I honestly don't mind the suspensions, but an expulsion is well beyond reasonable punishment for something that never went beyond speech, didn't take place on school grounds, and there was no particular reason to believe was true (even if it is).
Children should be punished for inappropriate behavior as a means of teaching right from wrong. An explusion is something that is going to follow her around. It's going to screw her family, who now has to try to find another school to take her in, which may or may not be anywhere near where they live, and may have no recourse but homeschooling or one of those schools for "troubled students." It will probably affect her ability to get into top colleges going forward even if she is otherwise completely deserving. In short, it is going to have a significant harm on her life and her family's.
Expulsions exist, and should be exercised, only to protect the population. If she's bringing weapons to school, an expulsion should be considered. If she is consistently getting into fights or disrupting her classes and previous, less severe punishments have had no effect, an expulsion could be considered. "I said my teacher was a pedophile on Facebook one day" should have never even entered consideration, much less actually had it applied.
It's like a life sentence for libel. Yes, libel is a problem and yes, it deserves a punishment, but not nearly one that severe. I hardly ever say something like this, but I think it's time for the family to lawyer up.
That's only somewhat true. Up until the last version, iOS upgrades were $9.99. Whether that remains true going forward remains to be seen. If it does, you can almost assuredly thank Google for it. And if not, well, calling it free as long as you never want to upgrade isn't what I would call a complete truth.
The bottom line is, comparing Google's involvement with Android to Apple's with iOS is fairly useless. Google isn't trying to directly monetize it, so the fact that they $0 they make from their OS is less than whatever Apple makes is largely irrelevant. For Google it's about suppressing iPhone, for fear that they could be essentially locked out by Apple cutting deals with Microsoft or somebody else for browsers/search engine defaults, which it is succeeding at to some degree; and on the flip side of that coin, getting more and more devices that rely on Google services into the hands of consumers, which it is also succeeding at. To what degree it ever overtakes Apple is relevant to Google only in very indirect ways.
As an aside, your first point made me giggle. Comparing every dollar Apple makes to every dollar Microsoft makes tells you nothing other than, well, the ratio of all the dollars they make. His point was that Microsoft's approach of decoupling the OS from the hardware was vastly more successful than Apple's approach of only selling one with the other, and he's demonstrably right. That their MP3 players or phones are more successful than Microsoft's pitiful attempts in those arenas does nothing to disprove it. Windows makes Microsoft more money than OS X+computer makes Apple, and that's all the OP was saying.
So they don't think Australians are little kids who cannot handle mature video game content, they just think that they're better at parenting than a child's actual parents?
That's because you're under the illusion that making money in the stock market involves the company you're investing in doing well. It's quite possible to make boatloads of money on stocks for companies with no futures.
With growth companies like Facebook and even Apple, you make money by buying stock and selling it for more. Buy Facebook stock on day one and you are going to make money -- guaranteed. How much will depend on how good you are at figuring out what the curve is going to be like and when the value is nearest its peak. People who buy stock at the peak are going to lose money.
There are companies like you're thinking of; companies like Microsoft pay a share of profits in the form of dividends, meaning the money you make is directly proportional to the money the company makes. Of course if you're good at buying low and selling high you can make extra money there too, but companies who pay dividends tend to have more stable investors: They're making near guaranteed money while they own stock, and while they can make a big chunk by selling they give up that income stream.
In short, the first investors aren't "one-cell brained" at all. They're the smart ones. People who come after them may or may not be smart depending on where in the peaks and valleys they enter.
Wouldn't you at least wish you had some recourse to stop publication of that book?
This reminds me of a scene in West Wing. Some of the presidents advisors were prepping him for questions about the death penalty, which he opposed. They posed him a hypothetical question a reporter might ask: "If somebody murdered your youngest daughter, would you want to see that man executed?" The president was busy and probably a bit annoyed with the prep and simply said: "No."
The advisor stopped and basically went off on him (as much as anybody goes off on the president), ultimately giving him what he thinks the response should be: "Of course I would. I would want it to be cruel and unusual, which is why it's probably a good idea that families of victims don't have rights in that case."
Would I wish I had some recourse? Of course. But that is the definition of bias. It should be evaluated on the relative merits of both arguments, not on some appeal to emotion. Is free speech something that should be set aside because of a risk of offending me? Isn't the ability to offend people pretty much the point of free speech? If nobody cared what you had to say, you wouldn't need protection to say it.
As long as it is presented as a fiction, I don't see an issue. Maybe the title should be changed, because it sounds awfully like some sort of biography. Other than that I don't have an issue. Does the estate have legal rights? Possibly. That doesn't mean they should, and if they shouldn't that doesn't mean it's not about the evils of intellectual property law. And even if we agreed that they should have some sort of rights, I'd argue that a man dead 37 years has exhausted them.
That was one of the creepiest fucking things I've ever read. Even if that's exactly what parents want, why on Earth should society support it? Living through your children is not psychologically healthy -- not for you, and certainly not for your children. They're not little mini-you's. They share some genetics with you, they'll obviously share a bit of you based on their upbringing, but they are not you.
If you want to argue you're protecting them... fine. It's a stupid argument and a terrible approach, but at least I can respect the goal. Suggesting you want to keylog your child's computer so you can spy on everything they do and make sure they turn out to be like you in every way instead of just "some ways"... is fucking creepy. There's no other way to put it.
WE ARE ANONYMOUS, VOICE OF FREE SPEECH. OBEY US OR BE SILENCED.
Only twats as self-important as they obviously are could write this sort of thing and not even realize what they're saying. Or perhaps they do realize and just think that they're so great that their hypocrisy doesn't matter. I believe we've seen this sort of thing in history before. It starts with a religion and ends with lots of dead people. But hey, maybe this time it will be awesome.
