Dec. 16, 2009: President Obama signs a presidential memorandum ordering Atty. Gen. Eric Holder and Defense secretary Robert Gates to acquire the state prison in Thompson, Illinois as the $350 million replacement for Guantanamo.
May 19, 2010: The House Armed Services Committee, controlled by members of the president's own Democratic party, absolutely prohibits any opening of a Guantanamo detention replacement facility within these United States. To underline its ban, the powerful committee erupts in an unusual display of bipartisanship: The prohibition vote is unanimous.
Have you forgotten all the fear-mongering that surrounded the proposal of imprisoning these people in the US? It was like a bad flashback to the Bush administration. When you could automatically win any argument by fear-mongering about terrorism. (A theory soundly proven by Bush's re-election in 2004).
Do I hold Obama blameless? No. He should have fought longer & harder to keep his promise. But just writing this gave me a flashback to the whole Bush administration, it was like a fresh nightmare every day, idiots wielding fear like a club against reason, every damn day. You're welcome to your opinion, but IMHO it's a lot less bad now.
We pretty much have to take Ajad at his word that he doesn't give a crap if atomic hellfire rains down on him after his rightous jihad of nuking Israel and the US
You just made that up.
How much of your opinion is based on facts and quotes you invent on the spot?
Solyndra is an embarrassment to Obama's Presidency. There's no real scandal since there's no real tie between the administration and the company, but it was a rushed and hyped and turned out bad. But let's keep this in perspective; nobody died, and it cost less than 1/4000 of the Iraq war. In other words, if Obama did a new Solyndra every day for two terms as president, it would still be a less costly than Iraq. And that's counting only US govt. outlays, to stay on topic. (Obviously the true cost of the Iraq war was many times greater if you consider the human cost, around 150,000 dead, the costs of tens of thousands of destroyed homes, buildings, and infrastructure, and lost oil production). I shudder to hear how most of the Republican field talk about Iran to score applause.
The rest of the examples, come on. You think Obama has a vendetta against Gibson guitars? You think the government hasn't bent over far enough to shield investors?
You would expect introverts to spend more time on gadgets, so the direction of causation here, if any, is not determined. I hate to use a cliche, but "correlation != causation" never seemed more apt.
I think you're missing the main locus of self-checkout - your internet connection. Do you order stuff from Amazon? Do you demand they send somebody out to your home to count your money (or enter your credit card number into their web page)? There is nobody in the loop who does what the cashier used to do.
1) In response to new government rules that airlines must advertise the bottom-line ticket prices, Spirit airlines whined: "Thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation's latest fare rules, Spirit must now HIDE the government's taxes and fees in your fares." (Which is a lie - they can still show a price breakdown, but must now show the bottom-line total).
2) Bank of America was eager to rationalize their $5/mo ATM card fee as "unintended consequence" of new regulations on on card swipe fees. (Yet somehow they found a way around this unintended consequence when passing the buck backfired and customers got mad at them instead of the government.)
3) Health insurance companies all rushed to blame Obamacare for steep price increases in 2010, even though none of the provisions of the law were to kick in for several years, and healthcare prices have been rising sharply for decades.
Of course, I'm not saying there's no truth in the claims. Regulations can be costly to certain parties. But the truth is almost independent of the rhetoric. Blaming the government for price hikes (whether as retribution against regulations, or simply as a fig leaf for hiking prices) is something companies will rarely miss an opportunity to do.
We'll use all the money we're saving with our socialized healthcare system.
It's funny you can say that without any irony, given that 100% of space exploration, ever, has been socialist (unless you have some narrower definition of "socialism" than "government funded," which judging by your healthcare comment, I don't think you do). Every moon landing, every probe to reach another planet or escape the solar system, every space telescope. All socialist.
The effects don't appear to be anything special. It's just a shot of Big Ben with a double-decker bus, converted to monchrome, with the bus colorized red to make it jump out. No reason to think they used the same software - except that so many people use photoshop there's a good chance these two did.
I'll have to disagree...it's tech worthy news. The more money Apple gets, the more money they have to influence the shape of things to come.
What I think is interesting is that the biggest profit for a company ever, except Exxon Q3 2008, came from consumer electronics. You might thing bigger-ticket items like cars or airliners or $350M per-copy fighter jets would have more room for profits. Or scamming Wall Street. Even if you limit it to IT, you might assume selling to corporations or government is the most profitable.
Nope! The biggest profits ever, save only Exxon Q3 2008, came from selling nothing that cost over a few hundred bucks, to a huge number of people.
Yes, I scanned the article for any good reason to think a "rogue" access point would any worse than any other, and only got:
Those Man-in-the-Middle attacks are serious, potentially leading to data or identity theft. Secure websites and services will display an error when this happens, but many users ignore the warnings.
