who is really going to pay for yet more random pontification from a supposed 'expert'?
It's not really the expertise of the op-ed columnist per se. The columnists serve, more often than you'd think, as a kind of conduit for ex-big shots, real experts, and government insiders who want to leak their analyses. The op-ed columnist gets to pass it off as their own insight, and it end up a win-win situation for the both.
Yeah, I remember reading a paragraph about that in Dance of Days. I think it's a great thing, really, because it means that Straight Edge is not a progressive or conservative thing.
Dischord Records is the label started by Ian MacKaye in Washington DC. Ian MacKaye was/is the central figure in three DC hardcore bands: The Teen Idles, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. Bad Brains and Minor Threat essentially created the DC hardcore punk scene in the mid-eighties. MacKaye is also the creator of the Straight Edge philosophy, which he developed in several Minor Threat songs: "Straight Edge", "Bottled Violence", "In My Eyes", and "Out of Step (with the world)", for example. Dischord Records was started so that punk bands could release albums at a very low cost and not have to deal with big corporate labels.
Anyone interested in the DC punk scene ought to check out Dance of Days which chronicles the development of DC punk.
The quote you cite on education does not address the universality of Chinese education (number of dropouts regardless), nor does it ascribe the effects it lists to capitalism. It simply says that the government eliminated some schools run by communes. Furthermore, the reference explains that Chinese education never was universal following the Cultural Revolution.
The health care quote also describes organized, but not universal, health care. Moreover, it does not say that people we left without coverage; it says that they were unwilling to support a collectivized system, implying that they sought alternatives.
China doesn't just "encourage" workers to migrate. The mass urbanization of nearly 400 million people over the next two decades is its official government policy.
China has taken has reversed this logic... China used to have universal education and health care but that is no longer the case. They eliminated free schooling and health care. The result is that rural workers must migrate to factories in the cities and live in dormitories to sent back their meagre wages to pay for school fees and health care.
China's "patriotic education" wasn't much of an education to begin with. Moreover, it wasn't a constantly provided benefit either. The education system was shut down during the mass insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards, Deng Xiaoping changed the system in the 1980s to allow for achievement and merit to serve as factors determining admissions, and universal education was set as the goal of the education policy, but was never actually achieved. Educational management was then devolved to the regions, and government control grew laxer as regional variations grew. These were the deliberate policies of the CPC, not the sinister consquences of unbridled global capitalist vampires. Wikipedia's article. Healthcare is essentially similar: Wikipedia's article.
The "migration" of rural workers to cities is not the workers choice but the result of an official CPC policy of urbanization with the goal of achieving an urbanization rate analogous to that of developed countries. Once again, it's not global capitalism, but the official development policy of China itself that causes these changes.
What is the overall cost of living? (Yes, I'm aware that the article makes reference to food and rent consuming "half" their salary.)
Hell, I work at a respectable entry-level white collar job in Washington, DC, and rent + food > half of my monthly paycheck, easily.
I'm not so sure that rent + food > half your pay qualifies you as exploited or downtrodden. I'm sure many other factors in these factories do, but if this is the only cited metric than most of the young kids living and working in Washington, New York, LA, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia etc are similarly exploited. And that's essentially B.S.
It's the same effect as starting out your post by saying "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...". Every single time it ends up a +5 post. Mods will always try to do the opposite of whatever mod advice/prediction is in a post.
I think we should look at this from the military point of view. I mean, supposing the Taiwanese stashes away mass spam, see. When they spam us in a hundred years they could take over! In fact, they might even try an immediate spam attack so they could take over our spam zombies. I think it would be extremely naive of us to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Taiwanese spammer expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other spam zombies, in order to spam more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! We must not allow... a spam zombie gap!
Yeah. This meme is kinda the opposite of the long-tail meme that's being making it's rounds.
On the one hand you have people telling you that you don't need to engage in software bloat, you don't need to add every single feature, you don't need to give the consumer every signle option or customizability in a product or offering.
On the other hand, you have countless numbers of folks touting the long-tail, whether it's the success of Amazon, or eBay, or Netflix, or what-have-you. The idea is that in offering every single last possible thing any consumer could conceive of wanting, you'll then doi more business with the obscure stuff than with the 20% most common/popular stuff.
So which is it? Do we keep things simple stupid? Do we offer limited functionality? Things that only do one thing and do it really well? Or do we offer swiss army knives of features/products? Do we appeal to every possible need and win out in the long run because no one just uses that initial 20%?
I know! It'd almost be like a bunch of American companies with rich traditions selling out to Japanese companies during the 1980s. That could never happen!
