Totally biased source. NASA just wants to convince us that the Earth is doomed so that we'll put more money into colonizing Mars. How can you not see right through these lies?
Not to mention buying their goods. Very, very often I run into the argument that corporations deserve a break because they are the ones putting bread on our tables. There seems to be very little recognition that people do the work and people buy the products. The relationship is mutual, but workers and consumers can actually exist without corporations, and the reverse isn't true.
Man, I remember how the military hated Clinton for BRAC back in the 90s. I totally understand where they were coming from, because a military base is a massive economic and cultural driver. But it just goes to show that when people say they want smaller government, what they really mean is they want spending cuts for everyone else and tax cuts for themselves. Most fiscal conservatives aren't nearly as noble as their own rhetoric leads them to believe.
Or beyond that, why do we even have organs? I always felt that an intelligent designer would have just created us as walking, talking bags of magical life made from life cubes or something. Whenever I ask creationists why I have an appendix or a gall bladder or why, out of all the temperatures in the universe, I can only live within a tiny range of them, or out of the entire EM spectrum, I can only see a tiny sliver of it, or why leukemia exists, the only answer I get is 'God made it that way'. Seriously? All powerful? All knowing? That's why people have to poop? God wanted them to?
Good, simple VPN solutions are a commodity nowadays. VPN is easy to do, easy to manage, easy to deploy. DirectAccess does let you be 'on the network' at boot time, but outside of that, it's just a more complicated and vendor and version specific way to do something that is already cheap and easy to do in a universal, vendor-neutral way.
Conclusion: The profs misinterpreted the message as a threat, and over-reacted as a result of the misinterpretation. Nobody was ever in any danger. Either the school will conclude that nothing was wrong and let her return to classes, or she will tansfer to some other school which realized there was never any danger and go from there.
Honestly, my conclusion is that she exercised pretty poor judgment in posting those messages to a public forum, and the inconvenience she's dealing with now is her own fault. I imagine she'll be back in class soon once everything is cleared up, but the she's way more responsible for the trouble than anyone else. You can't make specific threats like that in public places and then blame people for reacting to them.
I'll second that TB2 has some problems, actually. I've used it for about three years now with an Exchange and gmail account, both IMAP, and Lightning for calendaring. By and large it does just fine, but every once in a while it just chokes and becomes unresponsive. It doesn't always recover very gracefully from connection problems, either. I really do like Thunderbird, and I haven't given much thought to using anything else, but even I wouldn't say it's problem-free. If the new release cleans up some of the rough edges for performance and stability, then I'll gladly take it.
You didn't see major news outlets complaining when their TV ratings were soaring again and again over the last 15 years on hyped up, over-sensationalized stories. Now they're upset because their relevance is about on par with what you'd read on some guy's blog. They did this to themselves by sacrificing their credibility for ratings.
Of course, maybe the real problem is that most people didn't ever actually want the news in the first place. They just wanted to be entertained, and the internet at large is simply way better than Fox or CNN could ever be in that department.
To be fair, it's a little more nuanced than that. It's more like you asked somebody to do some work on your roof, but you didn't want to pay for it, so somehow you got the guy you hired to agree to pay for it instead. Then you stocked your house with millions of dollars worth of expensive things. THEN it leaked and all your stuff got ruined, and now you want the guy to replace your millions of dollars worth of expensive things.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not unsympathetic at all, and this whole thing is a case study in bad budgeting, short sightedness, and bad luck. I hope we'll learn something from it, but heaping all of the liability onto the government's shoulders isn't entirely fair. New Orleans is just a topologically bad situation to start with, and it always ran the risk of flooding. Negligence was definitely a factor, but it was just one factor.
