The Employee-Employer relationship is fundamentally different then the relationship between Card and I: there is an imbalance of power in that relationship and that invalidates the comparison.
Here, I am the customer: there are any number of possible places where my money can go and no one has any claim on it. If I do not buy something it is not a penalty, therefore the act of not buying something is not a punishment. He has no claim on my money, and so its lack is not a penalty. It is not something he would otherwise have had or that he would have had through some obligation or which has been taken away from him -- those are what make something a penalty.
The act of buying something is entirely within my sole discretion and is entirely my unqualified right to determine, for any reason.
That said: it is not merely his public opinions that are at issue. I do not boycott people who disagree with me. I could, and it would be entirely within my right, and entirely moral for me to do so, but I don't so its moot. Card is not being boycotted for his opinions (by me) -- he is being boycotted because he is a political activist, and therefore the money I give him supports and funds activism that I find reprehensible.
Yes, if someone wants to not shop at a store because it has gay people in it, they are entirely free to do so. Doing so does not punish the store.
If someone wants to spend their money only in stores run by Christians, that's entirely fine and moral. If someone wants to spend their money only in stores which have a good reputation for being 'green', that's entirely fine and moral. If someone does not want to buy a product because they believe the company is harming the environment or its suppliers are being abused, that's entirely fine and moral. The inverse of these are all also true, and just as fine -- though rarely do people want to buy something because the company is hurting the environment, more likely the inverse is that people don't care... which is ALSO entirely fine. Importantly, in none of those cases are they punishing anyone.
Card's political agenda is hurting people, his political activism is hurting people. Thus, I will not patronize him -- or Chick-fil-A, for that matter -- because it is my unqualified right to support those businesses and people I want to. My money is power, and empowering people who are actively championing against basic human dignity is something I choose not to do.
I'll say only: I am not castigating anyone for any beliefs. I am calling out someone who is a *political activist* who is attempting to impose his beliefs upon the nation and refusing to financially support him because of that activism.
Once one becomes an activist and puts their name, their reputation, their money behind a cause that is no longer a private matter. It is at that point entirely justified to consider those matters of public policy that they are so strongly advocating when deciding if you want to give them your business or not.
Card has done that, and in doing so has forfeited any claim to this being a private opinion or belief that he holds.
There's a lot of false equivalencies you have going on there that I'm not gonna address because the above is sufficient, but--
Card has no expectation or right to my money; and no one is advocating that his opinion be criminalized or penalized in any way. He has a right to whatever money he has earned through his work. If I choose to give -- or not as the case may be -- him money, that's me exercising my rights. That does not punish him.
Second, Card does not merely "not support" gay marriage: he does not merely have an opinion. He is an activist and major player in the political arena to deny gay people the right to marry. He is an influential member of a Church which poured huge amounts of money into Prop 8 in California, he sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. He is not merely a man with an opinion, he is an active political force on this issue.
Third, his stance is not merely that he is against gay marriage or for "protecting traditional marriage" -- go read his writings. He has argued that adult, consensual homosexuality has no place in society and should be criminalized. He since said that he merely wanted to keep existing laws "on the books" passively and that he wouldn't argue to reinstate them, but that doesn't really jive with what he said.
Every dollar I give him, small as my individual dollars are, is a dollar towards a person who is an active force against something I believe is an issue of fundamental rights and fair society. It's not that I'm threatened, its that it is counterproductive. To donate money to the Human Rights Campaign and turn around and patronize establishments like Chick-fil-A or this movie simply does not make sense.
I don't hate him, there's no exclamation marks involved in my thinking, and anyone who does go see this movie or buy his books I don't view as a bigot or supportive of bigotry. Some may be ignorant of what's behind it, some may prioritize their life and money differently, but for those of us who do KNOW who he is and what he has said, supports, and actively tries to do in society, our choice to not support him is valid.
It is not "punishment", he has neither right nor claim to our patronage. It is political, though.
Bear in mind, that's just one of many. Card has written many, many, many times on this subject -- even arguing that homosexual acts should be criminalized, that an adult willfully engaging in sex he doesn't find acceptable with other consenting adults should go to *jail* and be deemed an unacceptable part of society.
Not all hate speech is going to say 'faggot' and 'burn in hell' and stuff like that: those extreme positions are also supported and maintained by more intellectual and softly spoken declarations of the inhumanity of the minority and supporting that it has no right to be seen as a peer because its difference is too different to allow.