Then again, I can't think of an executive who is as important to his company as Steve Jobs is to Apple. They tried the "running without him" thing. What happened? Apple nearly went bankrupt, while Jobs went and bought a hardware company named Pixar for $10 million, turned it into an animation studio and sold it for $7.6 billion. Apple realized its mistake and brought him back, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world.
That's... a big turn around. To be quite honest, I don't think Jobs is as important to Apple now as he was then. As a company I think Apple is pretty much at a point where it could just coast for a while; beyond the point where anything as dramatic as bankruptcy was on the horizon. But if I were an investor, that's scary. And more than just being scary, it's a bad sign. Apple does not pay dividends; the way that investors make money on a growth company is by the company, you know. Growing. Are you confident that not only will Apple tread water once Steve Jobs retires or passes away, but it will actually continue to grow? I wouldn't be. As the investors are pushing for right now, I would at least want to know what the company's plans are for when that time comes.
Growing up, one of my dad's mottos was "different strokes for different folks." My brother was always angry that my bedtime was later than his at whatever my age (and gone by the time I was 12 or so) -- but then again he ditched school as if it was some sort of religious observance and ended up dropping out (he since went back but that is neither here nor there), while I would get myself up no matter when I went to bed, go to school and get good grades. Just because we're both people and both children of the same parents doesn't mean we necessarily need to be treated the same, just as the fact that Apple being a company somebody might invest in doesn't mean it needs to be treated identically to any other company somebody might invest in. You judge things on their merits. I doubt anybody cares if, say, Steve Ballmer dies or leaves Microsoft -- but they care if Steve Jobs does the same with Apple. For good reason.
Well if gunowners.org says it it has to be the unbiased truth!
Actually, ironically, the page you linked says very little about anything that you have said. England, United Kingdom, UK... these turn up nowhere in the document. Neither does any of the other items you mentioned. Quite an interesting source there.
But hell, Vermont allows guns and is really safe so I guess you win.
Washington D.C. [. ..] is one of the worst cities in the US for violent crime. One of the very reasons for this is actually the strict gun control laws. The same goes for Chicago. What about Los Angeles?
Wait, wait! Let me try to guess another one. Those were all commie liberal states, so let's head down to Texas. Houston is their biggest city so I'm going to guess Houston. Yessss! I'm good at this! It's almost like the majority of major urban populations have higher and often significantly higher than national average violent crime rates. I also note that your cherry-picking of which areas support your argument ignored New York, which has strict gun control laws and average or below-average crime rates pretty much across the board. Strange, that.
And while we're here, "one of the very reasons for this is actually the strict gun control laws" is nothing but a beyond-terrible non sequitor. If you want people to believe it you're going to have to do far better than that.
What people don't realize, or don't care to acknowledge, is that criminals don't care if they're breaking the law. Which is exactly why they're "Criminals".
I am actually inclined to agree in terms of violent criminals. However, it is worth pointing out that "criminal" includes everything from a misdemeanor assault charge during a bar fight to a DUI to a rapist to a murderer. In other words, far too broad to paint everybody with the same brush. The idea that every criminal is willing to step up from dealing pot or burglary to murder is a stetch.
If even a small percentage of relatively small-time criminals is scared by the possibility of their sentence exploding just for having a gun in their hoodie while they commit some other low-brow crime, that's a small percentage of people who can't accidentally (our out of fear) shoot and kill somebody.
Criminals want to take the path of least resistance; they're not going to break into a house KNOWING that it could very well be their last, when easier undefended targets are nearby.
That's not exactly a roaring argument in favor of guns. "Path of least resistance" is a relative term, and you're giving the criminals too much credit. Will I rob your house knowing you have a gun when I can rob your neighbor instead? Of course not. Will I rob your house not knowing if you have a gun or not? How, exactly, do you think most robberies are taking place? Posing as a door-to-door gun salesman and only hitting the houses that say "no thanks, I already have enough weapons?" They're not researching these things beyond, at best, "when do they leave for the day?" They're looking for targets of opportunity.
Even if you happen to achieve your goal of arming the entire populace, do you really believe most criminals are going to go "well, shit. I guess that's the end of my life of crime. I'd better turn my life around?" Even if you fully buy into the "path of least resistance" argument, all you're doing is creating more resistance all around. Most will still commit their crimes (and most, quite frankly, will still get away with them for all the same reasons they do right now) they'll just be doing it with a higher risk of getting shot for it than when they woke up the day before in reality instead of magical gun land. Nobody having a gun won't help. Everybody having a
That's not the old metamod system. The old system was essentially an agree/disagree with the moderation that was given to a post. This system basically asks you to moderate the posts yourself and, presumably, tries to see how many metamodders arrive at different conclusions than the moderators did.
The unfortunate part is that has been true since day one.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying it, but I have never seen Slashdotters leap on board conspiracy theories like they have with this one. You could have a discussion about 9/11 or the JFK assassination or--hell, as long as we're talking about things with absolutely no proof and flimsy-at-best evidence, god--and most people here would jump all over you for being an idiot conspiracy theorist or just plain an idiot for believing something with no proof.
But dare to suggest that not everything that happens to Wikileaks is a ham-fisted, incompetent CIA plot and hoo boy, you'd better watch out. Now YOU'RE the idiot because you can't see how blindingly obvious it is that with absolutely no proof or evidence that the CIA is behind it all. In fact, look at the other replies to see Weezul prove exactly what I am talking about. Apparently, "the rape charges already convinced anyone reasonable." My not believing it because there is no reason to believe it makes me unreasonable, it seems. Naive. And he's not the first. I've seen at least two other (+5) commenters making essentially the same claims just glancing down the comment thread.
