Do those same rednecks know how to capitalize letters that begin sentences? For someone claiming intellectual superiority over these "rednecks" your failing.
Thank you for introducing a little truth into the Detroit bashing. As someone who doesn't work in the auto industry but who lives with many who do and as someone who is sick and tired of all of the crap that's gets tossed around as "facts" your comments are greatly appreciated.
You are correct sir. We should pass a law preventing any company from trying to do something as dastardly as "satisfying the market". What a horrible, horrible thing to do. How dare a company build something that people actually want to buy. Instead, let's pass laws where we force companies to build things that people have no interest in buying. Then we can all sit back and scratch our heads and try and figure out where these companies went wrong.
How removed from reality does one have to be to post something as completely and utterly stupid as you've just posted? Do you not understand the basics of economics? Were US car companies too slow to build fuel efficient vehicles? Yes. Do you think that had anything to do with the fact that until about a year and half ago no US consumer could imagine $4.00 a gallon gas?
Get real. There is a reason more fuel efficient vehicles have been being built on the other side of the pond for a long, long time and they haven't been being built here. The US government, in it's infinite wisdom, choose not to tax fuel and make the price more expensive to reduce demand like the European countries did and the result was that when prices finally shot up high enough in such a quick fashion nobody here was prepared. Feel free to go ahead and blame the US automakers all you like though. It's clearly there fault they didn't employ enough psychics to see that coming. If only Miss Cleo would have been left out of jail she could have warned them. Oh, the shame!!!!!!
I don't usually reply to myself but before some smart ass looks at my example and says "just type in 'coke soft drink'" or something else like that my response is well no shit Sherlock. That was just a very, very basic example. The point still stands. People change and so does their behavior so the point is that past behavior doesn't necessarily indicate current or future behavior and that has to be accounted for in a service or a certain percent of the population will eventually find the service less than useful. In some instances it could be a hindrance.
The only issue I have with any kind of computer software that "learns" about your tendencies based on your past behavior is that human beings are unpredictable. We learn new things, we try new things and we aren't the same people today as we were 4 or 5 years ago. We grow and we change. So if I'm dealing with a search engine is that is filtering my results based on some previous information about my behavior what happens if I change?
Here's an extreme example. Let's say a drug user decides to clean up his act. He decides he wants to order a bunch of his favorite soft drink and have it delivered so he types in "coke". Well if he had previously searched for "coke" looking up information about the drug and how it affects your body and had previously been looking up information about other drugs and the search engine accounted for that then what comes up when he searches for "coke" but wants information about the soft drink? There better be an easy way for the system to set aside your previous behavior and start from scratch because people change and when you change the context in which you want information changes as well. Learning from past behavior has serious upside but there are some downsides as well that must be considered.
Agreed. The consulting business that I work for has an IT services side that I fill in on from time to time if they are short staffed. Most of my clients on the consulting side of the business and most of the small businesses that we provide completely or partially outsourced IT services for that believed they'd need new PC's in the next couple of years (who didn't have volume licenses for XP) have already purchased them so they could downgrade to XP. These are mostly non-tech savvy people here who have either heard bad things about Vista from others or who have some first hand experience with it on a home PC that they purchased and they wanted to be sure to buy new systems while they could still get XP. We have a neutral policy when it comes to Vista so they haven't been doing this at our behest.
In fact, I can count on two hands the number of times I've encountered a client who has one or more machines on-site running Vista. It's amazing to me how few clients we have that have even a single Vista machine and it's amazing to me what a bad rap Vista has with the non-tech savvy crowd.
I don't particularly like Vista and on my box at work I've stuck with XP but I don't absolutely hate the thing either. Perhaps that's because I have limited experience with it but if they replaced my box at work with new PC (and I wasn't given the choice to go with a Mac... I switched at home in 2006) and the box came with Vista pre-installed I probably wouldn't wipe it and re-install XP unless the box was a total POS and I needed to downgrade for performance reasons. I think the Vista to Windows Millenium comparison takes things a bit too far. Millenium was a complete and total POS that was clearly less stable than Windows 98 even on new hardware that came with the OS pre-installed. I've found that Vista, from the admittedly limited experience that I have with it, isn't that bad when it comes pre-installed on new hardware but Microsoft clearly screwed the pouch with it and I think that Apple is benefiting a little bit. We've had higher ups at a few of our clients opt for Macs in the last six or seven months who have asked us to setup Boot Camp or a VM product to run their Windows apps and if you would have told me we'd be seeing that a year ago I would have laughed in your face.
