And to your point, I would have agreed that #3 is the most likely, although the final paragraph in the WSJ indicates that Yahoo has taken the "poison pill" in order to prevent a hostile takeover and that Microsoft may have to oust the entire board to do it.
I find that particularly interesting - either they (Yahoo) are very desperate and are hoping for a miracle, or they really do believe in what they say.
Well, I do not know about you, but I've had two infections in the past six months - which, in my opinion, is bad enough.
Now, it's quite possible that I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, but hey I was speaking from my own personal experience. Similarly, it's quite possible that you were just lucky, too.
The man who has flown three or four times a year mocks the man who's flown once in a few years. Nice.
I fly regularly - and when I mean regularly, I mean twice a week. I'm a consultant and I fly out every Monday and fly back every Thursday. Sometimes, I fly more.
And let me tell you that TSA is a bloody joke. The people who handle things look like the kind of people who wouldn't be able to get a minimum wage job at the local Walmart.
You don't mind having to take off your shoes or carrying liquids because - oh wait - you fly 3 or 4 times a year. When you have to fly every other day, it gets old. And oh yeah, the luggage handling is just wonderful. So, every damn time, I have to check in my luggage so that I can take my toiletries with me and risk losing my luggage to who-knows-where.
And oh, just today, I flew out of O'Hare. The idiots there wanted to know why I had two laptops. Because it's my damn job, and it's none of their business. But no, good luck explaining to them.
Take off my shoes? Wonderful. When you get an athlete's foot infection every two months, let me know how it goes.
And I am of east-Indian descent - good luck being a brown man and flying out twice or four times a week. Your probability of meeting those jerks (the "rude" and "intimidating" ones that you spoke of) just shot up. And guess what? I can tell you right now that at least half of TSA is full of arrogant, racist losers who shouldn't be allowed a job, let alone one handling security.
We've a system where you can't even transport a bottle of wine safely. The one time I tried checking in some wine, the wonderful TSA opened my bags, checked out the bottles of wine, didn't repack them the way they were packed and left a note saying that they were snooping around. And oh, I opened my luggage to find brilliant red wine all over my clothes. It's a wonderful feeling, let me tell you. What is this, stone age?
And guess what? Most of the people who travel regularly do so on business. And they do it often. After some time, it just gets old, annoying and plain ridiculous.
I've been through Israeli security as well. You try being an Arab crossing that border when the IDF soldier at passport control is having a bad day, and you'll never complain about the TSA again!:)
That's because Israel faces *real* terrorist threats on a daily basis - not a once in a blue moon thing that's used as an excuse to have people do stupid things, and make a mockery of security in the name of safety.
Maybe you should try traveling a little more often and see what that does to your wonderful feeling of "make the best of it, it's not that bad."
It always starts small -- shut down the press for this reason, and then expand and control.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I simply cannot believe that people would make such recommendations, and not understand the import of their intent.
It's one thing for a tin-pot dictator in the middle of nowhere to do so, and it is quite another for someone in a position of authority in a western-styled democracy to make such statements. Then again, could be that the position of authority is what's making him make such statements.
You ever watching TV and they have those commercials for tech schools that teach auto repair? Sign up. Seriously. Work 9-5, make enough money to support the family and BBQ every weekend if you want to. Oh, and as a mechanic, you get paid by the job, so the better you are, the more money you get.
If you worked in IT, you can go up the ladder - and you have growth opportunities. Exactly what kind of growth opportunities exist as an auto-mechanic?
Now, here's a better suggestion - go to college, get a graduate degree or an MBA or something useful in your area of work. Work your days and study in your free time - and it will pay off.
Unless you want to be fixing cars at 60 and living in Hicksville, OK, of course. There is no alternative to working smart and working hard.
You forgot to explain what's wrong with the basket metaphor.
Oh that's easy.
It's not a car or a Library of Congress analogy. That's what's wrong with it!
Or, possibly, the poster is a religious nut who thinks that science and religion can somehow "peacefully coexist" and the basket analogy offends his/her beliefs.
