"Fed Ex And UPS Are Doing Just Fine, It's The Post Office That's Always Having Problems" - President Barak Obama, August 11, 2009.
Sounds like your guys made the right decision.
Care to link to a reliable source for that quote?
All Google turns up are a few obscure right-wing blogs, which makes it sort of difficult to believe or trust. Even Fox News doesn't seem to have picked up on it.
That said, the USPS has generally done "just fine." The service typically operates with a modest profit, receives no subsidies, and the mail gets delivered on time at an extremely low cost to the consumer.
It's also worth mentioning that in the UK, the Post Office is a separate entity from the Royal Mail (which handles the actual delivery).* UK Post Offices serve as a public front-end to several other public services and businesses in addition to the mail. The Royal Mail still operates under the auspices of the government.
*It's actually a lot more complicated than that. I honestly don't completely understand it myself. My understanding is "less like the USPS, and more like Amtrak"
Re:Is really a bad, bad idea...
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My favorite example of privatization gone horribly, horribly wrong is the UK Post Office.
After a year or two of operating under private ownership, the new owners decided there was no way that the Post Office could possibly operate profitably in rural markets, sold off all of its assets in these areas, closed up shop, and pocketed the money from the sales.
A great majority of Americans have thrown science and logic out the window, and choose instead to vote with their passions and emotions.
If this isn't a social disease, I don't know what is.
Keeping on topic, the healthcare debate is a great example of this, given that the right wing have successfully managed to convince the masses to actively protest against their own interests by spreading a net of thinly-veiled lies and passionate arguments.
What sort of person would actually believe that the president wanted to start "death squads" without actually verifying the claim?
I'd be happy to have a reasoned debate about the issue -- there are actually good arguments to be had on both sides of the issue. However, reason appears to have left the picture entirely.
Although, looking at how the Republicans have gotten people to take up arms in protest of giving them healthcare, I don't think they'll have any problem convincing the peanut gallery that keeping jobs in America means slave labor camps or some such nonsense.
Machiavelli would be impressed.
No secular political organization has ever so successfully persuaded the masses to fight against their own interests.
Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.
There are many possible employments of SVG that have absolutely nothing to do with Canvas, so no. Fix SVG. (This is not to say that Canvas shouldn't be properly implemented too.)
Let me revise my earlier statement: I feel that the Canvas element is potentially quite a bit more important, given the obvious advantages it has for navigation elements, UI controls, and dynamic content. HTML5 and CSS3 should eventually greatly reduce the number of images used in web layouts, especially if we finally get support for proper gradients in CSS.
SVG is ideally suited for static vectorized images, and not much else. There is indeed a use for this, although this is not something that is encountered all that frequently, and can already be achieved by simply linking to a PDF.
As much as I like the *idea* of SVG, it doesn't seem to work particularly well, even in browsers where it is "officially" supported.
Safari tends to choke on complicated images, and cannot zoom in on full-size SVG images, making it quite useless for reading maps and the like. Additionally, I've noticed that most current platforms do not include any sort of utility to view/edit/rasterize SVG images outside of the web browser. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine, but I seem to recall older versions having issues. Here's a reasonably complex image to try for yourself.
Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.
You can say what you want about the Google Library project, but the important thing to note is that it's finally gotten people in the mainstream industry to begin talking about the merits/drawbacks of extended copyright terms, and more importantly, compelled a number of very high-profile players to join the Internet Archive's "open" effort to digitize out-of-print books.
It might be convoluted, but the Google Library effort will be a very good thing if it fails, thanks to the dialogue that it's spurred.
Think about those enormous machines that were built to detect the drift of "the ether," but only measured said drift to be an extremely precise value of zero. Although initially viewed as failures, because they failed to find anything, these experiments were arguably among the most important experiments of modern physics precisely because, as it turned out, there was nothing to be found (when you think about it, the notion of a vacuum is indeed pretty damn weird)
Fixed that for you. Bungie was pretty much the Mac game developer before Microsoft purchased them.
I'll agree with your assessment, however, that Halo did seem to borrow exactly the right elements from other franchises. It's a good game, but certainly not the "best ever," and not sufficient reason to run out and buy a new console just to play it.
A few weeks ago, I realized that I finally owned a PC sufficiently good to play Half Life 2, and purchased the Orange Box. I swear that Valve are the Pixar of video game companies -- everything they touch turns to gold. The hype surrounding Portal was also surprisingly well-deserved.
