are we really back to that bullshit again? An atom processor (from the early 2000s) and little bits of ram and slow hard drive, shitty graphics, and you're compare it to a 4 core system with SSD and 8-16Gigs of ram?
No wonder most geeks don't get laid - no fucking clue.
You clearly don't know what you can get for 300 bucks these days. Try an Intel i3 with 4 gigs of RAM.
Even with an Atom processor, you think it's going to make a huge difference for someone running MS Word and a web browser? It's you who doesn't have a clue.
The trade-off with laptops has always been weight vs. power. Based on your previous comment, it's pretty clear you're in the weight camp.
Just because you value weight above other factors doesn't mean your view is correct.
Personally, I'm in the power camp, I don't mind carrying 30 pounds of equipment around if I have to (that's why I'm on a desktop most of the time anyway). But, hey, that's just my personal opinion, everyone has different tastes.
To even think about buying a non-technical user a Windows box and all the inherent baggage that comes with it is simply cruel to my mind - and it's a cruelty that as I said will be punishing you as well as the recipient.
That might've been true circa 1995 (and yes, I remember those days, and, yes, there were problems).
But, seriously, if someone's a regular end-user and their box or laptop was properly set-up/cleaned/protected by someone who knows what they're doing, and that end-user is [i]still[/i] experiencing problems using their computer on a day-to-day basis, then this is honestly someone who will have problems no matter what you give them.
Linux, Mac OS and Windows are all at a point where they're useable by basic users when properly set-up, and, within the past 14 years, I haven't experienced one being more difficult to train people to use.
In theory, there is no problem with 0 inflation. The problem is attaining it.
I always thought a simple solution would be to tie currency valuation to sexual services. That way, when inflation goes through the roof, we're all already fucked.
I-15 through Utah carries something like 60% of the drugs coming out of LA destined for the rest of the country. You might not be familiar with the geography but unless you are willing to drive on 300+ miles of dirt roads I-15 and I-10 are the only reasonable transit corridors out of LA to the rest of the country (unless you wanna drive from LA to Sacramento and come out on I-80). There just aren't that many roads across the Sierra's and as a result I-15 before it reaches I-70 becomes an ideal candidate for scanning and data collection. All you'd need is another camera in Arizona before it reaches Phoenix and you could cover almost 100% of the drug traffic out of southern California.
The bit about that route through Utah carrying ~60% of the drug traffic out of LA may be true (haven't seen the statistics personally), but it's not because people in LA are limited in how they can move.
There are plenty of routes out of LA, pretty much all of them crossing relatively flat areas, a few hills and a big desert. The largest obstacle to any commerce is the desert, the big mountains aren't really an issue until you get further north. There are probably hundreds of routes you could take before resorting to a dirt road, not the least of which being I-40 (goes all the way to Wilmington, NC).
I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?
In any event, reducing the auto industry in certain countries may help to discourage auto-friendly subsidies and allow competing industries to emerge.
I, for one, am ready for my self-driving vehicle (and I don't care where it's made).
A lot of people place emphasis on it because the counter is true - Apple is being beaten with this stick, so when it's *not* anything to do with Apple, why is that suddenly wrong to point that out? This is not an attempt to justify worker abuse, but aiming the criticism at the right companies involved is a good start. Not to mention that making stuff up and claiming it is true (Mike Daisey) does more harm to your cause than anything else.
Apple (and others) need to be taken to task for sure, but unless the criticism is wielded accurately, people will simply assume you're the boy crying wolf again and stop taking the issue seriously, which is the worst thing that could happen.
According to TFA, they make iPhones and iPads at the factory in Brazil. I saw a couple ACs suggest it's all Microsoft's fault, but, personally, I wouldn't rely on their info.
Whether it's Apple or Microsoft or a combination of these and other companies, it's immaterial to the workers who have to deal with the bad working conditions. And we bear some of the responsibility for allowing this to happen by living in a culture valuing goods higher than decent treatment.
This isn't some big election with millions of votes getting counted. This is 23 people in a room, 12 on one side, 11 on the other
Yes, this is exactly the situation. Say I'm a big multi-national corporation...
Show me the contact info for millions of people. Sorry, but I'll just pass that on to marketing for now.
Now, give me the run-down on 23 people in a room making decisions on copyright reform. Wait, there's no need, I already know about them, and, what's more, their checks are in the mail.
No. My wife hates DST, so she looked into the actual law.
Here it is: The federal US government sets the days that the DST transition happens on. It's up to the individual states to go on DST or not.