If public education makes no mention of God, the students take it upon themselves to do so, typically in the context of "no, God did it." By proactively addressing the relationship between religion (God) and science without making an opinionated statement on the matter, science teachers can disarm a lot of anti-science arguments, thus preventing disruptions in the classroom.
Why?
It is none of science's business - by obviously bringing religion into science, your wife is one of the culprits responsible for fostering thoughts on god and religion. And what's this whole thing about not making an opinionated statement on the matter? Is your wife a science teacher or a religious nutjob proselytizing to her students?
My wife teaches science in public schools, by the way. She takes 15-20 minutes early in the school year to address why religion and science don't have to be at odds, and why students don't need to jump in with comments about God every chance they get. It makes a huge difference in how these kids behave, and even in how they accept the material presented.
Yes they do. Because religion has been responsible for discouraging and killing scientific thought and scientists from days gone by until this day. Christianity more than most, but all religions are equally culpable.
Way to go.
She's also a devout Southern Baptist. So much for stereotypes, huh?
Hah. That explains a lot more. Religious nut indeed.
In fact, when I tried it at a store, I felt that I made a lot more typos than ever before. Which is one of the reasons that I decided to not get myself an iPhone. Plus, I cannot even dream of touch-typing with an iPhone (you know, surreptitiously typing that email in the middle of a meeting?).
Of course, good luck telling that to an iPhone fan-boy.
Sound engineering is a little different than what goes on in IVR design. I do understand that a lot of the IVRs are unusable, but a lot of that goes back to the fact that the applications that need to be IVR enabled are designed first, making the design of the IVR a tricky proposition.
Secondly, a speech scientist or a voice expert is quite different than a sound engineer - the latter's task includes making sure that the IVR has the same or similar sounding voice patterns all over, that the accents and terms used are standard, simple and understandable to that region, that the TTS (text to speech, if used) is set to configurations that are acceptable to the target audience and that volumes and amplitudes are all normalized (this one is probably the only thing that a sound engineer could also probably do).
Also, a speech scientist works on the voice recognition piece of things, including deciding which language models to use, designing the grammars for recognition, utilizing various tools to tune the recognizer, using various machine-learning techniques to help evolve the language models (e.g. SLMs) and so on.
On top of this, you have to do usability analysis to see how best your system is working out. If a lot of people are zeroing out, or if there is an alarmingly high percentage of recognition errors, then there is something wrong with your system. Also, the ease of use in accomplishing a thing is also considered (e.g. how many steps does it take to get a task done and can you minimize this somehow?). Additionally, you have to ensure that unique elements being used in your IVR (e.g. the biddy biddy boop) is understandable in the context to the target audience.
Other task include determining where voice is appropriate and where DTMF would work and finding ways of notifying the user of what's going on at the background without resorting to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for the 37th time (which could be a challenge in its own way).
So, no, I doubt if you could equate a sound engineer with a speech scientist. Most of the speech scientists that I work with would probably feel insulted by that term.
In terms of actual new things, the iPhone has visual voicemail. All of those other "advanced" phones have voicemail that works like a 1970's cassette-tape answering machine.
Agreed, that's a great feature. Unfortunately, for that to be accomodated, you needed the telco to modify the way their voice-mail system works. The fact that Apple has a cult following (and the hype around the iPhone) was want made AT&T change their voice mail system for the iPhone. I can assure you that if $PHONE_MFR had talked to telcos about this prior to Apple, they'd have just said, "But $OTHER_PHONE_MFR doesn't ask for this - why should we go along with you?" Just saying.
The iPhone has a proximity sensor to turn off its light and touch surface when it's next to your face on a call.
My Blackberry Curve does this, and does it quite well.
I have not seen or read that any do.) It has accelerometers so it knows what way it's facing (landscape or portrait), which may actually exist in other phones
I've seen them elsewhere, but I do wish that more phones came with them. That's a truly useful feature, but it would be pointless in most phones except touchscreen ones because why would you want to type sideways when your alphabets are facing down, right? Applicability and all that.
The iPhone has a consistent, fingers-only interface with things like pinch and stretch (which are unique).