We have a winner. AT&T stands to lose a hell of a lot more if Apple brings the iPhone to other carriers than Apple has to lose if AT&T offers other smart phones that run other OS's. AT&T's move is smart. Not everybody wants an iPhone so you might as well offer other smart phones. It would be suicide not to. I doubt Apple cares. Last time I checked the iPhone is doing pretty damn well and Apple isn't the kind of company that wants every person on the planet to buy it's stuff. They realize that there is a certain group of people willing to pay more for their products and they've done pretty well for themselves catering to that market.
Oh wait.. now you see the danger of activist judges who like to interpret the the law and try to measure it's "intent" but since it encroaches on your freedom only now are you upset... hmm... stupid is as stupid does... what a predicament......
With millions of iPhone and gPhone users out there, free streaming audio applications like FStream, and thousands of Internet radio stations to access, the question is: why would anyone want to pay for proprietary hardware and a limited selection of a few hundred stations all controlled by one company?"
Oh, I don't know... perhaps it has something to due with the fact that not everybody has a iPhone or a gPhone... just a thought...
'One of the things we've seen in the last two years is that attackers aren't even going after the browser itself anymore,' Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, said.
And if you believe that I've got this great piece of land I'd like to sell you.
This woman can and will be punished in civil court which is where something like this belongs. She could probably be sued successfully for wrongful death and could definitely be sued successfully for the intentional infliction of emotional distress. She'll be taken to the cleaners and rightfully so. That combined with the public shaming that has come from the publicity surrounding this case is just punishment in my opinion. This woman did a very mean and petty thing that resulted in a real tragedy but at the end of the day it was just words typed on a keyboard. Not actions, but words entered on a public social networking web site. Unless the women in question knew this girl was mentally unstable with possible suicidal tendencies I don't believe this is a criminal matter in any way, shape for form.
The big picture is that the networks should be free to do whatever they want and if you as a parent don't like it then don't let your kids watch. Go buy a ton of kid friendly DVD's and unhook the cable. The vast majority of the market shouldn't be kept from the kind of programming they want because some parents are too lazy to do their job. It's nonsense.
I won't believe a thing Microsoft says about Windows 7 until I see it. Microsoft is like a political candidate running for office. It makes a ton of promises you know it'll never keep.
Except they didn't drop Firewire entirely. They droped it from their consumer line of laptops aimed at college kids and switchers. If that's not you and you need a Firewire port because you do work with HD video the Macbook isn't supposed to be targeted at you. The Macbook Pro is. With the addition of the NVIDIA chipset and the improved graphics performance that comes with it there isn't much of a reason for most people to even consider the Macbook Pro, but remove the Firewire port from the Macbook and all of a sudden a lot more people have a reason to buy the Pro. It's a crappy thing to do to former Macbook users who need Firewire but I understand why they did it. They were obviously worried that the new Macbooks would eat into the Macbook Pro's market share. I think it's a stupid decision because you're ticking off a lot of loyal customers but this isn't the first time they've done something like this.
I've got a crapload of external drives, many of which are firewire only. Pisses me off that apple drops their own widely used standard on their own equipment.
Assmonkeys.
So do what I did and buy a Macbook Pro instead. If new units are too pricey, as they are for me, then grab a refurbished unit. I just bought one at the online Apple Store for $1,399 bucks (only $100 more than the $1,299 Apple is charging for the new model of the MacBook) that has a better processor, a bigger hard drive, a better GPU and firewire. The only downside is that it uses DDR2 memory instead of DDR3 but with a faster CPU and a much bigger hard drive and a better GPU I could care less. If you really, really want a Macbook than grab the $999 version which also has a firewire port but doesn't have the new case or the new NVIDIA chipset.