So, you could work at a state level to just have your state not participate in it. That's it.
While I encourage everyone to write representatives in their state legislature to 'opt-out' of DST, it should be noted numerous legislators from various states tried (and failed) to get out of DST in the past. I believe the most recent example is Nevada, where a legislator's efforts were largely ignored (and even laughed at).
Let's face it, people tend to love the status quo. You'll need a bit more than logic to convince people abolishing DST won't end the serenity of their sheltered lives.
Very impressive, though I can't help thinking its a vanity project and broadcasting from a number of smaller towers would be cheaper. I suppose that probably goes for all the world's ultra tall buildings though
It replaced the Tokyo Tower (a smaller tower), specifically because the surrounding buildings were getting quite tall and causing problems.
You say a bunch of smaller towers would be cheaper, but I hear the real estate in Tokyo is just a tad expensive.
Raw minced pork is also moderately popular in Germany, served on bread rolls with hardly any seasoning other than raw onions and salt and pepper.
I could probably eat almost anything mixed with raw onions, the flavor is far more powerful than cooked onions.
I've had many things raw or almost raw (including sausage, not the best idea), and even a small amount of seasoning makes a huge difference in my experience.
Tenure is there largely to protect educators' ability to teach effectively.
While there are downsides to the system, the upshot is we have teachers who are partially shielded from political or cultural sway so they can decide a curriculum based on reason rather than the popular flavor of the season.
You can talk about introducing a merit based system, but all this will do is create a popularity contest where effectiveness is measured by how well an educator can mimic whatever is currently in vogue.
You could say the teaching environment suffers when there's a teacher at a school, and they're not very good at what they do, but what about every single teacher at a school being selected based on an artificial politicized ideal? That would be downright frightening, if you ask me.
That only holds true for law-based definitions of right and wrong
except when it comes to JotForm the law wasn't followed, so they had noting to fear, had done nothing wrong, and still the law enforcement agencies stomped on them.
I agree with you, but isn't part of the issue certain people in law enforcement pay attention to the laws in their favor but ignores the others they're breaking?
The complexity of current law can enable some pretty nefarious actions.
Firing a teacher for anything short of driving their car into the school while drunk and getting a hummer from the head cheerleader is nearly impossible because of them.
Tell that to the 22,000 California teachers laid off last year.
Education is consistently targeted for cuts during this recession, and people keep insisting teachers have it easy.
They couldn't tell their students "that they need to get their act together"
Teachers are often children's only source of professional adults they come across. The teacher really need to be sure that they are professional in their jobs.
Where I come from, telling someone they need to get their shit together is perfectly acceptable. I had teachers say precisely this to their classes when I was a student.
Saying "shit" every once in awhile and swearing up a storm are two different things, and the former is pretty much part of life unless your religion forbids it.
I'm sure there are jobs where every swear word is counted against you (thank God I don't work there), but graduates entering the work-force should be able to use that other thing they supposedly learned in order to cope, adaptability.
There's no need to bring this puritanical nonsense into the classroom.
Any good high school teacher should be able to say "you guys need to get your shit together" in good conscience. If, on the other hand, a genuinely bad teacher is abusive towards students, this is a job for the parents and school administration to handle rationally.
There are already enough rules handed down to schools by politicized bureaucracies to make education a nightmare, why add to the burden with further insanity from the FCC?
Pocket change is only annoying if it's worthless metal. With real metal coins you could buy a weeks worth of groceries with a gold coin the size of a dime.
Metal is only worth what you have the skills to make with it. Any other worth is tacked on by social convention.
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are we really back to that bullshit again? An atom processor (from the early 2000s) and little bits of ram and slow hard drive, shitty graphics, and you're compare it to a 4 core system with SSD and 8-16Gigs of ram?
No wonder most geeks don't get laid - no fucking clue.
You clearly don't know what you can get for 300 bucks these days. Try an Intel i3 with 4 gigs of RAM.
Even with an Atom processor, you think it's going to make a huge difference for someone running MS Word and a web browser? It's you who doesn't have a clue.
It's a good computer but a terrible laptop.
The trade-off with laptops has always been weight vs. power. Based on your previous comment, it's pretty clear you're in the weight camp.
Just because you value weight above other factors doesn't mean your view is correct.
Personally, I'm in the power camp, I don't mind carrying 30 pounds of equipment around if I have to (that's why I'm on a desktop most of the time anyway). But, hey, that's just my personal opinion, everyone has different tastes.
