They play different formats to different platforms, and have for quite a while. Windows and Mac get Silverlight. ChromeOS, iOS and Android gets HTML 5, which I would assume the media companies approved because they're relatively controlled platforms. They also deliver straight to set-top boxes and "smart" TVs, though I'm not sure what format - probably not Silverlight given that the devices are quite limited and Silverlight is huge. But desktop browsers support "Premium Video Extensions" (DRM) then they'll deliver HTML5 video to everyone. Yay?
There's no copy protection for VHS in the sense of DRM. The closest to protection on VHS tapes are the weird scrambling schemes that are applied to commercial VHS tapes to make them harder to copy, essentially by distorting the signal so that it just barely plays properly from the original tape, but which causes distortion, screwed up synch, blinking, etc., in copies. And that is a commercial process applied in manufacturing mass-produced tapes, certainly wasn't done to your personal tape.
If I had to guess, perhaps your camcorder was badly misaligned or damaged so that it wrote a bad signal, so your recorded tape couldn't be cleanly copied/digitized. A badly recorded tape would look to the tape duplicator like the intentionally corrupted "protected" tapes. There are plenty of (cheap) devices that can take the corrupted signal and clean it up for copying.
Don't blame Netflix. The people that produce the movies and TV shows that people want to watch insist on DRM. So everyone that wants to deliver movies and TV shows digitally (Apple iTunes Store, Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, HBO, etc.), all have to have DRM on every platform that they deliver through, so you have pressure from the media owners and from all of the media vendors to implement DRM. Given that, Google had to decide whether to provide DRM in Android in order to be competitive with Apple. And clearly they decided to support DRM. So if you don't like DRM, blame the media companies that insist on it.
While STL printing (B9, Form1) are very promising, and is great for some applications, right now that technology has some serious limitations when compared to FDM printing. - Expense. Not only do FDM printers cost less, FDM printing is 5-10x cheaper than STL. Competition should drive down prices over time, as it has for FDM filament, but that's still a HUGE issue when printing FDM cost "cents" and printing STL costs "dollars". - Complexity. STL printers use a resin which is stinky and dangerous (handle with gloves), and has some tricky storage (filter the unused resin, pour it back into a bottle, store in cold/dark place). Spools of plastic for FDM printing are easy to handle. This was the reason that a friend of mine just sold his B9. - Speed. STL printers are very, very slow. - Build area. STL printers (so far) have very small print areas, comparable to the old "Cupcake" printers. This limits the volume of (very expensive) resin required, so it makes sense, but it does mean that you can't print large things using current STL printers. - Durability. STL prints are (so far) soft or fragile (depending on the material and aging - they start soft, and become harder but more brittle as they age). - Range of materials. STL printers have only a few resin choices (e.g. clear, orange and grey). This should improve over time.
That's not to say that STL is a bad technology - it's fantastic for making small display items that look stunning, or for "masters" for jewelry casting. But right now, for people printing "useful stuff", FDM is a better fit.
This is an absurd mis-representation. Given that both have been hashed over and discredited long ago, I'll post a correction to your errors:
First, MBI hasn't claimed "credit for all home 3d printing innovation despite the existence of the Reprap project" - they were formed specifically to commercialize the RepRap project, cooperatively with the RepRap project. MBI credits and links to the RepRap project, and vice versa. Almost all of MBI's software is FOSS (Skeinforge, Miracle Grue, Conveyor, Replicator G, firmware, etc.) with MBI starting several of those projects, and with MBI engineers contributing code into the open projects. It's all in GitHub, on the RepRap wiki, etc.
Second, they aren't "putting terms of service on their object repository Thingiverse that basically says, regardless of the license you select for the works you upload, you give them a permanent, irrevocable right to do whatever they want rights-wise with your stuff". The TOS gives them the rights, but you left off the limitation that the rights are granted only for the purposes of operating Thingiverse. If you didn't grant them any rights, they wouldn't have the right to serve the files that you upload to them to serve! You don't have to trust MBI or Stratasys, you have to be able to read the Thingiverse TOS without removing the limiting clauses then complaining that there are no limits!
And, to support Artifakt's point, the car companies initially fought like crazy against reasonable car safety measures such as seatbelts and gas bags, claiming that they'd make cars too expensive and unreliable. In reality, of course, seatbelts and gas bags are cheap, reliable, and highly effective in saving people's lives.