Some of those interfaces are nice and very useful. Others? Not so much. Especially Apple's touchscreen keyboard. I just tried out the iPhone at the store before deciding that I liked the new Blackberry better. The biggest reason for choosing so? The keyboard. I could not type a long enough mail without a goodly amount of mistakes. Now, using a stylus could have changed that, but the keys were so small that it was hard for me to type on them anything more than a few words without a mistake. It's quite possible that it's just me, but a lot of people that I've talked to have cited similar problems.
Just look at how you move through photos or through tabbed web pages: they made it work the same.
Yes, consistency in Apple UIs is a big plus, I won't even disagree with that. They also find unique ways of applying that to other applications in a very intuitive way.
Other phones don't even have real web browsers, much less tabbed web browsers, much less one where they've rethought how you move between tabs so it's clean and consistent with the rest of the phone.
That is not true. I've seen (and used) several phones with very efficient full-browsers. Now, some of them do not let you have Flash on them, which is a pain, but hey. Secondly, with today's data speeds (and data plans), having the full website be displayed may not necessarily be a good idea, after all.
In the end, I'm glad to hear the naysayers. The more the better -- up to a point -- for my stock investment. Apple stock does so well because so many people underestimate Apple. "Death spiral", "iPod-killer", "iTunes-killer", "nothing new iPhone", "market share too small and can't grow", "no halo effect", etc, etc.
Well, I think that has more to do with St. Stephen of Jobs than anyone else. To be fair, Wallstreet rarely ever talks of Apple in those terms. That seems rather restricted to the tech industry.
(Not to mention this is iPhone 1.0 and it's competing against Nokia 15.0 (or whatever) and Windows mobile 6.0 (?). Not that much different from the initial iPods, which did not exceed then-current MP3 players in many aspects, but did do it in a more stylish and polished way.)
Indeed. On the other hand, something like Nokia N95 does kick the iPhone in its balls - and it is independent of the provider.
I could go on -- but the point is that while the iPhone is
Okay, here are some pictures from what happened in our apartment's parking garage just last night.
Someone drove through the wall fast enough (in a parking garage) to cause a hole through the wall and their car fell off into the street.
Now, imagine a world full of these drivers, flying their cars over our houses and schools. Oh yeah, joy.
I mean, VTOLs are a great idea, but as long as they don't land on *my* terrace I am happy. There is no dearth of idiot drivers in this world and all that.
Former grants citizenship as a function of soil/territory and the latter through blood lineage. So, the method of deeming a person's citizenship would be heavily contingent upon the method used for determining the same.
China and Japan (and pretty much the rest of the world) are already looking to divest themselves of their reserves of US dollars,
Really? Tell me when that happens, please. I mean, Warren Buffet has been saying that he's been bearish on the USD for ages, too, but guess what? The USD has gone through ups and downs and it has almost always come back up on top.
And btw, if China stops pegging their currency artificially against the USD, it would just as soon kill *their* economy as it would ours. I mean, hey, if all those things that are being manufactured aren't being bought, what're the manufacturers going to do, hmmm?
The same goes for Japan and India and several other countries. Also, guess who has a lot of the money? That's right, American investors. Imagine if the FIIs from the US went and invested in all these other countries (instead of the US), and took it back once the US economy improved? That's right, the local economies that they invested in would crash. Which is why, even if the USD is doing badly, other countries would go out of their way to stop their local currencies from appreciating much against the greenback.
since Barneke has made it clear that he will destroy the dollar's value in a stupid attempt to delay the consequences of the collapsed housing bubble as long as possible, which will only make it worse when the time of reconning arrives,
Who's Barneke? I mean, at least learn to spell the man's name right.
I don't necessarily disagree with the general sentiment that pumping more money into the economy is a bad thing (and neither is bailing out Wallstreet every time something is wrong). And while it started out as a mess created by the subprime mortage problem, it's now much larger than that. It was a lot of things failing all at once - subprimes, quant-based hedge funds, highly-leveraged investments etc.
But the problem is bigger than that. The Glass-Steagal Act, which was enacted post-30s recession to help prevent something like that from happening, was repealed by Clinton and his gang. With the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, consolidation of banks were allowed and the so-called walling of conflicts of interest between the various banking divisions were ignored.
