry. And even when there is a massive economic collapse, like the Great Depression, America did not devolve into cruelty. FDR told the rich to pay back the money they swallowed up, and they did, and our economy was further assisted by a massive government spending program, including complete takeovers of private industry for a brief period of time. And that's fine because private enterprises are usually massively inefficient hierarchies controlled by internal politics rather than innovation (see: Microsoft).
Nowhere in your diatribe against debt do you make any coherent points with supporting evidence from reality. But that's just libertarian economics in a nutshell, I guess.
This is the stupidity of capitalism in a nutshell: as long as the Q4 before earth ceases supporting human life is "profitable", it's a win-win for everybody!
For most people, the connection they have is about the lyrics and the memories associated with the song anyway. There's magic in lo-fi recording like this rehearsal, and zero magic in some perfectly recorded crud step (though I do enjoy many electronic artists.) I think the main thing is the yearning in the recording itself.
I'd check out Grohl's keynote at SxSW in any event. He makes some very good points about artists who wouldn't survive American Idol that are a hell of a lot better than anyone who wins it. Music is about expression, about documenting loss and love and joy, and the "karaoke dictatorship" of talent shows that rob people of their voice and replace it with meaningless corporate pablum designed to sell products... well, it's horrible and empty and it doesn't matter what the bit rate is because it's not worth wasting time for.
You need a system that uses real dollars or the results are meaningless. Let people donate to the ACLU or EFF or any other supporters of a free (as in soeech) Internet with the proceeds.
I'd love to help create a real market without stuffing money in the pockets of marketing departments and other corporations that contribute little or nothing positive to my life. Let me know where to sign up.
I'm not saying it's a failure of the individual programs... the tools exist to build for one narrow purpose (like one or two versions of the same distro). I'm saying the "Linux Desktop" as a concept and as a platform is a failure. It is designed to fail.
With any other operating system, there's a major and and a minor version number that is pretty much all the information you need as a target platform. There's a default GUI setup that is exactly the same across all new installs, and that's a platform that can be tested and built upon. Since "Linux Desktop" can mean so many things it is meaningless.
I'm not talking about just the location of the control panel. I'm talking about how services are started and maintained. I'm talking about what directories programs are installed in. I'm talking about different security models. I think there is actually consensus that the term "Linux Desktop" is a useless phrase, so if that's understandable, accepting the fact that it isn't anything resembling a stable target platform shouldn't be far behind.
If the response you have to an average end user question is ever "put together a bash shell script," you are living in a fantasized reality.
In the world of mature adults, documentation and backwards compatibility are the most essential parts to platform success. As a software vendor, if I have the choice of including Linux and having to write documentation and deal with bugs for dozens of distros or ignore the platform entirely, which business case do you think wins out? Keep in mind that end-user desktop Linux usage is the equivalent of a statistical error. Also keep in mind that I'm not talking about end user training alone. I'm talking about training the support staff that deals with end user support, automating testing suites for usability and bug tracking, unit testing, how to pass software updates, how to maintain backwards compatibility between distro upgrades... the Linux desktop ecosystem is a sea of poorly documented unknowns. That's just the reality.
At this point there isn't even a sane way to come up with use cases for desktops that will work between Ubuntu 12.04 and 11.04, or between Xubuntu and Kubuntu and Lubuntu. What happens when you make the move from Debian to Centos to Slackware to Arch to Mint to SuSE?
The excuses ideological die hards make are pathetic, and they have been for the fifteen years I have been a Linux user and hearing about the age of the Linux Desktop. Despite all the noise, the situation remains exactly the same: come up with a standardized interface for the Linux Desktop -- including all the software tools to test, update, and maintain software across the vast majority of Linux platforms -- or continue to lose. Those are the two choices.
If you want that success for the Linux desktop, you need to push for standards and quit making excuses.
Sorry, you're falling flat on your face for this one. Here's why:
When I ask the question, "How do change the screen resolution?"
Windows: Control Panel
Mac: System Preferences
Linux: It depends
"Where do I change my network settings?"
Windows: Control Panel
Mac: System Preferences
Linux: It depends
The reason Windows and Mac and Android are dominating user devices is because they have standardized a GUI environment, and GUI failure is considered operating system failure.
The word you're looking for is "conspire."
Oh, so they didn't have meetings about it before they bought half of congress? That's an interesting point of view.
Again you're working diligently not to use the word conspire. When a ratings agency and a financial firm work together to sell shitty loans as good loans they are conspiring. Here's how it happened according to Stiglitz:
I think you're picturing black helicopters and secret meetings.
