Yes, that is correct. The anti-birth-control, anti-abortion movements stem as much from a sociocultural condemnation of premarital and unprotected sex (primarily by Limbaugh's "sluts") as any religious proscription.
Of course, the problem is that they're trying to pass laws about what other people can do -- whether or not they subscribe to their religious beliefs.
Anybody trying to pass laws that enforce their religious beliefs need to remember that it's not all about them, and that not all of us wish to be subject to their whims. They don't get a vote on what I do. Their god doesn't either -- that'll be between me and him if it comes to that.
I, for instance, think it should be illegal to come to my door peddling your religion or try to inject it into public education. Woe to someone who comes to my door telling me how I can achieve salvation.
Religion is the basis of your morality, fine. But when your religion spills over into telling other people what they should do when it has no impact on you... well, fuck off and keep your opinion to yourself. (I don't mean "you" or "your" in the specific, but in the general abstract sense.)
I must admit though, IKEA is a cool store to visit, if I want to earn browny points with the wife. She could spend days in there if they let her.
They just opened a new store in my area... well, they replaced the existing one.
Quite frankly, the place terrifies me. As you drive by it, it's enormous. It dwarfs the mall and restaurants near it, has something like 4 levels of parking. They went from 113,000 square feet to 427,000 square feet.
When you drive by it on the highway it looks so ridiculously outsized, it's not funny. It really is quite incongruous and looks like it is as big as some malls -- except it's a giant yellow and blue building. I think it even has a jumbotron on the front of it.
I'm curious, but I just can't imagine trying to go there on a weekend or most evenings. It was already overly difficult to get in and out and crammed with people and annoying to get in and out of.
They've got some cool stuff, but with the size of the one near me, I just don't know if I even want to go there any more. At least not without bringing my portable GPS and a snack.;-)
In this context "monetize" means transforming the content demand into something that can be resold
Holy crap, is that what that means? I R'd TFA several times, and had no idea what this meant.
So, not selling ads is not monetizing?
I really can't tell WTF Perry is arguing for, against, or about from the linked article. Or is are the content people arguing that everything should to be 'monetized' so some asshole can sell ads in every digital thing I ever get?
I guess these are the same people who claim that the version as broadcast has to include the ads it aired with -- ignoring that the ads vary by region as local stations sell their own ads.
There you go, you have no clue what economics is, you have no clue what free market is, you have no clue what the federal reserve is, you don't know what money is.
See, if you keep asserting your opinion as fact, and being an asshole about it, that's your problem.
You're mostly full of shit, and have decided that you have some special knowledge the rest of us couldn't possibly have which therefore makes you superior. Mostly it makes you a smug prick.
as I said, you never had principles.
Go fuck yourself.
You're entitled to your beliefs and your opinions, but since you know absolutely nothing about me, saying something like that makes you a grade a dickhead.
Either you're an exceedingly skilled troll, or really are an asshole. Either way, I don't care.
you are right, my position comes out of very strong principles, no doubt about it.
I have never doubted the fervor of your beliefs or principles, but I drank the Ayn Rand Kool Aid for 15 years. Then I decided to get over it.
I've just decided that it's completely soulless and without any form of empathy. And I just don't see pure capitalism providing the solutions that those who worship it expect of it. It's become like religious dogma that can't be questioned. It's overly romanticized and fixed and held as infallible.
The more I've watched economics since I gave up on believing the 'libertarian-capitalist' stuff, I'm convinced that a lot of the assumptions of these models is completely wrong. It's like when physicist assume a perfectly spherical cow. It makes the math easy, but it's not accurate.
So when you could see some train wrecks coming (like Greenspan telling people to borrow against their homes because it's "free money") it's hard to believe people who so fervently believe the Free Market Will Fix. It doesn't, it just moves wealth upwards to create serfs out of the schmucks at the bottom. Corporations get rich while everyone else's standard of living goes down... but, hey, that's Capitalism. That's simply not sustainable. In its current form, Capitalism is eating us.
Sadly, I find that the Right has totally unrealistic economic policies that amount to wishful thinking, and unfortunately, the Left does as well. Both are convinced that if only we'd implement their notion of things, Everything Would Be Alright. But since I've stopped seeing things in black and white, and see a whole lot more shades of grey and nuance as I get older.