The ipod will be obsoleted by the humble cell phone. Like it or not people want convergence. Particularly in Asia. Phone, Camera, multimedia, they (we) want it all in one smallish chunk of electronics - it also needs to be shiny and have flashing lights. And yup, the cameras these days are 'good enough' for social networking.
Apple understands this perfectly well. Hence the iPhone. Consumers want convergence and the iPhone is a pretty darn good MP3 player / smart phone / hand held computing device for the typical consumer who wants something that is easy to use and just works. It's not perfect by any means, especially if you want total control over the device out of the box or if you live in a country that doesn't force Apple to sell a SIM unlocked version of the phone and you have a problem with their carrier of choice, but if you're fine with the carrier that Apple has partnered with and don't mind the controls Apple has put in place over 3rd party applications or don't mind having to jailbreak the phone to get total control then I'd say it's one of the best consumer oriented MP3 player / smart phone / hand held computing convergence devices out there.
Apple not only understands that convergence is where it's at but they fired one of the first shots in the consumer oriented convergence device war with the iPhone.
You're not a Republican. You're a fiscal conservative as am I. While there are some like us in the Republican party, certainly more than there are in the Democrat party, we're still a minority voice within the party. So much so that I don't consider myself a Republican anymore. There are very few Republicans like Tom Coburn in the Senate and Ron Paul and Jeff Flake in the House that are truly fiscal conservative today and were truly fiscal conservatives during their years in the majority. Most of the party just plays it lip service when it suits them.
If there wasn't all of this public outrage at the bailout and if this wasn't right before Congressional elections I'm afraid you wouldn't see as many Republicans stand up for fiscal sanity. Where was this new found love for fiscal discipline during the Bush years when Republicans had control of the White House and had majorities in both Houses of Congress? They allowed the size of government, the size of the deficit, the size of the total national debt, the size of entitlement programs, and the size of future unfunded liabilities to grow at a rate not seen since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Programs of the 60's. That is the exact opposite of fiscal discipline. That's fiscal insanity. Especially when you consider that Social Security and Medicare are basically both ponzi schemes that only work if the working population stays larger than the population of retirees and we already know that isn't the case with the baby boomers.
If the Republicans were in the majority now in Congress I question whether the majority of the party would be against this bailout. After all, if a serious economic downturn occurs people tend to blame the party in the majority and even though the public may blame Republicans for this mess right now if things still look bad a year or two from now and Democrats are still in the majority you can be sure the voters will begin to revolt. It benefits Republicans to oppose this measure because they are in the minority and won't be held accountable for the economy if it's still bad and Democrats remain in control a year or two from now. They can afford the courage of their convictions because it won't hurt them politically. I highly doubt if they'd be so willing to do the same if they were in the majority and were worried about the political impact of an extended downturn.
I'm firmly opposed to this plan but I understand that not passing it means tougher times in the short and possibly medium term in order to have a better fiscal and economic position in the long term. Adding another 700 billion in debt on top of the 11 trillion we're already in debt is fiscal insanity when you consider the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare. In order to be healthier in the long term we can't keep adding to the debt, we must start reducing it and that means no bailouts and it also means cutting spending. Not reducing the rate of growth, but cutting spending to free up the funds to begin paying down the debt. It may even mean reverting back to the tax brackets that existed in the 90's. None of these are popular, but they are necessary, and I highly doubt Republicans would have the will to advocate for any of them if they were in the majority and we're primarily concerned with short term conditions so they could remain in power rather than worry about medium and long term conditions.
I have a new policy when it comes to voting for Senators and my Congressman. I'll always vote for a true fiscal conservative but if neither candidate in the race is a fiscal conservative then I'll vote against the incumbent, whatever party he or she may belong to.
Let the wingnuts in Kansas and other red states teach creationism or any other loony idea they want and let those of us who are in the blue states teach real science and math and critical thinking skills and let's see which population is more successful in our knowledge based economy 10 - 20 years down the road. Let the free market decide, as they say, with one condition. Let's do away with welfare and let the religious nut jobs who aren't interested in teaching science, math and critical thinking reap what they sew.
