Jokes aside, I've been testing the latest release, and not only is it stable, for the first time in my experience, a new Microsoft OS is faster on older hardware than the previous versions. Yes, I know Apple did that for years, but it's still a welcome trend for users (if not for hardware makers, as it provides less incentive to go out and buy new stuff". I've been pleasantly surprised how fast it is thus far. I hate the new interface paradigm, but performance-wise, I just can't complain.
Online education is to education as phone sex is to sex.
A little yes, but mostly no. The old saying goes "He who is self instructed has a fool for a teacher". But that's not what online courses are. If you decide to learn by simply gathering materials yourself and studying them, then you're self educated. But in most online courses you have a teacher, he/she's just not physically present. And while we make this out to be new and revolutionary, students that live on distant farms and plantations have been doing it this way for generations, but used ham radio instead of the Internet. Even when I was a kid... a long time ago... there were kids in distant Alaskan settlements and Australian farms deep into the boonies and African missions that were educated essentially by a mix of correspondence and radio communication. The Internet just gives the whole world the opportunity to learn without a physical classroom.
yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?
I have several family members that are teachers, and I don't know what state you live in, but where they are, they get a paycheck 12 months per year. Most school systems offer the option to spread their pay throughout the whole year, rather than just the school months. In some school systems, year-round pay is mandatory.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
In some places, teacher pay is far out of line. But in most cases, it's not teacher pay that's the problem, it's teacher attitudes. In most states, teachers unions have essentially become guilds that exist to shut out alternatives to public schools. They openly try to ban homeschooling, as well as web-based education alternatives and innovation. Their concerns are not "the children". Nothing so pure. The aim of their union is to guarantee jobs for their members, and if that means screwing others, so be it. We famously spend far more per pupil than any nation on Earth, and yet the stats don't show any kind of achievement for it. All together now, money.... pay for teachers and tax funds for education as a whole alike... are the not the cause of our education problems. The more money we shovel, the less things change.
Not the same situation. While you can also question the wisdom of "reclaiming land from the sea" as the Dutch have done, they did it in modern times using dikes. Further, the Dutch have a stable landmass with bedrock underneath. New Orleans literally goes away over time without fresh annual flooding, as it's nothing but delta silt built up over time with no bedrock underneath. People can't live with flooding, but without flooding, the landmass eventually goes away. New Orleans may be the single worst place to build a city in North America. And nothing we do can change that.
The US bribed someone to get him out of the way so they can get a more acquiescent judge who won't give a damn about what the law says and about all the laws the FBI violated in either country.
He left of his own accord. That means if anyone was bribed, it was the Judge himself, and that would make him corrupt in any case.
Or... you can come out of your tinfoil-lined basement, drop the conspiracy theories, and take the man at his word, that he left of his own accord because he did something stupid and is taking the proper action. But this is Slashdot, so I'm not holding my breath.
Next thing you know the Legislative Branch will start writing laws to sidestep the Judicial!!
As long as the Judicial Branch doesn't start declaring that "Up" really means "Sideways" in the Constitution or just start making stuff up from the bench, we'll be OK. I mean, sheesh, will we ever be in trouble if that happens.
MSNBC isn't objective, neither is CNBC, NBC aims to be objective.
CNBC covers financial news from the perspective of a the small stock / mutual fund investor. You'll rarely hear news on CNBC from the perspective of professionals or control investors. MSNBC offers opinion journalism from the perspective of the left. NBC tries as best as possible to offer traditional journalism, i.e. news from the perspective of the Washington rulership.
No, MSNBC isn't objective, but they're honest about their slant now. Good, I prefer it that way. Be up front about it. For all of the craven shilling MSNBC does for the left at times, they still have more integrity than NBC because they're honest about it. NBC doesn't "aim to be objective". NBC aims to cloak their biases under the blanket of objectivity, and increasingly, people aren't fooled.
The Brits had this figured out years ago in their press system. The Guardian doesn't pretend to be unbiased. Neither do the Telegraph or the Daily Mail. No one is unbiased. No one. Be upfront about your editorial slant, and readers (and viewers) are fine with that. You can have an admitted viewpoint and still do good reporting.