I totally think that a society which doesn't want to help pay for itself to operate is going to be in decline. I totally think that actively cultivating an attitude that the rest of the world can fuck off and leave you to fend for yourself eats into you over time and has a tendency to make you an asshole (speaking from personal experience, of course).
I've read and made many of the arguments you make. I just disagree with you as strongly as you believe in what you do. Because there was a time I'd have agreed with you; just not any more.
that's why I don't subscribe to any socialist principles, because they are the ones that operate on a belief that people are not rational actors
Have you looked around? Collectively, people aren't rational actors. The economic assumptions that the populace are rational actors acting on perfect information, and that the people in that market would never attempt to cheat, lie or steal is what finally made me realize your model of economics is based on untenable axioms. To me, it's your system which tries to make people into something they're not. People have been cooperating to eke out a better life for thousands of years. Precisely because it is in their best interest.
People do irrational things. People don't know what's always best for them.
Your system boils down to "fuck everyone else, as long as I have my gun to protect myself I can make it". That's not a "society", that's an uneasy peace since sooner or later one of these people who wants to win is going to remember it's far easier to just take it. You know, like Somalia.
You need to stop believing in Santa Clause.
And you the Easter Bunny. Or, maybe I should say Easter Bunnye since we're adding random e's.
As always, such a stimulating conversation.
I had forgotten how boring this stuff is and why I stopped reading Ayn Rand in the first place. Your rugged individualism is more like anti-social behavior to me. I also understand just how thoroughly committed you are to that viewpoint.
So, roll around in your ideology and fantasies of John Galt or being worthy enough to lick the boots of Dagny Taggart. I outgrew that shit 10 years ago.
You see, when USA was actually a free society, it was after the Civil War and before the Fed was established and IRS started collecting income taxes, that's when everybody wanted to come TO USA to do business, because how free the country was.
I've said it before to you, and I'll say it again... if you think you'd suddenly end up with some magically perfect society by rolling back that far, I believe you're sorely mistaken.
You'd end up with something like "Escape From New York" as your society would fall apart.
And, please, don't bother telling me again how the Austrian School of economics and Ron Paul magically prove all of your points. I don't feel like having that discussion again. You might as well try to tell me how the bible proves something scientific.
I work for an American cloud service provider, and even we do not want to store our(customers') data in the U.S. The patriot act is a huge obstacle when selling to foreign customers. Hence why we have a major data center in Canada, and are looking at putting one in the U.K.
Unless it's an arms length, wholly owned subsidiary in which the employees are all legally entitled to tell anybody with a Patriot Act request to piss off, you haven't done anything. Because an American owned company is still American controlled and subject to US laws.
So, unless you can demonstrate a lot more legal safeguards, you still might have troubles. Because if Americans can still access the data center, it's no different than if it was actually in the US in terms of the Patriot Act.
No, the US government is rightly concerned with the Australian government making spurious claims of security problems that harm legitimate competition for money from Australian companies, and is bringing up the issue with he Australian government, which is its job.
Sorry, but under the US Patriot Act, the US government has granted themselves unlimited, and secret access to any and all data stored on a US server.
I've done some contract work for the Canadian Government, and it is illegal to store certain kinds of information on US based servers because it would potentially violate Canadian law. There are companies who have arms-length subsidiaries whose job it is to handle government data that could not be allowed to be stored in the US. This is no different than similar issues with US owned companies accessing EU data because of the Patriot Act.
The US can claim their companies are being hurt by this, but the fact of the matter is, the US is not a trustworthy place to store your data unless you are also going to accept them potentially spying on your citizens.
This isn't a trade issue. It's a trust issue.
So if America wants to keep their Patriot Act which tries to violate the laws of other countries, their businesses are going to lose out in those markets if it would mean those companies can't comply with local laws and the US law at the same time.
Sorry, but these aren't spurious claims -- they're well established issues which have been covered before.
The reason I like Python so much is that it has the least syntactic silliness of any language I've used
Except for the whole "whitespace is syntacticly meaningful" thing.
The only Python code I've ever seen left me shaking my head... it could have been because it was shit code, but I just can't fathom why whitespace should affect the compilers interpretation of what the code means.
Though, clearly loads of people seem to like it so I'm probably in the minority on that one.