The federal government getting involved is the easy answer, but not the easy solution. It isn't too outrageous to think of states getting their acts together and upgrade their infrastructure.
Yes actually it is. I live in Michigan. You know, the state that has been in a single state recession since about 2003. The state where our state government, in it's infinite wisdom and despite this recession, has increased spending each and every year above the rate of inflation and thus this last year had to increase taxes to balance the budget even though the average wages in this state are declining due to to the massive pay and benefit concessions the unions are making to try and keep the auto industry afloat.
You may have also heard of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. You know, the mayor who fired two cops who were investigating allegations of misconduct by the mayor and his executive protection unit because he was afraid they would learn of his affair with his chief of staff. The mayor who lied on the stand about firing the cops, claiming they were only demoted, and who lied about the affair claiming it never happened when the two cops sued. The mayor who was on the losing side of the law suit who then claimed that racism played a factor and vowed to appeal the decision even though the officers, the mayor and his chief of staff were all African American. The mayor who, upon learning that the plaintiffs had uncovered text messages from city issued pagers that were sent between himself and his chief of staff that proved that he lied under oath about both firing the cops and about having an affair, suddenly agreed to settle the case for 8.4 million dollars and to craft a second, secret settlement agreement that would remain under seal that required that all copies of the text messages in question be turned over as a part of the settlement agreement. A mayor who then approached city council with the public portion of the settlement agreement and urged the council to settle the case without providing them any details of the secret agreement and the real reason why he was settling the case. A mayor who, after the local papers exposed the existence of the text messages and the second initially secret settlement agreement through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, has since been charged with multiple counts of perjury and obstruction of justice and who, while out on bond, assaulted a state police officer who was attempting to serve a subpoena to a family friend who will now stand trial on two counts of assaulting a police officer and who still, after all of this, refuses to leave office.
You may have also heard of our Governor, Jennifer Granholm. A governor who has state constitutional power to remove the mayor. A governor who sat back and did nothing as this scandal engulfed the largest city in the state and brought things to a standstill in the region because she is a white Democrat and she did not want to do anything to negatively effect African American voter turnout in this state for the presidential election when it looked like Hillary Clinton had a chance to be the party's nominee. A governor who finally choose to take action when it became clear that Barack Obama would be the nominee and thus African American voter turn out would be virtually guaranteed regardless of any action she may take against the mayor. A Governor who has sat back and done nothing since the existence of the text messages and the secret deal to try and cover them up were exposed in January and who will finally, on September 3rd, will hold a hearing to remove the mayor.
The alternative energy "plan" being pushed by our pathetic Governor calls for giving the two largest power companies in this state a virtual duopoly if they agree to certain targets for the generation of alternative energy when it is a well known fact in this state that both of these companies have allowed the infrastructure they are responsible for to decline, as have their response times when outages occur. It's like the bl
My parents both work for the local power company and this is a well known problem among those in the industry. I've been screaming about it forever. We can have all of the solar, wind, water and nuclear power in the world but it doesn't mean a thing if it can't be easily transferred from the places it can be generated to places where it's needed. Huge wind farms in the Midwest will only benefit the Midwest. A massive solar array in the Mojave dessert will only benefit states that are near it. Step #1 in the transition to alternative energy has to be to modernize and upgrade the power grid so energy generated in one region of the country can easily be transported to another and this is going to have to be a top down operation overseen by a single federal regulatory body. Leaving it in the hands of the states isn't going to cut it as the states have differing standards and regulatory environments.
I'm generally a libertarian but this is one area where the federal government is going to have to get involved to get everybody on the same page. It's akin to the interstate highway system. Without the direct involvement and oversight of the federal government that never would have happened and this won't either.
Mod parent up. There is no indication that 2.0.2 was supposed to fix the 3G issues. None at all. It came out a day after Jobs said they were aware of the problem and working on an update to address it. I highly doubt given the timing that 2.0.2 was supposed to address this. If so it seems to me he would have said they had fixed the problem and were releasing an update.