In fact, this entire article is nothing but that and almost nobody has bothered to bring up the fact that a contractor who sometimes works with the DoD making a sales pitch to Bank of America does not equal some government conspiracy. But here we are commenting on an article that tries to make that exact link Fox News-style. "Hey guys. Now I'm not saying this is some huge government conspiracy, all I'm saying is there are these companies linked to the government who are hatching a conspiracy and then BAM MAN! Right after that 'disgruntled volunteers' left and banks starting clamping down and Amazon cancelled Wikileaks' accounts and guys are getting harassed by the government." It's so hard to tell what the poster wants us to think, isn't it?
If this crap were coming out of Fox News about any other topic, Slashdot would be all over it. But it's about Wikileaks and, by extension, how evil and terrible and incompetent the US is so not only is it largely left alone, people lap up every bit of it as gospel and insult you for not believing it too.
It hasn't been possible to have a "Wikileaks conversation" since day one. Not here. It's one side trying to have a conversation and the other side trying to shout them down and call them names. Yeah, they'll use this flimsy crap as "evidence" in future "conversations" but it doesn't matter. A conversation implies the other party is listening to what you have to say, and that hasn't been true for a while now. They've made up their minds long ago and you and I are unreasonable idiots for not agreeing immediately with everything they say or Assange pulls out of his ass.
I think there's another issue that I don't think has been mentioned so far:
With a group that calls itself Anonymous starts having people get picked off, whether they are "leaders" or not, what does that do to the psyche of the group as a whole? "Anonymous as long as nobody looks too hard" hardly inspires confidence. The truly technically literate, they might be alright; they might be secure in their knowledge of how to avoid being found out. But what about the others? Are the script kiddies at the bottom that make these sorts of distributed attacks possible willing to take the risks once they are shown overwhelming evidence that there is, in fact, a risk?
It's attitudes like that that make our prisons' resounding success in rehabilitating prisoners possible. *eyeroll*
Do the rest of us a favor and get a fucking clue before you speak next time, would you? People like you are more of a problem than the average prisoner.
Selling something below cost* is a clear indication that you're trying to drive competitors out of business -- so you can then jack the prices up beyond what they were charging. Otherwise why would you do it? Why not just compete by offering something a little cheaper than them? You're losing money. The only reason companies are willing to lose money, voluntarily, is because they feel it is going to make them more later. In a situation like that, everybody other than that company ends up losing. Other companies go out of business; people lose jobs; and of course now there is no more competition, which means those great prices you got for a little while are gone and replaced with whatever prices they feel they can gouge you for before you break and stop buying altogether.
There's nothing wrong with determining that such anti-competitive, "I win because I have more money not on merit" policies should be illegal, nor does it mean that taking the slippery slope argumentative fallacy route is "a logical conclusion." The only problem is doing such in such a way that it isn't abused, and part of that relies on judges exercising common sense about the law and the intentions of the parties involved--which seems to be exactly what happened here. In fact the person who brought the suit got smacked with paying the respondent's attorney's fees on almost all counts.
* That doesn't tie-in to other profitable product lines and that won't benefit from more economical production in the future, at least.
Apple, unlike most other companies, has experience with how things go with and without him. Apple was nearly destroyed when Steve Jobs was gone, and his return made the company one of the most powerful in the world. That is a big damn jump.
Of course, that's not to say it's all him, nor is it to say that it would happen that way again. That doesn't mean investors shouldn't be concerned about the possibility and want to know what the company is doing to make sure it doesn't happen that way again. If Apple the Juggernaut is about to turn back into a pumpkin, I would certainly want to know that if I have money invested there. Being as that is what happend last time, asking for a plan for how they plan to prevent it going forward hardly seems unreasonable.
To be fair, as our friend Chief Traffic Engineer Kevin Lacy has illustrated to great effect here, a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.
Chicago probably goes a bit overboard because of our history with snowstorms (the short version: the story goes a mayor lost reelection because of how he was perceived to handle a snowstorm), but we had close to FIVE HUNDRED vehicles deployed in this storm.
It was something like 350 special-purpose trucks, the ones with the huge plows on the front, the dumptruck full of road salt and the salt spreader at the back (which damages roads other vehicles, by the way) and an additional 150 or so garbage trucks that can be fit with plows. And of course, at least one crew member (driver) per vehicle. Presumably, the majority of these people have other responsibilities within government -- meaning that if this snow control business isn't pure overtime, it's at least causing quite a bit of it. Then there's maintenance of this massive fleet of vehicles, the purchase and storage of huge mountains of this road salt, increased police patrols, and of course general loss of tax revenue from lost economic opportunities when people decide the roads are too dangerous to go out and buy anything (or even open their businesses).
It's well beyond my abilities to calculate how much all of this costs on an average year, much less how much it might be able to be reduced if we had some sort of road heating system in place or what such a system would cost -- but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that long-term, such a system could actually save money, at least in some places in the country. It should at least be explored, and snarky comments like yours that pretend to know it's not worthwhile without any such information helps nobody. Then again judging by your username and the recentness of your registration, I'm fairly certain you had no intentions of actually being a productive poster when you registered.
For starters, he never said people aren't complaining -- he said that the GGP not using Google anymore doesn't mean any other number of people are not using Google anymore.
More to the point, bitching is always more common than praise. Comparatively few people write a "letter" (letter, email, forum post, blog entry, etc) to talk about how much they enjoy something and want it to stay. That's simply a reality of human nature. And in this case, it's going to be exacerbated. What's the reason to post about Google Instant being great? It's already there, it's free, you're not trying to convince anybody to use it. People will post, overwhelmingly, if they want it to go away--not to stay.
you are referring to other persistent options, you making assumptions about browser security preferences.
Blame the stateless web. If you don't want cookies to exist on your system, that's your choice -- but you fully make it with the knowledge that some things on the web are simply not going to work for you. If that drives you away from Google, that's certainly your choice -- but let's not pretend you are in anything approaching the majority. Or even a minority worth redesigning things around.
