If this guy had really been a good CIA ops officer, he would have said nothing until he knew who the leaker was.
Maybe he's already had the leaker rendit..um..reditted? What the hell is the past participle of rendition? Rendered?
Anyway, maybe the dude is already strung up in some 3rd world data center, and this is just a distraction to keep people from thinking he's been found!
The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.
Its like kindergarden here on Slashdot today. Can no one read the English language?
Hmm, I've never seen an ad in itunes on my windows computer that I can recall. I've never gone to their web site though, and never clicked on anything resembling a store and I don't have an apple id or a microsoft id.
I know reading can be hard sometimes, but perhaps the grown ups were talking about ads in iTunes, not ads for iTunes.
You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president, but we do now. The people vote for who their electors vote for. That maybe wasn't how the founders intended for it to work, but they allowed the states to choose how to allocate their electoral votes and all of them have chosen to leave it up to their voters.
You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president
That's half a million voters whose votes basically did not count, and THAT is why the electoral college system is a problem.
Nowhere in the constitution or the intentions of the founders of the US is there anything saying the opinion of the voters SHOULD count towards who is President. In fact, they explicitly set it up to ensure they *didn't*.
The president is the CEO of the US, and the states are the board of directors. You don't see employees of corporations voting for their CEO. Why? Because the vast majority of employees aren't qualified to determine who would make a good CEO.
The electoral system causes presidential candidates to entirely ignore EIGHTY PERCENT of the population. Does that sound right to you? I think it is perfectly reasonable for a candidate to spend a lot of time in California, Texas, New York, and Florida. Because that's where most of the constituents are.
It doesn't ignore eighty percent of the population. It does precisely what it was intended to do -- ignore the entire population.
Electing the president, in the US, is done by the electors associated with the states, not by the people. That's just like how a Prime Minister is elected by the MPs in the UK, or most other elected officials. Why? Because the population is a bunch of morons who aren't qualified to pick a leader.
The fact that you can vote for anything other than positions associated with your state is a tradition the states created, but was *not* the intent of the founders of the US. Go read the 12th amendment -- you may be surprised what it contains, if you haven't. There is absolutely nothing about the people voting for the President, and there was no intention for that to be the case.
The US was founded under the belief that voters needed to be educated, and best understood their local issues, and the people elected in the states had the job of understanding the broader issues. But no one seems to actually learn about the structure of the US government or the reasons why it was carefully structured as it was anymore.
The thing that is messed up in the US isn't that a handful of voters in swing states are picking the president, its that the teeming masses of mouth breathers no matter where they live have any say in it. We've cut out the layers of indirection that were put in place explicitly to keep a more stable central government.
And this, kids, is precisely why you need to plan aggressively for retirement.
(To the original poster, I don't really have any suggestions, but you're making an important point -- work hard, save hard, and "what can I do to find work" when you're 60 isn't a question you'll need to worry about...)
Do you think Apple doesn't 'embed' a music store in their OS? Doesn't iTunes come pre-installed on both MacOS and iOS?
Yeah, but neither the iTunes player nor the store show me ads.
You launch the music player, you play music. You launch the music store, and it will show you stuff to buy.
This is ads embedded in the native apps... which is a whole different thing.
Of course iTunes does -- the whole right column in the display is ads trying to get you to buy music related to what you've got, or complete the album the music is from, etc...
Just as well, because if they ever did get off their planet they would be able to beat us. (their ships would out maneuver ours , they would have faster reflexes, and we wouldn't have a chance in hand to claw combat
And worst of all, their muscles are probably so dense, no amount of slow roasting will bring out any real flavor.
Unless its covered in a form of plant life that absorbs, refines and aggregates Uranium, eventually ending up in small thermonuclear blasts used to spread their spores in a more effective way in the high gravity. Then the inhabitants can just collect up their nukkel fruits, and make their own Orion-type engines to get off the planet.
The Anti-Apple routine here at Slashdot is getting very, very old. Well of course Apple charges more. They make the majority of their cash on hardware (although the App and iTunes stores are pretty lucrative too). Amazon is *all* about the content. So their goal is to get you to buy a Kindle by any means possible so they can make money on content sales. Apple's goal is to entice you to buy their hardware - if you don't buy anything in the store, no big deal they've made their money. Anything extra is gravy. The Kindle and iPad have different use cases & marketing models and are priced accordingly.