If you're running a service with 8 minute headways, you'd better be sure that everything runs like clockwork, or else you'll have subways bunching and piling up at stations or at the end of the line*. The driver, his union, and his boss all also want to make sure that his shift starts and ends at a well-established time.
The schedules are especially important at night, when headways increase to 30 minutes in some areas. There are parts of Queens where you do not want to be alone on a subway platform at 3AM.
The MTA's in the process of installing electronic signs that alert passengers of the time of the next arriving train like the ones they have in DC and Paris. Siemens (the contractor) have been working on it for several years, and might finally have the damn thing working in the next year or two.
*This does happen occasionally. Why don't you try managing the world's most complex urban transit system that also happens to be 100 years old, and suffered from extreme neglect and corruption during much of that time. I don't envy the MTA's job one bit. They do a remarkable job given the circumstances.
The main objection is that it's a trojan horse -- the gov't will run health care and this is the first step. However, that would be another bill, that people can vote against if they'd like.
In short, they're afraid people will like it.
I've never had a huge problem with healthcare in the US. My insurance premiums seemed reasonable, and the quality of care I received seemed appropriate. I lived in the UK for a while -- their healthcare was pretty good too, and it was pretty damn remarkable that they treat foreign students for free as a matter of policy.
Now I've graduated, and can't get a full-time job with health benefits, because the economy's gone to shit. I'll soon be without insurance, and can easily tell you which system I'd prefer.
The American system is hardly private either. We have Medicare, and most emergency rooms are required by law to treat anybody who enters their doors, regardless of their ability to pay, although you can imagine that the level of care is somewhat different. A few years ago, a close friend shared a hospital room with a homeless guy. HMOs are basically microcosms of socialized medicine (as long as you have a job).
The single-player campaigns were pretty good, but arguably not the best of the genre (an honor which the Half Life franchise seems to have held onto)
Multiplayer was pretty good too, but never really seemed to stand out from Unreal Tournament, or any of the other 5,000 FPS games on the market.
The other problem was that there were *very* few other games worth having that were XBox-only. I'm told that the 360 has a decent collection, which I don't doubt, although Halo always seemed to be the *only* reason you'd want to own a 1st-gen XBox.
I still wonder why it was so successful. Perhaps it was a combination of good timing and good marketing that brought all of the goodies that PC FPS gamers had enjoyed for so many years to a wide audience of adolescent teenagers.* I won't deny that Halo was a good FPS....but it's certainly not everything it's been hyped up to be, and there are definitely good FPSes elsewhere.
*Given Microsoft's apparent target audience, the inclusion of voice chat is particularly inexcusable.
I'd imagine that they make up a considerable portion of the 18% of contributions made by individual developers. Given that Ubuntu is a variant of Debian with a radically overhauled user interface, one would imagine that any Ubuntu kernel hackers would be encouraged to contribute upstream to Debian, rather than to Ubuntu itself.
Beware that Diesel fuel follows a different price/demand curve than regular gas, given that it's primarily used commercially.
Sometimes it's cheaper -- sometimes it's more expensive. Occasionally, it's a lot cheaper, while other times it's considerably more expensive. The added efficiency typically makes the extra cost worthwhile, even during those times when diesel is way more expensive than regular gas.
A diesel will pay for itself in a rather short period of time, whereas hybrids are rarely a smart investment.* Also don't forget that the VW and Mercedes diesels have a well-established reputation for lasting hundreds of thousands of miles, and retaining a shockingly high resale value. Although I'll buy that the battery packs in modern hybrids last a long time, I doubt that Toyota or Honda have defined "a long time" as 15-20 years.
*Yes, a Prius is a good investment compared to an SUV. However, it's a patently bad investment compared to an efficient non-hybrid such as the Honda Civic.
Don't hate on MSSQL -- it's actually a fairly well-respected database, even among folks who also use/maintain some of the open-source options. You could do far, far worse than MSSQL, even for this application.
Of course, if your administrators and developers are idiots, an injection vulnerability can be written into any database, no matter how secure.
We already have regions of Texas and California near the border that isn't American anymore. Culturally, that part of the soil has been eroded away to Mexico
Irony's a bitch. Go read up on the history of Texas and California -- the issue you're discussing is literally hundreds of years old (except Mexico was originally concerned that their territory and culture were eroding away into the US)
All of the things the GP mentioned are indeed illegal, and generally antisocial.