I know a lot of people don't like Java, but for teaching a language to an 11 year old, it abstracts out a lot of the crap and it's easy to get a development environment going.
So, maybe for an 11 year old "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" or something. If he gets through that then find the boy a new machine and get him whatever he needs.
Eclipse + Java and your kid is half way to being a rock star. From there, he could probably teach himself most any language out there.
Resolution and aspect ratio SHOULD NOT be tied together like that. If they are it means your display subsystem is naive and generally crap.
Umm.. the pixel size of an LCD monitor is usually fixed and defines both the aspect ratio and the resolution. Kind of by definition.
If you have a 1600x1200 resolution monitor that's physically got a wider aspect ratio than 4:3, all they've really done is stretch everything out wider. It's not a "real" widescreen -- it just looks like one. In this case, text in the manufacturers recommended setting looked like hell, and circles were oval. It's not like you could tell it to display at a resolution it can't physically do. Because it was physically shaped like a 16x9 or 16x10, but it had pixels counts which corresponded to 4:3.
As long as we have discrete pixels, I completely fail to see how we could have anything else. It's a grid, and the ratio of width to height is aspect ratio.
We're talking about physical properties here, so I would love to hear in what way this can made otherwise. Or do you have a display subsystem which is independent of the physical attributes of the display?
You might believe that, but studies show that long lines fatigue the eyes. Typography is well established science, and the 80 character limit is actually on the high end of what is recommended.
But you're only talking about reading text. My browser windows aren't as wide as my whole screen, but I do have two side by side. So I don't have a 400 line row of text, but I have a larger number of normal sized windows visible at once.
Not absolutely every task that people do is just reading text, but I regularly see people in Word with it full screen so they have two pages displayed at a time. I see loads of spreadsheets that have enough columns that a wider view lets you actually read it without constantly scrolling.
Hell, I've got a server monitor application open which has 6 windows, and one of them I've got set to about 5" high and about 16" wide so I can see what it says in one look without scrolling.
You're also forgetting about people doing graphics stuff. Not every task people do with computers comes down to reading text formatted in paragraphs. Or having your email client, IM client, and browser all visible on screen at once.
So, maybe for the singular case you're talking about a wider monitor offers no advantage. But for a lot of stuff, I'll stick by my assertion.
I knew people who used 132 columns on VT100's almost 20 years ago. I find 80 columns for code to be too small.
And, having upgraded to a widescreen monitor several years ago, I can have two windows side by side or overlapping and have more on the screen. I've got a Visio diagram I keep open most of the time with my network diagram on it, and it's the width of the screen that allows me to see more, and several applications I use can present more information on a wider screen. Throw in virtual desktops, and I've got 10+ square feet of screen available to me.
Not everything is just plain text displayed in courier font.
What you say is your opinion (and your welcome to it), but having the wider screen for a vast number of us is more productive. Hell, the company I work for, dual widescreen monitors is the norm for *everyone* -- which gives you a lot more horizontal resolution than vertical. The ability to look at things side by side is damned useful. If it wasn't for the fact that I'd need to buy a second video card, I'd have added a second widescreen monitor to my home machine.
However, I know for *some* applications, flipping a widescreen monitor 90 degrees to give you a tall screen works. For me not so much since I'm not editing documents that much.
Statcounter released new statistics today and 1366x768 is now the most used screen resolution on the internet. These screens are available in most cheap laptops, and therefore probably sold and used very much.
My wife was just bitching about her new work laptop today because it's got a smaller screen than her old one. This is the resolution she's running at.
I find it kind of pathetic that in this day and age companies are rolling out laptops to their employees with something which is only modestly better than 1024x768, which I was running in '91.
Reminds me of a monitor I got with a work PC a couple of years back -- it was a widescreen monitor, but it's native resolution was still 4:3. Which basically meant it couldn't draw circles, and was optimized more to be a TV than a computer monitor. WTF is the point in doing that? It looked like crap as a computer monitor.
i believe it said technical director, not the director. he was they guy in charge of trying to explain computers and what is and is not possible with said computers to the director.
Well, he may need someone to explain to him how laws work, and what is and is not possible with said laws.
I don't see them having any legal leg to stand on if they build this in such a way as to say "Oh, sorry, we can't comply with your Patriot Act request".