OK. The only takehome I get from this is, don't ignore SSL errors. I think we all know that we have no idea where our traffic is going and ultimately who is looking at it, regardless of the first hop.
So you wouldn't have any issue with coercing somebody to write testimony against themselves? Or compelling somebody to sign a "confession"? That seems pretty absurd.
Look, if setting up a phony corporation to launder money to influence politics is "speech," then a lot of things are speech.
Yes, well, that's the point of having laws, and equal protection under the law. If the people setting (and interpreting) the rules don't have to live under them, things go off the rails real quick.
I wonder too, but it's not like people aren't spending fantastic sums of money for conventional higher education. In other words, he could charge quite a bit of money and still save students quite a bit. Or in the immortal words of Scarface, "this town is like a giant..." (NSFW).
I suppose that's an issue for anybody who drives more than 75 miles to go to Cracker Barrel.
150 miles is far more than enough for most people's day-to-day driving. A typical family has a car and a minivan or SUV. This would replace the car, not the minivan.
I think you and the GP are missing an important, falsifiable statement from the story: "The air force did say that, because they had figured out what brought the RQ-170 down, they were continuing to fly RQ-170s on reconnaissance missions."
.
I have a hard time believing they would do this if your theory - simple jamming - were correct.
I also have a hard time believing the GP that US propagandists would use such a simple, falsifiable lie.
So, I think the most likely scenario is that this new high-tech drone simply broke down over Iran and crash-landed.
Certainly the Apple execs have thought about this and have made certain that they get compensated regardless.
I believe this is where the concept of fuck you money comes into play. On Wall Street, or in business, it is possible to make so much money in such a short time that it literally doesn't matter what happens afterwards. You've already got more than you can ever spend.
The statement about America's problems not being Apple's problems indicate precisely that mentality. Whoever said it knows very well that Apple's rise in America rather than Mogadishu is more than mere coincidence. Obviously they have profited greatly from the system here. But does that oblige them to help perpetuate the system? Oh, hell no. Like you said, they'll meet the minimum legal requirements, while actively striving to have those requirements reduced all the while.
...why do people buy tech products now if they are going to be cheaper later?
How about spending money to make more money? Do you think anybody at Bank of America regrets investing millions to create computerized banking in the 1950s? Of course they could have got banking computers cheaper if they'd waited around for the competition to do it first. Some "savings" that would have been.
As for entertainment, it's all relative. In its day my Atari 2600 was just as fun as my XBox 360 is now.
Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.
Stop right there. People like me and you have conservative path to moderate success, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population to do. But based on the sentence I quoted, have you ever stopped to think how lucky you are to be born with an interest and talent that also happens to be one of the more reliable ways to make a living? Seriously... imagine if the biggest sector of the US economy was ballet. Would your rational process translated into success for you as a ballet dancer? Or might you struggle?
What does apocalypse have to do with anything? The only real question is whether the anticipated costs of corrective actions are less than the anticipated consequences of the status quo.
Yes, there's really been a backslide in displays in the last few years, both on the desktop and laptops, towards HDTV resolutions.
I wonder what you were using before? I am using the 3008WFP, which is the predecessor to the one I posted, and wonder if the new one is much better? I was a little disappointed they didn't switch to LED backlight, since the heat from two of these in my office is considerable. But one is getting flaky and might need replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you forgotten all the fear-mongering that surrounded the proposal of imprisoning these people in the US? It was like a bad flashback to the Bush administration. When you could automatically win any argument by fear-mongering about terrorism. (A theory soundly proven by Bush's re-election in 2004).
Do I hold Obama blameless? No. He should have fought longer & harder to keep his promise. But just writing this gave me a flashback to the whole Bush administration, it was like a fresh nightmare every day, idiots wielding fear like a club against reason, every damn day. You're welcome to your opinion, but IMHO it's a lot less bad now.
You just made that up.
How much of your opinion is based on facts and quotes you invent on the spot?
Somehow I'll bet that's been tried.
.
Yup.
The rest of the examples, come on. You think Obama has a vendetta against Gibson guitars? You think the government hasn't bent over far enough to shield investors?
You would expect introverts to spend more time on gadgets, so the direction of causation here, if any, is not determined. I hate to use a cliche, but "correlation != causation" never seemed more apt.
I think you're missing the main locus of self-checkout - your internet connection. Do you order stuff from Amazon? Do you demand they send somebody out to your home to count your money (or enter your credit card number into their web page)? There is nobody in the loop who does what the cashier used to do.
1) In response to new government rules that airlines must advertise the bottom-line ticket prices, Spirit airlines whined: "Thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation's latest fare rules, Spirit must now HIDE the government's taxes and fees in your fares." (Which is a lie - they can still show a price breakdown, but must now show the bottom-line total).
