Bad example - modern evidence suggests that the Great Pyramids were built by salaried employees, possibly as a public works program to make up for the seasonal "unemployment" that would have occurred in sync with the Nile's flooding.
The Western notion that the Egyptians had vast hordes of slaves building the pyramids comes from incorrect speculation by the Ancient Greek historians, who didn't know what they were talking about - not really their fault, since the age of pyramids ended 1500 years before the Greek historians began writing.
I believe that the suit is claiming that Apple was improperly forcing users to perform a factory reset, rather than claiming that the reset process itself was malicious.
Under the ACA, everyone in the United States is required to have health insurance, and health insurance plans are required to provide female contraceptives for free (however, men usually must pay full cost for male contraception). Every women in the United States already has access to free birth control, unless either they are either not complying with the ACA mandate or their employer is one of the very few that have an exemption. Even without insurance, female contraception is around $4-$5 per 28 days at the local pharmacy. What more am I supposed be advocating for?
Interestingly, many pro-lifers actually cite the ubiquitous availability of birth control as one of the reasons they oppose abortion.
The smallest possible deduction for a U.S. taxpayer in 2014 is $3,950 for the personal exemption + $6,200 for the standard deduction. That works out to $845.83 per month, which is certainly enough money for reasonable if sparse two bedroom apartment in my city. And, as I say, that's the theoretical minimum - if you are married, have children, are over 65, are blind, have a high amount of deductible expenses (including but not limited to certain business expenses that you pay for yourself), or earn more than $400 in employment income but less than $37,870, your deduction will be larger - often much larger.
In most tournaments that have a significant prize pool, there is usually an online qualifying followed by an in-person elimination round. This gives the best of both worlds: the tournament is able to invite a larger number of teams than logistics would allow if all games were in-person. But the actual prize money is won at the 2-3 day "main event," where the tournament is able to closely supervise the players.
For example, in Dota 2 the Starladder tournament that is going on right now, based in Kiev, invites 44 teams, and has round-robin group play lasting from Nov. 14 to Jan. 18. Obviously, it wouldn't be possible to make 44 different 5 person teams from all over the world stay in Kiev for two months, so they have to have online play for these group stage games. This means that the fans of just about every major Dota team on Earth will want to watch part of the tournament - great for Starladder's viewership. Theoretically, a team could cheat through the group stages since they're using their own computers, but cheating is fairly unlikely because a) even if the team made it to the finals in Kiev by cheating, they'd just get crushed by the legitimate teams and b) most of the cheats that you can use in Dota are very obvious to observers.
My understanding is that this hack was noteworthy because the creator managed to get it flagged as a legitimate configuration file edit, which means that it was able to be used on tournament computers as well as their own. I could be wrong though; I don't follow CS:GO.
Not necessarily. Legally speaking, "tying" as you describe is only a problem if it demonstrably restricts consumer choice (consumers in this case being the phone OEMs). In this case, Intel's actions have if anything increased consumer choice, by providing an alternative to the market-dominating Qualcomm.
In U.S. legal parlance at least, all of the following must to be true behavior to qualify as "predatory pricing" for predatory pricing: -The business in question must have a dominant or substantial market share, -It must be more likely than not that the company's practices are affecting not only specific rivals but the entire market as a whole, -There must be a "substantial likelihood" that the predatory pricing will result in successful market monopolization, -The company's prices must be below any reasonable measure of the cost of production, -And, there must be evidence of actual harm to consumers (merely having a monopoly is not necessarily illegal, as long as the monopoly isn't provably causing actual harm).
Point 4 might be true for Intel, but the others definitely are not.
Not just phones, but there's plenty of room for innovation in almost any commodity. RAM has been a commodity for a long time now, but there's still a ton of innovation going on - the new DDR4 standard bringing on faster speeds, LP and LV RAM lowering power requirements, manufacturing process improvements leading to lower prices, etc. Apparently those kind of extremely complex feats of creative engineering are just too boring to notice.
And they were exactly right to do so. There is no scientifically accepted method to reliably predict earthquakes. There no scientifically accepted method to reliably predict increases in major earthquake risk over short periods of time. Period.
I work in the property & casualty insurance field. You seem to think that these seismologists should have known about some sort of method to detect an increased risk of a major earthquake. Can you tell me what this method is?
Seriously, if you could give my employer a method that reliably calculates increases in earthquake risk based on recent seismic activity, they would pay you 10 billion dollars. I am not even slightly joking about this.