Practically I don't see that the U.S. Court had any choice but to slap them down hard to discourage that as a tactic. Don't like how your case is going here? Sue in France!
Well, given what we've seen over the last bunch of months, the big players are variously suing each other in several courts around the world.
The reality is, these companies do business in lots of countries, and operate under multiple legal jurisdictions. How many different countries are Samsung and Apple suing one another in?
I don't see how the US court can have anything to say about legal proceedings in other countries when there's already plenty of instances of this exact thing happening. It's not like it's new.
Sadly, corporations rely on lawyers so much nowadays, this is the new normal. Especially since everybody has patented everything they can think of so they can sue everybody who isn't willing to license from them.
Former or not, still sounds like a 5th column in the making.
Yeah, I have a hard time believing the former director of the NSA is going to be willing to help create an ISP which would allow you to not be spied on by the NSA.
And, as people have pointed out, there's simply no way you could build this to circumvent the Patriot Act and other things without being illegal under those very things.
Castro was a mudering, bloodly, opperssive, totalitarian tyrant.
So was Batista before him -- but he was pro-American and corrupt as hell, so America liked him. I'm not defending everything Castro ever did, but he's been the bogey man to Americans since the 60's.
But having met and interacted with Cubans, they're not some oppressed people living under the boot heel of despotism. They're poor as hell. They're nice as you can get. And they're not particularly keen about the Platt Amendment by which the US gave themselves the right to meddle in Cuban legal issues and keep Guantanamo Bay. But generally, they do have freedoms and rights these days.
But quite honestly, I'd be more worried about the US than I would Cuba, because the US sounding much more creepy if you can be 'border searched' through an entire state.
But then you said "free education" and "free health care", so I suspect you're immune to any sort of reality.
OK, let me clarify and say socialized healthcare and public education -- they still pay for you guys to go to grade school, right? Ooooh, socialism. How evil.
So if you want to talk about 'reality' there skippy, some of us live in countries in which reality includes socialized medicine. Believe it or not, it works a lot better than the absurd 'for profit' medicine in America.
You and I may disagree about the economics and politics of it, but don't be a dick and say that I'm immune to reality. I've read the books, I just disagree with the conclusions. You're not the arbiter of reality.
A modern society without some form of socialism will devolve rapidly into a place you wouldn't want to live. But, hey, that's what the guns are for, right?
When you see totalitarian operations like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela
So, off topic here, but I'm betting what you know about Cuba is mostly wrong.
The Cubans largely like Castro, have the benefit of free education and health care, freedom of religion, and are generally mostly happy people. They're poor, but that's largely because of the American embargo.
Putting it into the list with Iran and North Korea tells me the sources who told you about Cuba are somewhat biased. Having been to Cuba several times, I wouldn't really call it totalitarian in any meaningful sense of the word.
I'm more afraid of the US government than the Cuban one.
Slashdot Mirror
Were they funny back then? I seem to recall it was rather a lame video game.
OK, how about having known wizened old geeks in the 90's people referred to as neckbeards.
To me it's a full beard where you make no pretense of shaving your neck, just pruning the beard back, if at all.
The version from urban dictionary I cited matches with my 20 year old usage of the term.
Anecdotal? Sure. Real usage? Absolutely.
LOL, is "multiple regional cache servers" now "the cloud"?
I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, I've just never seen it distilled quite down to its essence like that.
Going by definitition 3 on Urban Dictionary, that is exactly what I've always thought of as a neckbeard.
Of course, I'm sure it's not a standardized word either.
Of course, the problem is that they're trying to pass laws about what other people can do -- whether or not they subscribe to their religious beliefs.
Anybody trying to pass laws that enforce their religious beliefs need to remember that it's not all about them, and that not all of us wish to be subject to their whims. They don't get a vote on what I do. Their god doesn't either -- that'll be between me and him if it comes to that.
I, for instance, think it should be illegal to come to my door peddling your religion or try to inject it into public education. Woe to someone who comes to my door telling me how I can achieve salvation.
Religion is the basis of your morality, fine. But when your religion spills over into telling other people what they should do when it has no impact on you ... well, fuck off and keep your opinion to yourself. (I don't mean "you" or "your" in the specific, but in the general abstract sense.)
They just opened a new store in my area ... well, they replaced the existing one.
