"75% failure" isn't a very enlightening statistic. If that's the rate of failure over their entire development program, and they've been steadily improving then it's rather better than NASA did over the same amount of time when they started.
The Federal Reserve is the root of the problem. When you inflate the currency, it causes market distortions. In this case, the biggest distortion was the housing bubble. Fannie and Freddie are their chief accomplices, and the mortgage originators are like the corner drug dealers.
every respected economic expert on the planet disagrees
When you try to argue ad veracundiam, you might want to cite specific economists who happen to have been correct in their predictions. Just waving your hands like this makes you the idiot.
despite what many libertarians seem to believe, greed does not inherently promote public welfare or ethical/responsible behavior.
What a bizarre strawman you've built there. I don't know any libertarian who's made any claim to that effect. What we do claim, is that in a free market with the rule of law, the way to prosper is to offer what people want to buy. Doing business ethically is conducive to getting repeat business. People who fuck over their customers will suffer damage to their reputation, and their business will suffer as a result.
the Federal Reserve had nothing to do with predatory lending practices
Guess again.
No matter how slipshod a mortgage lender is, it's the endless supply of credit from the Fed that makes it possible for him to hand out those loans. In a free market for credit, the more loans are made, the less money is available for lending, and the interest rates go up.
anyone who thinks a laissez-faire free market economy is the solution to all the world's problems is clearly ignorant of our past and needs a reality check.
Anyone who thinks government interference in the economy can improve it is indulging in wishful thinking. As for reality checks, we're in the midst of one right now, but sadly there are far too many people who believe it's possible to extinguish a fire by flooding it with gasoline.
Yes, in a way it did come from the government -- it's called deregulation.
I see that you're swallowing the party line. The fact of the matter is, regulations grew just as much under Bush as under any president before him. The key factor to this bubble was the unlimited credit that the Federal Reserve issued, and the Fed is a government-established monopoly. The lesson here is that central planning is a recipe for disaster, whether it's the Soviet bureaucracy setting grain quotas and prices, or the Federal Reserve setting interest rates for fiat currency.
I've got a bit of news for you, sport. Google for "Federal Reserve", and try to figure out what effect they've had when they made an unlimited amount of credit available at an interest rate below the inflation rate.
Capitalism didn't get us into this mess. We were regulated into it, just like we were in 1929.
I'd have to agree. Besides getting to orbit, they've also built an extremely impressive in-house fabrication capability. Aerospace isn't my field, but if it was, I'd love to work there.
Your ranting aside, I'm sure that Apple got some good data on just how many people actually use MMS, and decided to pass on it because it's a dead end.
Once when I was departing a job, my supervisor came into my office with a firewire drive, and said he wanted a full copy of the contents of the machine I used there (which happened to be my property, not the company's.) My reply was "What's your next guess?" I told him I'd copy everything work-related to his drive, but a full image of the whole disk wasn't going to happen.
Background: this department was notoriously slow when it came to equipping their people, so I had bought and was using my own computer at the office.
I had a similar situation, where the sticking point was the phrase "remedy of specific performance", which my sister (who is a lawyer) told me was completely beyond the pale, and then explained to me what it meant. In a nutshell, if I had signed that, I would have been agreeing to an injunction to force me to return to work for them if I left and they wanted me back.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that it was boilerplate that they didn't understand, explained it to the company president. His reply was "Well, I can see where that might be to the company's advantage." I told him "I didn't say it wasn't to your advantage, I said I wouldn't sign it."
Upshot: I struck the offending language, and signed my modified version. I never got a copy back from them with a signature on it, but they did pay me the rate we'd discussed.
However, Motorola wants to keep these people unemployed.
I see a massive and expensive class-action suit in the offing. Motorola shareholders should contact the company's general counsel and tell him in no uncertain terms to cut that shit out.
Interesting to see how the paragons of capitalism don't believe in the free market.
Motorola is no paragon of capitalism. They've been part of the military-industrial complex for a very long time.
As for responding to that clown on your last day, I tend to say something along the lines of "your approval is neither sought nor required" in such a situation.
the inability of many of the "top-flight journalists" to do anything that remotely resembles objective reporting.
The pretense that reporters could be unbiased was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, confined mostly to the USA. Up until the middle of the last century, any political movement had its own newspaper, and you knew where they were coming from. That's pretty much been the case all along in Europe; you know which papers are left- or right-wing, and if you want to be well informed you read them both.
Slashdot Mirror
Most organizations eventually do, but it can take many decades if the founders are careful about the culture they create.
-jcr
What are they going to do? Bury us in paper like the Federal Reserve?
-jcr
"75% failure" isn't a very enlightening statistic. If that's the rate of failure over their entire development program, and they've been steadily improving then it's rather better than NASA did over the same amount of time when they started.
-jcr
You've got a nice little thought-stopper there
If he does, you're the one it's affecting.
Read and learn
The Federal Reserve is the root of the problem. When you inflate the currency, it causes market distortions. In this case, the biggest distortion was the housing bubble. Fannie and Freddie are their chief accomplices, and the mortgage originators are like the corner drug dealers.
every respected economic expert on the planet disagrees
When you try to argue ad veracundiam, you might want to cite specific economists who happen to have been correct in their predictions. Just waving your hands like this makes you the idiot.