The line about "if the government enforced the gun laws already on the books" is decades out of date. Almost all controls on guns have been either eliminated or undermined to the point where they're unenforceable. For example, gun dealers have do background checks, unless they sell the gun from their "show" inventory instead of their "dealer" inventory, at a "gun show" (which can be two cars in a parking lot) which is how 40% of guns in the US are sold. These days the laws are so pro-criminal that it's impossible to stop even obvious straw buyers. For example, in Arizona (an extreme state, to be sure) the ATF watched a broke, homeless man buy huge piles of guns with cash, week after week. When they wanted to tail the guy to observe him selling the guns to the gangs that he was buying for, the state judge ruled that it was a violation of his rights for them to do tail him, observe the crime, and arrest him. So every week the same broken, homeless man buys huge piles of guns with cash and hands them over to local gangs, who then sell them to gangs over the border. So while the right-wing was wailing about Fast and Furious (a misguided program, to be sure), this one many flooded US and Mexican gangs with more guns, and the right-wing made sure that he could do so.
This is why over 90% of the US opposes the NRA's fanatical position on gun sales. Most of us think that it would be good if there were laws against selling guns to violent criminals and mentally unstable people, and those laws were enforceable. The NRA is happy selling guns to gangs, because it's profitable. And, even better, when the gangs shoot the rest of us, and the NRA pays Congressmen to block the gun laws 90% of us want passed, the rest of us might buy more guns to "defend ourselves". So, while it's terrible for the country and will get lots of people killed, it'll be highly profitable for the gun salesmen who fund the NRA these days. Brilliant!
Your math is wrong. The mechanism doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile - nothing is 100% effective. Heck, guns aren't 100% effective now - they sometimes misfire, etc. It just has to be effective enough that it saves more lives than it costs. That is, if it can save police from getting shot with their own guns when a criminal grabs the gun (which happens more often than you'd think) more often than it prevents a policeman from being able to shoot when they need to (which is actually fairly rare) then it's a good tradeoff.
The problem, of course, is that irresponsible gun owners don't just endanger themselves, but also their families, neighbors, and in extreme cases (e.g. CT) large numbers of unrelated people.
That's the reason that we all have a vested interest in keeping guns under control.
Pretty close. But standing armies weren't the norm until long after the formation of the United States, and the founding fathers were vehemently opposed to the country having a standing army because they thought that it would lead to an overly militarized society because the government would keep finding uses for the army, while a government that had to recruit civilians to fight would have a strong pressure not to do so unless was a real, compelling threat.
Of course, back then wars were much slower and longer, so there was time to raise an army and train and arm them.:-(
I'm a liberal. And I was an NRA certified gun instructor, and I'm not anti-gun though I am certainly in favor of people keeping guns under control, and keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have them. And I can certainly see why people would want guns to be shootable only by the owner. Gun manufacturers have been showing off guns like this for decades. The challenge is that for this to be effective, the large majority of guns would have to implement this sort of mechanism, because otherwise it's too easy to simply ignore the few "locked down" guns. So by passing a law requiring this sort of locking mechanism, it gives manufacturers the incentive to put these mechanisms in large scale production (rather than limited demo runs they've been doing), making the mechanisms lower cost and more reliable (because competition works).
Objections to this idea sound a lot like the objections to seat belts and later airbags being mandatory in cars. Manufacturers claimed that it would make cars cost too much, would add too much complexity, would go off causing more accidents than they prevented, etc. In reality, of course, seat belts turned out to cost extremely little, be extremely reliable, and to overall save quite a few lives. So during the decades that the car companies fought the improvements in car safety, many thousands of people died or were injured who would not have been has the simply focused their efforts on implementing car safety instead of dragging their feet.
Is this challenge a difficult one? Of course. But it wasn't easy to make airbags cheap and reliable. But that's what engineers should do - solve difficult problems to make people's lives better.
Back in the real world, as opposed to movie fantasies, the most effective to stop a bad guy with a gun is to keep him from getting the gun (or ammo). There are plenty of cases where bad guys with guns were surrounded by good guys with guns, and that didn't stop them. It turns out that in real life, as opposed to movies, guns are actually only good at shooting people, not in keeping people from getting shot. That's why the actual number of criminals stopped with guns, based on real statistics rather than surveys of what people imagine, is vanishingly small.