I still don't get how NSA workers as American citizens can justify this kind of BS in their heads. They seriously must be the most sociopathic, mean-spirited, fascist-minded people in the country.
I know a guy who applied to the NSA. I don't know whether he got in, but I've known him since high school. He was a math major in college, played a lot of D&D, Lord of the Five Rings, Warhammer 40k, and World of Warcraft. For all intents and purposes he was completey apolitical. He thought he was a pagan in high school, but decided to be a nihilist by senior year after reading some Nietzsche. Now I think he's converting to Protestantism for his fiancee's family. He's also really good at DDR.
I don't really think he fits the "sociopathic, mean-spirited, fascist-minded" description you have in mind though. He was friendly, loyal, and generous as long as I knew him.
Well, my post was made tongue-in-cheek as it were, spoofing the reaction a crazed Apple zealot might take toward Apple making more profit. Of course I personally would prefer more dollars in my pocket than in Apple's. Don't worry, I'm not that obsessed.
Actually, I agree. I think Apple may reduce the Mac mini pricing by $100's if they can swing it. I bought one of the new intel Mac minis right after they were released and wasn't terribly happy about the $100 price jump that the new intel chip brought. As the minis are their low-end switch-to-Mac-bait computers, I think they stand a good chance of seeing a price reduction, even if none of the other computers among Apple's offerings see a reduction.
No, but it does mean that Apple's margin's will grow slightly larger. I'm sure that as a loyal Apple-user that will warm your heart. It warms mine. Yay!
Hell, let's go crazy. See if they'll put in Cat 7, or Cat 8. Heck, the sky's the limit at this point! They says curiousity killed the Cat, but we all know it was excessive versioning that really did it in.
You're making a blanket generalization about tens of millions of people who you want murdered because in your opinion they picked the wrong political party to put on their voter registration card. Substitute the word "Jew" or "Capitalist" for the word "Republican" and you'd fit in nicely in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR. That's about as anti-liberal as you can get.
Unbelievably, the choice between "Do Evil" and "Do no Evil" is irrelevant as Google is obliged by law to follow the shareholders interests above everything else.
Perhaps, but remember that Brin and Page issued an "Owner's Manual" for their stock when it was issued, and that it was issued in two different classes. Class A stock has much lower voting representation than Class B stock (a ratio of 1:10 voting weight). Class B stockholders are the ones with real power to steer Google, and Google's Class B stock is tightly held. Brin and Page together hold 33% of the Class B stock, which is enough to ensure that they can direct the company.
Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page own 33% of Google's Class B stock and have developed a voting structure that would let them keep the control of their creation. According to CNN Money, Brin owns 38.5 million Class B stocks while Page owns 38.6 million. The voting system that the two have put in place allows holders of B-level stock to have 10 votes for each share.
Owners of Google's Class A stock, which is what Google will be offering to the public, will have only one vote per stock. CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, owns 14.8 million Class B shares. Venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital each hold 23.9 million Class B shares. After that, the next largest Class B stock holder "is investor K. Ram Shriram, Amazon.com's former vice president of business development, with 5.3 million shares, or 2.3 percent."
The Beloved Free Market isn't about giving people the better product, it's about giving people what they think is the better product. And, in case you haven't noticed, people are fucking morons. And if you have the resources to make people think, contrary to the facts, that your product is better/safer/etc, you'll make your sale.
The theoretical ideal of the "Free Market" is dependent on the theoretical ideal of "Perfect information." Having the correct information ("the facts") about the products will help the free market differentiate between a better product and what they might otherwise think is a better product. Neither a free market nor perfect information exists in reality, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't work toward achieving them.
Tahoma is an abomination of a font to begin with. The move away from a serif font for articles and comments was a huge mistake. Sans-serif is fine for headers, titles, and sidebar options. But for paragraphs of text meant to be read, 14px serif fonts designed for the screen are best (read: Georgia (also here and here).
Tahoma was made specifically for small-font-size menus and titles, not for large blocks of text (see here).
Keep the left and right sidebars in small-size Tahoma, but please please please change the article and comment text to Georgia.
This article is just dumb. The author strains to make some sort of connection between gaming and the military-industrial complex, as if not gaming is somehow a "principled" stance against the Pentagon. There's no evidence that Apple specifically avoids gaming. Trotting out the pictures of children in iMovie demos does not count as some sort of evidence that Apple is shaking its fist at a perceived war machine. *Every company* on earth uses pictures of cute children in its advertising. Case-in-point: Lockheed and Boeing and Raytheon use pictures of children in their advertising.