-jcr
despite what many libertarians seem to believe, greed does not inherently promote public welfare or ethical/responsible behavior.
What a bizarre strawman you've built there. I don't know any libertarian who's made any claim to that effect. What we do claim, is that in a free market with the rule of law, the way to prosper is to offer what people want to buy. Doing business ethically is conducive to getting repeat business. People who fuck over their customers will suffer damage to their reputation, and their business will suffer as a result.
-jcr
the Federal Reserve had nothing to do with predatory lending practices
Guess again.
No matter how slipshod a mortgage lender is, it's the endless supply of credit from the Fed that makes it possible for him to hand out those loans. In a free market for credit, the more loans are made, the less money is available for lending, and the interest rates go up.
anyone who thinks a laissez-faire free market economy is the solution to all the world's problems is clearly ignorant of our past and needs a reality check.
Anyone who thinks government interference in the economy can improve it is indulging in wishful thinking. As for reality checks, we're in the midst of one right now, but sadly there are far too many people who believe it's possible to extinguish a fire by flooding it with gasoline.
-jcr
Yes, in a way it did come from the government -- it's called deregulation.
I see that you're swallowing the party line. The fact of the matter is, regulations grew just as much under Bush as under any president before him. The key factor to this bubble was the unlimited credit that the Federal Reserve issued, and the Fed is a government-established monopoly. The lesson here is that central planning is a recipe for disaster, whether it's the Soviet bureaucracy setting grain quotas and prices, or the Federal Reserve setting interest rates for fiat currency.
-jcr
I've got a bit of news for you, sport. Google for "Federal Reserve", and try to figure out what effect they've had when they made an unlimited amount of credit available at an interest rate below the inflation rate.
Capitalism didn't get us into this mess. We were regulated into it, just like we were in 1929.
-jcr
I'd have to agree. Besides getting to orbit, they've also built an extremely impressive in-house fabrication capability. Aerospace isn't my field, but if it was, I'd love to work there.
-jcr
Yay, newly-created organization which hasn't accumulated a work-impeding bureaucracy.
SpaceX is doing great work. Let's hope they don't become another bloated military-industrial dependency anytime soon.
-jcr
How much did we pay Sun for OpenOffice.org or Java?
Had a look at Sun's share price lately?
'nuff said.
-jcr
The code you want doesn't belong to you. It belongs to IBM's shareholders. If you want it, make an offer.
Sincerely,
IBM.
Your ranting aside, I'm sure that Apple got some good data on just how many people actually use MMS, and decided to pass on it because it's a dead end.
-jcr
This is probably why the iPhone still doesn't support MMS.
I would think that MMS is redundant, given that you can take a picture with the phone and e-mail it.
-jcr
SMS is just a special case of very low-bandwidth data traffic, which should be superseded by email or jabber anyway.
-jcr
Thanks. Do I know you?
-jcr
Once when I was departing a job, my supervisor came into my office with a firewire drive, and said he wanted a full copy of the contents of the machine I used there (which happened to be my property, not the company's.) My reply was "What's your next guess?" I told him I'd copy everything work-related to his drive, but a full image of the whole disk wasn't going to happen.
Background: this department was notoriously slow when it came to equipping their people, so I had bought and was using my own computer at the office.
-jcr
And anyone who thinks Obama is going to make that much difference is smoking opium.
Speaking of Obama and smoking, it looks like anyone who was hoping for an abatement of the war on drugs is out of luck.
-jcr
He said he'd "make my life a living legal hell" and lots of other nasty things if I did not sign.
Sounds like you should have recorded the call. Amazing just how useful a bit of audio can be.
-jcr
Heh. It wasn't Yahoo, it was a tiny company that has long since vanished.
-jcr
I had a similar situation, where the sticking point was the phrase "remedy of specific performance", which my sister (who is a lawyer) told me was completely beyond the pale, and then explained to me what it meant. In a nutshell, if I had signed that, I would have been agreeing to an injunction to force me to return to work for them if I left and they wanted me back.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that it was boilerplate that they didn't understand, explained it to the company president. His reply was "Well, I can see where that might be to the company's advantage." I told him "I didn't say it wasn't to your advantage, I said I wouldn't sign it."
Upshot: I struck the offending language, and signed my modified version. I never got a copy back from them with a signature on it, but they did pay me the rate we'd discussed.
-jcr
I say "tend", because I wouldn't necessarily deliver that line verbatim.
-jcr
However, Motorola wants to keep these people unemployed.
I see a massive and expensive class-action suit in the offing. Motorola shareholders should contact the company's general counsel and tell him in no uncertain terms to cut that shit out.
-jcr
Interesting to see how the paragons of capitalism don't believe in the free market.
Motorola is no paragon of capitalism. They've been part of the military-industrial complex for a very long time.
As for responding to that clown on your last day, I tend to say something along the lines of "your approval is neither sought nor required" in such a situation.
-jcr
the inability of many of the "top-flight journalists" to do anything that remotely resembles objective reporting.
The pretense that reporters could be unbiased was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, confined mostly to the USA. Up until the middle of the last century, any political movement had its own newspaper, and you knew where they were coming from. That's pretty much been the case all along in Europe; you know which papers are left- or right-wing, and if you want to be well informed you read them both.
-jcr