It doesn't matter how factual your news report is, if no one wants to read it.
Wow, there's a lot of subtext in that.
Read that statement over a few times. "It doesn't matter how factual your news report is, if no one wants to read it.
If you had the "most factual" accounts of the news, and nobody wants to read or watch it, then it says a lot more about the viewers, and maybe the medium, then it does about the news.
"I don't want the factual news, I want the news that has my point of view"
Is not that different from, "It's got what plants crave..."
Or maybe MSNBC sucks so badly that even when they get stories right, they're still written horribly and people just plain don't like the site?
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism.
Err, it's not capitalism at all. It's charity. Charity is a bandaid over the wounds of capitalism.
Of course it's better to do this than to squander the money, just as it's right to help up a man who keeps falling over. But you're still treating the symptom, not the cause.
"Bandaid over the wounds of capitalism". I'm so sick of this neo-Marxist stuff on Slashdot. Capitalism gave you your living standard, including the computer that you're typing that message with to rip capitalism. And don't even go to the "but socialism has never really been tried" crap, because it has, and it still sucks.
Currently just about every one of our southern states is racing toward third world status just as fast as they can
Is that why all the jobs are moving here? Is that why we're getting all the business investment in new factories?Is that why Texas is the number one state in business growth? Is that why Apple just expanded in Texas? Is that why Airbus is building a factory to produce A319 airliners in Alabama? Is that why Austal is building Littoral Combat Ships there for the Navy? Or why Thyssenkrupp is building a steel plant there? Have you noticed all of the auto plant construction in the South in the past two decades? Ever been to the huge shipyards in Mississippi? The aircraft plants in Georgia? The South is racing towards "Third World Status"? Try California. You know, the progressive model for America that's 3 billion in the hole, but is racing ahead to build a bullet train to nowhere at a commitment of $100 billion. The same California where jobs and people are leaving at a steady clip. You keep your progressive paradise. We'll keep taking the jobs, thanks.
How about fuck you, anonymous. Too many people equate liberal with liberty when, in fact, the opposite is quite the case - they're a mutually exclusive arrangement.
Only if you're using the FOX notions of what liberal and liberty mean.
The more that people see this, the better off this country will be. Not that Repubs are much better, but they are. Libertarian is the way.
Libertarians are just Republicans who aren't pretending to be on a Mission from God.
Don't like my opinions or what I post, use your mod points or stfu.
Or maybe reply? But no, your notion of "liberty" is "my way or the highway".
I'm not a fan of Libertarians, but to say that Libertarians are just "conservatives without a mission from God" is, frankly, stupid. It's not even close. Libertarians were just a faction of conservatism decades ago, but starting in the 90's, the whole movement did a 180 on social issues. It would be way more accurate today to say that Libertarians are liberals that want low taxes and minimal government. On every single social issue in dispute today... abortion, homosexuality, drug laws, hostility to religion... you name it... Libertarians line up almost exactly with liberals. This is why many conservatives call them liberaltarians right now. The movement is basically libertine with an anarchist streak. We don't even agree on taxes and scope of government anymore. Conservatives want lower taxes and a smaller government that does a few things well. Go peek in some libertarian forums, and you'll see that they think we're big government imperialists because we want to keep a defense department, when they basically want a militia-based defense with no standing army. We want lower tax rates... preferably a flat tax. They want NO tax rates and all government expenses paid via tariffs and fees (which, being free traders is basically contradiction in and of itself). These are not minor differences. The two schools of thought are very, very different. Libertarianism is as different from conservatism now as liberalism is different from conservatism. Libertarianism is no longer the "larval stage" of conservatism. It is its own movement, hostile to conservatism.
For all of your hypocritical noises about "Fox notions", maybe if you'd pry yourself away from MSNBC for a little bit, you'd have noticed that the conservative/libertarian split has been going on for years now. So wander off the liberal reservation for a little bit, and go to Reason.com, and then NationalReview.com; compare and contrast. You'll find Radley Balko spending most of his time at Reason ripping conservatives. The two movements are far more opposed to each other than related now.