Did you miss the part of RTFA where it talks about movie distribution contracts? They aren't free to set any business model they want. They owe a percentage to the upstream provider based on "ticket sales" -- every person in a seat for every showing -- and are *required* to track that.
Now, I have no idea how they're calculating ticket sales or basing the percentage owed off of what value or any of the various details involved, but public showing of movies requires a separate license and those terms are not something three guys in some small town can just get set at whatever is most convenient for their ideal business situation.
It'd surely be better for consumers if it were an all you can use service, but I bet they are still with its once-per-movie plan actually intending on getting most of their money from refreshments and the like..., because movie theaters really don't make that much off of ticket sales. I don't know the precise details, but for new releases theaters only get like 20-30% or so of the ticket sales... after a month or so, they may get most of it, but they always end up paying.
And remember, a big point of this plan is these local people *do* want to go out and watch new releases and have social events after them with their community, and not have to drive an hour away to do that. So while some people will be going and watching when this theater gets most of the money, a lot will be going when they have to pay most of it to the movie's owner.
He didn't take it to an FBI technician-- if he did, it'd probably have been cleaned up tight and fast. He took it into his office, where TFA says *they don't have cyber guys*. I.e., he's in some dingy little office without a cyber crimes unit. This doesn't sound implausible at all, the guy's in an FBI office across the Pacific in a US territory, not in Los Angeles.
Then he took it in to a local computer repair shop, and it doesn't at all sound implausible to me that they might have fibbed on just what they did. Instead of re-imagining it, they may have just done a quick scrub of the user settings.
"The FBI" didn't go through a two step process. A guy who is also an FBI agent went through a two step process. Not everything an FBI agent does is with the full force and resources of The FBI.
Read TFA -- the Judge made a note of this. The initial report that he got was just him as a father: after that what he was doing was basically being an FBI agent. *However* even though he was, the fact that the computer was essentially stolen meant the guy had no expectation of privacy for it. anyways.
That's what I thought at first, having lived through Andrew in Florida -- I was all, "psh, its only a category 1". However, thi sisn't a Yankees media situation. Sandy was significantly more powerful then the category would imply.
For one thing, by the time it hit NYC, it was no longer a hurricane -- it had merged with one or two cold storm systems that were coming in from the other direction. This changed the dynamic of the storm significantly: whereas hurricanes gain their energy from the warm ocean waters, this type of storm gained its energy from the difference between the cold and hot storm systems merging together. Or something. (The precise details are not clear to me: I'm not a meteorologist)
Sandy was also *huge* -- measuring the total energy in the storm, it was bigger then Katrina. Hurricanes can get intense but the brunt of their power is focused. They may have a lot of wind speed, and strictly by that measure Sandy wasn't very impressive... but when you have a cat 1 spread out as far as Sandy was, its pulling in a HUGE amount of water.
It wasn't the wind that was so destructive here: it was the storm surge that the huge storm system brought with it.
But, really. Its not just rhetoric of omg the Yanks are finally getting hit that made this seem bad. It really was a very, very, very bad storm and the hurricane classification only makes it seem small.
My paraphrasing may have made it sound like that routine because I've seen it so it may have lingered in the back of my mind: but that is just the paraphrasing. The tweets were much worse and personal. It was along the lines of saying he has his theoretical black "friends" and he's fine with them, but those unknown-blacks that voted for Obama are niggers. To me the "tone" (insofar as texts have tones) was nothing like Chris Rock's thing.
Then again, I'm not sure a white dude saying "nigger" and a black dude saying "nigger" can ever really be compared fairly.:)
If you say he's a bad President with bad policy decisions and poor judgement, that's the content of his character (or actions). If you say he's a (sand) nigger or muslim or mention slavery or his non-whiteness, as many of those posts in the blog did, its racist. If you talk about the preferred method of assassination being lynching as MANY of these did, its *really* racist (also stupid as shit).
Those were *really* blatant. "I'm not racist!" one said, "I like plenty of black people, I just hate niggers" (paraphrased by me, site's down now). Its hard to read that as anything but, "I like the black people who know their place, i.e., subservient to my white ass." And that'd be one of the nicer ones.
Things get fuzzier when you have someone talking about the loss or waning of "Traditional America", which is IMO racist -- but which is trying very hard to cover it.
When you talk about the only reason he won is because the "new" America is getting "gifts" from Santa, you're bemoaning the decline of the white male bloc and rather offensively deciding no one but that white male bloc can make an intelligent decision on its merits -- that's just generally insulting, but arguably not quite racist. But is it *damn* close to both racism and male chauvinism (since this new America also happens to include whores and sluts: i.e., single women who are thinking only of sex sex sex sex sex sex and all the sex they can have for free now, and not about the future as a responsible wife and mother would).