Honestly, what surprised me most about your post and the GGP post was that anybody searches through the website anymore. In Chrome I use the Chrome bar (which I have fallen in love with). In Firefox I use either the Google firefox bar or the built-in search box. Either way, I seldom see Instant unless I need to actually refine the search -- and in that relatively rare case, I can cope with it even though I don't particularly like it (and yes, I could also turn it off--but I care about it little enough to not even go through that effort).
Err, until then, you do realize that you keep logging into their property and as long as you do, you're explicitly agreeing to their conditions, right?
You have an exceptionally quaint definition of "explicitly."
Of course, if you want to access the cable company's private servers (i.e. "PSN"), then a different service provider won't work for you. But you have that choice, you know, it being your property and their servers being their property.
If it were that simple, I would be inclined to agree with you. But it is not. PSN access is required by any number of things that quite frankly have no business requiring it, to force you to accept their updates, their new, unilateral conditions and, apparently, their backdoors. And I don't even mean for new items.
Internet access of any kind requires a valid PSN login. That includes things like the Netflix application, which has no need to ever touch Sony's servers or networks. It also includes some games, which will refuse to run without an Internet connection, and others, particularly new games, which refuse to run without specific firmware updates. And of course if you actually happen to enjoy any multiplayer in any game anywhere, you're out of luck.
If you could simply do the PSN equivilent of "tell the cable company to fark off [and] get a different service provider," that would be great. But you can't. Your choices are to essentially brick your property--certainly going forward and possibly even going backward as well--or continue to "use" the service you don't actually use but is engineered into the PS3 to be a required step to almost everything, so that they can continue to force you to "agree" to allowing them to run a backdoor to execute arbitrary code on your system.
Is "that's a nice PS3, it would be a shame if anything happened to it" your idea of agreeing to something, much less explicitly? I mean, really? Or are you just another ignorant person who doesn't even own the system in question but naturally assumes that reading half of a Slashdot summary qualifies you to post about it?
The morality crusaders will find ammunition whether you give it to them or not. If somebody shoots some people at school, it's because he played Doom. If a guy detonates a bomb in an airport, it's because they played a scene in MW2 where five guys went shooting people in an airport. By that example alone you can see the kind of tenuous logic these people are willing to employ. So fuck 'em. It might be worth trying to tip-toe around people who are actually being reasonable, but it's not at all worth it trying to tip-toe around people who will literally twist any event to support their agenda. Better at that point to take whatever creative license one thinks his game might benefit from since he's going to catch flak either way.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I also find it somewhat amusing the parts that people leave out about MW2. Like, for instance, nobody is forcing the player to shoot anybody. (In fact, the first time you start MW2 it asks you if you even want to play the scene AT ALL, but that's not what I'm talking about.) Or the fact that it is not nearly the most horrible thing that happens in that game. One might be able to defend--on some equally dubious grounds--Russia invading the United States because they found a terrorist shot in the head (hrm, but there were no policemen around who could have shot him?) who turned out to be an American, and all the subsequent civilian deaths that you absolutely know must have followed. But nuclear weapons were used. Because we don't actually see the skin melting off the innocent civilians' bodies, they make that out to be better.
I agree with the vast majority of what you said, but I do wish people would talk less in absolutes about teachers' pay.
Most teachers may get paid peanuts, or most (or even all) teachers who are just starting out in teaching may get paid peanuts. These things are true, and ones I can believe.
But claiming they all do is simply demonstrably false. When I was going to high school, the highest paid teacher there was a PE teacher and volleyball coach. He was bringing home over $120,000 a year. One of my favorite teachers, who taught a variety of different computer-related courses (A+ certification, CCNA for a while [though it got cancelled for lack of interest], MCSE [same], intro C++ programming, etc) was bringing home about $90,000, and I believe he was working on a doctorate at the time so that number was set to jump. My favorite math teacher was bringing home $108,000. These are extremely healthy salaries. The year after I had my all-time favorite English teacher, he realized that he had enough vacation days to buy something like a year and a half off of his career and retire. I don't believe there was a single teacher I looked up that was making less than $50,000, which isn't exactly in the range of "rich" but stil exceeds the US median household income.
Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school. But it was still a public school, and not all of these teachers were 30 year veterans. Obviously the ones who were and the ones who had advanced degrees tended to be higher toward those six figures and the newer teachers were toward the lower end.
Like I said, I know that's not true in all schools, or even most schools. Teachers, as a general rule, should absolutely get a raise. They have one of the most thankless yet important jobs in the entirety of American society. But let's just be honest and acknowledge that not all of them are getting paid peanuts. Most Americans would kill to be paid $90,000 at any point in their career, and to have the sort of job security that a tenured teacher does on top is gravy.
Honestly, if they want to teach ID, no problem -- they can set up an entire class for it, or add it as part of some comparative religion class or something that they might already have going on. If there is a class on extremely recent history, it might even fit there.
But not in a science classroom. It is not science, and it does not belong there. There are enough idiots running around out there who don't even know the difference between, as another poster put it, a scientific theory and something they came up with on the shitter while they were reading comics that this is more than misleading, it's downright dangerous. The mere fact that you're fine with them teaching evolution as "the leading theory" implies in no uncertain terms that ID is another theory, putting them somehow on the same level other than evidence in support -- and they are not. One is science. The other is something somebody came up with on the shitter.
If these people are religious, that's fine. They're welcome to believe in ID. They're welcome to believe in god. They're welcome to put "because god says so" at the end of every theory. Science and religion need not clash -- which is exactly what you set them up to do when you treat them as equally valid views on the same matters.