If they start pissing off arrogant, self-important hippies and douchebags, there goes their core market. By the way:
Except that Apple's market is a LOT more than hippies and douchebags now. The whole reason I went to Apple was because, simply put, they have the best commercial desktop OS, and I really liked the idea of a good commercial Unix OS. The "elegant" hardware is just a nice cherry on top. I'm willing to pay a little more to get OS X. That's what it all comes down to, and truth be told, I think that Apple's expanded market consists mainly of people like me more than the traditional caricature of the artsy, pretentious Mac user. Apple knows they have the freedom to move beyond that kind of buyer now, and you know what made that possible? The iPhone/iPod. People that never dreamed of buying a Mac desktop are buying iPhones, and it's opened up a whole new sphere of mindshare. Yes, the hippies and trendy douchebags are the most visible Mac users... but not the most numerous. Not anymore. Many of these so called "green certification" programs are basically political scams anyway, that do nothing to really limit the amount of waste in the production/purchase cycle. I applaud Tim Cook for more or less saying "You know, we're not going to play this game anymore, it's a fraud". If San Francisco... the city that tried to ban toys in Happy Meals... wants to make another useless political statement by not buying Apple stuff... hey, I don't think it'll hurt Apple's bottom line one bit. California is sliding down the tubes anyway. This is a bit like Rome swearing vengeance on some foreign foe the night before the Alaric and the Visigoths come crashing through the gates. I just don't think Apple's all that worried about it. Know where Apple's latest expansion will be? Texas. I think Apple is consciously trying to move beyond the whole "artsy Mac fan" thing to a broader customer base. If that's the case, then it's a smart move by Cook.
Personally I am an atheist, but it seems that low-levels of religious belief seem to do most people little harm and some good and at least in smaller communities seem to provide a certain amount of greater good
So do large amounts. It's not how religious someone is, but what they do with that faith and their principles. Most churches... and temples and mosques, for that matter... do far more good than harm. Even Thomas Jefferson, famously a skeptic about religion in his younger years... came to see religion as beneficial as he got older. He just didn't fully embrace it himself.
Keep in mind also that Pakistan literally means "Land of the Pure". So there's not going to be a lot of built-in tolerance for heretical branches of Islam. But Ahmadis will tell you they are Muslim, and that no other sect gets to decide that, God does.
Have you forgotten that all spending bills must originate in the House? Where the the group that led the charge to kill the Supercollider was led by a Democrat with the following vote totals:
Voting to kill - 166 Democrats, 115 Republicans Voting to save - 98 Democrats, 61 Republicans
Democrats were a large majority in the House in this period.
Make that a God Particle Gun instead of "Superconducting Super Collider" and you're golden.
Ah, the stupid Texans hate science thing. You do know that it was the Congress... controlled by mostly non-Southern Democrats... that killed the Supercollider, right? With the full support of then-President Bill Clinton. Most Republicans tried to save it as a matter of national prestige.
Yeah Microsoft will be like all those big brands like Nokia and Kodak and live on forever.
Or IBM, remember when they used to be a going concern? Oh wait, they still are. Companies can adapt, and Microsoft is, far and away, the number one provider of operating systems and office software in the word... still. Like I said, they seem to have lost a step, but so what? Ford lost a step with the Edsel. It didn't kill them. Predicting doom for Microsoft at this point is just stupid.
That may be the mother of misleading book titles. Microsoft has lost a step in some areas (as much due to Apple's ascendence as anything MS did wrong), but this sounds like one of those apocalyptic books you see about finance ("The Coming Great Depression" and stuff like that). It's essentially a tabloid headline on a book cover.