Quite frankly, the place terrifies me. As you drive by it, it's enormous. It dwarfs the mall and restaurants near it, has something like 4 levels of parking. They went from 113,000 square feet to 427,000 square feet.
When you drive by it on the highway it looks so ridiculously outsized, it's not funny. It really is quite incongruous and looks like it is as big as some malls -- except it's a giant yellow and blue building. I think it even has a jumbotron on the front of it.
I'm curious, but I just can't imagine trying to go there on a weekend or most evenings. It was already overly difficult to get in and out and crammed with people and annoying to get in and out of.
They've got some cool stuff, but with the size of the one near me, I just don't know if I even want to go there any more. At least not without bringing my portable GPS and a snack. ;-)
Holy crap, is that what that means? I R'd TFA several times, and had no idea what this meant.
So, not selling ads is not monetizing?
I really can't tell WTF Perry is arguing for, against, or about from the linked article. Or is are the content people arguing that everything should to be 'monetized' so some asshole can sell ads in every digital thing I ever get?
I guess these are the same people who claim that the version as broadcast has to include the ads it aired with -- ignoring that the ads vary by region as local stations sell their own ads.
See, if you keep asserting your opinion as fact, and being an asshole about it, that's your problem.
You're mostly full of shit, and have decided that you have some special knowledge the rest of us couldn't possibly have which therefore makes you superior. Mostly it makes you a smug prick.
Go fuck yourself.
You're entitled to your beliefs and your opinions, but since you know absolutely nothing about me, saying something like that makes you a grade a dickhead.
Either you're an exceedingly skilled troll, or really are an asshole. Either way, I don't care.
I have never doubted the fervor of your beliefs or principles, but I drank the Ayn Rand Kool Aid for 15 years. Then I decided to get over it.
I've just decided that it's completely soulless and without any form of empathy. And I just don't see pure capitalism providing the solutions that those who worship it expect of it. It's become like religious dogma that can't be questioned. It's overly romanticized and fixed and held as infallible.
The more I've watched economics since I gave up on believing the 'libertarian-capitalist' stuff, I'm convinced that a lot of the assumptions of these models is completely wrong. It's like when physicist assume a perfectly spherical cow. It makes the math easy, but it's not accurate.
So when you could see some train wrecks coming (like Greenspan telling people to borrow against their homes because it's "free money") it's hard to believe people who so fervently believe the Free Market Will Fix. It doesn't, it just moves wealth upwards to create serfs out of the schmucks at the bottom. Corporations get rich while everyone else's standard of living goes down ... but, hey, that's Capitalism. That's simply not sustainable. In its current form, Capitalism is eating us.
Sadly, I find that the Right has totally unrealistic economic policies that amount to wishful thinking, and unfortunately, the Left does as well. Both are convinced that if only we'd implement their notion of things, Everything Would Be Alright. But since I've stopped seeing things in black and white, and see a whole lot more shades of grey and nuance as I get older.
I totally think that a society which doesn't want to help pay for itself to operate is going to be in decline. I totally think that actively cultivating an attitude that the rest of the world can fuck off and leave you to fend for yourself eats into you over time and has a tendency to make you an asshole (speaking from personal experience, of course).
I've read and made many of the arguments you make. I just disagree with you as strongly as you believe in what you do. Because there was a time I'd have agreed with you; just not any more.
Cheers. It's been fun. :-P
Have you looked around? Collectively, people aren't rational actors. The economic assumptions that the populace are rational actors acting on perfect information, and that the people in that market would never attempt to cheat, lie or steal is what finally made me realize your model of economics is based on untenable axioms. To me, it's your system which tries to make people into something they're not. People have been cooperating to eke out a better life for thousands of years. Precisely because it is in their best interest.
People do irrational things. People don't know what's always best for them.
Your system boils down to "fuck everyone else, as long as I have my gun to protect myself I can make it". That's not a "society", that's an uneasy peace since sooner or later one of these people who wants to win is going to remember it's far easier to just take it. You know, like Somalia.
And you the Easter Bunny. Or, maybe I should say Easter Bunnye since we're adding random e's.
As always, such a stimulating conversation.
I had forgotten how boring this stuff is and why I stopped reading Ayn Rand in the first place. Your rugged individualism is more like anti-social behavior to me. I also understand just how thoroughly committed you are to that viewpoint.