I don't know about you, but I've had more than enough ignorant generations of people and I'm not in the mood to foster more because people need to be coddled. If they can't believe in god AND evolution that's a problem with their religion or their faith, not with evolution. If teaching just evolution gives them a complex about their religion, good. It means they're actually thinking about what they believe and why, and whether they ultimately come out of that going "I still believe in god" or "what a fucking sham religion is!" they're healthier and frankly more intelligent people for it. "Fuck that science shit" as a valid atttitude... not so much.
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I honestly don't mind the suspensions, but an expulsion is well beyond reasonable punishment for something that never went beyond speech, didn't take place on school grounds, and there was no particular reason to believe was true (even if it is).
Children should be punished for inappropriate behavior as a means of teaching right from wrong. An explusion is something that is going to follow her around. It's going to screw her family, who now has to try to find another school to take her in, which may or may not be anywhere near where they live, and may have no recourse but homeschooling or one of those schools for "troubled students." It will probably affect her ability to get into top colleges going forward even if she is otherwise completely deserving. In short, it is going to have a significant harm on her life and her family's.
Expulsions exist, and should be exercised, only to protect the population. If she's bringing weapons to school, an expulsion should be considered. If she is consistently getting into fights or disrupting her classes and previous, less severe punishments have had no effect, an expulsion could be considered. "I said my teacher was a pedophile on Facebook one day" should have never even entered consideration, much less actually had it applied.
It's like a life sentence for libel. Yes, libel is a problem and yes, it deserves a punishment, but not nearly one that severe. I hardly ever say something like this, but I think it's time for the family to lawyer up.
That's only somewhat true. Up until the last version, iOS upgrades were $9.99. Whether that remains true going forward remains to be seen. If it does, you can almost assuredly thank Google for it. And if not, well, calling it free as long as you never want to upgrade isn't what I would call a complete truth.
The bottom line is, comparing Google's involvement with Android to Apple's with iOS is fairly useless. Google isn't trying to directly monetize it, so the fact that they $0 they make from their OS is less than whatever Apple makes is largely irrelevant. For Google it's about suppressing iPhone, for fear that they could be essentially locked out by Apple cutting deals with Microsoft or somebody else for browsers/search engine defaults, which it is succeeding at to some degree; and on the flip side of that coin, getting more and more devices that rely on Google services into the hands of consumers, which it is also succeeding at. To what degree it ever overtakes Apple is relevant to Google only in very indirect ways.
As an aside, your first point made me giggle. Comparing every dollar Apple makes to every dollar Microsoft makes tells you nothing other than, well, the ratio of all the dollars they make. His point was that Microsoft's approach of decoupling the OS from the hardware was vastly more successful than Apple's approach of only selling one with the other, and he's demonstrably right. That their MP3 players or phones are more successful than Microsoft's pitiful attempts in those arenas does nothing to disprove it. Windows makes Microsoft more money than OS X+computer makes Apple, and that's all the OP was saying.
And that hurts anybody other than the mostly innocent employees and shareholders... how?
So they don't think Australians are little kids who cannot handle mature video game content, they just think that they're better at parenting than a child's actual parents?
And you think that's better?
That's because you're under the illusion that making money in the stock market involves the company you're investing in doing well. It's quite possible to make boatloads of money on stocks for companies with no futures.
With growth companies like Facebook and even Apple, you make money by buying stock and selling it for more. Buy Facebook stock on day one and you are going to make money -- guaranteed. How much will depend on how good you are at figuring out what the curve is going to be like and when the value is nearest its peak. People who buy stock at the peak are going to lose money.
There are companies like you're thinking of; companies like Microsoft pay a share of profits in the form of dividends, meaning the money you make is directly proportional to the money the company makes. Of course if you're good at buying low and selling high you can make extra money there too, but companies who pay dividends tend to have more stable investors: They're making near guaranteed money while they own stock, and while they can make a big chunk by selling they give up that income stream.
In short, the first investors aren't "one-cell brained" at all. They're the smart ones. People who come after them may or may not be smart depending on where in the peaks and valleys they enter.
This reminds me of a scene in West Wing. Some of the presidents advisors were prepping him for questions about the death penalty, which he opposed. They posed him a hypothetical question a reporter might ask: "If somebody murdered your youngest daughter, would you want to see that man executed?" The president was busy and probably a bit annoyed with the prep and simply said: "No."
The advisor stopped and basically went off on him (as much as anybody goes off on the president), ultimately giving him what he thinks the response should be: "Of course I would. I would want it to be cruel and unusual, which is why it's probably a good idea that families of victims don't have rights in that case."
Would I wish I had some recourse? Of course. But that is the definition of bias. It should be evaluated on the relative merits of both arguments, not on some appeal to emotion. Is free speech something that should be set aside because of a risk of offending me? Isn't the ability to offend people pretty much the point of free speech? If nobody cared what you had to say, you wouldn't need protection to say it.
As long as it is presented as a fiction, I don't see an issue. Maybe the title should be changed, because it sounds awfully like some sort of biography. Other than that I don't have an issue. Does the estate have legal rights? Possibly. That doesn't mean they should, and if they shouldn't that doesn't mean it's not about the evils of intellectual property law. And even if we agreed that they should have some sort of rights, I'd argue that a man dead 37 years has exhausted them.
That was one of the creepiest fucking things I've ever read. Even if that's exactly what parents want, why on Earth should society support it? Living through your children is not psychologically healthy -- not for you, and certainly not for your children. They're not little mini-you's. They share some genetics with you, they'll obviously share a bit of you based on their upbringing, but they are not you.
If you want to argue you're protecting them... fine. It's a stupid argument and a terrible approach, but at least I can respect the goal. Suggesting you want to keylog your child's computer so you can spy on everything they do and make sure they turn out to be like you in every way instead of just "some ways"... is fucking creepy. There's no other way to put it.
WE ARE ANONYMOUS, VOICE OF FREE SPEECH. OBEY US OR BE SILENCED.