Comparable in every way except being able to run any modern OS in the world, including Mac OS X.
Uhh, seriously? You can find $300 laptops that will run Windows 7 and the major Linux distros.
Pretty much anything out there that's currently for sale can run a "modern" OS.
To even think about buying a non-technical user a Windows box and all the inherent baggage that comes with it is simply cruel to my mind - and it's a cruelty that as I said will be punishing you as well as the recipient.
That might've been true circa 1995 (and yes, I remember those days, and, yes, there were problems).
But, seriously, if someone's a regular end-user and their box or laptop was properly set-up/cleaned/protected by someone who knows what they're doing, and that end-user is [i]still[/i] experiencing problems using their computer on a day-to-day basis, then this is honestly someone who will have problems no matter what you give them.
Linux, Mac OS and Windows are all at a point where they're useable by basic users when properly set-up, and, within the past 14 years, I haven't experienced one being more difficult to train people to use.
In theory, there is no problem with 0 inflation. The problem is attaining it.
I always thought a simple solution would be to tie currency valuation to sexual services. That way, when inflation goes through the roof, we're all already fucked.
I-15 through Utah carries something like 60% of the drugs coming out of LA destined for the rest of the country. You might not be familiar with the geography but unless you are willing to drive on 300+ miles of dirt roads I-15 and I-10 are the only reasonable transit corridors out of LA to the rest of the country (unless you wanna drive from LA to Sacramento and come out on I-80). There just aren't that many roads across the Sierra's and as a result I-15 before it reaches I-70 becomes an ideal candidate for scanning and data collection. All you'd need is another camera in Arizona before it reaches Phoenix and you could cover almost 100% of the drug traffic out of southern California.
The bit about that route through Utah carrying ~60% of the drug traffic out of LA may be true (haven't seen the statistics personally), but it's not because people in LA are limited in how they can move.
There are plenty of routes out of LA, pretty much all of them crossing relatively flat areas, a few hills and a big desert. The largest obstacle to any commerce is the desert, the big mountains aren't really an issue until you get further north. There are probably hundreds of routes you could take before resorting to a dirt road, not the least of which being I-40 (goes all the way to Wilmington, NC).
I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?
In any event, reducing the auto industry in certain countries may help to discourage auto-friendly subsidies and allow competing industries to emerge.
I, for one, am ready for my self-driving vehicle (and I don't care where it's made).
A lot of people place emphasis on it because the counter is true - Apple is being beaten with this stick, so when it's *not* anything to do with Apple, why is that suddenly wrong to point that out? This is not an attempt to justify worker abuse, but aiming the criticism at the right companies involved is a good start. Not to mention that making stuff up and claiming it is true (Mike Daisey) does more harm to your cause than anything else.
Apple (and others) need to be taken to task for sure, but unless the criticism is wielded accurately, people will simply assume you're the boy crying wolf again and stop taking the issue seriously, which is the worst thing that could happen.
According to TFA, they make iPhones and iPads at the factory in Brazil. I saw a couple ACs suggest it's all Microsoft's fault, but, personally, I wouldn't rely on their info.
Whether it's Apple or Microsoft or a combination of these and other companies, it's immaterial to the workers who have to deal with the bad working conditions. And we bear some of the responsibility for allowing this to happen by living in a culture valuing goods higher than decent treatment.
This is not terribly different from different countries on the map lining up with either the US or the Soviets... or going non-aligned.
It's a good old fashioned "military alliance"... just with patents and lawyers instead of nuclear warheads.
So, we wait until one of the sides goes bankrupt and Ronald Reagan takes credit?
This isn't some big election with millions of votes getting counted. This is 23 people in a room, 12 on one side, 11 on the other
Yes, this is exactly the situation. Say I'm a big multi-national corporation...
Show me the contact info for millions of people. Sorry, but I'll just pass that on to marketing for now.
Now, give me the run-down on 23 people in a room making decisions on copyright reform. Wait, there's no need, I already know about them, and, what's more, their checks are in the mail.
No. My wife hates DST, so she looked into the actual law.
Here it is: The federal US government sets the days that the DST transition happens on. It's up to the individual states to go on DST or not.
So, you could work at a state level to just have your state not participate in it. That's it.
While I encourage everyone to write representatives in their state legislature to 'opt-out' of DST, it should be noted numerous legislators from various states tried (and failed) to get out of DST in the past. I believe the most recent example is Nevada, where a legislator's efforts were largely ignored (and even laughed at).