All said or written when he was younger. When he was older... especially after he was President... he changed his mind on a great many things. Not always completely, but his attitude on religion did a near-180. Jefferson never became a conventional Trinitarian Chirstian, but he did warm up to religion and came to understand it as healthy and necessary in America, to the point where he believed that American liberty might not survive without it. Jefferson recognized that while he wasn't a conventional Christian, the vast majority of his countrymen were, and he came to respect their faith. Contrary to the whole notion that Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists indicated he favored a complete ban on religious expression on public grounds (the letter with the now oft-misquoted "separation of church and state" line), this was a false understanding of his position. Jefferson himself approved of Protestant services being held in the US capitol building. He attended them himself every Sunday, and at times even had the Marine Band play music for the hyms... all at public expense. And don't take my word for it. See what the Library of Congress has to say about it:
It is no exaggeration to say that on Sundays in Washington during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and of James Madison (1809-1817) the state became the church. Within a year of his inauguration, Jefferson began attending church services in the House of Representatives. Madison followed Jefferson's example, although unlike Jefferson, who rode on horseback to church in the Capitol, Madison came in a coach and four. Worship services in the House--a practice that continued until after the Civil War--were acceptable to Jefferson because they were nondiscriminatory and voluntary. Preachers of every Protestant denomination appeared. (Catholic priests began officiating in 1826.) As early as January 1806 a female evangelist, Dorothy Ripley, delivered a camp meeting-style exhortation in the House to Jefferson, Vice President Aaron Burr, and a "crowded audience." Throughout his administration Jefferson permitted church services in executive branch buildings. The Gospel was also preached in the Supreme Court chambers. Jefferson's actions may seem surprising because his attitude toward the relation between religion and government is usually thought to have been embodied in his recommendation that there exist "a wall of separation between church and state." In that statement, Jefferson was apparently declaring his opposition, as Madison had done in introducing the Bill of Rights, to a "national" religion. In attending church services on public property, Jefferson and Madison consciously and deliberately were offering symbolic support to religion as a prop for republican government."
"Religion, as well as reason, confirms the soundness of those principles on which our government has been founded and its rights asserted." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815.
Jefferson, after all, was the primary mover behind the notion that we had an inalienable right to freedom of religion, and was the primary influence in ensuring that this right was enshrined in the Constitution. Like a lot of people, he was a bit of a radical hothead when he was younger, and again like most people, he became older and wiser.
You don't have to buy health insurance either. You will simply pay 2.5% more in income tax up to an extra $2,085 per year. But nobody is forcing you to purchase health insurance.
What a dishonest dodge. It IS forcing you to buy it if the government will seize your money if you don't.
Otherwise, it's pretty much like car insurance, so was the game already over decades ago?
Of all the lies spewed about this law, this is the most disingenuous. You can choose not to drive. Unless you put a gun to your head, you can't choose not to live.And that's precisely what this law is: a government mandated fee (NOT a tax, that's also BS) for simply being alive.
The gun law was for national defense, a Constitutionally mandated responsibility. It's not the same thing, no matter how you twist it to be. And Adams' law wasn't for the whole population, but a small segment that chose a specific profession. No one could MAKE you be a sailor for living. Well, now the government probably could.
If you don't do what the government wants, you will find a new "tax" will appear to make you do it.
Yes, especially when the government (AKA "we the people") wants you to stop freeloading on the health insurance system we're paying for.
The government is not "we the people". They're representatives of the people. There's a pretty big difference. Government is not "things we decide to do together". Government is not my church, or my family. And government was supposed to be limited. That, in reality, is what died today: any notion that people have rights beyond the power of the government. Free elections and the rule of law mean squat without liberty. You simply get elections with changing names, but the government's power over simply continues to grow and grow. Good God, we picked up rifles and killed redcoats for less than this. Washington and Jefferson would weep. We've become a nation of lickspittle slaves. Perhaps we deserve our fate.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet it also crashes much much faster!!
Jokes aside, I've been testing the latest release, and not only is it stable, for the first time in my experience, a new Microsoft OS is faster on older hardware than the previous versions. Yes, I know Apple did that for years, but it's still a welcome trend for users (if not for hardware makers, as it provides less incentive to go out and buy new stuff". I've been pleasantly surprised how fast it is thus far. I hate the new interface paradigm, but performance-wise, I just can't complain.