Only twats as self-important as they obviously are could write this sort of thing and not even realize what they're saying. Or perhaps they do realize and just think that they're so great that their hypocrisy doesn't matter. I believe we've seen this sort of thing in history before. It starts with a religion and ends with lots of dead people. But hey, maybe this time it will be awesome.
Of course not.
Then again, I can't think of an executive who is as important to his company as Steve Jobs is to Apple. They tried the "running without him" thing. What happened? Apple nearly went bankrupt, while Jobs went and bought a hardware company named Pixar for $10 million, turned it into an animation studio and sold it for $7.6 billion. Apple realized its mistake and brought him back, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world.
That's... a big turn around. To be quite honest, I don't think Jobs is as important to Apple now as he was then. As a company I think Apple is pretty much at a point where it could just coast for a while; beyond the point where anything as dramatic as bankruptcy was on the horizon. But if I were an investor, that's scary. And more than just being scary, it's a bad sign. Apple does not pay dividends; the way that investors make money on a growth company is by the company, you know. Growing. Are you confident that not only will Apple tread water once Steve Jobs retires or passes away, but it will actually continue to grow? I wouldn't be. As the investors are pushing for right now, I would at least want to know what the company's plans are for when that time comes.
Growing up, one of my dad's mottos was "different strokes for different folks." My brother was always angry that my bedtime was later than his at whatever my age (and gone by the time I was 12 or so) -- but then again he ditched school as if it was some sort of religious observance and ended up dropping out (he since went back but that is neither here nor there), while I would get myself up no matter when I went to bed, go to school and get good grades. Just because we're both people and both children of the same parents doesn't mean we necessarily need to be treated the same, just as the fact that Apple being a company somebody might invest in doesn't mean it needs to be treated identically to any other company somebody might invest in. You judge things on their merits. I doubt anybody cares if, say, Steve Ballmer dies or leaves Microsoft -- but they care if Steve Jobs does the same with Apple. For good reason.
Well if gunowners.org says it it has to be the unbiased truth!
Actually, ironically, the page you linked says very little about anything that you have said. England, United Kingdom, UK... these turn up nowhere in the document. Neither does any of the other items you mentioned. Quite an interesting source there.
But hell, Vermont allows guns and is really safe so I guess you win.
Wait, wait! Let me try to guess another one. Those were all commie liberal states, so let's head down to Texas. Houston is their biggest city so I'm going to guess Houston. Yessss! I'm good at this! It's almost like the majority of major urban populations have higher and often significantly higher than national average violent crime rates. I also note that your cherry-picking of which areas support your argument ignored New York, which has strict gun control laws and average or below-average crime rates pretty much across the board. Strange, that.
And while we're here, "one of the very reasons for this is actually the strict gun control laws" is nothing but a beyond-terrible non sequitor. If you want people to believe it you're going to have to do far better than that.
I am actually inclined to agree in terms of violent criminals. However, it is worth pointing out that "criminal" includes everything from a misdemeanor assault charge during a bar fight to a DUI to a rapist to a murderer. In other words, far too broad to paint everybody with the same brush. The idea that every criminal is willing to step up from dealing pot or burglary to murder is a stetch.
If even a small percentage of relatively small-time criminals is scared by the possibility of their sentence exploding just for having a gun in their hoodie while they commit some other low-brow crime, that's a small percentage of people who can't accidentally (our out of fear) shoot and kill somebody.
That's not exactly a roaring argument in favor of guns. "Path of least resistance" is a relative term, and you're giving the criminals too much credit. Will I rob your house knowing you have a gun when I can rob your neighbor instead? Of course not. Will I rob your house not knowing if you have a gun or not? How, exactly, do you think most robberies are taking place? Posing as a door-to-door gun salesman and only hitting the houses that say "no thanks, I already have enough weapons?" They're not researching these things beyond, at best, "when do they leave for the day?" They're looking for targets of opportunity.
Even if you happen to achieve your goal of arming the entire populace, do you really believe most criminals are going to go "well, shit. I guess that's the end of my life of crime. I'd better turn my life around?" Even if you fully buy into the "path of least resistance" argument, all you're doing is creating more resistance all around. Most will still commit their crimes (and most, quite frankly, will still get away with them for all the same reasons they do right now) they'll just be doing it with a higher risk of getting shot for it than when they woke up the day before in reality instead of magical gun land. Nobody having a gun won't help. Everybody having a
That's not the old metamod system. The old system was essentially an agree/disagree with the moderation that was given to a post. This system basically asks you to moderate the posts yourself and, presumably, tries to see how many metamodders arrive at different conclusions than the moderators did.
Facebook must be cooperating or they're hacking each individual account? I think you're missing a third option.
The unfortunate part is that has been true since day one.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying it, but I have never seen Slashdotters leap on board conspiracy theories like they have with this one. You could have a discussion about 9/11 or the JFK assassination or--hell, as long as we're talking about things with absolutely no proof and flimsy-at-best evidence, god--and most people here would jump all over you for being an idiot conspiracy theorist or just plain an idiot for believing something with no proof.
But dare to suggest that not everything that happens to Wikileaks is a ham-fisted, incompetent CIA plot and hoo boy, you'd better watch out. Now YOU'RE the idiot because you can't see how blindingly obvious it is that with absolutely no proof or evidence that the CIA is behind it all. In fact, look at the other replies to see Weezul prove exactly what I am talking about. Apparently, "the rape charges already convinced anyone reasonable." My not believing it because there is no reason to believe it makes me unreasonable, it seems. Naive. And he's not the first. I've seen at least two other (+5) commenters making essentially the same claims just glancing down the comment thread.