I'll also point out that 2/3rds of the people that die from guns are suicides. Flooding the country with more guns won't reduce suicides.
"Dr Stephen Jobs must be rolliing over in his grave
This says that as long as your app makes its revenue outside of the Apple walled garden, you don't have to give Apple a cut
And now this establishes a legal precedent for a framework of similar deals in the future for every app developer, contingent upon the proper legal framework (i.e., a class action lawsuit if necessary)"
I guess you hadn't noticed, but that's been the choice for as long as there's been an iOS App Store. And there have been companies selling products through their web site that are then accessed in iOS apps for YEARS. Have you heard of Amazon? Netflix? Hulu? So the "news" is that MS made the same decision that those companies did. So it's not a new thing, not a dramatic precedent, and wouldn't upset Jobs since he's the one that set it up that way.
Exactly right. Apple charges for providing the in-app and app-store purchasing infrastructure,marketing, consistent user experience with high adoption rates, etc., for which they charge 30%. Companies have been free to choose not to use it, and do try to drive people to web sites for purchasing for as long as there have been iOS apps. It's a simple decision, really. If you would lose more than 30% of your sales due to the "friction" you use Apple's in-store and in-app purchasing. And if you think that you would lose less than 30% of your sales you sell access to service/content through the web site, and give the app away for free.
I disagree - the Wii was perfectly position as a cheap, fun game machine when MS and Sony were chasing high-end gamers with expensive consoles, and Nintendo sold a ton of them, because the population of people who want to buy something cheap to entertain their kids is very large.
The problem Nintendo has now is that the Xbox has dropped in price, so there's less room for the Wii to be significantly cheaper. So now they're letting the Wii drop in price, and going up-market with the Wii U. They've got a year until MS and Sony launch their next generation boxes.
The other problem that Nintendo has is that while the Wii might be an amazing machine, the sales drones in retail don't know anything about it, and don't know how to sell it, so they basically sabotage it. I've been in several stores to see the Wii U, and while Nintendo bought placement of demo kiosks, so far all I've seen is demo kiosks locked into a video loop, and one actually turned off. I've seen this for other products. The sales drones don't like new, interesting products, because they take effort to understand and communicate, all they know how to do is sell commodity products based on easily explained metrics. Like TV's with screen size, or PC's with clock speed. The Wii U is weird and different, and they're scared by that. IMO, Nintendo needs to SPIF the sales drones so that they're broken out of their stupor by greed. Either that or run their own retail outlets. like Apple did, but that's a pretty expensive proposition. Admittedly the Nintendo World Store in NYC is great fun, but there's only one of them.
Gamestop is a bit better, but they staff still has no training about the Wii U, and they can't answer any questions.
So if the Wii U really is amazing, Nintendo is going to have to do some work to get that info out past the "wall of stupid".
This is a huge waste of effort that would just result in people doing more work and being less productive.
It's entirely reasonable to rely on Google to run Google Docs well, particularly if you set up a paid Google Apps account. And you get a lot more than document management using Google Apps - there's a real power to integrated mail, document, conferencing, web based and accessible from anywhere online. Yes, you're giving up some degree of control, compared to running your own system, but in return you get a cheap, easy to use system that someone else is hosting, enhancing and maintaining. Do you really want to be dealing with developing software (or locating, installing and maintaining it), hosting a server, installing security patches, configuring accounts, etc.? Remember, this is a non-profit, not a big company with a lot of staff.
Yes, Google is vulnerable to an outage. So is a box you run yourself. Which one has a team of sysadmins monitoring and running it? Do you really want to get called in the middle of the night because something happened to your server?
I'd add one step before that - make sure that there really is an issue with the document management system. Find out how everyone else feels about it. If the rest of the board doesn't have a problem with it, don't raise it as a board level issue. Spend time informally with Bob to learn about the document management system and how he feels about it. He might be thrilled that there's finally someone else in the organization that can help him!
Good point. The problem may not be documents at all, but running the meetings and recording them efficiently. You can do that in Google Docs (or any other document based system) with a little discipline. But if what you really need is a system that helps plan meeting agendas, record decisions, track action items, etc., you need more than document management, you need something more like LessMeeting.