Online education is to education as phone sex is to sex.
A little yes, but mostly no. The old saying goes "He who is self instructed has a fool for a teacher". But that's not what online courses are. If you decide to learn by simply gathering materials yourself and studying them, then you're self educated. But in most online courses you have a teacher, he/she's just not physically present. And while we make this out to be new and revolutionary, students that live on distant farms and plantations have been doing it this way for generations, but used ham radio instead of the Internet. Even when I was a kid... a long time ago... there were kids in distant Alaskan settlements and Australian farms deep into the boonies and African missions that were educated essentially by a mix of correspondence and radio communication. The Internet just gives the whole world the opportunity to learn without a physical classroom.
yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?
I have several family members that are teachers, and I don't know what state you live in, but where they are, they get a paycheck 12 months per year. Most school systems offer the option to spread their pay throughout the whole year, rather than just the school months. In some school systems, year-round pay is mandatory.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
In some places, teacher pay is far out of line. But in most cases, it's not teacher pay that's the problem, it's teacher attitudes. In most states, teachers unions have essentially become guilds that exist to shut out alternatives to public schools. They openly try to ban homeschooling, as well as web-based education alternatives and innovation. Their concerns are not "the children". Nothing so pure. The aim of their union is to guarantee jobs for their members, and if that means screwing others, so be it. We famously spend far more per pupil than any nation on Earth, and yet the stats don't show any kind of achievement for it. All together now, money.... pay for teachers and tax funds for education as a whole alike... are the not the cause of our education problems. The more money we shovel, the less things change.
The Netherlands?
Not the same situation. While you can also question the wisdom of "reclaiming land from the sea" as the Dutch have done, they did it in modern times using dikes. Further, the Dutch have a stable landmass with bedrock underneath. New Orleans literally goes away over time without fresh annual flooding, as it's nothing but delta silt built up over time with no bedrock underneath. People can't live with flooding, but without flooding, the landmass eventually goes away. New Orleans may be the single worst place to build a city in North America. And nothing we do can change that.
The US bribed someone to get him out of the way so they can get a more acquiescent judge who won't give a damn about what the law says and about all the laws the FBI violated in either country.
He left of his own accord. That means if anyone was bribed, it was the Judge himself, and that would make him corrupt in any case.
Or... you can come out of your tinfoil-lined basement, drop the conspiracy theories, and take the man at his word, that he left of his own accord because he did something stupid and is taking the proper action. But this is Slashdot, so I'm not holding my breath.
Next thing you know the Legislative Branch will start writing laws to sidestep the Judicial!!
As long as the Judicial Branch doesn't start declaring that "Up" really means "Sideways" in the Constitution or just start making stuff up from the bench, we'll be OK. I mean, sheesh, will we ever be in trouble if that happens.
MSNBC isn't objective, neither is CNBC, NBC aims to be objective.
CNBC covers financial news from the perspective of a the small stock / mutual fund investor. You'll rarely hear news on CNBC from the perspective of professionals or control investors.
MSNBC offers opinion journalism from the perspective of the left.
NBC tries as best as possible to offer traditional journalism, i.e. news from the perspective of the Washington rulership.
No, MSNBC isn't objective, but they're honest about their slant now. Good, I prefer it that way. Be up front about it. For all of the craven shilling MSNBC does for the left at times, they still have more integrity than NBC because they're honest about it. NBC doesn't "aim to be objective". NBC aims to cloak their biases under the blanket of objectivity, and increasingly, people aren't fooled.
The Brits had this figured out years ago in their press system. The Guardian doesn't pretend to be unbiased. Neither do the Telegraph or the Daily Mail. No one is unbiased. No one. Be upfront about your editorial slant, and readers (and viewers) are fine with that. You can have an admitted viewpoint and still do good reporting.
Wow, there's a lot of subtext in that.
Read that statement over a few times. "It doesn't matter how factual your news report is, if no one wants to read it.