In fact, this entire article is nothing but that and almost nobody has bothered to bring up the fact that a contractor who sometimes works with the DoD making a sales pitch to Bank of America does not equal some government conspiracy. But here we are commenting on an article that tries to make that exact link Fox News-style. "Hey guys. Now I'm not saying this is some huge government conspiracy, all I'm saying is there are these companies linked to the government who are hatching a conspiracy and then BAM MAN! Right after that 'disgruntled volunteers' left and banks starting clamping down and Amazon cancelled Wikileaks' accounts and guys are getting harassed by the government." It's so hard to tell what the poster wants us to think, isn't it?
If this crap were coming out of Fox News about any other topic, Slashdot would be all over it. But it's about Wikileaks and, by extension, how evil and terrible and incompetent the US is so not only is it largely left alone, people lap up every bit of it as gospel and insult you for not believing it too.
It hasn't been possible to have a "Wikileaks conversation" since day one. Not here. It's one side trying to have a conversation and the other side trying to shout them down and call them names. Yeah, they'll use this flimsy crap as "evidence" in future "conversations" but it doesn't matter. A conversation implies the other party is listening to what you have to say, and that hasn't been true for a while now. They've made up their minds long ago and you and I are unreasonable idiots for not agreeing immediately with everything they say or Assange pulls out of his ass.
I think there's another issue that I don't think has been mentioned so far:
With a group that calls itself Anonymous starts having people get picked off, whether they are "leaders" or not, what does that do to the psyche of the group as a whole? "Anonymous as long as nobody looks too hard" hardly inspires confidence. The truly technically literate, they might be alright; they might be secure in their knowledge of how to avoid being found out. But what about the others? Are the script kiddies at the bottom that make these sorts of distributed attacks possible willing to take the risks once they are shown overwhelming evidence that there is, in fact, a risk?
It's attitudes like that that make our prisons' resounding success in rehabilitating prisoners possible. *eyeroll*
Do the rest of us a favor and get a fucking clue before you speak next time, would you? People like you are more of a problem than the average prisoner.
That's... not a logical conclusion at all.
Selling something below cost* is a clear indication that you're trying to drive competitors out of business -- so you can then jack the prices up beyond what they were charging. Otherwise why would you do it? Why not just compete by offering something a little cheaper than them? You're losing money. The only reason companies are willing to lose money, voluntarily, is because they feel it is going to make them more later. In a situation like that, everybody other than that company ends up losing. Other companies go out of business; people lose jobs; and of course now there is no more competition, which means those great prices you got for a little while are gone and replaced with whatever prices they feel they can gouge you for before you break and stop buying altogether.
There's nothing wrong with determining that such anti-competitive, "I win because I have more money not on merit" policies should be illegal, nor does it mean that taking the slippery slope argumentative fallacy route is "a logical conclusion." The only problem is doing such in such a way that it isn't abused, and part of that relies on judges exercising common sense about the law and the intentions of the parties involved--which seems to be exactly what happened here. In fact the person who brought the suit got smacked with paying the respondent's attorney's fees on almost all counts.
* That doesn't tie-in to other profitable product lines and that won't benefit from more economical production in the future, at least.
It doesn't take very long to investigate and make a determination. Why, Slashdot has already decided before they even finished reading the summary!
Apple, unlike most other companies, has experience with how things go with and without him. Apple was nearly destroyed when Steve Jobs was gone, and his return made the company one of the most powerful in the world. That is a big damn jump.
Of course, that's not to say it's all him, nor is it to say that it would happen that way again. That doesn't mean investors shouldn't be concerned about the possibility and want to know what the company is doing to make sure it doesn't happen that way again. If Apple the Juggernaut is about to turn back into a pumpkin, I would certainly want to know that if I have money invested there. Being as that is what happend last time, asking for a plan for how they plan to prevent it going forward hardly seems unreasonable.
To be fair, as our friend Chief Traffic Engineer Kevin Lacy has illustrated to great effect here, a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.
Chicago probably goes a bit overboard because of our history with snowstorms (the short version: the story goes a mayor lost reelection because of how he was perceived to handle a snowstorm), but we had close to FIVE HUNDRED vehicles deployed in this storm.
It was something like 350 special-purpose trucks, the ones with the huge plows on the front, the dumptruck full of road salt and the salt spreader at the back (which damages roads other vehicles, by the way) and an additional 150 or so garbage trucks that can be fit with plows. And of course, at least one crew member (driver) per vehicle. Presumably, the majority of these people have other responsibilities within government -- meaning that if this snow control business isn't pure overtime, it's at least causing quite a bit of it. Then there's maintenance of this massive fleet of vehicles, the purchase and storage of huge mountains of this road salt, increased police patrols, and of course general loss of tax revenue from lost economic opportunities when people decide the roads are too dangerous to go out and buy anything (or even open their businesses).
It's well beyond my abilities to calculate how much all of this costs on an average year, much less how much it might be able to be reduced if we had some sort of road heating system in place or what such a system would cost -- but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that long-term, such a system could actually save money, at least in some places in the country. It should at least be explored, and snarky comments like yours that pretend to know it's not worthwhile without any such information helps nobody. Then again judging by your username and the recentness of your registration, I'm fairly certain you had no intentions of actually being a productive poster when you registered.
What's your point?
For starters, he never said people aren't complaining -- he said that the GGP not using Google anymore doesn't mean any other number of people are not using Google anymore.
More to the point, bitching is always more common than praise. Comparatively few people write a "letter" (letter, email, forum post, blog entry, etc) to talk about how much they enjoy something and want it to stay. That's simply a reality of human nature. And in this case, it's going to be exacerbated. What's the reason to post about Google Instant being great? It's already there, it's free, you're not trying to convince anybody to use it. People will post, overwhelmingly, if they want it to go away--not to stay.
Blame the stateless web. If you don't want cookies to exist on your system, that's your choice -- but you fully make it with the knowledge that some things on the web are simply not going to work for you. If that drives you away from Google, that's certainly your choice -- but let's not pretend you are in anything approaching the majority. Or even a minority worth redesigning things around.