Exactly. Don't treat this as a fight with Bob - you're assuming that he loves his system and wants to run it forever, and that may not be the case at all. Try asking him what he thinks of Google Docs (for example), and ask him if he's ever thought about moving the board's docs there. Who knows, he might LOVE the idea - it can't be much fun single-handedly managing a custom document management system for free. Let him do the analysis and make a recommendation to the board! Who knows, he might step up and drive the migration to make his life easier. Or he might find a legitimate reason not to do so, and at least it'll be on the table to discuss openly.
No, boards and employees of non-profits are often paid, and some are paid quite well (e.g. museum boards, well known fund-raising organizations). All a non-profit means is that they can't return a profit to investors, as their goal is social rather than financial.
That being said, most non-profits are small organizations run entirely with unpaid volunteers. And that's great, of course. But pretty much any non-profit that is big enough that you can name them has full-time paid staff running them, even if most of the workers are unpaid volunteers, because it's worth it to have a degree of continuity and professionalism that you can't usually get from volunteers.
Technically Romney didn't resign, but as a resident of Massachusetts, I saw that after getting "Romneycare" passed, Romney pretty much blew off his job and and worked full-time to position himself to run for President. This really pissed off the residents of Massachusetts. Everyone would have understood if he'd resigned because he was elected to another position, because as you point out that's how elections often work. But blowing off the job you were elected for, because you're not taking it seriously but just using it as a "stepping stone" to your next job, was insulting. The original poster is right - in Massachusetts, the consensus is that Romney didn't finish the job he was elected to.
To address your second point, arguably the invasion of Iraq was unauthorized. Congress authorized the President to take action against whoever was behind the 9/11 attacks, which was the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and there was never any evidence of a connection - we now know that "connection" was all invented by the Bush administration without any supporting evidence or even rational basis (Saddam Hussein was the ENEMY of the Taliban) in order to provide a legal basis for an invasion that they had planned out well before 9/11.
The same way he's trying to get elected now. He ran on his having "saved" the Olympics and saying that he was a successful businessman, and pretty much said whatever he thought voters wanted to hear, and had so much more cash than his opponent that he could drown out the fact checkers and buy the election. So he claimed to be a life-long, committed believer in gay rights and pro-choice, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, which is a combination that's pretty popular in Massachusetts. While Massachusetts is perceived as wildly liberal, like any state there are people across the political spectrum (e.g. Boston is largely liberal, the suburbs more conservative), and there's a tradition of individuals reaching across the aisle to get things done, so there have been a number of Republican Governors who worked out pretty well, so his campaign was pretty plausible.
Of course, after one term Romney was widely considered a failure, and it was obvious that he'd run on a pack of lies, and treated the Governorship not as a real responsibility but as a stepping stone to the Presidency, the result was that he was unpopular to the point where he didn't even try to run for re-election.
"No actual substance, just sound bites and hot air."
If you ignore the substance of what the candidates say, and only barely notice that they each said the other lied, then I suppose you could argue that there was no actual substance.
If you pay attention to the actual words they said, they outlined very different positions on a range of issues. And when they claimed different facts, those facts are objectively verifiable. So you can be lazy and say that they both accused the other of lying, or you can do a little research (e.g. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/oct/16/fact-checking-town-hall-debate/) and see that some things that they said (e.g. "President Obama began his presidency with an apology tour") were simply not true, and other things (e.g. "Romney refuses to say whether he would have signed the Lily Ledbetter Act") were true. And if you do a little more digging (or remember history) you can assess for yourself what was true and not true.
If you think this debate had no actual substance, you weren't paying attention.
Arguably the lack of a social safety net discourages risk taking entrepreneurs. For example, many people considering startups don't do so because it's impossible for startups and other small businesses to provide healthcare on good terms, so healthcare benefits (a major concern and cost for employees) tend to drive people towards large companies and away from small companies. When people can buy healthcare through exchanges that issue is taken off the table, so they are more free to move between companies, boosting the ability of small companies to hire.
I agree with the rest - tax structures that encourage money to be invested in the economy instead of hidden away would be a HUGE plus.