Sure there are plenty of people who are Obama critics who are not racists. However, a LOT are -- and a LOT of what's going around is very thinly veiled racism. This blog was posting up stuff which didn't even try to veil said racism, though.:)
When a frankly moderate (at best: we progressives did/not/ get the far-left guy we thought we wanted) President's every action is treated as some sort of alien insurrection that is utterly incomprehensible to the people -- there's something more then just policy disagreement going on. It's so far beyond partisan or political policy.
Isn't that typical only when taking cases on contingency? In this case, they're billing Apple their hourly rate. (Probably a very high one: don't get me wrong, the lawyers are making plenty of money off of Apple here -- but I don't believe its a percentage of the awarded damages)
IIUC, and I didn't even think I understood it at all before this well-written article, you're confusing the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field.
The *particle* -- the boson -- does not give anything mass, the *field* does. Particles interact with the field, and have inertial mass as a result. But we can't detect the field. However, since particles and fields are the same thing, we/can/ in theory detect occasional blips in the field, when the energy of the field materializes as the particle. (E=mc2) That's very rare, and those don't last very long, which is why its elusive.
But those particles aren't what's important. They don't give everything mass, they aren't everywhere: they may have been around at the start of the universe when everything was all bursting with energy and such, but they quickly decayed; the field persisted though, and that underlining/field/ of the same name, is everywhere.
Trademarks do not leave open the option of just letting it go; they/have/ to be enforced, or the claim weakens and sooner or later the company gets into court on a real, *major* violation and the mark is ruled abandoned.
JD makes more then just whiskey. They make all kinds of merchandise that is related to their core business, all under the same brand umbrella, all under the same image. No one would confuse his book for a bottle of whiskey, but they may confuse it for some official JD-endorsed publication. Is that very likely? Hard to say.
However, JD is _required_ to enforce their trademark or they *lose* it.
There's nothing wrong about it. Trademarks require enforcement or you lose them. They aren't copyright, "fair use" as copyright defines does not apply.
A few more dollars, so like, $40? Okay, I'd do $40 for a more powerful CPU and more RAM. Maybe $50? Sure, I have the cash. I mean, it goes against the goal and purpose of the Raspberry Pi, so it might not make the target audience happy, but sure.
Except, just some minor googling seems to put the items you're listening at $90 to $150. That's not a few more dollars. That's two to four times the cost.
Because they voluntarily joined the WTO, because they *chose* to submit to certain trade agreements. Because they get lots of benefits by being in the WTO, and are expected to comply with their obligations.
Among those is that if they are selling this mineral to a Chinese company for X, then an American company has to be able to buy it for X, too. The market value of the mineral is X, period. Thus, Chinese and American companies are in competition for the mineral on an even footing. That's what the WTO membership requires.
In this case, more importantly, if they are allowing Chinese companies to buy as much of the mineral as they'd like, but limiting export, then they're unfairly advantaging their companies in a way that is specifically not allowed by the WTO rules they agreed to when they joined. Now, there are some reasons to limit exports, and its up to the US/EU and others to prove it to the WTO. Submitting to WTO judgement on such matters is also something China agreed to.
But this isn't some kind of unilateral international pressure or something. This is about China *volunteering* to join an organization knowing full well that doing so was agreeing to abide by certain regulations, in return for getting access to markets and trade benefits.
Lawyers are not free. Being sued is a royal pain in the ass. Having to deal with it may not be worth the trouble to him, even if it would turn out he'd surely win.
I'm sure Apple would love nothing more then to go SIMless: the idea of completely eliminating a component would thrill them. Think of what they could put in its place!
But, the carriers rejected that idea hard, years ago. So Apple is doing the next best thing: trying to make the damn things as small as possible so they can recover the space for other things.
The manufacturers only have so much power-- even Apple, whose influence over carriers is unparalleled and unprecedented, has limits to what it can twist their arm into doing. Unfortunately.
I doubt its a cost issue; people keep saying on here "Oh, the regular one is small enough to not impact the phone size" and "Oh, the micro-SIM is small enough...." But, that's just missing the point. Its not the phone size Apple wants to change: its that they very much want the iPhone to turn into the Doctor's Blue Box and cram more into it without the size changing.