I think he's making good on the things he promised during his campaign. The fact that the economy isn't fully healed 13 months after it all fell apart doesn't mean that he's failed as a leader, and it doesn't mean the stimulus bill he pushed for was wrong. You're throwing rocks at a plan from the comfort of an economy that managed not to disintegrate over the last year, and there was an awful lot of fear and speculation that it would. The very best case you can make against the stimulus bill and its effect on the economy and job recovery is that there's a chance - and only a chance - that things could have been just as good without it, and there are a lot of economists who would disagree with you strongly there. I have to wonder where you think we should be today in terms of jobs and GDP in light of where we were a year ago and also whether or not your assessment would be in any way realistic.
Contrast this with Bush, who, when presented with the news that Iraq was disappointingly WMD-less, decided that we really took the nation to war over our desire to spread democracy. When his FEMA Deputy Director was behaving with utter incompetence, he announced that he was doing a heck of a job. I can't imagine how you can see Bush as the one more willing to accept responsibility for mistakes.
For example, Obama in February on his failed Tom Daschle nomination: "I'm here on television saying I screwed up, and that's part of the era of responsibility. It's not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do."
Compared to Bush, who in 2008, was still insisting that invading Iraq was the 'right thing to do'.
I suppose you can believe what you want about Bush, and you can try to draw comparisons to Obama, but I just don't think there's anything there. If somebody shows up from some alternate universe where there was no stimulus bill and tells us they're all crazy rich and we got it all wrong, then I guess I'd expect an apology from Obama, and I'd be extremely disappointed if he didn't offer one. Based on how Bush handled Iraq, I would expect his administration to announce that the stimulus plan was never really intended to improve the economy anyway, so it doesn't matter.
I don't think Obama is a superstar or anything, but I honestly can't even put him and Bush in the same corner of my brain at the same time. Bush's most offensive aspect in my mind was that he was completely unable to admit that he'd been wrong and that we were doing the wrong thing. His attitude toward leadership was that it was some kind of show of weakness to ever admit to a mistake, and he encouraged a lot of Americans to stupidly think the same way. It also bothered me a little that he looked and sounded like a buffoon on the world stage. Obama's biggest crime is that people expect miracles from him, but I can't blame him for that. At least he doesn't seem to think the Constitution is the right place for laws about marriage.
Just to be sure, you're aware that the vast majority (somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-85%) of the stimulus money hasn't been spent yet, right? I think there's a lot of talk as if we went to the grocery store when the bill was signed and laid $787 billion down at the checkout counter. Even TFA sort of implies this when it refers to the argument over how many jobs the stimulus package actually created, as if all of the money is spent and we're now just trying to measure the results. Also, a lot of the stimulus money (~$280 billion) is actually just tax cuts, so that also is spread out over time. I'm not trying to argue that the stimulus plan is smart or stupid, but either way, it is intended to be spent over several years, not all at one time.
I went to school in the 80s and 90s as well (in FL), and the discussion on that particular aspect of our westward expansion was extremely muted. Compared to the coverage given to Nazi Germany, I couldn't have even rated it as a footnote. I remember there was a single corner of one page devoted to the Trail of Tears, and I think the language was something like 'forced migration under harsh conditions'. That was pretty typical of how the narrative was presented altogether. I'm really surprised to hear you say that it was taught as genocide, to be honest. I don't think many Americans consider the US to be guilty of genocide, but maybe I'll try suggesting it in a crowded room some time and see how it plays. My gut tells me that it would be a lot like mentioning the holocaust in a crowded room in Germany -- nobody would say it never happened, but you won't be very popular for bringing it up.
It's not like we don't have a culture of denial here in the US. We wiped out the American Indians pretty remorselessly. That's pretty close to genocide, but it doesn't get taught that way in our schools. Every nation tries to overlook the terrible things its done in the past. People and countries are pretty much all the same, wherever you go.
Also don't forget that, as The Daily Show has pointed out on numerous occasions, Fox News then uses Beck's show and his audience (without direct reference, of course) to assert that 'Americans are starting to wonder if this government program isn't suspiciously like something Hitler would do'. It is painfully obvious that the whole thing is orchestrated to invent news. Fox has figured out a way to monetize the self-righteous indignation of Americans. All of the cable news outlets are guilty of it to some degree, but Fox consistently seems to be the most shameless. As far as right-wing and left-wing go, it hardly even matters to them. The far right just happens to be the audience they've chosen for the show they put on, and at the moment, it's a pretty lucrative demographic.