And we are paying the price for that today (e.g. the Citigroup mess). But even assuming the worst, the market will probably make a ~10%-15% correction and everything will go back to being peachy again. The US economy is too dynamic for it to stagnate persistently over extender periods of time.
The USD is no longer a "reserve currency". This has broad implications for the US' ability to "project force", and its loss of superpower status.
Excuse me? Do you even know what you are talking about?
There is no one reserve currency. And the USD was never the "only" reserve currency. Traditionally, the USD and the Pound Sterling were reserve currencies (with the latter being relegated to the second place after WW2). And lately, the Euro has taken the second place. But the only way the USD is going to be replaced is our economy keeps getting worse for several years in a row (as opposed to a few quarters in a row) and if trade with the countr-y(/ies) with the reserve currency is standardized enough and makes economic sense for the participating economies.
But that's okay. I guess if people can bullshit about technology on Slashdot, what's stopping someone from bullshitting on something else that they have no clue about, right?
Would that work for you, Mr. Philosopher, because you seem more interested in the moral relativism of something rather than the fact that it violates some fundamental precepts of human dignity?
Oh and if you're gonna listen to a Bose offering (typically not the best value for the price), really listen to the alternatives, you'll be surprised.
Indeed. And don't listen to Bose in their sound-room -- that room has been rigged specifically to make audio sound way better, and it's not a fair indicator of how it would sound in your home.
And if you want to build a sound-proof room that's acoustically sound (pardon the pun), it is going to cost you a fair penny.
If you want something that isn't too expensive but yet good, you should definitely look at Polk Audio.
and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes
has any end user ever sucesfully got MS to pay for thier fuckups?
I wasn't talking about MS - I was talking about having the company that you work for compensate you for screwing up your work laptop.
And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty.
Yeah right, when you take a machine in with a failed hard drive they aren't exactly going to be able to tell what OS was on it before it failed are they?
Obviously you've not had to work with IT schmucks that ask you stupid questions.
Modded a troll for stating a personal opinion? Gee.
Let's see - two operating systems. One could potentially harm your hard-disk (due to perhaps fault on the manufacturer, but harm nevertheless) and the other couldn't. See the obvious choice?
Sure, there's a fix, and that's great - but what about the harm that's already been done? Also, Some of us do not necessarily have the time to spend tweaking out and find ways around every bug that is there (and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes).
And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty. And good luck trying to tell IT about it, too.
I'd rather spend the extra money on Vista/Windows than have an OS that could potentially crash my hard-drive. And given the fact that laptops are all that some of us use, it's not worth the extra effort (assuming the article is right, of course).
Seriously though, companies will take you to court over stealing a few hundred bucks worth of equipment but if you rob the company blind with sleazy accounting, incompetence, and outright robbery as an executive you get let go with millions in severance.
I would love to live in a city that has decent public transportation so I don't have to own a car. Midwestern cities are usually so spread out, though, that buses are the only reasonable public transportation, and it usually takes a long time to get where you're going.
Tell me about it. I live in downtown Cincinnati, and yet it is almost impossible to be without a car. My girlfriend works just a few miles off (~20) and there are no buses that go there.
Also, public transport does not take you to any of the places that you may need to go to for groceries etc. I imagine that it's much worse in the suburbs. People I know drive ~40 minutes - 2 hours to get to work, and it's just accepted as the way of life.
And do you want to do any kind of activity? Good luck not having a car. Doing just about anything requires a car, and cabs and public transport are simply not as economical.
Slashdot Mirror
A link to the WSJ article would have been nice, as some of us do have subscriptions - Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid.
And to your point, I would have agreed that #3 is the most likely, although the final paragraph in the WSJ indicates that Yahoo has taken the "poison pill" in order to prevent a hostile takeover and that Microsoft may have to oust the entire board to do it.
I find that particularly interesting - either they (Yahoo) are very desperate and are hoping for a miracle, or they really do believe in what they say.
Well, I do not know about you, but I've had two infections in the past six months - which, in my opinion, is bad enough.
Now, it's quite possible that I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, but hey I was speaking from my own personal experience. Similarly, it's quite possible that you were just lucky, too.
Just saying, that's all.