Slashdot Mirror
They play different formats to different platforms, and have for quite a while. Windows and Mac get Silverlight. ChromeOS, iOS and Android gets HTML 5, which I would assume the media companies approved because they're relatively controlled platforms. They also deliver straight to set-top boxes and "smart" TVs, though I'm not sure what format - probably not Silverlight given that the devices are quite limited and Silverlight is huge. But desktop browsers support "Premium Video Extensions" (DRM) then they'll deliver HTML5 video to everyone. Yay?
There's no copy protection for VHS in the sense of DRM. The closest to protection on VHS tapes are the weird scrambling schemes that are applied to commercial VHS tapes to make them harder to copy, essentially by distorting the signal so that it just barely plays properly from the original tape, but which causes distortion, screwed up synch, blinking, etc., in copies. And that is a commercial process applied in manufacturing mass-produced tapes, certainly wasn't done to your personal tape.
If I had to guess, perhaps your camcorder was badly misaligned or damaged so that it wrote a bad signal, so your recorded tape couldn't be cleanly copied/digitized. A badly recorded tape would look to the tape duplicator like the intentionally corrupted "protected" tapes. There are plenty of (cheap) devices that can take the corrupted signal and clean it up for copying.
Don't blame Netflix. The people that produce the movies and TV shows that people want to watch insist on DRM. So everyone that wants to deliver movies and TV shows digitally (Apple iTunes Store, Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, HBO, etc.), all have to have DRM on every platform that they deliver through, so you have pressure from the media owners and from all of the media vendors to implement DRM. Given that, Google had to decide whether to provide DRM in Android in order to be competitive with Apple. And clearly they decided to support DRM. So if you don't like DRM, blame the media companies that insist on it.
While STL printing (B9, Form1) are very promising, and is great for some applications, right now that technology has some serious limitations when compared to FDM printing.
- Expense. Not only do FDM printers cost less, FDM printing is 5-10x cheaper than STL. Competition should drive down prices over time, as it has for FDM filament, but that's still a HUGE issue when printing FDM cost "cents" and printing STL costs "dollars".
- Complexity. STL printers use a resin which is stinky and dangerous (handle with gloves), and has some tricky storage (filter the unused resin, pour it back into a bottle, store in cold/dark place). Spools of plastic for FDM printing are easy to handle. This was the reason that a friend of mine just sold his B9.
- Speed. STL printers are very, very slow.
- Build area. STL printers (so far) have very small print areas, comparable to the old "Cupcake" printers. This limits the volume of (very expensive) resin required, so it makes sense, but it does mean that you can't print large things using current STL printers.
- Durability. STL prints are (so far) soft or fragile (depending on the material and aging - they start soft, and become harder but more brittle as they age).
- Range of materials. STL printers have only a few resin choices (e.g. clear, orange and grey). This should improve over time.
That's not to say that STL is a bad technology - it's fantastic for making small display items that look stunning, or for "masters" for jewelry casting. But right now, for people printing "useful stuff", FDM is a better fit.
This is an absurd mis-representation. Given that both have been hashed over and discredited long ago, I'll post a correction to your errors:
First, MBI hasn't claimed "credit for all home 3d printing innovation despite the existence of the Reprap project" - they were formed specifically to commercialize the RepRap project, cooperatively with the RepRap project. MBI credits and links to the RepRap project, and vice versa. Almost all of MBI's software is FOSS (Skeinforge, Miracle Grue, Conveyor, Replicator G, firmware, etc.) with MBI starting several of those projects, and with MBI engineers contributing code into the open projects. It's all in GitHub, on the RepRap wiki, etc.
Second, they aren't "putting terms of service on their object repository Thingiverse that basically says, regardless of the license you select for the works you upload, you give them a permanent, irrevocable right to do whatever they want rights-wise with your stuff". The TOS gives them the rights, but you left off the limitation that the rights are granted only for the purposes of operating Thingiverse. If you didn't grant them any rights, they wouldn't have the right to serve the files that you upload to them to serve! You don't have to trust MBI or Stratasys, you have to be able to read the Thingiverse TOS without removing the limiting clauses then complaining that there are no limits!
And, to support Artifakt's point, the car companies initially fought like crazy against reasonable car safety measures such as seatbelts and gas bags, claiming that they'd make cars too expensive and unreliable. In reality, of course, seatbelts and gas bags are cheap, reliable, and highly effective in saving people's lives.