If you look at the teardown of modern iPhones, you should notice just how densely packed they are-- and/any/ space savings means either more battery (likely), or some place to fit another chip in to provide some sensor or feature. Every little bit counts these days. Look at the teardown: the micro-SIM is to your fingers but it and its supporting space is significant on the scale of the device and its packed electronics.
If they want to add more (more chips, more battery, more anything) they can only a) increase the device's size, b) take something out, or c) shrink something already in. They're trying to do c) and everything is on the table for shrinkage.
Romney, kinda. Except he's electable by the core only on a "I'm not Obama. Honest. No, really, I'm not" platform which will get the core to vote for him only begrudgingly. He might appeal to some moderates and he has at least a chance at the general, I think. If only as a "not Obama" candidate.
The rest are gonna freak the hell out of any moderates they get near and guarantee an Obama re-election. I think the real candidates are sitting this election out and waiting for 2016.
This is all true to an extent (though an incumbent President can loose, but they do have a solid advantage).
But we are also a nation which has a fundamentalist minority that drives the election process of one of our two major parties.
They aren't the Christian Taliban because the Taliban was actually in power, so could do what it wanted. The difference is these people can't. That doesn't mean they don't want to.
These people would be happy to criminalize sex that didn't conform to their view of Correct (all the while preaching of "personal liberty" and "freedom"). They would not stone the woman for being raped, but they'd call her a whore who asked for it because she didn't dress appropriately. They would teach only what is religiously acceptable in schools, including mandating prayer (except for the Jews, who are the only ones who would not have to go). They would go back to segregation at best (if not outright slavery, which was also in the bible).
Fortunately, most Americans are not this vile. Even most Republicans. Unfortunately, this minority has enthusiasm and a will-to-power like no one else, so is always out there on election day, always donating, always working -- so the Republicans have to kowtow to them. There is a certain subset of their beliefs-- fiscal conservatism-- which resonates with a lot of the sane Republicans, and a lot of moderates (and even some Democrats), and so lately they've been trumpeting that and getting a lot of support in the "Tea Party" movement.
But their fundamentalism, the ultimately theocratic Republic they actually want, the "social conservatism" that almost everyone outside of their minority rejects, is never very far away. They just don't say it too loud, and say only the least bigoted things they can get away with. Currently, homophobia is the most socially acceptable form of bigotry, so they're all about that.
That doesn't mean they wouldn't put the blacks in their place if they could. They are just sane enough to keep that talk mostly quiet (but its quite telling when someone brings a mic to rallies...).
Alas. Our parties are engines for elections more then ideological political groupings, and this minority has rooted itself very deeply into the engine of one of the them. That's scary as all hell, but they are a long way to becoming the Christian Taliban. That doesn't mean they don't *wish* they had that power.
Most Christians by far are still fair-minded, decent people who may even disagree with things like homosexuality and even vote against gay marriage -- but they don't long for the day before Lawrence vs Texas was ruled when gay sex was an actual crime. There's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Christianity and mainstream Christianity. Just like there's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Islam and mainstream Islam.
The fundamentalists in the Christian world are just not in actual power. (Thank God. History tells us what happens when they do get in power).
Your mental exercise is flawed; but let's go with it. If someone took Obama's actual words and actual vulgar, racist profanity and turned it around into an over-the-top satiric(sp?) response that was more disgusting (but not by an order of a magnitude) then what Obama actually said, and turned it into some huge online campaign which got to the top of the search results -- I'd see no problem with it, either. Its not bullying.
Politicians are not just people. They choose the public space, they put themselves on the pulpit. Their speech is magnified already without the internet: moreover, their power is magnified beyond what any individual has. They can effect change that directly endangers people's liberty and safety.
That someone manages to take the internet and use it to counter the hate-machine that supports this politician (the Tea Party and "conservative" movement which are all for smaller government doing less-- except when it comes to government involvement in sex, where it needs to be bigger and do more) is not an act of "bullying".
A bully uses superior power to beat down someone weaker. A United States Senator does not qualify as someone needing protection from the mean, awful, big bad brutes on the playground. Who are being just *mean*.
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The Employee-Employer relationship is fundamentally different then the relationship between Card and I: there is an imbalance of power in that relationship and that invalidates the comparison.
Here, I am the customer: there are any number of possible places where my money can go and no one has any claim on it. If I do not buy something it is not a penalty, therefore the act of not buying something is not a punishment. He has no claim on my money, and so its lack is not a penalty. It is not something he would otherwise have had or that he would have had through some obligation or which has been taken away from him -- those are what make something a penalty.