The reality of the situation is that Apple knows its user demographics, it understands the gaming industry, and wasn't going to waste its time promoting something that wasn't going to happen. Apple doesn't sell to hardcore gamers. Apples ran on non-standard hardware using Apple's unique application environments and only had 2-3% market share--no gaming company was going to waste its time with Apple, and Apple wasn't going to waste its time on games. End of story.
This guy is reaching hard for something that's not there, most likely reflecting his own personal biases rather than any insight into Apple's behavior. If Apple wanted to be in gaming, and the market would support Apple being in gaming, they could easily take a position like Nintendo (avoiding gore and focusing on writing as many kid appropriate games as they could).
Gaming != support for military. Moderate article -1 Troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but she doesn't get rich from justice. That's where MySpace comes in...
It's not really the expertise of the op-ed columnist per se. The columnists serve, more often than you'd think, as a kind of conduit for ex-big shots, real experts, and government insiders who want to leak their analyses. The op-ed columnist gets to pass it off as their own insight, and it end up a win-win situation for the both.
Except it's centralized and turns a profit.
Your proposal doesn't go far enough. If we dropped Aero on top of MSDOS, then we'd be seeing some progress!
Yeah, I remember reading a paragraph about that in Dance of Days. I think it's a great thing, really, because it means that Straight Edge is not a progressive or conservative thing.
Dischord Records is the label started by Ian MacKaye in Washington DC. Ian MacKaye was/is the central figure in three DC hardcore bands: The Teen Idles, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. Bad Brains and Minor Threat essentially created the DC hardcore punk scene in the mid-eighties. MacKaye is also the creator of the Straight Edge philosophy, which he developed in several Minor Threat songs: "Straight Edge", "Bottled Violence", "In My Eyes", and "Out of Step (with the world)", for example. Dischord Records was started so that punk bands could release albums at a very low cost and not have to deal with big corporate labels.
Anyone interested in the DC punk scene ought to check out Dance of Days which chronicles the development of DC punk.
The quote you cite on education does not address the universality of Chinese education (number of dropouts regardless), nor does it ascribe the effects it lists to capitalism. It simply says that the government eliminated some schools run by communes. Furthermore, the reference explains that Chinese education never was universal following the Cultural Revolution.
The health care quote also describes organized, but not universal, health care. Moreover, it does not say that people we left without coverage; it says that they were unwilling to support a collectivized system, implying that they sought alternatives.
China doesn't just "encourage" workers to migrate. The mass urbanization of nearly 400 million people over the next two decades is its official government policy.
China's "patriotic education" wasn't much of an education to begin with. Moreover, it wasn't a constantly provided benefit either. The education system was shut down during the mass insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards, Deng Xiaoping changed the system in the 1980s to allow for achievement and merit to serve as factors determining admissions, and universal education was set as the goal of the education policy, but was never actually achieved. Educational management was then devolved to the regions, and government control grew laxer as regional variations grew. These were the deliberate policies of the CPC, not the sinister consquences of unbridled global capitalist vampires. Wikipedia's article. Healthcare is essentially similar: Wikipedia's article.
The "migration" of rural workers to cities is not the workers choice but the result of an official CPC policy of urbanization with the goal of achieving an urbanization rate analogous to that of developed countries. Once again, it's not global capitalism, but the official development policy of China itself that causes these changes.
Hell, I work at a respectable entry-level white collar job in Washington, DC, and rent + food > half of my monthly paycheck, easily.
I'm not so sure that rent + food > half your pay qualifies you as exploited or downtrodden. I'm sure many other factors in these factories do, but if this is the only cited metric than most of the young kids living and working in Washington, New York, LA, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia etc are similarly exploited. And that's essentially B.S.
It's the same effect as starting out your post by saying "I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but...". Every single time it ends up a +5 post. Mods will always try to do the opposite of whatever mod advice/prediction is in a post.
I think we should look at this from the military point of view. I mean, supposing the Taiwanese stashes away mass spam, see. When they spam us in a hundred years they could take over! In fact, they might even try an immediate spam attack so they could take over our spam zombies. I think it would be extremely naive of us to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Taiwanese spammer expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other spam zombies, in order to spam more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! We must not allow... a spam zombie gap!
Yeah. This meme is kinda the opposite of the long-tail meme that's being making it's rounds.
On the one hand you have people telling you that you don't need to engage in software bloat, you don't need to add every single feature, you don't need to give the consumer every signle option or customizability in a product or offering.