However, the punishment has to fit the crime -- the Constitution is quite explicit on this subject.
Temporarily revoking the licenses of repeat traffic offenders would be a severe -- but appropriate punishment. Being placed in a maximum security prison camp is most certainly not appropriate.
It might be that if more jails/prisons were run this way, we might have fewer return trips.
That depends upon whether you view imprisonment as a form of punishment or rehabilitation. I personally like to keep a cautiously optimistic view on humanity, and opt for the latter. On the logical side of the coin, harsh/humiliating imprisonment is highly likely to breed violent qualities in nonviolent criminals, while retrenching sociopathic tendencies in inmates.
I wonder what his repeat statistics are in comparison to other places that run taxpayer funded country clubs.
Spend a weekend in county jail, and I'll bet you won't use that analogy again.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
They're exactly that -- words -- abstract concepts. A "criminal" could be somebody who drove 5mph over the speed limit. The constitution is also extremely explicit about the treatment of so-called "criminals." (In fact, it's arguably more explicit about this subject than anything else in the document.) This not only serves to protect the rights of criminals (particularly minor offenders, or perpetrators of 'political' crimes), but also to protect the wrongfully accused. One only needs to look at the number of prisoners that were set free once DNA testing was introduced to prove that our justice system is not perfect. Illegal immigration is a particularly tricky issue, given that the American people and government turned their backs to the large number of immigrants entering the US illegally. Once this practice stopped suiting our own interests, we began imprisoning these people, denying them basic human rights, and threatening to deport them to a country that has no more capacity to support them than the US does. The fact that children are almost always tied up in illegal immigration cases makes the matter even more difficult and troubling. It's also worth mentioning that the illegal immigration debate is rife with unfiltered racism and xenophobia.
I dont think that prisoners should have access to TV or weight lifting equipment or be allowed to form gangs or get drugs while in prison. I suspect those activities are pretty limited under his command.
Agreed. Inmates shouldn't be allowed to form gangs or get drugs in prison. I'm not aware of any prison that explicitly allows or encourages such behavior in the United States. Not sure why weights or TV are bad. Gives them something to pass the time, rather than spending their days breeding hatred and anger. (Wouldn't you be angry at the people who put you in jail?)
If it is so demeaning to dignity to be in jail, sobeit.
See my first point.
It should NOT be a badge of honor like it is treated.
Outside of street gangs, I can assure you that it's not. It's extraordinarily difficult to secure any sort of employment with a criminal record, and American society has intentionally placed quite a few roadblocks in the way of criminal rehabilitation.
I am not against immigration or work permits but I am against paying for (via taxes) medical and infrastructure expenses for those who do not contribute and merely send money out of the country. If they pay their fair share and are here legally, good on them and they are welcome.
I think this is one of those "why don't they build the entire plane out of the black box material" questions.
Odds are that high-performance mirror glass is extremely expensive, heavy, and fragile. Similarly, it's difficult to keep something clean when blasting through the atmosphere at 1000mph.
Wrong target market. These devices will likely be sold as "big iPhones"
There's a market for such a machine, as long as it's got a web browser, word processor, and a reasonable assortment of other apps available. I'd love to have a spare PC lying around...particularly one that's cheap enough to be slightly reckless with, and has extremely long battery life.
I'm not entirely convinced that the target market's huge, given that we already have our expensive/precious laptops and iPhones. However, the popularity of netbooks (particularly the relative popularity of Linux netbooks among non-geeks) has proven that there *is* a target market for these devices.
To make the market for these devices *really* take off, you'd need a damn good marketing campaign, and a decent (and standardized) desktop shell to go along with it. There are a number of halfway-decent linux netbook shells available already, although there's no real sense of standardization. If the major players could either team up, or if one distribution could capture the market by sheer awesomeness alone, these devices would become a whole lot more popular. (Think of how much more *useful* the iPhone became once Apple opened the platform to applications)
Slashdot Mirror
"Fed Ex And UPS Are Doing Just Fine, It's The Post Office That's Always Having Problems" - President Barak Obama, August 11, 2009.
Sounds like your guys made the right decision.
Care to link to a reliable source for that quote?
All Google turns up are a few obscure right-wing blogs, which makes it sort of difficult to believe or trust. Even Fox News doesn't seem to have picked up on it.
That said, the USPS has generally done "just fine." The service typically operates with a modest profit, receives no subsidies, and the mail gets delivered on time at an extremely low cost to the consumer.