The White House is probably right to ignore them, but since mainstream media is mostly about entertainment, and since everybody would much rather watch entertainment than the news, the government needs those outlets to actually reach people. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Because we're idiots. Energy production is the next real economic driver, and whoever can produce it will become the next oil-rich nation. The US needs to focus on how to solve its own energy needs and how to sell energy to the rest of the world, which is only going to become more and more hungry for it. Moreover, it needs a geographically unique solution to energy production in order to compete, because technology, information, and talent are geographically independent in the 21st century. We have a lot of land, so solar and wind seem like something we can do that a lot of other people can't. Whatever we end up doing, if the US doesn't start producing something of value soon, it will quickly become the most irrelevant first-world nation on the planet (at least while it remains first-world). This absurd idea that we can sell our amazing business and financial management services to the rest of the world forever is going to kill us just as soon they realize that we aren't especially good at it.
I agree, this isn't a big win for open source just yet. They could easily re-implement and run into all of the same problems. But it is still a real loss for Microsoft and.NET. Consider the statement:
".NET is a fantastic development environment, and it is fantastic for virtually any size websites. You can even use it to build a real-time trading system."
That's a pretty powerful statement that Microsoft can no longer make effectively, and it helps force.NET down into a specific market rather than the sky being the limit. No matter who's to blame (who knows, maybe it wasn't.NET's fault at all), the takeaway will still be that.NET didn't cut it in the major leagues (something it really needs to do if it wants more Java marketshare).
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Totally biased source. NASA just wants to convince us that the Earth is doomed so that we'll put more money into colonizing Mars. How can you not see right through these lies?
Not to mention buying their goods. Very, very often I run into the argument that corporations deserve a break because they are the ones putting bread on our tables. There seems to be very little recognition that people do the work and people buy the products. The relationship is mutual, but workers and consumers can actually exist without corporations, and the reverse isn't true.
Man, I remember how the military hated Clinton for BRAC back in the 90s. I totally understand where they were coming from, because a military base is a massive economic and cultural driver. But it just goes to show that when people say they want smaller government, what they really mean is they want spending cuts for everyone else and tax cuts for themselves. Most fiscal conservatives aren't nearly as noble as their own rhetoric leads them to believe.
Or beyond that, why do we even have organs? I always felt that an intelligent designer would have just created us as walking, talking bags of magical life made from life cubes or something. Whenever I ask creationists why I have an appendix or a gall bladder or why, out of all the temperatures in the universe, I can only live within a tiny range of them, or out of the entire EM spectrum, I can only see a tiny sliver of it, or why leukemia exists, the only answer I get is 'God made it that way'. Seriously? All powerful? All knowing? That's why people have to poop? God wanted them to?
Hey, what if we pour acid in our eyes and stare at the sun?
No, seriously... it's a better idea.
Yeah, but do you know how many years of research went into that glue? Pretty impressive engineering, wouldn't you say?
And it also explains why we'll never get along, especially around the holidays.
That's the blatantly obvious parallel in print media. I can't understand why anybody would think this is surprising or remarkable in any way.
Good, simple VPN solutions are a commodity nowadays. VPN is easy to do, easy to manage, easy to deploy. DirectAccess does let you be 'on the network' at boot time, but outside of that, it's just a more complicated and vendor and version specific way to do something that is already cheap and easy to do in a universal, vendor-neutral way.
Honestly, my conclusion is that she exercised pretty poor judgment in posting those messages to a public forum, and the inconvenience she's dealing with now is her own fault. I imagine she'll be back in class soon once everything is cleared up, but the she's way more responsible for the trouble than anyone else. You can't make specific threats like that in public places and then blame people for reacting to them.