Honestly, what surprised me most about your post and the GGP post was that anybody searches through the website anymore. In Chrome I use the Chrome bar (which I have fallen in love with). In Firefox I use either the Google firefox bar or the built-in search box. Either way, I seldom see Instant unless I need to actually refine the search -- and in that relatively rare case, I can cope with it even though I don't particularly like it (and yes, I could also turn it off--but I care about it little enough to not even go through that effort).
You have an exceptionally quaint definition of "explicitly."
If it were that simple, I would be inclined to agree with you. But it is not. PSN access is required by any number of things that quite frankly have no business requiring it, to force you to accept their updates, their new, unilateral conditions and, apparently, their backdoors. And I don't even mean for new items.
Internet access of any kind requires a valid PSN login. That includes things like the Netflix application, which has no need to ever touch Sony's servers or networks. It also includes some games, which will refuse to run without an Internet connection, and others, particularly new games, which refuse to run without specific firmware updates. And of course if you actually happen to enjoy any multiplayer in any game anywhere, you're out of luck.
If you could simply do the PSN equivilent of "tell the cable company to fark off [and] get a different service provider," that would be great. But you can't. Your choices are to essentially brick your property--certainly going forward and possibly even going backward as well--or continue to "use" the service you don't actually use but is engineered into the PS3 to be a required step to almost everything, so that they can continue to force you to "agree" to allowing them to run a backdoor to execute arbitrary code on your system.
Is "that's a nice PS3, it would be a shame if anything happened to it" your idea of agreeing to something, much less explicitly? I mean, really? Or are you just another ignorant person who doesn't even own the system in question but naturally assumes that reading half of a Slashdot summary qualifies you to post about it?
The morality crusaders will find ammunition whether you give it to them or not. If somebody shoots some people at school, it's because he played Doom. If a guy detonates a bomb in an airport, it's because they played a scene in MW2 where five guys went shooting people in an airport. By that example alone you can see the kind of tenuous logic these people are willing to employ. So fuck 'em. It might be worth trying to tip-toe around people who are actually being reasonable, but it's not at all worth it trying to tip-toe around people who will literally twist any event to support their agenda. Better at that point to take whatever creative license one thinks his game might benefit from since he's going to catch flak either way.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I also find it somewhat amusing the parts that people leave out about MW2. Like, for instance, nobody is forcing the player to shoot anybody. (In fact, the first time you start MW2 it asks you if you even want to play the scene AT ALL, but that's not what I'm talking about.) Or the fact that it is not nearly the most horrible thing that happens in that game. One might be able to defend--on some equally dubious grounds--Russia invading the United States because they found a terrorist shot in the head (hrm, but there were no policemen around who could have shot him?) who turned out to be an American, and all the subsequent civilian deaths that you absolutely know must have followed. But nuclear weapons were used. Because we don't actually see the skin melting off the innocent civilians' bodies, they make that out to be better.
I agree with the vast majority of what you said, but I do wish people would talk less in absolutes about teachers' pay.
Most teachers may get paid peanuts, or most (or even all) teachers who are just starting out in teaching may get paid peanuts. These things are true, and ones I can believe.
But claiming they all do is simply demonstrably false. When I was going to high school, the highest paid teacher there was a PE teacher and volleyball coach. He was bringing home over $120,000 a year. One of my favorite teachers, who taught a variety of different computer-related courses (A+ certification, CCNA for a while [though it got cancelled for lack of interest], MCSE [same], intro C++ programming, etc) was bringing home about $90,000, and I believe he was working on a doctorate at the time so that number was set to jump. My favorite math teacher was bringing home $108,000. These are extremely healthy salaries. The year after I had my all-time favorite English teacher, he realized that he had enough vacation days to buy something like a year and a half off of his career and retire. I don't believe there was a single teacher I looked up that was making less than $50,000, which isn't exactly in the range of "rich" but stil exceeds the US median household income.
Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school. But it was still a public school, and not all of these teachers were 30 year veterans. Obviously the ones who were and the ones who had advanced degrees tended to be higher toward those six figures and the newer teachers were toward the lower end.
Like I said, I know that's not true in all schools, or even most schools. Teachers, as a general rule, should absolutely get a raise. They have one of the most thankless yet important jobs in the entirety of American society. But let's just be honest and acknowledge that not all of them are getting paid peanuts. Most Americans would kill to be paid $90,000 at any point in their career, and to have the sort of job security that a tenured teacher does on top is gravy.
I care.
Honestly, if they want to teach ID, no problem -- they can set up an entire class for it, or add it as part of some comparative religion class or something that they might already have going on. If there is a class on extremely recent history, it might even fit there.
But not in a science classroom. It is not science, and it does not belong there. There are enough idiots running around out there who don't even know the difference between, as another poster put it, a scientific theory and something they came up with on the shitter while they were reading comics that this is more than misleading, it's downright dangerous. The mere fact that you're fine with them teaching evolution as "the leading theory" implies in no uncertain terms that ID is another theory, putting them somehow on the same level other than evidence in support -- and they are not. One is science. The other is something somebody came up with on the shitter.
If these people are religious, that's fine. They're welcome to believe in ID. They're welcome to believe in god. They're welcome to put "because god says so" at the end of every theory. Science and religion need not clash -- which is exactly what you set them up to do when you treat them as equally valid views on the same matters.
I don't know about you, but I've had more than enough ignorant generations of people and I'm not in the mood to foster more because people need to be coddled. If they can't believe in god AND evolution that's a problem with their religion or their faith, not with evolution. If teaching just evolution gives them a complex about their religion, good. It means they're actually thinking about what they believe and why, and whether they ultimately come out of that going "I still believe in god" or "what a fucking sham religion is!" they're healthier and frankly more intelligent people for it. "Fuck that science shit" as a valid atttitude... not so much.