It's also worth mentioning that in the UK, the Post Office is a separate entity from the Royal Mail (which handles the actual delivery).* UK Post Offices serve as a public front-end to several other public services and businesses in addition to the mail. The Royal Mail still operates under the auspices of the government.
*It's actually a lot more complicated than that. I honestly don't completely understand it myself. My understanding is "less like the USPS, and more like Amtrak"
My favorite example of privatization gone horribly, horribly wrong is the UK Post Office.
After a year or two of operating under private ownership, the new owners decided there was no way that the Post Office could possibly operate profitably in rural markets, sold off all of its assets in these areas, closed up shop, and pocketed the money from the sales.
A great majority of Americans have thrown science and logic out the window, and choose instead to vote with their passions and emotions.
If this isn't a social disease, I don't know what is.
Keeping on topic, the healthcare debate is a great example of this, given that the right wing have successfully managed to convince the masses to actively protest against their own interests by spreading a net of thinly-veiled lies and passionate arguments.
What sort of person would actually believe that the president wanted to start "death squads" without actually verifying the claim?
I'd be happy to have a reasoned debate about the issue -- there are actually good arguments to be had on both sides of the issue. However, reason appears to have left the picture entirely.
Attempt to change the legislation and be called an America-hating Hitler-Nazi-Communist-Socialist-Terrorist-Muslim-Paedophile.
That many hyphens, and you couldn't find room for a homophobic slur?
And to think you call yourself an American... Hmmph!
Although, looking at how the Republicans have gotten people to take up arms in protest of giving them healthcare, I don't think they'll have any problem convincing the peanut gallery that keeping jobs in America means slave labor camps or some such nonsense.
Machiavelli would be impressed.
No secular political organization has ever so successfully persuaded the masses to fight against their own interests.
Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.
There are many possible employments of SVG that have absolutely nothing to do with Canvas, so no. Fix SVG. (This is not to say that Canvas shouldn't be properly implemented too.)
Let me revise my earlier statement: I feel that the Canvas element is potentially quite a bit more important, given the obvious advantages it has for navigation elements, UI controls, and dynamic content. HTML5 and CSS3 should eventually greatly reduce the number of images used in web layouts, especially if we finally get support for proper gradients in CSS.
SVG is ideally suited for static vectorized images, and not much else. There is indeed a use for this, although this is not something that is encountered all that frequently, and can already be achieved by simply linking to a PDF.
As much as I like the *idea* of SVG, it doesn't seem to work particularly well, even in browsers where it is "officially" supported.
Safari tends to choke on complicated images, and cannot zoom in on full-size SVG images, making it quite useless for reading maps and the like. Additionally, I've noticed that most current platforms do not include any sort of utility to view/edit/rasterize SVG images outside of the web browser. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine, but I seem to recall older versions having issues. Here's a reasonably complex image to try for yourself.
Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.
You can say what you want about the Google Library project, but the important thing to note is that it's finally gotten people in the mainstream industry to begin talking about the merits/drawbacks of extended copyright terms, and more importantly, compelled a number of very high-profile players to join the Internet Archive's "open" effort to digitize out-of-print books.
It might be convoluted, but the Google Library effort will be a very good thing if it fails, thanks to the dialogue that it's spurred.
It certainly says something about the current state of humanity, when the "news" reported by The Onion often eventually becomes true.
Darn right.
Think about those enormous machines that were built to detect the drift of "the ether," but only measured said drift to be an extremely precise value of zero. Although initially viewed as failures, because they failed to find anything, these experiments were arguably among the most important experiments of modern physics precisely because, as it turned out, there was nothing to be found (when you think about it, the notion of a vacuum is indeed pretty damn weird)
And Halo was still supposed to be a Mac game.
Fixed that for you. Bungie was pretty much the Mac game developer before Microsoft purchased them.
I'll agree with your assessment, however, that Halo did seem to borrow exactly the right elements from other franchises. It's a good game, but certainly not the "best ever," and not sufficient reason to run out and buy a new console just to play it.
A few weeks ago, I realized that I finally owned a PC sufficiently good to play Half Life 2, and purchased the Orange Box. I swear that Valve are the Pixar of video game companies -- everything they touch turns to gold. The hype surrounding Portal was also surprisingly well-deserved.
Wrong. There's a schedule.
If you're running a service with 8 minute headways, you'd better be sure that everything runs like clockwork, or else you'll have subways bunching and piling up at stations or at the end of the line*. The driver, his union, and his boss all also want to make sure that his shift starts and ends at a well-established time.