The man who has flown three or four times a year mocks the man who's flown once in a few years. Nice.
I fly regularly - and when I mean regularly, I mean twice a week. I'm a consultant and I fly out every Monday and fly back every Thursday. Sometimes, I fly more.
And let me tell you that TSA is a bloody joke. The people who handle things look like the kind of people who wouldn't be able to get a minimum wage job at the local Walmart.
You don't mind having to take off your shoes or carrying liquids because - oh wait - you fly 3 or 4 times a year. When you have to fly every other day, it gets old. And oh yeah, the luggage handling is just wonderful. So, every damn time, I have to check in my luggage so that I can take my toiletries with me and risk losing my luggage to who-knows-where.
And oh, just today, I flew out of O'Hare. The idiots there wanted to know why I had two laptops. Because it's my damn job, and it's none of their business. But no, good luck explaining to them.
Take off my shoes? Wonderful. When you get an athlete's foot infection every two months, let me know how it goes.
And I am of east-Indian descent - good luck being a brown man and flying out twice or four times a week. Your probability of meeting those jerks (the "rude" and "intimidating" ones that you spoke of) just shot up. And guess what? I can tell you right now that at least half of TSA is full of arrogant, racist losers who shouldn't be allowed a job, let alone one handling security.
We've a system where you can't even transport a bottle of wine safely. The one time I tried checking in some wine, the wonderful TSA opened my bags, checked out the bottles of wine, didn't repack them the way they were packed and left a note saying that they were snooping around. And oh, I opened my luggage to find brilliant red wine all over my clothes. It's a wonderful feeling, let me tell you. What is this, stone age?
And guess what? Most of the people who travel regularly do so on business. And they do it often. After some time, it just gets old, annoying and plain ridiculous. That's because Israel faces *real* terrorist threats on a daily basis - not a once in a blue moon thing that's used as an excuse to have people do stupid things, and make a mockery of security in the name of safety.
Maybe you should try traveling a little more often and see what that does to your wonderful feeling of "make the best of it, it's not that bad."
(An irritated frequent flyer)
Wow, seriously.
It always starts small -- shut down the press for this reason, and then expand and control.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I simply cannot believe that people would make such recommendations, and not understand the import of their intent.
It's one thing for a tin-pot dictator in the middle of nowhere to do so, and it is quite another for someone in a position of authority in a western-styled democracy to make such statements. Then again, could be that the position of authority is what's making him make such statements.
I am just... baffled.
Now, here's a better suggestion - go to college, get a graduate degree or an MBA or something useful in your area of work. Work your days and study in your free time - and it will pay off.
Unless you want to be fixing cars at 60 and living in Hicksville, OK, of course. There is no alternative to working smart and working hard.
Oh that's easy.
It's not a car or a Library of Congress analogy. That's what's wrong with it!
Or, possibly, the poster is a religious nut who thinks that science and religion can somehow "peacefully coexist" and the basket analogy offends his/her beliefs.
It is none of science's business - by obviously bringing religion into science, your wife is one of the culprits responsible for fostering thoughts on god and religion. And what's this whole thing about not making an opinionated statement on the matter? Is your wife a science teacher or a religious nutjob proselytizing to her students? Yes they do. Because religion has been responsible for discouraging and killing scientific thought and scientists from days gone by until this day. Christianity more than most, but all religions are equally culpable.
Way to go. Hah. That explains a lot more. Religious nut indeed.
Precisely.
In fact, when I tried it at a store, I felt that I made a lot more typos than ever before. Which is one of the reasons that I decided to not get myself an iPhone. Plus, I cannot even dream of touch-typing with an iPhone (you know, surreptitiously typing that email in the middle of a meeting?).
Of course, good luck telling that to an iPhone fan-boy.
Okay, you're an idiot.
He's making money off software (not killing or maiming people, but writing pieces of code) and he's using that money to HELP people.
You know? Those things like curing AIDs and other diseases, finding ways of providing potable water etc?
He runs a business and he is a little ruthless about it, yes - but it's business.
Priorities man, priorities.
Sound engineering is a little different than what goes on in IVR design. I do understand that a lot of the IVRs are unusable, but a lot of that goes back to the fact that the applications that need to be IVR enabled are designed first, making the design of the IVR a tricky proposition.