If you had the "most factual" accounts of the news, and nobody wants to read or watch it, then it says a lot more about the viewers, and maybe the medium, then it does about the news.
"I don't want the factual news, I want the news that has my point of view"
Is not that different from, "It's got what plants crave..."
Or maybe MSNBC sucks so badly that even when they get stories right, they're still written horribly and people just plain don't like the site?
She and her husband continue to show the best side of capitalism.
Err, it's not capitalism at all. It's charity. Charity is a bandaid over the wounds of capitalism.
Of course it's better to do this than to squander the money, just as it's right to help up a man who keeps falling over. But you're still treating the symptom, not the cause.
"Bandaid over the wounds of capitalism". I'm so sick of this neo-Marxist stuff on Slashdot. Capitalism gave you your living standard, including the computer that you're typing that message with to rip capitalism. And don't even go to the "but socialism has never really been tried" crap, because it has, and it still sucks.
Currently just about every one of our southern states is racing toward third world status just as fast as they can
Is that why all the jobs are moving here? Is that why we're getting all the business investment in new factories?Is that why Texas is the number one state in business growth? Is that why Apple just expanded in Texas? Is that why Airbus is building a factory to produce A319 airliners in Alabama? Is that why Austal is building Littoral Combat Ships there for the Navy? Or why Thyssenkrupp is building a steel plant there? Have you noticed all of the auto plant construction in the South in the past two decades? Ever been to the huge shipyards in Mississippi? The aircraft plants in Georgia? The South is racing towards "Third World Status"? Try California. You know, the progressive model for America that's 3 billion in the hole, but is racing ahead to build a bullet train to nowhere at a commitment of $100 billion. The same California where jobs and people are leaving at a steady clip. You keep your progressive paradise. We'll keep taking the jobs, thanks.
How about fuck you, anonymous. Too many people equate liberal with liberty when, in fact, the opposite is quite the case - they're a mutually exclusive arrangement.
Only if you're using the FOX notions of what liberal and liberty mean.
The more that people see this, the better off this country will be. Not that Repubs are much better, but they are. Libertarian is the way.
Libertarians are just Republicans who aren't pretending to be on a Mission from God.
Don't like my opinions or what I post, use your mod points or stfu.
Or maybe reply? But no, your notion of "liberty" is "my way or the highway".
I'm not a fan of Libertarians, but to say that Libertarians are just "conservatives without a mission from God" is, frankly, stupid. It's not even close. Libertarians were just a faction of conservatism decades ago, but starting in the 90's, the whole movement did a 180 on social issues. It would be way more accurate today to say that Libertarians are liberals that want low taxes and minimal government. On every single social issue in dispute today... abortion, homosexuality, drug laws, hostility to religion... you name it... Libertarians line up almost exactly with liberals. This is why many conservatives call them liberaltarians right now. The movement is basically libertine with an anarchist streak. We don't even agree on taxes and scope of government anymore. Conservatives want lower taxes and a smaller government that does a few things well. Go peek in some libertarian forums, and you'll see that they think we're big government imperialists because we want to keep a defense department, when they basically want a militia-based defense with no standing army. We want lower tax rates... preferably a flat tax. They want NO tax rates and all government expenses paid via tariffs and fees (which, being free traders is basically contradiction in and of itself). These are not minor differences. The two schools of thought are very, very different. Libertarianism is as different from conservatism now as liberalism is different from conservatism. Libertarianism is no longer the "larval stage" of conservatism. It is its own movement, hostile to conservatism.
For all of your hypocritical noises about "Fox notions", maybe if you'd pry yourself away from MSNBC for a little bit, you'd have noticed that the conservative/libertarian split has been going on for years now. So wander off the liberal reservation for a little bit, and go to Reason.com, and then NationalReview.com; compare and contrast. You'll find Radley Balko spending most of his time at Reason ripping conservatives. The two movements are far more opposed to each other than related now.