Now you wanna complain? Why does Microsoft make more than $250 on every Surface Tablet ? (Guess: because they actually don't expect to sell many)
Apple is more of a media company than Amazon is. By a long shot. And "anything else" is not gravy for Apple. Its the sole reason for the devices existing, and the sole reason they have to justify their stock price to investors.
If people wouldn't pay $500 for an iPad, Apple would be selling them at cost, just like Amazon. Amazon doesn't have the brand clout Apple does. The Amazon name doesn't automatically add $200 in value to the product. You better believe, if Amazon could get away with $500, they would. And if Apple couldn't, they'd still be selling the iPads.
The Cadillac still seems to be targeted at old people, and based on the way I see most driven, self driving Cadillacs will be a huge benefit to motorists everywhere. The last time I saw the interior of one, it looked like all navigation and controls had been made large enough to be operated by someone with extremely poor vision. I shuddered. Yes, I realize most of them have a lot of power, but it's exceedingly rare that one is driven like it has.
If Cadillac sold a self-driving car for $100k, I'd be in line day one for it, and I'm not old. I just have a very long, stop-and-go, miserable commute. It'd be worth every penny of that kind of price, if not just for my long term sanity.
I'm fond of Detroit, but it's worth mentioning that it could be a set from Blade Runner.
Well, on the upside, if you enjoy having variety in your living situation, you can buy a whole block fairly easily. You can have a house for every day of the week!
One of the first lessons to be learned in a unionized shop is that doing the absolute minimum gets paid exactly as much as working really hard and trying to excel.
Second lesson to be learned is what is the absolute minimum necessary to avoid getting fired?
Third lesson is how to suck up to the union bosses so that, even when you drop below the minimum work level, they'll still protect you.
On second thought, you've sold me. Where can I sign up?
Obviously you can't go straight back to industrial levels. You would have to start with considerably lower-tech solutions and build up from there, not too different from how it worked the first time around. The object is to make it faster (without the overhead of rediscovery from scratch), not to make it instantaneous.
The first time around, you could mine coal with hand tools. Oil was found near the surface, and could be drilled with primitive equipment. Before that there were massive old growth forests of dense wood that could be felled for fuel. None of that is true anymore. We've used up all of the easy to acquire resources. You need to dig deep for metals, you need to dig deep for coal. You need to drill deep for oil.
Its optimistic to think its even possible to bootstrap anymore. There may be very limited sources of all the required resources available, but they're geographically diverse and (more importantly) not politically aligned. Western industrialization happened via effectively strip-mining all accessible resources, and iteratively applying the results of those increases in modernization to make additional resources available.
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
Neither are actually really of much use. There's too much interconnected technology these days. Behind any one little thing there's a chain of a hundred other technologies (or entire industries) supporting it. And underlying almost all of it is "available energy". There are very few viable energy sources a group of "survivors" could tap if they truly had to bootstrap a technical society again. The fuel sources that powered industrialization (coal, whale oil, eventually petroleum) are all largely non-recoverable anymore without infrastructure built up over time using those same energy sources.
A bulldozer won't help you do much -- you need steel to make more. That takes electricity or coal. To get electricity, you need (in its simplest form, something like hydro) bulldozers. To get coal, you need them, too. And to build them you need steel -- and fuel to power them. To get that fuel, you need drilling equipment. See where this goes?
If you really wanted to help "survivors" you need to enormously reduce the industrial and energy requirements of manufacturing your manufacturing equipment. The industrial revolution was very likely a one-time event in history, at this point.
Why would developers need unions? We have fantastic work conditions, we get paid very well in comparison to the people around us, and we can pick between a plethora of jobs. Furthermore, we are not tied to a geographic location, as farctory workers are. I fear that my own quality of life would go down as a function of union creation. Why would one want to push this 19th century concept into the 21st century work place. If I don't like the work conditions where I am, I quit and I have another job as soon as I want one. Take your union corruption and stick it somewhere obscure please.
The lousy developers who think their skills are worth dramatically more than they are want the unions. Unions lower everyone to the lowest common denominator. They protect the incompetent at the expense of the competent.