Actually, while your comment is correct in most cases, it's not applicable here. Apparently, according to a whistleblower, upper management paid lower level employees very generously to keep their mouths shut.
If your bank is so horrible, why do you continue to do business there? In the 14 years since I got my first checking and savings accounts, the only fee I have ever paid is a $7 fee to print a spare box of physical checks.
Unless you live in an extremely isolated rural area, you almost certainly have access to a not-for-profit credit union. Heck, even if you are in an isolated area, most credit unions will allow you to deposit checks by mail, and to make all other transactions via the Internet. At one point, I spent two years living 400 miles away from my credit union's nearest branch without a problem.
Also, "less interest" is a function of the Federal Reserve's fiscal policy decisions. Short term interest rates are more or less going to look like whatever the Fed wants them to look like.
The world sure would seem more just if the banks suffered more, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The loans were made specifically on the basis of Moneual's revenue statements. That is, the banks were trying to learn from mistakes they made last decade, and were relying on audited sales figures to make their loans, rather than "it's a technology company, it must be magic" like they were ten years ago. Unfortunately, the company lied about its sales figures, and then the auditing firm confirmed those falsified numbers. I'm not sure why the banks involved "should" have known that Moneual was lying and the auditing firm was incompetent. Maybe it's different in South Korea, but in the U.S., that kind of screwup would put the company's executives in jail for many years, and would lead to crippling fines and lawsuits for the auditing firm (how's Arthur Andersen doing these days?), so income statements and balance sheets tend to be considered fairly trustworthy.
Furthermore, bank loans like this are almost always collateralized by company assets, so in the event of default the bank gets first go at anything left over. Only large, well established companies can get away with issuing unsecured debt without crippling interest rates. Secured debt is precisely why lending to a startup (the Korean parent company is only four years old) is not a "foolish risk." Seriously, think about a world in which banks were not allowed to recover assets from their debtors. Why would any bank issue a loan, or at least a loan without double digit interest rates?
Actually, you don't have to imagine this - just look at the interest rates on a credit card, which is unsecured by any collateral. And before you tell me that those rates are so high only because banks are greedy, compare the credit card interest rate to the interest rate on a mortgage. Both credit cards and mortgages are issued by the same greedy banks, yet one usually has an interest rate of 15%-20% while the other has an interest rate of 4%-5%. The main reason for this difference is the fact that the mortgage is collateralized by the underlying house. That is precisely why lending $200,000 to a couple that makes $60,000 a year is not a foolish risk; the bank knows that it can get most or all of its money back by foreclosing on the house.
And lastly, how would you feel if the same logic got applied to every other fraud victim? Do you find it just as easy to say that the victims of Bernie Madoff "should" have known that something was suspicious, and that those investors took a foolish risk and should suffer the consequences? Why should these fraud victims (and make no mistake, the banks are fraud victims in this case, according to statements from at least one Moneual's own managers) be treated differently just because you don't like them?
Partial answers are given in this article, where a whistleblower answers some of these questions. Some of the answers seem like they have suffered in translation, unfortunately.
By the way, the fraud was not committed by Zalman, but by the South Korean company, Moneual, that bought Zalman in 2011.
I know it's fashionable to hate on health insurance companies, and I agree that there are very many good reasons to do so. But circumventing the restrictions on loss ratios is certainly not one of those reasons.
Insurance companies in the US are subject to Statuatory Accounting Principles, which are distinct from the typical GAAP accounting requirement. Under SAP, insurance companies required to report earned premiums and loss costs, both of which are well defined terms that leave no room for creativity in reporting. The company's loss costs (dollars paid to doctors & hospitals, in this case) divided by earned premiums is its loss ratio. You can calculate these numbers yourself from any insurance company's financial report.
There is no such thing as Hollywood accounting when it comes to U.S. insurance companies. An insurance company CFO would have to be exceptionally stupid or exceptionally desperate to try to fiddle with SAP compliance. I'm not saying it doesn't happen sometimes, but executives absolutely will face federal PMITA prison if they get caught deliberately manipulating SAP figures, not to mention the company being immediately forced into receivership by a bunch of angry state insurance regulators (as an aside, it seems like most Americans really don't understand how harshly deliberate accounting fraud is punished in the US).
And "NEVER" is a demonstrably false adverb - I got my refund check for the first half of 2014 from Blue Cross three months ago. Apparently their loss ratio in my state came in at 84.8%, so I got.2% of my premium refunded.