The act of buying something is entirely within my sole discretion and is entirely my unqualified right to determine, for any reason.
That said: it is not merely his public opinions that are at issue. I do not boycott people who disagree with me. I could, and it would be entirely within my right, and entirely moral for me to do so, but I don't so its moot. Card is not being boycotted for his opinions (by me) -- he is being boycotted because he is a political activist, and therefore the money I give him supports and funds activism that I find reprehensible.
Yes, if someone wants to not shop at a store because it has gay people in it, they are entirely free to do so. Doing so does not punish the store.
If someone wants to spend their money only in stores run by Christians, that's entirely fine and moral. If someone wants to spend their money only in stores which have a good reputation for being 'green', that's entirely fine and moral. If someone does not want to buy a product because they believe the company is harming the environment or its suppliers are being abused, that's entirely fine and moral. The inverse of these are all also true, and just as fine -- though rarely do people want to buy something because the company is hurting the environment, more likely the inverse is that people don't care... which is ALSO entirely fine. Importantly, in none of those cases are they punishing anyone.
Card's political agenda is hurting people, his political activism is hurting people. Thus, I will not patronize him -- or Chick-fil-A, for that matter -- because it is my unqualified right to support those businesses and people I want to. My money is power, and empowering people who are actively championing against basic human dignity is something I choose not to do.
I... there is so much wrong here.
I'll say only: I am not castigating anyone for any beliefs. I am calling out someone who is a *political activist* who is attempting to impose his beliefs upon the nation and refusing to financially support him because of that activism.
I reject your definition of private.
Once one becomes an activist and puts their name, their reputation, their money behind a cause that is no longer a private matter. It is at that point entirely justified to consider those matters of public policy that they are so strongly advocating when deciding if you want to give them your business or not.
Card has done that, and in doing so has forfeited any claim to this being a private opinion or belief that he holds.
There's a lot of false equivalencies you have going on there that I'm not gonna address because the above is sufficient, but--
First, It is not "punishment".
Card has no expectation or right to my money; and no one is advocating that his opinion be criminalized or penalized in any way. He has a right to whatever money he has earned through his work. If I choose to give -- or not as the case may be -- him money, that's me exercising my rights. That does not punish him.
Second, Card does not merely "not support" gay marriage: he does not merely have an opinion. He is an activist and major player in the political arena to deny gay people the right to marry. He is an influential member of a Church which poured huge amounts of money into Prop 8 in California, he sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. He is not merely a man with an opinion, he is an active political force on this issue.
Third, his stance is not merely that he is against gay marriage or for "protecting traditional marriage" -- go read his writings. He has argued that adult, consensual homosexuality has no place in society and should be criminalized. He since said that he merely wanted to keep existing laws "on the books" passively and that he wouldn't argue to reinstate them, but that doesn't really jive with what he said.
Every dollar I give him, small as my individual dollars are, is a dollar towards a person who is an active force against something I believe is an issue of fundamental rights and fair society. It's not that I'm threatened, its that it is counterproductive. To donate money to the Human Rights Campaign and turn around and patronize establishments like Chick-fil-A or this movie simply does not make sense.
I don't hate him, there's no exclamation marks involved in my thinking, and anyone who does go see this movie or buy his books I don't view as a bigot or supportive of bigotry. Some may be ignorant of what's behind it, some may prioritize their life and money differently, but for those of us who do KNOW who he is and what he has said, supports, and actively tries to do in society, our choice to not support him is valid.
It is not "punishment", he has neither right nor claim to our patronage. It is political, though.
Bear in mind, that's just one of many. Card has written many, many, many times on this subject -- even arguing that homosexual acts should be criminalized, that an adult willfully engaging in sex he doesn't find acceptable with other consenting adults should go to *jail* and be deemed an unacceptable part of society.
Not all hate speech is going to say 'faggot' and 'burn in hell' and stuff like that: those extreme positions are also supported and maintained by more intellectual and softly spoken declarations of the inhumanity of the minority and supporting that it has no right to be seen as a peer because its difference is too different to allow.
Did you miss the part of RTFA where it talks about movie distribution contracts? They aren't free to set any business model they want. They owe a percentage to the upstream provider based on "ticket sales" -- every person in a seat for every showing -- and are *required* to track that.
Now, I have no idea how they're calculating ticket sales or basing the percentage owed off of what value or any of the various details involved, but public showing of movies requires a separate license and those terms are not something three guys in some small town can just get set at whatever is most convenient for their ideal business situation.