The line about "if the government enforced the gun laws already on the books" is decades out of date. Almost all controls on guns have been either eliminated or undermined to the point where they're unenforceable. For example, gun dealers have do background checks, unless they sell the gun from their "show" inventory instead of their "dealer" inventory, at a "gun show" (which can be two cars in a parking lot) which is how 40% of guns in the US are sold. These days the laws are so pro-criminal that it's impossible to stop even obvious straw buyers. For example, in Arizona (an extreme state, to be sure) the ATF watched a broke, homeless man buy huge piles of guns with cash, week after week. When they wanted to tail the guy to observe him selling the guns to the gangs that he was buying for, the state judge ruled that it was a violation of his rights for them to do tail him, observe the crime, and arrest him. So every week the same broken, homeless man buys huge piles of guns with cash and hands them over to local gangs, who then sell them to gangs over the border. So while the right-wing was wailing about Fast and Furious (a misguided program, to be sure), this one many flooded US and Mexican gangs with more guns, and the right-wing made sure that he could do so.
This is why over 90% of the US opposes the NRA's fanatical position on gun sales. Most of us think that it would be good if there were laws against selling guns to violent criminals and mentally unstable people, and those laws were enforceable. The NRA is happy selling guns to gangs, because it's profitable. And, even better, when the gangs shoot the rest of us, and the NRA pays Congressmen to block the gun laws 90% of us want passed, the rest of us might buy more guns to "defend ourselves". So, while it's terrible for the country and will get lots of people killed, it'll be highly profitable for the gun salesmen who fund the NRA these days. Brilliant!
Your math is wrong. The mechanism doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile - nothing is 100% effective. Heck, guns aren't 100% effective now - they sometimes misfire, etc. It just has to be effective enough that it saves more lives than it costs. That is, if it can save police from getting shot with their own guns when a criminal grabs the gun (which happens more often than you'd think) more often than it prevents a policeman from being able to shoot when they need to (which is actually fairly rare) then it's a good tradeoff.
And locks on doors. People would never accept that intrusion just to keep their stuff safe while they're away...
The problem, of course, is that irresponsible gun owners don't just endanger themselves, but also their families, neighbors, and in extreme cases (e.g. CT) large numbers of unrelated people.
That's the reason that we all have a vested interest in keeping guns under control.
Pretty close. But standing armies weren't the norm until long after the formation of the United States, and the founding fathers were vehemently opposed to the country having a standing army because they thought that it would lead to an overly militarized society because the government would keep finding uses for the army, while a government that had to recruit civilians to fight would have a strong pressure not to do so unless was a real, compelling threat.
Of course, back then wars were much slower and longer, so there was time to raise an army and train and arm them. :-(
I'm a liberal. And I was an NRA certified gun instructor, and I'm not anti-gun though I am certainly in favor of people keeping guns under control, and keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have them. And I can certainly see why people would want guns to be shootable only by the owner. Gun manufacturers have been showing off guns like this for decades. The challenge is that for this to be effective, the large majority of guns would have to implement this sort of mechanism, because otherwise it's too easy to simply ignore the few "locked down" guns. So by passing a law requiring this sort of locking mechanism, it gives manufacturers the incentive to put these mechanisms in large scale production (rather than limited demo runs they've been doing), making the mechanisms lower cost and more reliable (because competition works).
Objections to this idea sound a lot like the objections to seat belts and later airbags being mandatory in cars. Manufacturers claimed that it would make cars cost too much, would add too much complexity, would go off causing more accidents than they prevented, etc. In reality, of course, seat belts turned out to cost extremely little, be extremely reliable, and to overall save quite a few lives. So during the decades that the car companies fought the improvements in car safety, many thousands of people died or were injured who would not have been has the simply focused their efforts on implementing car safety instead of dragging their feet.
Is this challenge a difficult one? Of course. But it wasn't easy to make airbags cheap and reliable. But that's what engineers should do - solve difficult problems to make people's lives better.
Back in the real world, as opposed to movie fantasies, the most effective to stop a bad guy with a gun is to keep him from getting the gun (or ammo). There are plenty of cases where bad guys with guns were surrounded by good guys with guns, and that didn't stop them. It turns out that in real life, as opposed to movies, guns are actually only good at shooting people, not in keeping people from getting shot. That's why the actual number of criminals stopped with guns, based on real statistics rather than surveys of what people imagine, is vanishingly small.