About 20% of Americans think George W. Bush is doing a good job as President which just goes to show you that 20% of Americans are freaking idiots who will not accept reality no matter how clear the facts are. I'm sure there are idiots who still think the Earth is flat. It's probably some of the same tools who think the Earth was really created in 6 days and that George W. Bush is doing a good job.
I was a Republican and I'm voting for Obama. There are plenty of us around. The Republican party lost its way when it had control of the House, Senate and the White House. Fiscal and foreign policy sanity went out the window and as a result I'm now a Libertarian who will back Obama because I live in a swing state (Michigan) that will be critical for Obama to win if he's going to get to 270 electoral votes and I recognize the enormous stupidity in trying to peruse a security agreement with Iraq that will result in 50 permanent bases, perpetual violence and an eventual war with Iran. That is what we will get if McCain wins this election and that can not be allowed to happen.
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Do those same rednecks know how to capitalize letters that begin sentences? For someone claiming intellectual superiority over these "rednecks" your failing.
Thank you for introducing a little truth into the Detroit bashing. As someone who doesn't work in the auto industry but who lives with many who do and as someone who is sick and tired of all of the crap that's gets tossed around as "facts" your comments are greatly appreciated.
You are correct sir. We should pass a law preventing any company from trying to do something as dastardly as "satisfying the market". What a horrible, horrible thing to do. How dare a company build something that people actually want to buy. Instead, let's pass laws where we force companies to build things that people have no interest in buying. Then we can all sit back and scratch our heads and try and figure out where these companies went wrong. How removed from reality does one have to be to post something as completely and utterly stupid as you've just posted? Do you not understand the basics of economics? Were US car companies too slow to build fuel efficient vehicles? Yes. Do you think that had anything to do with the fact that until about a year and half ago no US consumer could imagine $4.00 a gallon gas? Get real. There is a reason more fuel efficient vehicles have been being built on the other side of the pond for a long, long time and they haven't been being built here. The US government, in it's infinite wisdom, choose not to tax fuel and make the price more expensive to reduce demand like the European countries did and the result was that when prices finally shot up high enough in such a quick fashion nobody here was prepared. Feel free to go ahead and blame the US automakers all you like though. It's clearly there fault they didn't employ enough psychics to see that coming. If only Miss Cleo would have been left out of jail she could have warned them. Oh, the shame!!!!!!
I don't usually reply to myself but before some smart ass looks at my example and says "just type in 'coke soft drink'" or something else like that my response is well no shit Sherlock. That was just a very, very basic example. The point still stands. People change and so does their behavior so the point is that past behavior doesn't necessarily indicate current or future behavior and that has to be accounted for in a service or a certain percent of the population will eventually find the service less than useful. In some instances it could be a hindrance.
The only issue I have with any kind of computer software that "learns" about your tendencies based on your past behavior is that human beings are unpredictable. We learn new things, we try new things and we aren't the same people today as we were 4 or 5 years ago. We grow and we change. So if I'm dealing with a search engine is that is filtering my results based on some previous information about my behavior what happens if I change?
Here's an extreme example. Let's say a drug user decides to clean up his act. He decides he wants to order a bunch of his favorite soft drink and have it delivered so he types in "coke". Well if he had previously searched for "coke" looking up information about the drug and how it affects your body and had previously been looking up information about other drugs and the search engine accounted for that then what comes up when he searches for "coke" but wants information about the soft drink? There better be an easy way for the system to set aside your previous behavior and start from scratch because people change and when you change the context in which you want information changes as well. Learning from past behavior has serious upside but there are some downsides as well that must be considered.
Agreed. The consulting business that I work for has an IT services side that I fill in on from time to time if they are short staffed. Most of my clients on the consulting side of the business and most of the small businesses that we provide completely or partially outsourced IT services for that believed they'd need new PC's in the next couple of years (who didn't have volume licenses for XP) have already purchased them so they could downgrade to XP. These are mostly non-tech savvy people here who have either heard bad things about Vista from others or who have some first hand experience with it on a home PC that they purchased and they wanted to be sure to buy new systems while they could still get XP. We have a neutral policy when it comes to Vista so they haven't been doing this at our behest.