The beginning of the end for Apple
If they start pissing off arrogant, self-important hippies and douchebags, there goes their core market. By the way:
Except that Apple's market is a LOT more than hippies and douchebags now. The whole reason I went to Apple was because, simply put, they have the best commercial desktop OS, and I really liked the idea of a good commercial Unix OS. The "elegant" hardware is just a nice cherry on top. I'm willing to pay a little more to get OS X. That's what it all comes down to, and truth be told, I think that Apple's expanded market consists mainly of people like me more than the traditional caricature of the artsy, pretentious Mac user. Apple knows they have the freedom to move beyond that kind of buyer now, and you know what made that possible? The iPhone/iPod. People that never dreamed of buying a Mac desktop are buying iPhones, and it's opened up a whole new sphere of mindshare. Yes, the hippies and trendy douchebags are the most visible Mac users... but not the most numerous. Not anymore. Many of these so called "green certification" programs are basically political scams anyway, that do nothing to really limit the amount of waste in the production/purchase cycle. I applaud Tim Cook for more or less saying "You know, we're not going to play this game anymore, it's a fraud". If San Francisco... the city that tried to ban toys in Happy Meals... wants to make another useless political statement by not buying Apple stuff... hey, I don't think it'll hurt Apple's bottom line one bit. California is sliding down the tubes anyway. This is a bit like Rome swearing vengeance on some foreign foe the night before the Alaric and the Visigoths come crashing through the gates. I just don't think Apple's all that worried about it. Know where Apple's latest expansion will be? Texas. I think Apple is consciously trying to move beyond the whole "artsy Mac fan" thing to a broader customer base. If that's the case, then it's a smart move by Cook.
Personally I am an atheist, but it seems that low-levels of religious belief seem to do most people little harm and some good and at least in smaller communities seem to provide a certain amount of greater good
So do large amounts. It's not how religious someone is, but what they do with that faith and their principles. Most churches... and temples and mosques, for that matter... do far more good than harm. Even Thomas Jefferson, famously a skeptic about religion in his younger years... came to see religion as beneficial as he got older. He just didn't fully embrace it himself.
Keep in mind also that Pakistan literally means "Land of the Pure". So there's not going to be a lot of built-in tolerance for heretical branches of Islam. But Ahmadis will tell you they are Muslim, and that no other sect gets to decide that, God does.
... is a bitch.
Nice try at the revisionism, but that shit don't fly in the age of Google.
Here was the Senate vote:
Kill it:
Source
Have you forgotten that all spending bills must originate in the House? Where the the group that led the charge to kill the Supercollider was led by a Democrat with the following vote totals:
Voting to kill - 166 Democrats, 115 Republicans
Voting to save - 98 Democrats, 61 Republicans
Democrats were a large majority in the House in this period.
should have said "God Particle" in the proposal.
Eleventy billion dollar grant.
Make that a God Particle Gun instead of "Superconducting Super Collider" and you're golden.
Ah, the stupid Texans hate science thing. You do know that it was the Congress... controlled by mostly non-Southern Democrats... that killed the Supercollider, right? With the full support of then-President Bill Clinton. Most Republicans tried to save it as a matter of national prestige.
Yeah Microsoft will be like all those big brands like Nokia and Kodak and live on forever.
Or IBM, remember when they used to be a going concern? Oh wait, they still are. Companies can adapt, and Microsoft is, far and away, the number one provider of operating systems and office software in the word... still. Like I said, they seem to have lost a step, but so what? Ford lost a step with the Edsel. It didn't kill them. Predicting doom for Microsoft at this point is just stupid.
That may be the mother of misleading book titles. Microsoft has lost a step in some areas (as much due to Apple's ascendence as anything MS did wrong), but this sounds like one of those apocalyptic books you see about finance ("The Coming Great Depression" and stuff like that). It's essentially a tabloid headline on a book cover.