It'd surely be better for consumers if it were an all you can use service, but I bet they are still with its once-per-movie plan actually intending on getting most of their money from refreshments and the like..., because movie theaters really don't make that much off of ticket sales. I don't know the precise details, but for new releases theaters only get like 20-30% or so of the ticket sales... after a month or so, they may get most of it, but they always end up paying.
And remember, a big point of this plan is these local people *do* want to go out and watch new releases and have social events after them with their community, and not have to drive an hour away to do that. So while some people will be going and watching when this theater gets most of the money, a lot will be going when they have to pay most of it to the movie's owner.
"The FBI" is not a monolithic thing.
He didn't take it to an FBI technician-- if he did, it'd probably have been cleaned up tight and fast. He took it into his office, where TFA says *they don't have cyber guys*. I.e., he's in some dingy little office without a cyber crimes unit. This doesn't sound implausible at all, the guy's in an FBI office across the Pacific in a US territory, not in Los Angeles.
Then he took it in to a local computer repair shop, and it doesn't at all sound implausible to me that they might have fibbed on just what they did. Instead of re-imagining it, they may have just done a quick scrub of the user settings.
"The FBI" didn't go through a two step process. A guy who is also an FBI agent went through a two step process. Not everything an FBI agent does is with the full force and resources of The FBI.
Not all FBI agents are computer wizzes. TFA said that the office he was in had no computer crimes unit which is where the computer wizzes congregate.
And it surprises you that a computer repair shop might not actually do what they say they are going to? Really?
Read TFA -- the Judge made a note of this. The initial report that he got was just him as a father: after that what he was doing was basically being an FBI agent. *However* even though he was, the fact that the computer was essentially stolen meant the guy had no expectation of privacy for it. anyways.
That's what I thought at first, having lived through Andrew in Florida -- I was all, "psh, its only a category 1". However, thi sisn't a Yankees media situation. Sandy was significantly more powerful then the category would imply.
For one thing, by the time it hit NYC, it was no longer a hurricane -- it had merged with one or two cold storm systems that were coming in from the other direction. This changed the dynamic of the storm significantly: whereas hurricanes gain their energy from the warm ocean waters, this type of storm gained its energy from the difference between the cold and hot storm systems merging together. Or something. (The precise details are not clear to me: I'm not a meteorologist)
Sandy was also *huge* -- measuring the total energy in the storm, it was bigger then Katrina. Hurricanes can get intense but the brunt of their power is focused. They may have a lot of wind speed, and strictly by that measure Sandy wasn't very impressive... but when you have a cat 1 spread out as far as Sandy was, its pulling in a HUGE amount of water.
It wasn't the wind that was so destructive here: it was the storm surge that the huge storm system brought with it.
More sciency stuff at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/sandy-packed-more-total-energy-than-katrina-at-landfall/2012/11/02/baa4e3c4-24f4-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html (Warning: yankee media)
But, really. Its not just rhetoric of omg the Yanks are finally getting hit that made this seem bad. It really was a very, very, very bad storm and the hurricane classification only makes it seem small.
My paraphrasing may have made it sound like that routine because I've seen it so it may have lingered in the back of my mind: but that is just the paraphrasing. The tweets were much worse and personal. It was along the lines of saying he has his theoretical black "friends" and he's fine with them, but those unknown-blacks that voted for Obama are niggers. To me the "tone" (insofar as texts have tones) was nothing like Chris Rock's thing.
Then again, I'm not sure a white dude saying "nigger" and a black dude saying "nigger" can ever really be compared fairly. :)
In this case, its pretty easy.
If you say he's a bad President with bad policy decisions and poor judgement, that's the content of his character (or actions). If you say he's a (sand) nigger or muslim or mention slavery or his non-whiteness, as many of those posts in the blog did, its racist. If you talk about the preferred method of assassination being lynching as MANY of these did, its *really* racist (also stupid as shit).
Those were *really* blatant. "I'm not racist!" one said, "I like plenty of black people, I just hate niggers" (paraphrased by me, site's down now). Its hard to read that as anything but, "I like the black people who know their place, i.e., subservient to my white ass." And that'd be one of the nicer ones.
Things get fuzzier when you have someone talking about the loss or waning of "Traditional America", which is IMO racist -- but which is trying very hard to cover it.