In fact, I can count on two hands the number of times I've encountered a client who has one or more machines on-site running Vista. It's amazing to me how few clients we have that have even a single Vista machine and it's amazing to me what a bad rap Vista has with the non-tech savvy crowd.
I don't particularly like Vista and on my box at work I've stuck with XP but I don't absolutely hate the thing either. Perhaps that's because I have limited experience with it but if they replaced my box at work with new PC (and I wasn't given the choice to go with a Mac ... I switched at home in 2006) and the box came with Vista pre-installed I probably wouldn't wipe it and re-install XP unless the box was a total POS and I needed to downgrade for performance reasons. I think the Vista to Windows Millenium comparison takes things a bit too far. Millenium was a complete and total POS that was clearly less stable than Windows 98 even on new hardware that came with the OS pre-installed. I've found that Vista, from the admittedly limited experience that I have with it, isn't that bad when it comes pre-installed on new hardware but Microsoft clearly screwed the pouch with it and I think that Apple is benefiting a little bit. We've had higher ups at a few of our clients opt for Macs in the last six or seven months who have asked us to setup Boot Camp or a VM product to run their Windows apps and if you would have told me we'd be seeing that a year ago I would have laughed in your face.
We have a winner. AT&T stands to lose a hell of a lot more if Apple brings the iPhone to other carriers than Apple has to lose if AT&T offers other smart phones that run other OS's. AT&T's move is smart. Not everybody wants an iPhone so you might as well offer other smart phones. It would be suicide not to. I doubt Apple cares. Last time I checked the iPhone is doing pretty damn well and Apple isn't the kind of company that wants every person on the planet to buy it's stuff. They realize that there is a certain group of people willing to pay more for their products and they've done pretty well for themselves catering to that market.
Oh wait .. now you see the danger of activist judges who like to interpret the the law and try to measure it's "intent" but since it encroaches on your freedom only now are you upset ... hmm ... stupid is as stupid does ... what a predicament ......
Oh, I don't know ... perhaps it has something to due with the fact that not everybody has a iPhone or a gPhone ... just a thought ...
And if you believe that I've got this great piece of land I'd like to sell you.
This woman can and will be punished in civil court which is where something like this belongs. She could probably be sued successfully for wrongful death and could definitely be sued successfully for the intentional infliction of emotional distress. She'll be taken to the cleaners and rightfully so. That combined with the public shaming that has come from the publicity surrounding this case is just punishment in my opinion. This woman did a very mean and petty thing that resulted in a real tragedy but at the end of the day it was just words typed on a keyboard. Not actions, but words entered on a public social networking web site. Unless the women in question knew this girl was mentally unstable with possible suicidal tendencies I don't believe this is a criminal matter in any way, shape for form.
It is so ....
The big picture is that the networks should be free to do whatever they want and if you as a parent don't like it then don't let your kids watch. Go buy a ton of kid friendly DVD's and unhook the cable. The vast majority of the market shouldn't be kept from the kind of programming they want because some parents are too lazy to do their job. It's nonsense.
I won't believe a thing Microsoft says about Windows 7 until I see it. Microsoft is like a political candidate running for office. It makes a ton of promises you know it'll never keep.
Except they didn't drop Firewire entirely. They droped it from their consumer line of laptops aimed at college kids and switchers. If that's not you and you need a Firewire port because you do work with HD video the Macbook isn't supposed to be targeted at you. The Macbook Pro is. With the addition of the NVIDIA chipset and the improved graphics performance that comes with it there isn't much of a reason for most people to even consider the Macbook Pro, but remove the Firewire port from the Macbook and all of a sudden a lot more people have a reason to buy the Pro. It's a crappy thing to do to former Macbook users who need Firewire but I understand why they did it. They were obviously worried that the new Macbooks would eat into the Macbook Pro's market share. I think it's a stupid decision because you're ticking off a lot of loyal customers but this isn't the first time they've done something like this.