Let's face it, people tend to love the status quo. You'll need a bit more than logic to convince people abolishing DST won't end the serenity of their sheltered lives.
Very impressive, though I can't help thinking its a vanity project and broadcasting from a number of smaller towers would be cheaper. I suppose that probably goes for all the world's ultra tall buildings though
It replaced the Tokyo Tower (a smaller tower), specifically because the surrounding buildings were getting quite tall and causing problems.
You say a bunch of smaller towers would be cheaper, but I hear the real estate in Tokyo is just a tad expensive.
Raw minced pork is also moderately popular in Germany, served on bread rolls with hardly any seasoning other than raw onions and salt and pepper.
I could probably eat almost anything mixed with raw onions, the flavor is far more powerful than cooked onions.
I've had many things raw or almost raw (including sausage, not the best idea), and even a small amount of seasoning makes a huge difference in my experience.
Lucky you. I woke up next to Ms. Thundering Pegasus.
Is that you, Wilhelmina?
I believe beer is the perfect lens through which to examine innovation
The last time I used beer as a lens, I woke up surrounded by 15 naked people with spotty memories of sleeping with the babysitter.
Tenure is there largely to protect educators' ability to teach effectively.
While there are downsides to the system, the upshot is we have teachers who are partially shielded from political or cultural sway so they can decide a curriculum based on reason rather than the popular flavor of the season.
You can talk about introducing a merit based system, but all this will do is create a popularity contest where effectiveness is measured by how well an educator can mimic whatever is currently in vogue.
You could say the teaching environment suffers when there's a teacher at a school, and they're not very good at what they do, but what about every single teacher at a school being selected based on an artificial politicized ideal? That would be downright frightening, if you ask me.
That only holds true for law-based definitions of right and wrong
except when it comes to JotForm the law wasn't followed, so they had noting to fear, had done nothing wrong, and still the law enforcement agencies stomped on them.
I agree with you, but isn't part of the issue certain people in law enforcement pay attention to the laws in their favor but ignores the others they're breaking?
The complexity of current law can enable some pretty nefarious actions.
Just remember Nokia, motorola, HTC also build their phones in China, but they don't even get apples minimal level of raising the workers up.
There are ZERO phones out there made without sweatshops like this.
Apple gets singled out because they are large, but smaller shops are the ones who treat them the worst.
I see a lot of people rushing to defend Apple, a large corporation that recently posted record profits.
I don't see many concerned about the lives of these workers.
It's a sad world we live in.
Firing != laid off
The two are synonymous. Look it up, if you don't believe me.
If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear. Just make sure you follow the law.
That only holds true for law-based definitions of right and wrong.
Many would diverge rather sharply from the law in their personal ethical equations, so it's best not to confuse the two.
Teachers' Unions.
Firing a teacher for anything short of driving their car into the school while drunk and getting a hummer from the head cheerleader is nearly impossible because of them.
Tell that to the 22,000 California teachers laid off last year.
Education is consistently targeted for cuts during this recession, and people keep insisting teachers have it easy.
Wake up. It's our kids that are going to suffer.
They couldn't tell their students "that they need to get their act together"
Teachers are often children's only source of professional adults they come across. The teacher really need to be sure that they are professional in their jobs.
Where I come from, telling someone they need to get their shit together is perfectly acceptable. I had teachers say precisely this to their classes when I was a student.
Saying "shit" every once in awhile and swearing up a storm are two different things, and the former is pretty much part of life unless your religion forbids it.
I'm sure there are jobs where every swear word is counted against you (thank God I don't work there), but graduates entering the work-force should be able to use that other thing they supposedly learned in order to cope, adaptability.
There's no need to bring this puritanical nonsense into the classroom.
Any good high school teacher should be able to say "you guys need to get your shit together" in good conscience. If, on the other hand, a genuinely bad teacher is abusive towards students, this is a job for the parents and school administration to handle rationally.
There are already enough rules handed down to schools by politicized bureaucracies to make education a nightmare, why add to the burden with further insanity from the FCC?
Pocket change is only annoying if it's worthless metal. With real metal coins you could buy a weeks worth of groceries with a gold coin the size of a dime.
Metal is only worth what you have the skills to make with it. Any other worth is tacked on by social convention.
All it will take is one "think of the children" campaign courtesy of the chronically ignorant to derail this.
Think of all the children that are killed by drunk/reckless drivers
Good luck explaining that to paranoid crowds waving photoshopped placards of roadkill and screaming about robot vehicles on the rampage