I'll second that TB2 has some problems, actually. I've used it for about three years now with an Exchange and gmail account, both IMAP, and Lightning for calendaring. By and large it does just fine, but every once in a while it just chokes and becomes unresponsive. It doesn't always recover very gracefully from connection problems, either. I really do like Thunderbird, and I haven't given much thought to using anything else, but even I wouldn't say it's problem-free. If the new release cleans up some of the rough edges for performance and stability, then I'll gladly take it.
You didn't see major news outlets complaining when their TV ratings were soaring again and again over the last 15 years on hyped up, over-sensationalized stories. Now they're upset because their relevance is about on par with what you'd read on some guy's blog. They did this to themselves by sacrificing their credibility for ratings.
Of course, maybe the real problem is that most people didn't ever actually want the news in the first place. They just wanted to be entertained, and the internet at large is simply way better than Fox or CNN could ever be in that department.
Not to mention that time they framed Roger Rabbit. How do they keep getting away with it?
To be fair, it's a little more nuanced than that. It's more like you asked somebody to do some work on your roof, but you didn't want to pay for it, so somehow you got the guy you hired to agree to pay for it instead. Then you stocked your house with millions of dollars worth of expensive things. THEN it leaked and all your stuff got ruined, and now you want the guy to replace your millions of dollars worth of expensive things.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not unsympathetic at all, and this whole thing is a case study in bad budgeting, short sightedness, and bad luck. I hope we'll learn something from it, but heaping all of the liability onto the government's shoulders isn't entirely fair. New Orleans is just a topologically bad situation to start with, and it always ran the risk of flooding. Negligence was definitely a factor, but it was just one factor.
Open freezer door, insert hair drier.
Figure THAT one out, you communist Progress Energy bastards!
I think he's making good on the things he promised during his campaign. The fact that the economy isn't fully healed 13 months after it all fell apart doesn't mean that he's failed as a leader, and it doesn't mean the stimulus bill he pushed for was wrong. You're throwing rocks at a plan from the comfort of an economy that managed not to disintegrate over the last year, and there was an awful lot of fear and speculation that it would. The very best case you can make against the stimulus bill and its effect on the economy and job recovery is that there's a chance - and only a chance - that things could have been just as good without it, and there are a lot of economists who would disagree with you strongly there. I have to wonder where you think we should be today in terms of jobs and GDP in light of where we were a year ago and also whether or not your assessment would be in any way realistic.
Contrast this with Bush, who, when presented with the news that Iraq was disappointingly WMD-less, decided that we really took the nation to war over our desire to spread democracy. When his FEMA Deputy Director was behaving with utter incompetence, he announced that he was doing a heck of a job. I can't imagine how you can see Bush as the one more willing to accept responsibility for mistakes.
For example, Obama in February on his failed Tom Daschle nomination:
"I'm here on television saying I screwed up, and that's part of the era of responsibility. It's not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do."
Compared to Bush, who in 2008, was still insisting that invading Iraq was the 'right thing to do'.
I suppose you can believe what you want about Bush, and you can try to draw comparisons to Obama, but I just don't think there's anything there. If somebody shows up from some alternate universe where there was no stimulus bill and tells us they're all crazy rich and we got it all wrong, then I guess I'd expect an apology from Obama, and I'd be extremely disappointed if he didn't offer one. Based on how Bush handled Iraq, I would expect his administration to announce that the stimulus plan was never really intended to improve the economy anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Are you sure? I was so certain that the last part of that movie was directed by a random number generator.
I don't think Obama is a superstar or anything, but I honestly can't even put him and Bush in the same corner of my brain at the same time. Bush's most offensive aspect in my mind was that he was completely unable to admit that he'd been wrong and that we were doing the wrong thing. His attitude toward leadership was that it was some kind of show of weakness to ever admit to a mistake, and he encouraged a lot of Americans to stupidly think the same way. It also bothered me a little that he looked and sounded like a buffoon on the world stage. Obama's biggest crime is that people expect miracles from him, but I can't blame him for that. At least he doesn't seem to think the Constitution is the right place for laws about marriage.