I'm talking about is secret meetings -- which happen on a daily basis -- and the plans that were executed at those meetings. Who benefited from the wholesale destruction of financial regulations, and paid the lobbyists who had a direct hand in getting that accomplished? Who created a financial instrument to leverage invented assets and make billions of dollars in the process? Who fought regulators tooth and nail to prevent them from investigating those financial instruments? Who forced a deal with the US Government leveraging their former employees to secure 250 billion dollars worth of cash and eventually 7.7 trillion dollars in guarantees to protect themselves from the fallout of their idiotic financial schemes?
When literally every major banking house in the world is caught conspiring in one way or another to commit fraud, why would you take the position that conspiracy wasn't a central component of the financial crisis?
Bloomberg Business Week
Reuters
Usually people examine evidence and build a case before they rest it.
The entire world economy recently fell apart because information was kept secret through collusion and conspiracy. LIBOR was a conspiracy. Nearly very major tech company was caught engaging in "no poaching" employment rules. Corporations invested in fossil fuel infrastructure spend massive amounts of money buying lawmakers and inventing political movements so they can block the push for alternative technologies that would devalue their corporate asset sheets. Empires spent the better portion of the last few thousand years exploiting people to death for the benefit of a handful of individuals.
Pretending that people with a shitload of money, time, and power don't collude for their own self interest is one of the dumbest ideas that a person can have in the 21st Century. Since the dawn of hierarchical organizations there has been abuse and secrecy at the upper portions of those hierarchies. From khans to queens to popes this has been a self-evident fact of human psychology.
Where do you think the phrase "cui bono" came from?
Who claimed the NK didn't launch the weapon? You don't understand what a false flag operation is. I'd advise you to read about the Gulf of Tonkin affair, but you'd probably walk away wondering why we fought Vietnam over little toy trucks.
The Administration recently announced that America would focus their projection of power to the Asian-Pacific region. My guess is that the claims of a long range NK missile are either the allowance of idiotic intelligence assessments to further propaganda goals, or the outright fabrication of assessments for the same purpose.
China will squash NK like a gnat if they threaten regional stability in any real sense, but the if the United States allows that to happen, it will be a blow to perceived US power in that area. There has to be an open ended excuse for a strike or an invasion to avoid that possibility.
How many people think earning billions of dollars of income is not enough reward in and of itself for hard work? Why should Schmidt and his corporation pay less tax by ratio than the people in my neighborhood who actually perform valuable functions within our economy?
Depraved materialists like Schmidt wouldn't have a dime if it were not for the efforts of American public research funded by taxes. Schmidt is probably smart enough to understand that he wouldn't be here without publicly funded research, but he has the ethical acuity of a fucking viral infection. Actually, that's a perfect analogy, because he's so blinded by his own limitless greed that he'd gladly kill his host as long as the digits in his bank account go up. Even a rat has enough empathy to help another one out, but Schmidt only aspires to be a rat. He would rather watch the American middle class sink while he talks about what a super guy he is and how it's justified that Google keep a few extra billion to piss away on his failed social media network while others fight for food stamps, safe neighborhoods, and the most basic educational programs.
Fuck Schmidt and every other hopeless asshole who thinks like him. The only way he could make the world a better place is if he stopped doing business altogether. And he should.
And to answer your question, no one earning under 250K has the time or the resources to game the system quite like multinational corporations. They are the only people, and I use that term loosely, with the resources and the absence of human dignity to suck money out of the economies they depend on so a few random shitheads can have nicer paintings in the bathrooms of their yachts. But according to capitalist fundamentalists, a ten million dollar panting hanging over a solid gold shitter has more economic value than a few thousand people getting assistance with a college education, or 20,000 families receiving nutritious food for a month. It's transparently a lie, and everyone knows it. It's too bad Schmidt lacks the integrity and/or the intelligence to say otherwise.
Astro turfing isn't going to solve the problem, and neither are integrations of third party utilities by end users desperate to avoid the crap interface that has been crudely bolted on to the Windows kernel. I notice that you're unable to explain how introducing two poorly integrated paradigms helps businesses accomplish their computing tasks.
Not only does Metro completely suck, but it breaks the definition of what a Windows application is. Microsoft has managed to create an operating system worse than Vista by breaking backwards compatibility going one generation back and forcing developers to choose a platform within a platform, or write for both and waste time and resources so Steve Balmer can consider himself an innovator. It's an accomplishment, but not the kind you'd want to put on a resume.
It's sad but true. Much of the developed world operates under the radical assumption that human rights are more important than the unrestricted pursuit of capital by corporations. It appears to be a cultural defect we inherited from the British Empire.