On the other hand, you have countless numbers of folks touting the long-tail, whether it's the success of Amazon, or eBay, or Netflix, or what-have-you. The idea is that in offering every single last possible thing any consumer could conceive of wanting, you'll then doi more business with the obscure stuff than with the 20% most common/popular stuff.
So which is it? Do we keep things simple stupid? Do we offer limited functionality? Things that only do one thing and do it really well? Or do we offer swiss army knives of features/products? Do we appeal to every possible need and win out in the long run because no one just uses that initial 20%?
Let's settle this meme war once and for all.
I know! It'd almost be like a bunch of American companies with rich traditions selling out to Japanese companies during the 1980s. That could never happen!
I know a guy who applied to the NSA. I don't know whether he got in, but I've known him since high school. He was a math major in college, played a lot of D&D, Lord of the Five Rings, Warhammer 40k, and World of Warcraft. For all intents and purposes he was completey apolitical. He thought he was a pagan in high school, but decided to be a nihilist by senior year after reading some Nietzsche. Now I think he's converting to Protestantism for his fiancee's family. He's also really good at DDR.
I don't really think he fits the "sociopathic, mean-spirited, fascist-minded" description you have in mind though. He was friendly, loyal, and generous as long as I knew him.
Well, my post was made tongue-in-cheek as it were, spoofing the reaction a crazed Apple zealot might take toward Apple making more profit. Of course I personally would prefer more dollars in my pocket than in Apple's. Don't worry, I'm not that obsessed.
Actually, I agree. I think Apple may reduce the Mac mini pricing by $100's if they can swing it. I bought one of the new intel Mac minis right after they were released and wasn't terribly happy about the $100 price jump that the new intel chip brought. As the minis are their low-end switch-to-Mac-bait computers, I think they stand a good chance of seeing a price reduction, even if none of the other computers among Apple's offerings see a reduction.
No, but it does mean that Apple's margin's will grow slightly larger. I'm sure that as a loyal Apple-user that will warm your heart. It warms mine. Yay!
Hell, let's go crazy. See if they'll put in Cat 7, or Cat 8. Heck, the sky's the limit at this point! They says curiousity killed the Cat, but we all know it was excessive versioning that really did it in.
You're making a blanket generalization about tens of millions of people who you want murdered because in your opinion they picked the wrong political party to put on their voter registration card. Substitute the word "Jew" or "Capitalist" for the word "Republican" and you'd fit in nicely in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR. That's about as anti-liberal as you can get.
Perhaps, but remember that Brin and Page issued an "Owner's Manual" for their stock when it was issued, and that it was issued in two different classes. Class A stock has much lower voting representation than Class B stock (a ratio of 1:10 voting weight). Class B stockholders are the ones with real power to steer Google, and Google's Class B stock is tightly held. Brin and Page together hold 33% of the Class B stock, which is enough to ensure that they can direct the company.
You are a murderer in every sense except for your cowardice.
I'm not a Republican, but I still find your signature fundamentally anti-liberal. See here.
The theoretical ideal of the "Free Market" is dependent on the theoretical ideal of "Perfect information." Having the correct information ("the facts") about the products will help the free market differentiate between a better product and what they might otherwise think is a better product. Neither a free market nor perfect information exists in reality, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't work toward achieving them.
Tahoma was made specifically for small-font-size menus and titles, not for large blocks of text (see here).
Keep the left and right sidebars in small-size Tahoma, but please please please change the article and comment text to Georgia.
This article is just dumb. The author strains to make some sort of connection between gaming and the military-industrial complex, as if not gaming is somehow a "principled" stance against the Pentagon. There's no evidence that Apple specifically avoids gaming. Trotting out the pictures of children in iMovie demos does not count as some sort of evidence that Apple is shaking its fist at a perceived war machine. *Every company* on earth uses pictures of cute children in its advertising. Case-in-point: Lockheed and Boeing and Raytheon use pictures of children in their advertising.
The reality of the situation is that Apple knows its user demographics, it understands the gaming industry, and wasn't going to waste its time promoting something that wasn't going to happen. Apple doesn't sell to hardcore gamers. Apples ran on non-standard hardware using Apple's unique application environments and only had 2-3% market share--no gaming company was going to waste its time with Apple, and Apple wasn't going to waste its time on games. End of story.
This guy is reaching hard for something that's not there, most likely reflecting his own personal biases rather than any insight into Apple's behavior. If Apple wanted to be in gaming, and the market would support Apple being in gaming, they could easily take a position like Nintendo (avoiding gore and focusing on writing as many kid appropriate games as they could).
Gaming != support for military. Moderate article -1 Troll.
Lynched yes, burnt alive no. Even the KKK didn't burn people alive.