Again, I don't want to sound like I'm defending health insurance companies, because they can be pretty slimy. But in some ways, their sliminess actually comes because their profit margins are so small - they have to fight and scrap for every penny.
I assume that he was talking about only taxes. Berkshire Hathaway is probably second only to GE in terms of corporate skill at manipulating the tax code.
I find the meme about poor states = conservative to be a bit annoying and misleading. While it is true that conservative states, especially Southern states, tend to have lower median incomes, they also have significantly lower costs of living. "Studies" like this one never adjust for purchasing power parity, and that oversight always makes me question anything else they have to say.
For example, according to Wikipedia's article on household income in the United States (alas, the numbers are a couple of years old), strongly Democrat Hawaii, which is the 5th wealthiest state by income, is actually dead last adjusted for cost of living. New York ranks 44th once incomes are adjusted for purchasing power parity. Virginia and Utah are the two wealthiest states in the U.S. by PPP income. Of course, Mississippi and West Virginia are still poor no matter how you slice it, but the correlation between political orientation and real income among states is weak at best.
This should not be surprising - local government politics in the U.S. look decidedly different from national politics. This is especially true for conservatives - many Republicans are comfortable with giving powers to local or state governments that they would abhor giving to the federal government, and moreover local elections frequently come down to personal, rather than party, politics. So judging the results of a state's internal, local elections and policymaking by how its citizens voted in a national election doesn't make that much sense, because those two things are imperfectly correlated.
Sorry - that turned out to be a bit long and off topic, but I have a problem trusting articles like this that purport to investigate a fairly complicated and nuanced issue while also making such offhand implicit assumptions.
I couldn't agree more. Start 8 basically let me turn Windows 8 into Windows 7.1 - all of the underlying system improvements are there, with none of the UI "improvements." It's fairly irritating to spend $5 on a third-party configuration tool for just for my desktop, but since the result is IMHO the best version of Windows yet, it's hard to complain too much.
All very good points, but I'd mention that the quote about feeling "uneasy" is apparently coming from liberal Christians on campus, not necessarily atheists. The student quoted in the article apparently is, understandably, upset because she feels threatened by extremists from her own religion.
Emily Weigel, an MSU graduate student in evolution and a member of the BEACON center, says the event has made her feel like she’s under attack—in part because of her own religious faith. “As a religious BEACONite, I've never felt unwelcome” at MSU, she says. “But this conference on campus has made me uneasy about my identity on campus for the first time. It's antiacademic in the way it is being carried out, and honestly, it is shaming for fellow Christians to target individuals in an attack such as this one.”
Say what? I'm pretty sure the meaning of the word "reborn" is very much the opposite of "dead."
Semantic quibbles aside, Nokia is very much alive and kicking, as an independent and hopefully revitalized company. They have about 56,000 employees, $15.5 billion in revenues, and and a $30 billion market capitalization. They have been consistently profitable since shedding their phone division, with profits for the upcoming fiscal year expected to be around $1.5 billion. For reference, that puts post-spinoff Nokia at a bit larger than Texas Instruments, and a bit smaller than EMC/VMware (depending on exactly how you measure a company's "size").
I can't speak for any of IBM's other decisions, but in this case I have to strongly disagree with you. The IBM semiconductor business has been losing money hand over fist recently. They can't compete with Samsung or TSMC on price and volume, and there's not enough interest in specialty chips or POWER to make up the slack. It costs at minimum $5 billion to build a new fab, and IBM would have to build at least one, maybe two new fabs, not to mention updating their existing fabs, in order to be competitive with the big guys.
So, IBM could spend $5 billion - $10 billion just to catch up to their competitors, and still be at a very serious risk of the division being unprofitable, or they could spend $1.3 billion knowing for certain that the bleeding will stop. I only wonder what took them so long.
Also, for what it's worth, IBM is allegedly doing this deal in part so that it can focus more money into design research. They've announced a $3 billion investment into their semiconductor research division, which they aren't getting rid of. The implication is that the manufacturing division was crowding out any other R&D spending, and that IBM can now focus on high margin ARM-style licensing instead of getting dragged further into a war with TSMC et al. that they would inevitably lose.
Colloquially speaking, "hacking" means malicious exploitation of computer vulnerabilities for personal gain or other nefarious purposes. Colloquially speaking, a megabyte consists of one million bytes. Colloquially speaking, "virii" is a fake word made up by computer nerds who didn't understand Latin.