I'll also point out that 2/3rds of the people that die from guns are suicides. Flooding the country with more guns won't reduce suicides.
"Dr Stephen Jobs must be rolliing over in his grave
This says that as long as your app makes its revenue outside of the Apple walled garden, you don't have to give Apple a cut
And now this establishes a legal precedent for a framework of similar deals in the future for every app developer, contingent upon the proper legal framework (i.e., a class action lawsuit if necessary)"
I guess you hadn't noticed, but that's been the choice for as long as there's been an iOS App Store. And there have been companies selling products through their web site that are then accessed in iOS apps for YEARS. Have you heard of Amazon? Netflix? Hulu? So the "news" is that MS made the same decision that those companies did. So it's not a new thing, not a dramatic precedent, and wouldn't upset Jobs since he's the one that set it up that way.
Exactly right. Apple charges for providing the in-app and app-store purchasing infrastructure,marketing, consistent user experience with high adoption rates, etc., for which they charge 30%. Companies have been free to choose not to use it, and do try to drive people to web sites for purchasing for as long as there have been iOS apps. It's a simple decision, really. If you would lose more than 30% of your sales due to the "friction" you use Apple's in-store and in-app purchasing. And if you think that you would lose less than 30% of your sales you sell access to service/content through the web site, and give the app away for free.
I disagree - the Wii was perfectly position as a cheap, fun game machine when MS and Sony were chasing high-end gamers with expensive consoles, and Nintendo sold a ton of them, because the population of people who want to buy something cheap to entertain their kids is very large.
The problem Nintendo has now is that the Xbox has dropped in price, so there's less room for the Wii to be significantly cheaper. So now they're letting the Wii drop in price, and going up-market with the Wii U. They've got a year until MS and Sony launch their next generation boxes.
The other problem that Nintendo has is that while the Wii might be an amazing machine, the sales drones in retail don't know anything about it, and don't know how to sell it, so they basically sabotage it. I've been in several stores to see the Wii U, and while Nintendo bought placement of demo kiosks, so far all I've seen is demo kiosks locked into a video loop, and one actually turned off. I've seen this for other products. The sales drones don't like new, interesting products, because they take effort to understand and communicate, all they know how to do is sell commodity products based on easily explained metrics. Like TV's with screen size, or PC's with clock speed. The Wii U is weird and different, and they're scared by that. IMO, Nintendo needs to SPIF the sales drones so that they're broken out of their stupor by greed. Either that or run their own retail outlets. like Apple did, but that's a pretty expensive proposition. Admittedly the Nintendo World Store in NYC is great fun, but there's only one of them.
Gamestop is a bit better, but they staff still has no training about the Wii U, and they can't answer any questions.
So if the Wii U really is amazing, Nintendo is going to have to do some work to get that info out past the "wall of stupid".
This is a huge waste of effort that would just result in people doing more work and being less productive.
It's entirely reasonable to rely on Google to run Google Docs well, particularly if you set up a paid Google Apps account. And you get a lot more than document management using Google Apps - there's a real power to integrated mail, document, conferencing, web based and accessible from anywhere online. Yes, you're giving up some degree of control, compared to running your own system, but in return you get a cheap, easy to use system that someone else is hosting, enhancing and maintaining. Do you really want to be dealing with developing software (or locating, installing and maintaining it), hosting a server, installing security patches, configuring accounts, etc.? Remember, this is a non-profit, not a big company with a lot of staff.
Yes, Google is vulnerable to an outage. So is a box you run yourself. Which one has a team of sysadmins monitoring and running it? Do you really want to get called in the middle of the night because something happened to your server?
This is dead on.
I'd add one step before that - make sure that there really is an issue with the document management system. Find out how everyone else feels about it. If the rest of the board doesn't have a problem with it, don't raise it as a board level issue. Spend time informally with Bob to learn about the document management system and how he feels about it. He might be thrilled that there's finally someone else in the organization that can help him!
Good point. The problem may not be documents at all, but running the meetings and recording them efficiently. You can do that in Google Docs (or any other document based system) with a little discipline. But if what you really need is a system that helps plan meeting agendas, record decisions, track action items, etc., you need more than document management, you need something more like LessMeeting.