When you talk about the only reason he won is because the "new" America is getting "gifts" from Santa, you're bemoaning the decline of the white male bloc and rather offensively deciding no one but that white male bloc can make an intelligent decision on its merits -- that's just generally insulting, but arguably not quite racist. But is it *damn* close to both racism and male chauvinism (since this new America also happens to include whores and sluts: i.e., single women who are thinking only of sex sex sex sex sex sex and all the sex they can have for free now, and not about the future as a responsible wife and mother would).
Sure there are plenty of people who are Obama critics who are not racists. However, a LOT are -- and a LOT of what's going around is very thinly veiled racism. This blog was posting up stuff which didn't even try to veil said racism, though. :)
When a frankly moderate (at best: we progressives did /not/ get the far-left guy we thought we wanted) President's every action is treated as some sort of alien insurrection that is utterly incomprehensible to the people -- there's something more then just policy disagreement going on. It's so far beyond partisan or political policy.
Isn't that typical only when taking cases on contingency? In this case, they're billing Apple their hourly rate. (Probably a very high one: don't get me wrong, the lawyers are making plenty of money off of Apple here -- but I don't believe its a percentage of the awarded damages)
IIUC, and I didn't even think I understood it at all before this well-written article, you're confusing the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field.
The *particle* -- the boson -- does not give anything mass, the *field* does. Particles interact with the field, and have inertial mass as a result. But we can't detect the field. However, since particles and fields are the same thing, we /can/ in theory detect occasional blips in the field, when the energy of the field materializes as the particle. (E=mc2) That's very rare, and those don't last very long, which is why its elusive.
But those particles aren't what's important. They don't give everything mass, they aren't everywhere: they may have been around at the start of the universe when everything was all bursting with energy and such, but they quickly decayed; the field persisted though, and that underlining /field/ of the same name, is everywhere.
I think.
JD sells more then booze. A lot more.
They sell books, too, among other things. The core business of JD is booze, but their brand is much bigger then that.
Some of it is just merchandise for the fans. Others are things like cookbooks who have licensed JD's trademark.
Trademarks do not leave open the option of just letting it go; they /have/ to be enforced, or the claim weakens and sooner or later the company gets into court on a real, *major* violation and the mark is ruled abandoned.
JD makes more then just whiskey. They make all kinds of merchandise that is related to their core business, all under the same brand umbrella, all under the same image. No one would confuse his book for a bottle of whiskey, but they may confuse it for some official JD-endorsed publication. Is that very likely? Hard to say.
However, JD is _required_ to enforce their trademark or they *lose* it.
There's nothing wrong about it. Trademarks require enforcement or you lose them. They aren't copyright, "fair use" as copyright defines does not apply.
A few more dollars, so like, $40? Okay, I'd do $40 for a more powerful CPU and more RAM. Maybe $50? Sure, I have the cash. I mean, it goes against the goal and purpose of the Raspberry Pi, so it might not make the target audience happy, but sure.
Except, just some minor googling seems to put the items you're listening at $90 to $150. That's not a few more dollars. That's two to four times the cost.
Because they voluntarily joined the WTO, because they *chose* to submit to certain trade agreements. Because they get lots of benefits by being in the WTO, and are expected to comply with their obligations.
Among those is that if they are selling this mineral to a Chinese company for X, then an American company has to be able to buy it for X, too. The market value of the mineral is X, period. Thus, Chinese and American companies are in competition for the mineral on an even footing. That's what the WTO membership requires.
In this case, more importantly, if they are allowing Chinese companies to buy as much of the mineral as they'd like, but limiting export, then they're unfairly advantaging their companies in a way that is specifically not allowed by the WTO rules they agreed to when they joined. Now, there are some reasons to limit exports, and its up to the US/EU and others to prove it to the WTO. Submitting to WTO judgement on such matters is also something China agreed to.
But this isn't some kind of unilateral international pressure or something. This is about China *volunteering* to join an organization knowing full well that doing so was agreeing to abide by certain regulations, in return for getting access to markets and trade benefits.
Lawyers are not free. Being sued is a royal pain in the ass. Having to deal with it may not be worth the trouble to him, even if it would turn out he'd surely win.
I'm sure Apple would love nothing more then to go SIMless: the idea of completely eliminating a component would thrill them. Think of what they could put in its place!
But, the carriers rejected that idea hard, years ago. So Apple is doing the next best thing: trying to make the damn things as small as possible so they can recover the space for other things.
The manufacturers only have so much power-- even Apple, whose influence over carriers is unparalleled and unprecedented, has limits to what it can twist their arm into doing. Unfortunately.