Should I be expecting Slashdot to get on board with these colloquialisms as well?
Never is an awfully strong word. Just off the top of my head, Apple/Siri, Micron/Elpida, and Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad have all been extremely successful mergers with obvious synergies. But most successful mergers are boring and don't make the news much, whereas we've been hearing about HP's ongoing woes for at least three solid years.
I'll throw in my agreement with Mint for desktop users.
In my house, my wife is the Linux advocate, while I'm the one who's fond of Windows 7. This is in spite of the fact that I am usually the technically competent tinkerer, and she wants things to "just work." But my wife loves Linux because she never has to call me for help any more now that she got a new laptop and put Mint on it (that's not really a knock on Windows, it's just that her old laptop was a supremely crappy Vista machine that was always crashing).
My wife doesn't have a clue what ALSA or Pulseaudio are, she just knows that she can play all of her music through Amazon Cloud Player. She could care less about open vs. proprietary document formats; she just knows that she can do word processing without paying for Office, while still saving to files her friends & family can read. And she certainly doesn't care about the finer points of human-computer interface design; she's just happy that all of the icons and buttons are in the "right place," where she expects them after almost 20 years of using Windows. Most of all, she loves the fact that Mint never crashes.
Congratulations, Linux advocates. I never thought this day would come. But there's finally a distro out there that 1) can be installed and operated by a technically un-savvy but vaguely intelligent home user using only basic Google skills 2) requires minimal support from technically inclined friends/family 3) is rock stable 4) never, ever requires the use of the console 5) can perform all the basic functions an average home user would want (actual average users, not Slashdot's imaginary "average user") 6) and is still open-source, Unixy, and tinkerable.
Heck, I don't even use Linux, and I'll still say that I love Mint. Why are you Linux On The Desktop advocates not making a bigger deal about Mint?
I will note, however, that my wife flatly refuses to use the GIMP, both because of the weird interface and the awful name. It's the only thing that can make her switch back to her Windows partition. Can't someone come up with something better?
Slashdot Mirror
Bad example - modern evidence suggests that the Great Pyramids were built by salaried employees, possibly as a public works program to make up for the seasonal "unemployment" that would have occurred in sync with the Nile's flooding.
The Western notion that the Egyptians had vast hordes of slaves building the pyramids comes from incorrect speculation by the Ancient Greek historians, who didn't know what they were talking about - not really their fault, since the age of pyramids ended 1500 years before the Greek historians began writing.
I believe that the suit is claiming that Apple was improperly forcing users to perform a factory reset, rather than claiming that the reset process itself was malicious.
Under the ACA, everyone in the United States is required to have health insurance, and health insurance plans are required to provide female contraceptives for free (however, men usually must pay full cost for male contraception). Every women in the United States already has access to free birth control, unless either they are either not complying with the ACA mandate or their employer is one of the very few that have an exemption. Even without insurance, female contraception is around $4-$5 per 28 days at the local pharmacy. What more am I supposed be advocating for?
Interestingly, many pro-lifers actually cite the ubiquitous availability of birth control as one of the reasons they oppose abortion.
The smallest possible deduction for a U.S. taxpayer in 2014 is $3,950 for the personal exemption + $6,200 for the standard deduction. That works out to $845.83 per month, which is certainly enough money for reasonable if sparse two bedroom apartment in my city. And, as I say, that's the theoretical minimum - if you are married, have children, are over 65, are blind, have a high amount of deductible expenses (including but not limited to certain business expenses that you pay for yourself), or earn more than $400 in employment income but less than $37,870, your deduction will be larger - often much larger.
In most tournaments that have a significant prize pool, there is usually an online qualifying followed by an in-person elimination round. This gives the best of both worlds: the tournament is able to invite a larger number of teams than logistics would allow if all games were in-person. But the actual prize money is won at the 2-3 day "main event," where the tournament is able to closely supervise the players.
For example, in Dota 2 the Starladder tournament that is going on right now, based in Kiev, invites 44 teams, and has round-robin group play lasting from Nov. 14 to Jan. 18. Obviously, it wouldn't be possible to make 44 different 5 person teams from all over the world stay in Kiev for two months, so they have to have online play for these group stage games. This means that the fans of just about every major Dota team on Earth will want to watch part of the tournament - great for Starladder's viewership. Theoretically, a team could cheat through the group stages since they're using their own computers, but cheating is fairly unlikely because a) even if the team made it to the finals in Kiev by cheating, they'd just get crushed by the legitimate teams and b) most of the cheats that you can use in Dota are very obvious to observers.