The schedules are especially important at night, when headways increase to 30 minutes in some areas. There are parts of Queens where you do not want to be alone on a subway platform at 3AM.
The MTA's in the process of installing electronic signs that alert passengers of the time of the next arriving train like the ones they have in DC and Paris. Siemens (the contractor) have been working on it for several years, and might finally have the damn thing working in the next year or two.
*This does happen occasionally. Why don't you try managing the world's most complex urban transit system that also happens to be 100 years old, and suffered from extreme neglect and corruption during much of that time. I don't envy the MTA's job one bit. They do a remarkable job given the circumstances.
The main objection is that it's a trojan horse -- the gov't will run health care and this is the first step. However, that would be another bill, that people can vote against if they'd like.
In short, they're afraid people will like it.
I've never had a huge problem with healthcare in the US. My insurance premiums seemed reasonable, and the quality of care I received seemed appropriate. I lived in the UK for a while -- their healthcare was pretty good too, and it was pretty damn remarkable that they treat foreign students for free as a matter of policy.
Now I've graduated, and can't get a full-time job with health benefits, because the economy's gone to shit. I'll soon be without insurance, and can easily tell you which system I'd prefer.
The American system is hardly private either. We have Medicare, and most emergency rooms are required by law to treat anybody who enters their doors, regardless of their ability to pay, although you can imagine that the level of care is somewhat different. A few years ago, a close friend shared a hospital room with a homeless guy. HMOs are basically microcosms of socialized medicine (as long as you have a job).
Have you played the Halo franchise?
Yep. Still don't understand the hype.
The single-player campaigns were pretty good, but arguably not the best of the genre (an honor which the Half Life franchise seems to have held onto)
Multiplayer was pretty good too, but never really seemed to stand out from Unreal Tournament, or any of the other 5,000 FPS games on the market.
The other problem was that there were *very* few other games worth having that were XBox-only. I'm told that the 360 has a decent collection, which I don't doubt, although Halo always seemed to be the *only* reason you'd want to own a 1st-gen XBox.
I still wonder why it was so successful. Perhaps it was a combination of good timing and good marketing that brought all of the goodies that PC FPS gamers had enjoyed for so many years to a wide audience of adolescent teenagers.* I won't deny that Halo was a good FPS....but it's certainly not everything it's been hyped up to be, and there are definitely good FPSes elsewhere.
*Given Microsoft's apparent target audience, the inclusion of voice chat is particularly inexcusable.
In that case, where are GNU and Debian?
I'd imagine that they make up a considerable portion of the 18% of contributions made by individual developers. Given that Ubuntu is a variant of Debian with a radically overhauled user interface, one would imagine that any Ubuntu kernel hackers would be encouraged to contribute upstream to Debian, rather than to Ubuntu itself.
Beware that Diesel fuel follows a different price/demand curve than regular gas, given that it's primarily used commercially.
Sometimes it's cheaper -- sometimes it's more expensive. Occasionally, it's a lot cheaper, while other times it's considerably more expensive. The added efficiency typically makes the extra cost worthwhile, even during those times when diesel is way more expensive than regular gas.
A diesel will pay for itself in a rather short period of time, whereas hybrids are rarely a smart investment.* Also don't forget that the VW and Mercedes diesels have a well-established reputation for lasting hundreds of thousands of miles, and retaining a shockingly high resale value. Although I'll buy that the battery packs in modern hybrids last a long time, I doubt that Toyota or Honda have defined "a long time" as 15-20 years.
*Yes, a Prius is a good investment compared to an SUV. However, it's a patently bad investment compared to an efficient non-hybrid such as the Honda Civic.
The USSR's later experiments in space-based weapons were even crazier, and looked incredibly badass when mounted on the rocket.
Fortunately, a software glitch (probably intentional) prevented the spacecraft from making orbit.
Looks like the writers just...
puts on sunglasses ...soiled their genes.
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Obligatory (especially if you have no idea what the parent poster is talking about).
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Don't hate on MSSQL -- it's actually a fairly well-respected database, even among folks who also use/maintain some of the open-source options. You could do far, far worse than MSSQL, even for this application.
Of course, if your administrators and developers are idiots, an injection vulnerability can be written into any database, no matter how secure.
The airports that were too small to handle the A380 aren't terribly likely to have any 800-seat flights operating out of them.