Just to be sure, you're aware that the vast majority (somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-85%) of the stimulus money hasn't been spent yet, right? I think there's a lot of talk as if we went to the grocery store when the bill was signed and laid $787 billion down at the checkout counter. Even TFA sort of implies this when it refers to the argument over how many jobs the stimulus package actually created, as if all of the money is spent and we're now just trying to measure the results. Also, a lot of the stimulus money (~$280 billion) is actually just tax cuts, so that also is spread out over time. I'm not trying to argue that the stimulus plan is smart or stupid, but either way, it is intended to be spent over several years, not all at one time.
I went to school in the 80s and 90s as well (in FL), and the discussion on that particular aspect of our westward expansion was extremely muted. Compared to the coverage given to Nazi Germany, I couldn't have even rated it as a footnote. I remember there was a single corner of one page devoted to the Trail of Tears, and I think the language was something like 'forced migration under harsh conditions'. That was pretty typical of how the narrative was presented altogether. I'm really surprised to hear you say that it was taught as genocide, to be honest. I don't think many Americans consider the US to be guilty of genocide, but maybe I'll try suggesting it in a crowded room some time and see how it plays. My gut tells me that it would be a lot like mentioning the holocaust in a crowded room in Germany -- nobody would say it never happened, but you won't be very popular for bringing it up.
It's not like we don't have a culture of denial here in the US. We wiped out the American Indians pretty remorselessly. That's pretty close to genocide, but it doesn't get taught that way in our schools. Every nation tries to overlook the terrible things its done in the past. People and countries are pretty much all the same, wherever you go.
Also don't forget that, as The Daily Show has pointed out on numerous occasions, Fox News then uses Beck's show and his audience (without direct reference, of course) to assert that 'Americans are starting to wonder if this government program isn't suspiciously like something Hitler would do'. It is painfully obvious that the whole thing is orchestrated to invent news. Fox has figured out a way to monetize the self-righteous indignation of Americans. All of the cable news outlets are guilty of it to some degree, but Fox consistently seems to be the most shameless. As far as right-wing and left-wing go, it hardly even matters to them. The far right just happens to be the audience they've chosen for the show they put on, and at the moment, it's a pretty lucrative demographic.
The White House is probably right to ignore them, but since mainstream media is mostly about entertainment, and since everybody would much rather watch entertainment than the news, the government needs those outlets to actually reach people. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Because we're idiots. Energy production is the next real economic driver, and whoever can produce it will become the next oil-rich nation. The US needs to focus on how to solve its own energy needs and how to sell energy to the rest of the world, which is only going to become more and more hungry for it. Moreover, it needs a geographically unique solution to energy production in order to compete, because technology, information, and talent are geographically independent in the 21st century. We have a lot of land, so solar and wind seem like something we can do that a lot of other people can't. Whatever we end up doing, if the US doesn't start producing something of value soon, it will quickly become the most irrelevant first-world nation on the planet (at least while it remains first-world). This absurd idea that we can sell our amazing business and financial management services to the rest of the world forever is going to kill us just as soon they realize that we aren't especially good at it.
Oh good, so I'm not the only one who thought this.
I agree, this isn't a big win for open source just yet. They could easily re-implement and run into all of the same problems. But it is still a real loss for Microsoft and .NET. Consider the statement:
".NET is a fantastic development environment, and it is fantastic for virtually any size websites. You can even use it to build a real-time trading system."
That's a pretty powerful statement that Microsoft can no longer make effectively, and it helps force .NET down into a specific market rather than the sky being the limit. No matter who's to blame (who knows, maybe it wasn't .NET's fault at all), the takeaway will still be that .NET didn't cut it in the major leagues (something it really needs to do if it wants more Java marketshare).