My understanding is that this hack was noteworthy because the creator managed to get it flagged as a legitimate configuration file edit, which means that it was able to be used on tournament computers as well as their own. I could be wrong though; I don't follow CS:GO.
Yuck - please excuse my poor phrasing. It was early in the morning.
Not necessarily. Legally speaking, "tying" as you describe is only a problem if it demonstrably restricts consumer choice (consumers in this case being the phone OEMs). In this case, Intel's actions have if anything increased consumer choice, by providing an alternative to the market-dominating Qualcomm.
In U.S. legal parlance at least, all of the following must to be true behavior to qualify as "predatory pricing" for predatory pricing:
-The business in question must have a dominant or substantial market share,
-It must be more likely than not that the company's practices are affecting not only specific rivals but the entire market as a whole,
-There must be a "substantial likelihood" that the predatory pricing will result in successful market monopolization,
-The company's prices must be below any reasonable measure of the cost of production,
-And, there must be evidence of actual harm to consumers (merely having a monopoly is not necessarily illegal, as long as the monopoly isn't provably causing actual harm).
Point 4 might be true for Intel, but the others definitely are not.
Not just phones, but there's plenty of room for innovation in almost any commodity. RAM has been a commodity for a long time now, but there's still a ton of innovation going on - the new DDR4 standard bringing on faster speeds, LP and LV RAM lowering power requirements, manufacturing process improvements leading to lower prices, etc. Apparently those kind of extremely complex feats of creative engineering are just too boring to notice.
And they were exactly right to do so. There is no scientifically accepted method to reliably predict earthquakes. There no scientifically accepted method to reliably predict increases in major earthquake risk over short periods of time. Period.
I work in the property & casualty insurance field. You seem to think that these seismologists should have known about some sort of method to detect an increased risk of a major earthquake. Can you tell me what this method is?
Seriously, if you could give my employer a method that reliably calculates increases in earthquake risk based on recent seismic activity, they would pay you 10 billion dollars. I am not even slightly joking about this.
Actually, while your comment is correct in most cases, it's not applicable here. Apparently, according to a whistleblower, upper management paid lower level employees very generously to keep their mouths shut.
If your bank is so horrible, why do you continue to do business there? In the 14 years since I got my first checking and savings accounts, the only fee I have ever paid is a $7 fee to print a spare box of physical checks.
Unless you live in an extremely isolated rural area, you almost certainly have access to a not-for-profit credit union. Heck, even if you are in an isolated area, most credit unions will allow you to deposit checks by mail, and to make all other transactions via the Internet. At one point, I spent two years living 400 miles away from my credit union's nearest branch without a problem.
Also, "less interest" is a function of the Federal Reserve's fiscal policy decisions. Short term interest rates are more or less going to look like whatever the Fed wants them to look like.
The world sure would seem more just if the banks suffered more, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The loans were made specifically on the basis of Moneual's revenue statements. That is, the banks were trying to learn from mistakes they made last decade, and were relying on audited sales figures to make their loans, rather than "it's a technology company, it must be magic" like they were ten years ago. Unfortunately, the company lied about its sales figures, and then the auditing firm confirmed those falsified numbers. I'm not sure why the banks involved "should" have known that Moneual was lying and the auditing firm was incompetent. Maybe it's different in South Korea, but in the U.S., that kind of screwup would put the company's executives in jail for many years, and would lead to crippling fines and lawsuits for the auditing firm (how's Arthur Andersen doing these days?), so income statements and balance sheets tend to be considered fairly trustworthy.
Furthermore, bank loans like this are almost always collateralized by company assets, so in the event of default the bank gets first go at anything left over. Only large, well established companies can get away with issuing unsecured debt without crippling interest rates. Secured debt is precisely why lending to a startup (the Korean parent company is only four years old) is not a "foolish risk." Seriously, think about a world in which banks were not allowed to recover assets from their debtors. Why would any bank issue a loan, or at least a loan without double digit interest rates?