Secondly, a speech scientist or a voice expert is quite different than a sound engineer - the latter's task includes making sure that the IVR has the same or similar sounding voice patterns all over, that the accents and terms used are standard, simple and understandable to that region, that the TTS (text to speech, if used) is set to configurations that are acceptable to the target audience and that volumes and amplitudes are all normalized (this one is probably the only thing that a sound engineer could also probably do).
Also, a speech scientist works on the voice recognition piece of things, including deciding which language models to use, designing the grammars for recognition, utilizing various tools to tune the recognizer, using various machine-learning techniques to help evolve the language models (e.g. SLMs) and so on.
On top of this, you have to do usability analysis to see how best your system is working out. If a lot of people are zeroing out, or if there is an alarmingly high percentage of recognition errors, then there is something wrong with your system. Also, the ease of use in accomplishing a thing is also considered (e.g. how many steps does it take to get a task done and can you minimize this somehow?). Additionally, you have to ensure that unique elements being used in your IVR (e.g. the biddy biddy boop) is understandable in the context to the target audience.
Other task include determining where voice is appropriate and where DTMF would work and finding ways of notifying the user of what's going on at the background without resorting to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for the 37th time (which could be a challenge in its own way).
So, no, I doubt if you could equate a sound engineer with a speech scientist. Most of the speech scientists that I work with would probably feel insulted by that term.
> "senior voice expert"?
> that gives me flashbacks to the
Ummm, obviously you don't work in telecom.
Almost every automated system has the equivalent of a voice expert or a speech scientist whose job is to do things like this.
Every time you call an IVR or reach an automated speech system, someone's worked at it to make it not just functional, but also usable and friendly.
Agreed, that's a great feature. Unfortunately, for that to be accomodated, you needed the telco to modify the way their voice-mail system works. The fact that Apple has a cult following (and the hype around the iPhone) was want made AT&T change their voice mail system for the iPhone. I can assure you that if $PHONE_MFR had talked to telcos about this prior to Apple, they'd have just said, "But $OTHER_PHONE_MFR doesn't ask for this - why should we go along with you?" Just saying.
My Blackberry Curve does this, and does it quite well.
I've seen them elsewhere, but I do wish that more phones came with them. That's a truly useful feature, but it would be pointless in most phones except touchscreen ones because why would you want to type sideways when your alphabets are facing down, right? Applicability and all that.
Some of those interfaces are nice and very useful. Others? Not so much. Especially Apple's touchscreen keyboard. I just tried out the iPhone at the store before deciding that I liked the new Blackberry better. The biggest reason for choosing so? The keyboard. I could not type a long enough mail without a goodly amount of mistakes. Now, using a stylus could have changed that, but the keys were so small that it was hard for me to type on them anything more than a few words without a mistake. It's quite possible that it's just me, but a lot of people that I've talked to have cited similar problems.
Yes, consistency in Apple UIs is a big plus, I won't even disagree with that. They also find unique ways of applying that to other applications in a very intuitive way.
That is not true. I've seen (and used) several phones with very efficient full-browsers. Now, some of them do not let you have Flash on them, which is a pain, but hey. Secondly, with today's data speeds (and data plans), having the full website be displayed may not necessarily be a good idea, after all.
Well, I think that has more to do with St. Stephen of Jobs than anyone else. To be fair, Wallstreet rarely ever talks of Apple in those terms. That seems rather restricted to the tech industry.
Indeed. On the other hand, something like Nokia N95 does kick the iPhone in its balls - and it is independent of the provider.
I could go on -- but the point is that while the iPhone is
Okay, here are some pictures from what happened in our apartment's parking garage just last night.
Someone drove through the wall fast enough (in a parking garage) to cause a hole through the wall and their car fell off into the street.
Now, imagine a world full of these drivers, flying their cars over our houses and schools. Oh yeah, joy.
I mean, VTOLs are a great idea, but as long as they don't land on *my* terrace I am happy. There is no dearth of idiot drivers in this world and all that.
See, first, you need to raise cats (and maybe dogs).