I doubt its a cost issue; people keep saying on here "Oh, the regular one is small enough to not impact the phone size" and "Oh, the micro-SIM is small enough...." But, that's just missing the point. Its not the phone size Apple wants to change: its that they very much want the iPhone to turn into the Doctor's Blue Box and cram more into it without the size changing.
If you look at the teardown of modern iPhones, you should notice just how densely packed they are-- and /any/ space savings means either more battery (likely), or some place to fit another chip in to provide some sensor or feature. Every little bit counts these days. Look at the teardown: the micro-SIM is to your fingers but it and its supporting space is significant on the scale of the device and its packed electronics.
If they want to add more (more chips, more battery, more anything) they can only a) increase the device's size, b) take something out, or c) shrink something already in. They're trying to do c) and everything is on the table for shrinkage.
Romney, kinda. Except he's electable by the core only on a "I'm not Obama. Honest. No, really, I'm not" platform which will get the core to vote for him only begrudgingly. He might appeal to some moderates and he has at least a chance at the general, I think. If only as a "not Obama" candidate.
The rest are gonna freak the hell out of any moderates they get near and guarantee an Obama re-election. I think the real candidates are sitting this election out and waiting for 2016.
This is all true to an extent (though an incumbent President can loose, but they do have a solid advantage).
But we are also a nation which has a fundamentalist minority that drives the election process of one of our two major parties.
They aren't the Christian Taliban because the Taliban was actually in power, so could do what it wanted. The difference is these people can't. That doesn't mean they don't want to.
These people would be happy to criminalize sex that didn't conform to their view of Correct (all the while preaching of "personal liberty" and "freedom"). They would not stone the woman for being raped, but they'd call her a whore who asked for it because she didn't dress appropriately. They would teach only what is religiously acceptable in schools, including mandating prayer (except for the Jews, who are the only ones who would not have to go). They would go back to segregation at best (if not outright slavery, which was also in the bible).
Fortunately, most Americans are not this vile. Even most Republicans. Unfortunately, this minority has enthusiasm and a will-to-power like no one else, so is always out there on election day, always donating, always working -- so the Republicans have to kowtow to them. There is a certain subset of their beliefs-- fiscal conservatism-- which resonates with a lot of the sane Republicans, and a lot of moderates (and even some Democrats), and so lately they've been trumpeting that and getting a lot of support in the "Tea Party" movement.
But their fundamentalism, the ultimately theocratic Republic they actually want, the "social conservatism" that almost everyone outside of their minority rejects, is never very far away. They just don't say it too loud, and say only the least bigoted things they can get away with. Currently, homophobia is the most socially acceptable form of bigotry, so they're all about that.
That doesn't mean they wouldn't put the blacks in their place if they could. They are just sane enough to keep that talk mostly quiet (but its quite telling when someone brings a mic to rallies...).
Alas. Our parties are engines for elections more then ideological political groupings, and this minority has rooted itself very deeply into the engine of one of the them. That's scary as all hell, but they are a long way to becoming the Christian Taliban. That doesn't mean they don't *wish* they had that power.
Most Christians by far are still fair-minded, decent people who may even disagree with things like homosexuality and even vote against gay marriage -- but they don't long for the day before Lawrence vs Texas was ruled when gay sex was an actual crime. There's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Christianity and mainstream Christianity. Just like there's a huge difference between Fundamentalist Islam and mainstream Islam.
The fundamentalists in the Christian world are just not in actual power. (Thank God. History tells us what happens when they do get in power).
Your mental exercise is flawed; but let's go with it. If someone took Obama's actual words and actual vulgar, racist profanity and turned it around into an over-the-top satiric(sp?) response that was more disgusting (but not by an order of a magnitude) then what Obama actually said, and turned it into some huge online campaign which got to the top of the search results -- I'd see no problem with it, either. Its not bullying.
Politicians are not just people. They choose the public space, they put themselves on the pulpit. Their speech is magnified already without the internet: moreover, their power is magnified beyond what any individual has. They can effect change that directly endangers people's liberty and safety.
That someone manages to take the internet and use it to counter the hate-machine that supports this politician (the Tea Party and "conservative" movement which are all for smaller government doing less-- except when it comes to government involvement in sex, where it needs to be bigger and do more) is not an act of "bullying".
A bully uses superior power to beat down someone weaker. A United States Senator does not qualify as someone needing protection from the mean, awful, big bad brutes on the playground. Who are being just *mean*.