Actually, you don't have to imagine this - just look at the interest rates on a credit card, which is unsecured by any collateral. And before you tell me that those rates are so high only because banks are greedy, compare the credit card interest rate to the interest rate on a mortgage. Both credit cards and mortgages are issued by the same greedy banks, yet one usually has an interest rate of 15%-20% while the other has an interest rate of 4%-5%. The main reason for this difference is the fact that the mortgage is collateralized by the underlying house. That is precisely why lending $200,000 to a couple that makes $60,000 a year is not a foolish risk; the bank knows that it can get most or all of its money back by foreclosing on the house.
And lastly, how would you feel if the same logic got applied to every other fraud victim? Do you find it just as easy to say that the victims of Bernie Madoff "should" have known that something was suspicious, and that those investors took a foolish risk and should suffer the consequences? Why should these fraud victims (and make no mistake, the banks are fraud victims in this case, according to statements from at least one Moneual's own managers) be treated differently just because you don't like them?
Partial answers are given in this article, where a whistleblower answers some of these questions. Some of the answers seem like they have suffered in translation, unfortunately.
By the way, the fraud was not committed by Zalman, but by the South Korean company, Moneual, that bought Zalman in 2011.
I know it's fashionable to hate on health insurance companies, and I agree that there are very many good reasons to do so. But circumventing the restrictions on loss ratios is certainly not one of those reasons.
Insurance companies in the US are subject to Statuatory Accounting Principles, which are distinct from the typical GAAP accounting requirement. Under SAP, insurance companies required to report earned premiums and loss costs, both of which are well defined terms that leave no room for creativity in reporting. The company's loss costs (dollars paid to doctors & hospitals, in this case) divided by earned premiums is its loss ratio. You can calculate these numbers yourself from any insurance company's financial report.
There is no such thing as Hollywood accounting when it comes to U.S. insurance companies. An insurance company CFO would have to be exceptionally stupid or exceptionally desperate to try to fiddle with SAP compliance. I'm not saying it doesn't happen sometimes, but executives absolutely will face federal PMITA prison if they get caught deliberately manipulating SAP figures, not to mention the company being immediately forced into receivership by a bunch of angry state insurance regulators (as an aside, it seems like most Americans really don't understand how harshly deliberate accounting fraud is punished in the US).
And "NEVER" is a demonstrably false adverb - I got my refund check for the first half of 2014 from Blue Cross three months ago. Apparently their loss ratio in my state came in at 84.8%, so I got .2% of my premium refunded.
Again, I don't want to sound like I'm defending health insurance companies, because they can be pretty slimy. But in some ways, their sliminess actually comes because their profit margins are so small - they have to fight and scrap for every penny.
I assume that he was talking about only taxes. Berkshire Hathaway is probably second only to GE in terms of corporate skill at manipulating the tax code.
I find the meme about poor states = conservative to be a bit annoying and misleading. While it is true that conservative states, especially Southern states, tend to have lower median incomes, they also have significantly lower costs of living. "Studies" like this one never adjust for purchasing power parity, and that oversight always makes me question anything else they have to say.
For example, according to Wikipedia's article on household income in the United States (alas, the numbers are a couple of years old), strongly Democrat Hawaii, which is the 5th wealthiest state by income, is actually dead last adjusted for cost of living. New York ranks 44th once incomes are adjusted for purchasing power parity. Virginia and Utah are the two wealthiest states in the U.S. by PPP income. Of course, Mississippi and West Virginia are still poor no matter how you slice it, but the correlation between political orientation and real income among states is weak at best.
This should not be surprising - local government politics in the U.S. look decidedly different from national politics. This is especially true for conservatives - many Republicans are comfortable with giving powers to local or state governments that they would abhor giving to the federal government, and moreover local elections frequently come down to personal, rather than party, politics. So judging the results of a state's internal, local elections and policymaking by how its citizens voted in a national election doesn't make that much sense, because those two things are imperfectly correlated.
Sorry - that turned out to be a bit long and off topic, but I have a problem trusting articles like this that purport to investigate a fairly complicated and nuanced issue while also making such offhand implicit assumptions.
I couldn't agree more. Start 8 basically let me turn Windows 8 into Windows 7.1 - all of the underlying system improvements are there, with none of the UI "improvements." It's fairly irritating to spend $5 on a third-party configuration tool for just for my desktop, but since the result is IMHO the best version of Windows yet, it's hard to complain too much.
Count me as one of them. Given a choice between $20 and a window seat, I'll gladly take $20.
When I fly, I see most passengers reading, using a phone or tablet, or sleeping. I never realized that anyone cared about a window view.