I think a vast number of developers would benefit, if they could get shops unionized. Most developers are well south of competent at their jobs. That said, the ones who are good have the clout -- they'd be promoted into development management positions (avoiding the unions), and a smart company would fire the rest and outsource at the first hint of it.
What "blows my mind", is this: I've been to Europe & saw castles that have stood for 2-3 thousand years, & touched their mortar. Guess what? It's STILL solid as the day it cured & dried... tells me a lot, right there - they didn't "skimp" on using the right amount of lime in it (vs. overdoing the sand part to save a buck).
No, you didn't. Virtually all castles in Europe are 300-600 years old. Some VERY uncommon ones may be 1000. None are 2-3 thousand years old. And the ones you see that aren't piles of rubble are ones that were actively rebuilt, maintained and/or restored MANY times since their construction. You can tell the ones that are old -- they're overgrown piles of rubble with a random wall here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, because I've personally worked on hundreds of them.
*woosh*
If the USPTO can grant patents on rounded corners(Apple) why not this ?
Those are design patents.
If you don't understand patents, its probably best to not comment on patents. And, you don't understand patents.
Cheap Tablets with limited 3G bandwidth and full access to the Internet. Let the real revolution start!
Who is going to revolt when they're bleeding profusely from the head wounds the tablets caused?
A short list of his hobbies are: Water-boarding, fingernail pulling, testicular electrical shock, sodium pentathol injections, sleep depravation,
Sounds like my last girlfriend ...
Damn, I miss her.
If this guy had really been a good CIA ops officer, he would have said nothing until he knew who the leaker was.
Maybe he's already had the leaker rendit..um..reditted? What the hell is the past participle of rendition? Rendered?
Anyway, maybe the dude is already strung up in some 3rd world data center, and this is just a distraction to keep people from thinking he's been found!
The whole metaphor of the Nation as Business stinks. You go telling people the President is a CEO, your next step is to say that USA Inc. can fire its underperforming citizens. Of course you favor disenfranchising the vast majority of voters - your metaphor justifies taking every single right they have away, not just the franchise. And, it justifies taking all yours away as well, which is probably not what you intended and not something I would wish on you. I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt and assuming you meant "nowhere in the constitution, PRE-AMENDMENTS" rather than including them in your analysis, and even with that limitation, there's nothing to say the founders opposed the individual ballot BECAUSE OF A CORPORATE ANALOGY. The founding fathers may have mostly opposed direct popular election of the president. At least some of them certainly wanted the EC as a check on democracy running roughtshod over the rights of the states. To turn that into claiming the US is intended to function as would a corporation, is sort of like claiming Teddy Rosevelt was a total pacifist because only a Ghandi clone would have started a national park system. You have to ignore a tremendous number of inconvenient facts to stretch the truth that far.
Its like kindergarden here on Slashdot today. Can no one read the English language?
Hmm, I've never seen an ad in itunes on my windows computer that I can recall. I've never gone to their web site though, and never clicked on anything resembling a store and I don't have an apple id or a microsoft id.
I know reading can be hard sometimes, but perhaps the grown ups were talking about ads in iTunes, not ads for iTunes.
You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president, but we do now. The people vote for who their electors vote for. That maybe wasn't how the founders intended for it to work, but they allowed the states to choose how to allocate their electoral votes and all of them have chosen to leave it up to their voters.
You're entirely wrong. The original design was that the people wouldn't vote for the president
I do not think it means what you think it means.
That's half a million voters whose votes basically did not count, and THAT is why the electoral college system is a problem.
Nowhere in the constitution or the intentions of the founders of the US is there anything saying the opinion of the voters SHOULD count towards who is President. In fact, they explicitly set it up to ensure they *didn't*.
The president is the CEO of the US, and the states are the board of directors. You don't see employees of corporations voting for their CEO. Why? Because the vast majority of employees aren't qualified to determine who would make a good CEO.
The electoral system causes presidential candidates to entirely ignore EIGHTY PERCENT of the population. Does that sound right to you? I think it is perfectly reasonable for a candidate to spend a lot of time in California, Texas, New York, and Florida. Because that's where most of the constituents are.