2) Bank of America was eager to rationalize their $5/mo ATM card fee as "unintended consequence" of new regulations on on card swipe fees. (Yet somehow they found a way around this unintended consequence when passing the buck backfired and customers got mad at them instead of the government.)
3) Health insurance companies all rushed to blame Obamacare for steep price increases in 2010, even though none of the provisions of the law were to kick in for several years, and healthcare prices have been rising sharply for decades.
Of course, I'm not saying there's no truth in the claims. Regulations can be costly to certain parties. But the truth is almost independent of the rhetoric. Blaming the government for price hikes (whether as retribution against regulations, or simply as a fig leaf for hiking prices) is something companies will rarely miss an opportunity to do.
It's funny you can say that without any irony, given that 100% of space exploration, ever, has been socialist (unless you have some narrower definition of "socialism" than "government funded," which judging by your healthcare comment, I don't think you do). Every moon landing, every probe to reach another planet or escape the solar system, every space telescope. All socialist.
The effects don't appear to be anything special. It's just a shot of Big Ben with a double-decker bus, converted to monchrome, with the bus colorized red to make it jump out. No reason to think they used the same software - except that so many people use photoshop there's a good chance these two did.
My, how times have changed. I remember when suggesting a compulsory national ID card would have sent conservatives running for their firearms.
What I think is interesting is that the biggest profit for a company ever, except Exxon Q3 2008, came from consumer electronics. You might thing bigger-ticket items like cars or airliners or $350M per-copy fighter jets would have more room for profits. Or scamming Wall Street. Even if you limit it to IT, you might assume selling to corporations or government is the most profitable.
Nope! The biggest profits ever, save only Exxon Q3 2008, came from selling nothing that cost over a few hundred bucks, to a huge number of people.
OK. The only takehome I get from this is, don't ignore SSL errors. I think we all know that we have no idea where our traffic is going and ultimately who is looking at it, regardless of the first hop.
Look, if setting up a phony corporation to launder money to influence politics is "speech," then a lot of things are speech.
Yes, well, that's the point of having laws, and equal protection under the law. If the people setting (and interpreting) the rules don't have to live under them, things go off the rails real quick.
I wonder too, but it's not like people aren't spending fantastic sums of money for conventional higher education. In other words, he could charge quite a bit of money and still save students quite a bit. Or in the immortal words of Scarface, "this town is like a giant..." (NSFW).
150 miles is far more than enough for most people's day-to-day driving. A typical family has a car and a minivan or SUV. This would replace the car, not the minivan.
.
I have a hard time believing they would do this if your theory - simple jamming - were correct.
I also have a hard time believing the GP that US propagandists would use such a simple, falsifiable lie.
So, I think the most likely scenario is that this new high-tech drone simply broke down over Iran and crash-landed.
I believe this is where the concept of fuck you money comes into play. On Wall Street, or in business, it is possible to make so much money in such a short time that it literally doesn't matter what happens afterwards. You've already got more than you can ever spend.
The statement about America's problems not being Apple's problems indicate precisely that mentality. Whoever said it knows very well that Apple's rise in America rather than Mogadishu is more than mere coincidence. Obviously they have profited greatly from the system here. But does that oblige them to help perpetuate the system? Oh, hell no. Like you said, they'll meet the minimum legal requirements, while actively striving to have those requirements reduced all the while.
Don't forget the other place Apple places its profits: a massive bonuses for top executives.
Speaking of which, I keep meaning to ask the "Buy Gold!" crowd for their latest prediction on when to expect hyperinflation.
How about spending money to make more money? Do you think anybody at Bank of America regrets investing millions to create computerized banking in the 1950s? Of course they could have got banking computers cheaper if they'd waited around for the competition to do it first. Some "savings" that would have been.
As for entertainment, it's all relative. In its day my Atari 2600 was just as fun as my XBox 360 is now.
Stop right there. People like me and you have conservative path to moderate success, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population to do. But based on the sentence I quoted, have you ever stopped to think how lucky you are to be born with an interest and talent that also happens to be one of the more reliable ways to make a living? Seriously... imagine if the biggest sector of the US economy was ballet. Would your rational process translated into success for you as a ballet dancer? Or might you struggle?
What does apocalypse have to do with anything? The only real question is whether the anticipated costs of corrective actions are less than the anticipated consequences of the status quo.
You said it wouldn't get warmer. It did. Quit whining about being labeled a denier.
I wonder what you were using before? I am using the 3008WFP, which is the predecessor to the one I posted, and wonder if the new one is much better? I was a little disappointed they didn't switch to LED backlight, since the heat from two of these in my office is considerable. But one is getting flaky and might need replacement.