Once you've given up on those, you should consider having kids and raising those.
If *that* works out, you'll probably have an idea about *why* they put things in their mouth.
There are two types - Jus Soli and Jus sanguinis.
Former grants citizenship as a function of soil/territory and the latter through blood lineage. So, the method of deeming a person's citizenship would be heavily contingent upon the method used for determining the same.
I'm not saying that some of the things that the US is doing is right, but that neither obliviates nor excuses China's actions.
How do the sins of this country in any way have a bearing on respecting basic human rights elsewhere?
And btw, if China stops pegging their currency artificially against the USD, it would just as soon kill *their* economy as it would ours. I mean, hey, if all those things that are being manufactured aren't being bought, what're the manufacturers going to do, hmmm?
The same goes for Japan and India and several other countries. Also, guess who has a lot of the money? That's right, American investors. Imagine if the FIIs from the US went and invested in all these other countries (instead of the US), and took it back once the US economy improved? That's right, the local economies that they invested in would crash. Which is why, even if the USD is doing badly, other countries would go out of their way to stop their local currencies from appreciating much against the greenback. Who's Barneke? I mean, at least learn to spell the man's name right.
I don't necessarily disagree with the general sentiment that pumping more money into the economy is a bad thing (and neither is bailing out Wallstreet every time something is wrong). And while it started out as a mess created by the subprime mortage problem, it's now much larger than that. It was a lot of things failing all at once - subprimes, quant-based hedge funds, highly-leveraged investments etc.
But the problem is bigger than that. The Glass-Steagal Act, which was enacted post-30s recession to help prevent something like that from happening, was repealed by Clinton and his gang. With the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, consolidation of banks were allowed and the so-called walling of conflicts of interest between the various banking divisions were ignored.
And we are paying the price for that today (e.g. the Citigroup mess). But even assuming the worst, the market will probably make a ~10%-15% correction and everything will go back to being peachy again. The US economy is too dynamic for it to stagnate persistently over extender periods of time. Excuse me? Do you even know what you are talking about?
There is no one reserve currency. And the USD was never the "only" reserve currency. Traditionally, the USD and the Pound Sterling were reserve currencies (with the latter being relegated to the second place after WW2). And lately, the Euro has taken the second place. But the only way the USD is going to be replaced is our economy keeps getting worse for several years in a row (as opposed to a few quarters in a row) and if trade with the countr-y(/ies) with the reserve currency is standardized enough and makes economic sense for the participating economies.
But that's okay. I guess if people can bullshit about technology on Slashdot, what's stopping someone from bullshitting on something else that they have no clue about, right?
Gee.
How about upholding basic human rights as put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights charter of the UN?
Would that work for you, Mr. Philosopher, because you seem more interested in the moral relativism of something rather than the fact that it violates some fundamental precepts of human dignity?
And if you want to build a sound-proof room that's acoustically sound (pardon the pun), it is going to cost you a fair penny.
If you want something that isn't too expensive but yet good, you should definitely look at Polk Audio.
Modded a troll for stating a personal opinion? Gee.
Let's see - two operating systems. One could potentially harm your hard-disk (due to perhaps fault on the manufacturer, but harm nevertheless) and the other couldn't. See the obvious choice?
Sure, there's a fix, and that's great - but what about the harm that's already been done? Also, Some of us do not necessarily have the time to spend tweaking out and find ways around every bug that is there (and Windows has plenty, but hey - you can always get the company to compensate for their mistakes).
And good luck getting your warranty - if your s/w is partly responsible for the failure, they'll do everything possible to deny you the warranty. And good luck trying to tell IT about it, too.
-shakes head-
Eh.
I'd rather spend the extra money on Vista/Windows than have an OS that could potentially crash my hard-drive. And given the fact that laptops are all that some of us use, it's not worth the extra effort (assuming the article is right, of course).
Also, public transport does not take you to any of the places that you may need to go to for groceries etc. I imagine that it's much worse in the suburbs. People I know drive ~40 minutes - 2 hours to get to work, and it's just accepted as the way of life.
And do you want to do any kind of activity? Good luck not having a car. Doing just about anything requires a car, and cabs and public transport are simply not as economical.