It doesn't ignore eighty percent of the population. It does precisely what it was intended to do -- ignore the entire population.
Electing the president, in the US, is done by the electors associated with the states, not by the people. That's just like how a Prime Minister is elected by the MPs in the UK, or most other elected officials. Why? Because the population is a bunch of morons who aren't qualified to pick a leader.
The fact that you can vote for anything other than positions associated with your state is a tradition the states created, but was *not* the intent of the founders of the US. Go read the 12th amendment -- you may be surprised what it contains, if you haven't. There is absolutely nothing about the people voting for the President, and there was no intention for that to be the case.
The US was founded under the belief that voters needed to be educated, and best understood their local issues, and the people elected in the states had the job of understanding the broader issues. But no one seems to actually learn about the structure of the US government or the reasons why it was carefully structured as it was anymore.
The thing that is messed up in the US isn't that a handful of voters in swing states are picking the president, its that the teeming masses of mouth breathers no matter where they live have any say in it. We've cut out the layers of indirection that were put in place explicitly to keep a more stable central government.
And this, kids, is precisely why you need to plan aggressively for retirement.
(To the original poster, I don't really have any suggestions, but you're making an important point -- work hard, save hard, and "what can I do to find work" when you're 60 isn't a question you'll need to worry about...)
In west Texas, they know how to bbq a tough brisket until it melts in your mouth. Just sayin.
Of course, in West Texas, they don't really believe in science, so we may have a bit of an impasse.
Yeah, but neither the iTunes player nor the store show me ads.
You launch the music player, you play music. You launch the music store, and it will show you stuff to buy.
This is ads embedded in the native apps ... which is a whole different thing.
Of course iTunes does -- the whole right column in the display is ads trying to get you to buy music related to what you've got, or complete the album the music is from, etc ...
Just as well, because if they ever did get off their planet they would be able to beat us.
(their ships would out maneuver ours , they would have faster reflexes, and we wouldn't have a chance in hand to claw combat
And worst of all, their muscles are probably so dense, no amount of slow roasting will bring out any real flavor.
seven times more massive than Earth...
so much for their early space program
Unless its covered in a form of plant life that absorbs, refines and aggregates Uranium, eventually ending up in small thermonuclear blasts used to spread their spores in a more effective way in the high gravity. Then the inhabitants can just collect up their nukkel fruits, and make their own Orion-type engines to get off the planet.
It'd be a real blast.
Wondering if this was Kobol'sstar?
No, Battlestar Galactica was a fictional story, not a documentary.
The Anti-Apple routine here at Slashdot is getting very, very old. Well of course Apple charges more. They make the majority of their cash on hardware (although the App and iTunes stores are pretty lucrative too). Amazon is *all* about the content. So their goal is to get you to buy a Kindle by any means possible so they can make money on content sales. Apple's goal is to entice you to buy their hardware - if you don't buy anything in the store, no big deal they've made their money. Anything extra is gravy. The Kindle and iPad have different use cases & marketing models and are priced accordingly.
Now you wanna complain? Why does Microsoft make more than $250 on every Surface Tablet ? (Guess: because they actually don't expect to sell many)
Apple is more of a media company than Amazon is. By a long shot. And "anything else" is not gravy for Apple. Its the sole reason for the devices existing, and the sole reason they have to justify their stock price to investors.
If people wouldn't pay $500 for an iPad, Apple would be selling them at cost, just like Amazon. Amazon doesn't have the brand clout Apple does. The Amazon name doesn't automatically add $200 in value to the product. You better believe, if Amazon could get away with $500, they would. And if Apple couldn't, they'd still be selling the iPads.
The Cadillac still seems to be targeted at old people, and based on the way I see most driven, self driving Cadillacs will be a huge benefit to motorists everywhere. The last time I saw the interior of one, it looked like all navigation and controls had been made large enough to be operated by someone with extremely poor vision. I shuddered. Yes, I realize most of them have a lot of power, but it's exceedingly rare that one is driven like it has.
If Cadillac sold a self-driving car for $100k, I'd be in line day one for it, and I'm not old. I just have a very long, stop-and-go, miserable commute. It'd be worth every penny of that kind of price, if not just for my long term sanity.