Thomas Jefferson
All said or written when he was younger. When he was older ... especially after he was President... he changed his mind on a great many things. Not always completely, but his attitude on religion did a near-180. Jefferson never became a conventional Trinitarian Chirstian, but he did warm up to religion and came to understand it as healthy and necessary in America, to the point where he believed that American liberty might not survive without it. Jefferson recognized that while he wasn't a conventional Christian, the vast majority of his countrymen were, and he came to respect their faith. Contrary to the whole notion that Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists indicated he favored a complete ban on religious expression on public grounds (the letter with the now oft-misquoted "separation of church and state" line), this was a false understanding of his position. Jefferson himself approved of Protestant services being held in the US capitol building. He attended them himself every Sunday, and at times even had the Marine Band play music for the hyms... all at public expense. And don't take my word for it. See what the Library of Congress has to say about it:
It is no exaggeration to say that on Sundays in Washington during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and of James Madison (1809-1817) the state became the church. Within a year of his inauguration, Jefferson began attending church services in the House of Representatives. Madison followed Jefferson's example, although unlike Jefferson, who rode on horseback to church in the Capitol, Madison came in a coach and four. Worship services in the House--a practice that continued until after the Civil War--were acceptable to Jefferson because they were nondiscriminatory and voluntary. Preachers of every Protestant denomination appeared. (Catholic priests began officiating in 1826.) As early as January 1806 a female evangelist, Dorothy Ripley, delivered a camp meeting-style exhortation in the House to Jefferson, Vice President Aaron Burr, and a "crowded audience." Throughout his administration Jefferson permitted church services in executive branch buildings. The Gospel was also preached in the Supreme Court chambers.
Jefferson's actions may seem surprising because his attitude toward the relation between religion and government is usually thought to have been embodied in his recommendation that there exist "a wall of separation between church and state." In that statement, Jefferson was apparently declaring his opposition, as Madison had done in introducing the Bill of Rights, to a "national" religion. In attending church services on public property, Jefferson and Madison consciously and deliberately were offering symbolic support to religion as a prop for republican government."
Far from being anti-religion, Jefferson came to recognize that the American experiment depended on a melding of ideas that had to include religion and the best ideas of the enlightenment:
"Religion, as well as reason, confirms the soundness of those principles on which our government has been founded and its rights asserted." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815.
Jefferson, after all, was the primary mover behind the notion that we had an inalienable right to freedom of religion, and was the primary influence in ensuring that this right was enshrined in the Constitution. Like a lot of people, he was a bit of a radical hothead when he was younger, and again like most people, he became older and wiser.
Who gives a fuck? Ubuntu is a train wreck. If you're going to promote Linux, at least promote a good distro.
Ubuntu is exhibit A that open source/free software groups can't market worth a damn.
You don't have to buy health insurance either. You will simply pay 2.5% more in income tax up to an extra $2,085 per year. But nobody is forcing you to purchase health insurance.
What a dishonest dodge. It IS forcing you to buy it if the government will seize your money if you don't.
Otherwise, it's pretty much like car insurance, so was the game already over decades ago?
Of all the lies spewed about this law, this is the most disingenuous. You can choose not to drive. Unless you put a gun to your head, you can't choose not to live.And that's precisely what this law is: a government mandated fee (NOT a tax, that's also BS) for simply being alive.
The gun law was for national defense, a Constitutionally mandated responsibility. It's not the same thing, no matter how you twist it to be. And Adams' law wasn't for the whole population, but a small segment that chose a specific profession. No one could MAKE you be a sailor for living. Well, now the government probably could.
If you don't do what the government wants, you will find a new "tax" will appear to make you do it.
Yes, especially when the government (AKA "we the people") wants you to stop freeloading on the health insurance system we're paying for.
The government is not "we the people". They're representatives of the people. There's a pretty big difference. Government is not "things we decide to do together". Government is not my church, or my family. And government was supposed to be limited. That, in reality, is what died today: any notion that people have rights beyond the power of the government. Free elections and the rule of law mean squat without liberty. You simply get elections with changing names, but the government's power over simply continues to grow and grow. Good God, we picked up rifles and killed redcoats for less than this. Washington and Jefferson would weep. We've become a nation of lickspittle slaves. Perhaps we deserve our fate.