So, roll around in your ideology and fantasies of John Galt or being worthy enough to lick the boots of Dagny Taggart. I outgrew that shit 10 years ago.
Cheers
I've said it before to you, and I'll say it again ... if you think you'd suddenly end up with some magically perfect society by rolling back that far, I believe you're sorely mistaken.
You'd end up with something like "Escape From New York" as your society would fall apart.
And, please, don't bother telling me again how the Austrian School of economics and Ron Paul magically prove all of your points. I don't feel like having that discussion again. You might as well try to tell me how the bible proves something scientific.
Unless it's an arms length, wholly owned subsidiary in which the employees are all legally entitled to tell anybody with a Patriot Act request to piss off, you haven't done anything. Because an American owned company is still American controlled and subject to US laws.
So, unless you can demonstrate a lot more legal safeguards, you still might have troubles. Because if Americans can still access the data center, it's no different than if it was actually in the US in terms of the Patriot Act.
Sorry, but under the US Patriot Act, the US government has granted themselves unlimited, and secret access to any and all data stored on a US server.
I've done some contract work for the Canadian Government, and it is illegal to store certain kinds of information on US based servers because it would potentially violate Canadian law. There are companies who have arms-length subsidiaries whose job it is to handle government data that could not be allowed to be stored in the US. This is no different than similar issues with US owned companies accessing EU data because of the Patriot Act.
The US can claim their companies are being hurt by this, but the fact of the matter is, the US is not a trustworthy place to store your data unless you are also going to accept them potentially spying on your citizens.
This isn't a trade issue. It's a trust issue.
So if America wants to keep their Patriot Act which tries to violate the laws of other countries, their businesses are going to lose out in those markets if it would mean those companies can't comply with local laws and the US law at the same time.
Sorry, but these aren't spurious claims -- they're well established issues which have been covered before.
Except for the whole "whitespace is syntacticly meaningful" thing.
The only Python code I've ever seen left me shaking my head ... it could have been because it was shit code, but I just can't fathom why whitespace should affect the compilers interpretation of what the code means.
Though, clearly loads of people seem to like it so I'm probably in the minority on that one.
I know a lot of people don't like Java, but for teaching a language to an 11 year old, it abstracts out a lot of the crap and it's easy to get a development environment going.
So, maybe for an 11 year old "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" or something. If he gets through that then find the boy a new machine and get him whatever he needs.
Eclipse + Java and your kid is half way to being a rock star. From there, he could probably teach himself most any language out there.
Umm .. the pixel size of an LCD monitor is usually fixed and defines both the aspect ratio and the resolution. Kind of by definition.
If you have a 1600x1200 resolution monitor that's physically got a wider aspect ratio than 4:3, all they've really done is stretch everything out wider. It's not a "real" widescreen -- it just looks like one. In this case, text in the manufacturers recommended setting looked like hell, and circles were oval. It's not like you could tell it to display at a resolution it can't physically do. Because it was physically shaped like a 16x9 or 16x10, but it had pixels counts which corresponded to 4:3.
As long as we have discrete pixels, I completely fail to see how we could have anything else. It's a grid, and the ratio of width to height is aspect ratio.
We're talking about physical properties here, so I would love to hear in what way this can made otherwise. Or do you have a display subsystem which is independent of the physical attributes of the display?
But you're only talking about reading text. My browser windows aren't as wide as my whole screen, but I do have two side by side. So I don't have a 400 line row of text, but I have a larger number of normal sized windows visible at once.
Not absolutely every task that people do is just reading text, but I regularly see people in Word with it full screen so they have two pages displayed at a time. I see loads of spreadsheets that have enough columns that a wider view lets you actually read it without constantly scrolling.
Hell, I've got a server monitor application open which has 6 windows, and one of them I've got set to about 5" high and about 16" wide so I can see what it says in one look without scrolling.
You're also forgetting about people doing graphics stuff. Not every task people do with computers comes down to reading text formatted in paragraphs. Or having your email client, IM client, and browser all visible on screen at once.
So, maybe for the singular case you're talking about a wider monitor offers no advantage. But for a lot of stuff, I'll stick by my assertion.
Not to be blunt, but horseshit.