Exactly. Don't treat this as a fight with Bob - you're assuming that he loves his system and wants to run it forever, and that may not be the case at all. Try asking him what he thinks of Google Docs (for example), and ask him if he's ever thought about moving the board's docs there. Who knows, he might LOVE the idea - it can't be much fun single-handedly managing a custom document management system for free. Let him do the analysis and make a recommendation to the board! Who knows, he might step up and drive the migration to make his life easier. Or he might find a legitimate reason not to do so, and at least it'll be on the table to discuss openly.
No, boards and employees of non-profits are often paid, and some are paid quite well (e.g. museum boards, well known fund-raising organizations). All a non-profit means is that they can't return a profit to investors, as their goal is social rather than financial.
That being said, most non-profits are small organizations run entirely with unpaid volunteers. And that's great, of course. But pretty much any non-profit that is big enough that you can name them has full-time paid staff running them, even if most of the workers are unpaid volunteers, because it's worth it to have a degree of continuity and professionalism that you can't usually get from volunteers.
For example, this report (yay Google) has survey data of non-profits: http://www.asaecenter.org/Resources/whitepaperdetail.cfm?ItemNumber=22981 /
Technically Romney didn't resign, but as a resident of Massachusetts, I saw that after getting "Romneycare" passed, Romney pretty much blew off his job and and worked full-time to position himself to run for President. This really pissed off the residents of Massachusetts. Everyone would have understood if he'd resigned because he was elected to another position, because as you point out that's how elections often work. But blowing off the job you were elected for, because you're not taking it seriously but just using it as a "stepping stone" to your next job, was insulting. The original poster is right - in Massachusetts, the consensus is that Romney didn't finish the job he was elected to.
To address your second point, arguably the invasion of Iraq was unauthorized. Congress authorized the President to take action against whoever was behind the 9/11 attacks, which was the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and there was never any evidence of a connection - we now know that "connection" was all invented by the Bush administration without any supporting evidence or even rational basis (Saddam Hussein was the ENEMY of the Taliban) in order to provide a legal basis for an invasion that they had planned out well before 9/11.
The same way he's trying to get elected now. He ran on his having "saved" the Olympics and saying that he was a successful businessman, and pretty much said whatever he thought voters wanted to hear, and had so much more cash than his opponent that he could drown out the fact checkers and buy the election. So he claimed to be a life-long, committed believer in gay rights and pro-choice, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, which is a combination that's pretty popular in Massachusetts. While Massachusetts is perceived as wildly liberal, like any state there are people across the political spectrum (e.g. Boston is largely liberal, the suburbs more conservative), and there's a tradition of individuals reaching across the aisle to get things done, so there have been a number of Republican Governors who worked out pretty well, so his campaign was pretty plausible.
Of course, after one term Romney was widely considered a failure, and it was obvious that he'd run on a pack of lies, and treated the Governorship not as a real responsibility but as a stepping stone to the Presidency, the result was that he was unpopular to the point where he didn't even try to run for re-election.
"No actual substance, just sound bites and hot air."
If you ignore the substance of what the candidates say, and only barely notice that they each said the other lied, then I suppose you could argue that there was no actual substance.
If you pay attention to the actual words they said, they outlined very different positions on a range of issues. And when they claimed different facts, those facts are objectively verifiable. So you can be lazy and say that they both accused the other of lying, or you can do a little research (e.g. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/oct/16/fact-checking-town-hall-debate/) and see that some things that they said (e.g. "President Obama began his presidency with an apology tour") were simply not true, and other things (e.g. "Romney refuses to say whether he would have signed the Lily Ledbetter Act") were true. And if you do a little more digging (or remember history) you can assess for yourself what was true and not true.
If you think this debate had no actual substance, you weren't paying attention.
Arguably the lack of a social safety net discourages risk taking entrepreneurs. For example, many people considering startups don't do so because it's impossible for startups and other small businesses to provide healthcare on good terms, so healthcare benefits (a major concern and cost for employees) tend to drive people towards large companies and away from small companies. When people can buy healthcare through exchanges that issue is taken off the table, so they are more free to move between companies, boosting the ability of small companies to hire.
I agree with the rest - tax structures that encourage money to be invested in the economy instead of hidden away would be a HUGE plus.