We already have regions of Texas and California near the border that isn't American anymore. Culturally, that part of the soil has been eroded away to Mexico
Irony's a bitch. Go read up on the history of Texas and California -- the issue you're discussing is literally hundreds of years old (except Mexico was originally concerned that their territory and culture were eroding away into the US)
All of the things the GP mentioned are indeed illegal, and generally antisocial.
However, the punishment has to fit the crime -- the Constitution is quite explicit on this subject.
Temporarily revoking the licenses of repeat traffic offenders would be a severe -- but appropriate punishment. Being placed in a maximum security prison camp is most certainly not appropriate.
I'll run through this bit by bit:
It might be that if more jails/prisons were run this way, we might have fewer return trips.
That depends upon whether you view imprisonment as a form of punishment or rehabilitation. I personally like to keep a cautiously optimistic view on humanity, and opt for the latter. On the logical side of the coin, harsh/humiliating imprisonment is highly likely to breed violent qualities in nonviolent criminals, while retrenching sociopathic tendencies in inmates.
I wonder what his repeat statistics are in comparison to other places that run taxpayer funded country clubs.
Spend a weekend in county jail, and I'll bet you won't use that analogy again.
What is it about the words -Criminal- and -Illegal- alien that is so hard for slashdotters to fathom.
They're exactly that -- words -- abstract concepts. A "criminal" could be somebody who drove 5mph over the speed limit. The constitution is also extremely explicit about the treatment of so-called "criminals." (In fact, it's arguably more explicit about this subject than anything else in the document.) This not only serves to protect the rights of criminals (particularly minor offenders, or perpetrators of 'political' crimes), but also to protect the wrongfully accused. One only needs to look at the number of prisoners that were set free once DNA testing was introduced to prove that our justice system is not perfect.
Illegal immigration is a particularly tricky issue, given that the American people and government turned their backs to the large number of immigrants entering the US illegally. Once this practice stopped suiting our own interests, we began imprisoning these people, denying them basic human rights, and threatening to deport them to a country that has no more capacity to support them than the US does. The fact that children are almost always tied up in illegal immigration cases makes the matter even more difficult and troubling.
It's also worth mentioning that the illegal immigration debate is rife with unfiltered racism and xenophobia.
I dont think that prisoners should have access to TV or weight lifting equipment or be allowed to form gangs or get drugs while in prison. I suspect those activities are pretty limited under his command.
Agreed. Inmates shouldn't be allowed to form gangs or get drugs in prison. I'm not aware of any prison that explicitly allows or encourages such behavior in the United States.
Not sure why weights or TV are bad. Gives them something to pass the time, rather than spending their days breeding hatred and anger. (Wouldn't you be angry at the people who put you in jail?)
If it is so demeaning to dignity to be in jail, sobeit.
See my first point.
It should NOT be a badge of honor like it is treated.
Outside of street gangs, I can assure you that it's not. It's extraordinarily difficult to secure any sort of employment with a criminal record, and American society has intentionally placed quite a few roadblocks in the way of criminal rehabilitation.
I am not against immigration or work permits but I am against paying for (via taxes) medical and infrastructure expenses for those who do not contribute and merely send money out of the country. If they pay their fair share and are here legally, good on them and they are welcome.
(so much for karma in this thread)
Sounds fine to me!
I think this is one of those "why don't they build the entire plane out of the black box material" questions.
Odds are that high-performance mirror glass is extremely expensive, heavy, and fragile. Similarly, it's difficult to keep something clean when blasting through the atmosphere at 1000mph.
Wrong target market. These devices will likely be sold as "big iPhones"
There's a market for such a machine, as long as it's got a web browser, word processor, and a reasonable assortment of other apps available. I'd love to have a spare PC lying around...particularly one that's cheap enough to be slightly reckless with, and has extremely long battery life.
I'm not entirely convinced that the target market's huge, given that we already have our expensive/precious laptops and iPhones. However, the popularity of netbooks (particularly the relative popularity of Linux netbooks among non-geeks) has proven that there *is* a target market for these devices.
To make the market for these devices *really* take off, you'd need a damn good marketing campaign, and a decent (and standardized) desktop shell to go along with it. There are a number of halfway-decent linux netbook shells available already, although there's no real sense of standardization. If the major players could either team up, or if one distribution could capture the market by sheer awesomeness alone, these devices would become a whole lot more popular. (Think of how much more *useful* the iPhone became once Apple opened the platform to applications)