I'm fond of Detroit, but it's worth mentioning that it could be a set from Blade Runner.
Well, on the upside, if you enjoy having variety in your living situation, you can buy a whole block fairly easily. You can have a house for every day of the week!
One of the first lessons to be learned in a unionized shop is that doing the absolute minimum gets paid exactly as much as working really hard and trying to excel.
Second lesson to be learned is what is the absolute minimum necessary to avoid getting fired?
Third lesson is how to suck up to the union bosses so that, even when you drop below the minimum work level, they'll still protect you.
On second thought, you've sold me. Where can I sign up?
Obviously you can't go straight back to industrial levels. You would have to start with considerably lower-tech solutions and build up from there, not too different from how it worked the first time around. The object is to make it faster (without the overhead of rediscovery from scratch), not to make it instantaneous.
The first time around, you could mine coal with hand tools. Oil was found near the surface, and could be drilled with primitive equipment. Before that there were massive old growth forests of dense wood that could be felled for fuel. None of that is true anymore. We've used up all of the easy to acquire resources. You need to dig deep for metals, you need to dig deep for coal. You need to drill deep for oil.
Its optimistic to think its even possible to bootstrap anymore. There may be very limited sources of all the required resources available, but they're geographically diverse and (more importantly) not politically aligned. Western industrialization happened via effectively strip-mining all accessible resources, and iteratively applying the results of those increases in modernization to make additional resources available.
Perhaps not, but the idea of an archive from which the survivors of a disaster could start to rebuild is intriguing. I'd tend to focus more in information than objects, mostly because I believe it would be easier to ensure that the information survives in a usable state, but objects do have the advantage of allowing you to test your specifications.
Neither are actually really of much use. There's too much interconnected technology these days. Behind any one little thing there's a chain of a hundred other technologies (or entire industries) supporting it. And underlying almost all of it is "available energy". There are very few viable energy sources a group of "survivors" could tap if they truly had to bootstrap a technical society again. The fuel sources that powered industrialization (coal, whale oil, eventually petroleum) are all largely non-recoverable anymore without infrastructure built up over time using those same energy sources.
A bulldozer won't help you do much -- you need steel to make more. That takes electricity or coal. To get electricity, you need (in its simplest form, something like hydro) bulldozers. To get coal, you need them, too. And to build them you need steel -- and fuel to power them. To get that fuel, you need drilling equipment. See where this goes?
If you really wanted to help "survivors" you need to enormously reduce the industrial and energy requirements of manufacturing your manufacturing equipment. The industrial revolution was very likely a one-time event in history, at this point.
Why would developers need unions? We have fantastic work conditions, we get paid very well in comparison to the people around us, and we can pick between a plethora of jobs. Furthermore, we are not tied to a geographic location, as farctory workers are. I fear that my own quality of life would go down as a function of union creation. Why would one want to push this 19th century concept into the 21st century work place. If I don't like the work conditions where I am, I quit and I have another job as soon as I want one. Take your union corruption and stick it somewhere obscure please.
The lousy developers who think their skills are worth dramatically more than they are want the unions. Unions lower everyone to the lowest common denominator. They protect the incompetent at the expense of the competent.
I think a vast number of developers would benefit, if they could get shops unionized. Most developers are well south of competent at their jobs. That said, the ones who are good have the clout -- they'd be promoted into development management positions (avoiding the unions), and a smart company would fire the rest and outsource at the first hint of it.
What "blows my mind", is this: I've been to Europe & saw castles that have stood for 2-3 thousand years, & touched their mortar. Guess what? It's STILL solid as the day it cured & dried... tells me a lot, right there - they didn't "skimp" on using the right amount of lime in it (vs. overdoing the sand part to save a buck).
No, you didn't. Virtually all castles in Europe are 300-600 years old. Some VERY uncommon ones may be 1000. None are 2-3 thousand years old. And the ones you see that aren't piles of rubble are ones that were actively rebuilt, maintained and/or restored MANY times since their construction. You can tell the ones that are old -- they're overgrown piles of rubble with a random wall here and there.
If price of the electric car > Price of cheap gas fueled car + 200,000 miles of gasoline then don't buy
If economics are how you judge a vehicle, spending anything more than a couple grand on a used car is a bad decision for you.