I knew people who used 132 columns on VT100's almost 20 years ago. I find 80 columns for code to be too small.
And, having upgraded to a widescreen monitor several years ago, I can have two windows side by side or overlapping and have more on the screen. I've got a Visio diagram I keep open most of the time with my network diagram on it, and it's the width of the screen that allows me to see more, and several applications I use can present more information on a wider screen. Throw in virtual desktops, and I've got 10+ square feet of screen available to me.
Not everything is just plain text displayed in courier font.
What you say is your opinion (and your welcome to it), but having the wider screen for a vast number of us is more productive. Hell, the company I work for, dual widescreen monitors is the norm for *everyone* -- which gives you a lot more horizontal resolution than vertical. The ability to look at things side by side is damned useful. If it wasn't for the fact that I'd need to buy a second video card, I'd have added a second widescreen monitor to my home machine.
However, I know for *some* applications, flipping a widescreen monitor 90 degrees to give you a tall screen works. For me not so much since I'm not editing documents that much.
To maximize profits. Higher resolution would cost more.
My wife was just bitching about her new work laptop today because it's got a smaller screen than her old one. This is the resolution she's running at.
I find it kind of pathetic that in this day and age companies are rolling out laptops to their employees with something which is only modestly better than 1024x768, which I was running in '91.
Reminds me of a monitor I got with a work PC a couple of years back -- it was a widescreen monitor, but it's native resolution was still 4:3. Which basically meant it couldn't draw circles, and was optimized more to be a TV than a computer monitor. WTF is the point in doing that? It looked like crap as a computer monitor.
Well, he may need someone to explain to him how laws work, and what is and is not possible with said laws.
I don't see them having any legal leg to stand on if they build this in such a way as to say "Oh, sorry, we can't comply with your Patriot Act request".
Well, given what we've seen over the last bunch of months, the big players are variously suing each other in several courts around the world.
The reality is, these companies do business in lots of countries, and operate under multiple legal jurisdictions. How many different countries are Samsung and Apple suing one another in?
I don't see how the US court can have anything to say about legal proceedings in other countries when there's already plenty of instances of this exact thing happening. It's not like it's new.
Sadly, corporations rely on lawyers so much nowadays, this is the new normal. Especially since everybody has patented everything they can think of so they can sue everybody who isn't willing to license from them.
Yeah, I have a hard time believing the former director of the NSA is going to be willing to help create an ISP which would allow you to not be spied on by the NSA.
And, as people have pointed out, there's simply no way you could build this to circumvent the Patriot Act and other things without being illegal under those very things.
Governments want more access, not less.
So was Batista before him -- but he was pro-American and corrupt as hell, so America liked him. I'm not defending everything Castro ever did, but he's been the bogey man to Americans since the 60's.
But having met and interacted with Cubans, they're not some oppressed people living under the boot heel of despotism. They're poor as hell. They're nice as you can get. And they're not particularly keen about the Platt Amendment by which the US gave themselves the right to meddle in Cuban legal issues and keep Guantanamo Bay. But generally, they do have freedoms and rights these days.
But quite honestly, I'd be more worried about the US than I would Cuba, because the US sounding much more creepy if you can be 'border searched' through an entire state.
OK, let me clarify and say socialized healthcare and public education -- they still pay for you guys to go to grade school, right? Ooooh, socialism. How evil.
So if you want to talk about 'reality' there skippy, some of us live in countries in which reality includes socialized medicine. Believe it or not, it works a lot better than the absurd 'for profit' medicine in America.
You and I may disagree about the economics and politics of it, but don't be a dick and say that I'm immune to reality. I've read the books, I just disagree with the conclusions. You're not the arbiter of reality.
A modern society without some form of socialism will devolve rapidly into a place you wouldn't want to live. But, hey, that's what the guns are for, right?
So, off topic here, but I'm betting what you know about Cuba is mostly wrong.
The Cubans largely like Castro, have the benefit of free education and health care, freedom of religion, and are generally mostly happy people. They're poor, but that's largely because of the American embargo.
Putting it into the list with Iran and North Korea tells me the sources who told you about Cuba are somewhat biased. Having been to Cuba several times, I wouldn't really call it totalitarian in any meaningful sense of the word.
I'm more afraid of the US government than the Cuban one.