All very good points, but I'd mention that the quote about feeling "uneasy" is apparently coming from liberal Christians on campus, not necessarily atheists. The student quoted in the article apparently is, understandably, upset because she feels threatened by extremists from her own religion.
Emily Weigel, an MSU graduate student in evolution and a member of the BEACON center, says the event has made her feel like she’s under attack—in part because of her own religious faith. “As a religious BEACONite, I've never felt unwelcome” at MSU, she says. “But this conference on campus has made me uneasy about my identity on campus for the first time. It's antiacademic in the way it is being carried out, and honestly, it is shaming for fellow Christians to target individuals in an attack such as this one.”
Say what? I'm pretty sure the meaning of the word "reborn" is very much the opposite of "dead."
Semantic quibbles aside, Nokia is very much alive and kicking, as an independent and hopefully revitalized company. They have about 56,000 employees, $15.5 billion in revenues, and and a $30 billion market capitalization. They have been consistently profitable since shedding their phone division, with profits for the upcoming fiscal year expected to be around $1.5 billion. For reference, that puts post-spinoff Nokia at a bit larger than Texas Instruments, and a bit smaller than EMC/VMware (depending on exactly how you measure a company's "size").
I can't speak for any of IBM's other decisions, but in this case I have to strongly disagree with you. The IBM semiconductor business has been losing money hand over fist recently. They can't compete with Samsung or TSMC on price and volume, and there's not enough interest in specialty chips or POWER to make up the slack. It costs at minimum $5 billion to build a new fab, and IBM would have to build at least one, maybe two new fabs, not to mention updating their existing fabs, in order to be competitive with the big guys.
So, IBM could spend $5 billion - $10 billion just to catch up to their competitors, and still be at a very serious risk of the division being unprofitable, or they could spend $1.3 billion knowing for certain that the bleeding will stop. I only wonder what took them so long.
Also, for what it's worth, IBM is allegedly doing this deal in part so that it can focus more money into design research. They've announced a $3 billion investment into their semiconductor research division, which they aren't getting rid of. The implication is that the manufacturing division was crowding out any other R&D spending, and that IBM can now focus on high margin ARM-style licensing instead of getting dragged further into a war with TSMC et al. that they would inevitably lose.
Colloquially speaking, "hacking" means malicious exploitation of computer vulnerabilities for personal gain or other nefarious purposes.
Colloquially speaking, a megabyte consists of one million bytes.
Colloquially speaking, "virii" is a fake word made up by computer nerds who didn't understand Latin.
Should I be expecting Slashdot to get on board with these colloquialisms as well?
Never is an awfully strong word. Just off the top of my head, Apple/Siri, Micron/Elpida, and Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad have all been extremely successful mergers with obvious synergies. But most successful mergers are boring and don't make the news much, whereas we've been hearing about HP's ongoing woes for at least three solid years.
I'll throw in my agreement with Mint for desktop users.
In my house, my wife is the Linux advocate, while I'm the one who's fond of Windows 7. This is in spite of the fact that I am usually the technically competent tinkerer, and she wants things to "just work." But my wife loves Linux because she never has to call me for help any more now that she got a new laptop and put Mint on it (that's not really a knock on Windows, it's just that her old laptop was a supremely crappy Vista machine that was always crashing).
My wife doesn't have a clue what ALSA or Pulseaudio are, she just knows that she can play all of her music through Amazon Cloud Player. She could care less about open vs. proprietary document formats; she just knows that she can do word processing without paying for Office, while still saving to files her friends & family can read. And she certainly doesn't care about the finer points of human-computer interface design; she's just happy that all of the icons and buttons are in the "right place," where she expects them after almost 20 years of using Windows. Most of all, she loves the fact that Mint never crashes.
Congratulations, Linux advocates. I never thought this day would come. But there's finally a distro out there that 1) can be installed and operated by a technically un-savvy but vaguely intelligent home user using only basic Google skills 2) requires minimal support from technically inclined friends/family 3) is rock stable 4) never, ever requires the use of the console 5) can perform all the basic functions an average home user would want (actual average users, not Slashdot's imaginary "average user") 6) and is still open-source, Unixy, and tinkerable.
Heck, I don't even use Linux, and I'll still say that I love Mint. Why are you Linux On The Desktop advocates not making a bigger deal about Mint?
I will note, however, that my wife flatly refuses to use the GIMP, both because of the weird interface and the awful name. It's the only thing that can make her switch back to her Windows partition. Can't someone come up with something better?