So do what I did and buy a Macbook Pro instead. If new units are too pricey, as they are for me, then grab a refurbished unit. I just bought one at the online Apple Store for $1,399 bucks (only $100 more than the $1,299 Apple is charging for the new model of the MacBook) that has a better processor, a bigger hard drive, a better GPU and firewire. The only downside is that it uses DDR2 memory instead of DDR3 but with a faster CPU and a much bigger hard drive and a better GPU I could care less. If you really, really want a Macbook than grab the $999 version which also has a firewire port but doesn't have the new case or the new NVIDIA chipset.
Problem solved.
Apple understands this perfectly well. Hence the iPhone. Consumers want convergence and the iPhone is a pretty darn good MP3 player / smart phone / hand held computing device for the typical consumer who wants something that is easy to use and just works. It's not perfect by any means, especially if you want total control over the device out of the box or if you live in a country that doesn't force Apple to sell a SIM unlocked version of the phone and you have a problem with their carrier of choice, but if you're fine with the carrier that Apple has partnered with and don't mind the controls Apple has put in place over 3rd party applications or don't mind having to jailbreak the phone to get total control then I'd say it's one of the best consumer oriented MP3 player / smart phone / hand held computing convergence devices out there.
Apple not only understands that convergence is where it's at but they fired one of the first shots in the consumer oriented convergence device war with the iPhone.
You're not a Republican. You're a fiscal conservative as am I. While there are some like us in the Republican party, certainly more than there are in the Democrat party, we're still a minority voice within the party. So much so that I don't consider myself a Republican anymore. There are very few Republicans like Tom Coburn in the Senate and Ron Paul and Jeff Flake in the House that are truly fiscal conservative today and were truly fiscal conservatives during their years in the majority. Most of the party just plays it lip service when it suits them.
If there wasn't all of this public outrage at the bailout and if this wasn't right before Congressional elections I'm afraid you wouldn't see as many Republicans stand up for fiscal sanity. Where was this new found love for fiscal discipline during the Bush years when Republicans had control of the White House and had majorities in both Houses of Congress? They allowed the size of government, the size of the deficit, the size of the total national debt, the size of entitlement programs, and the size of future unfunded liabilities to grow at a rate not seen since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Programs of the 60's. That is the exact opposite of fiscal discipline. That's fiscal insanity. Especially when you consider that Social Security and Medicare are basically both ponzi schemes that only work if the working population stays larger than the population of retirees and we already know that isn't the case with the baby boomers.
If the Republicans were in the majority now in Congress I question whether the majority of the party would be against this bailout. After all, if a serious economic downturn occurs people tend to blame the party in the majority and even though the public may blame Republicans for this mess right now if things still look bad a year or two from now and Democrats are still in the majority you can be sure the voters will begin to revolt. It benefits Republicans to oppose this measure because they are in the minority and won't be held accountable for the economy if it's still bad and Democrats remain in control a year or two from now. They can afford the courage of their convictions because it won't hurt them politically. I highly doubt if they'd be so willing to do the same if they were in the majority and were worried about the political impact of an extended downturn.
I'm firmly opposed to this plan but I understand that not passing it means tougher times in the short and possibly medium term in order to have a better fiscal and economic position in the long term. Adding another 700 billion in debt on top of the 11 trillion we're already in debt is fiscal insanity when you consider the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare. In order to be healthier in the long term we can't keep adding to the debt, we must start reducing it and that means no bailouts and it also means cutting spending. Not reducing the rate of growth, but cutting spending to free up the funds to begin paying down the debt. It may even mean reverting back to the tax brackets that existed in the 90's. None of these are popular, but they are necessary, and I highly doubt Republicans would have the will to advocate for any of them if they were in the majority and we're primarily concerned with short term conditions so they could remain in power rather than worry about medium and long term conditions.
I have a new policy when it comes to voting for Senators and my Congressman. I'll always vote for a true fiscal conservative but if neither candidate in the race is a fiscal conservative then I'll vote against the incumbent, whatever party he or she may belong to.
Let the wingnuts in Kansas and other red states teach creationism or any other loony idea they want and let those of us who are in the blue states teach real science and math and critical thinking skills and let's see which population is more successful in our knowledge based economy 10 - 20 years down the road. Let the free market decide, as they say, with one condition. Let's do away with welfare and let the religious nut jobs who aren't interested in teaching science, math and critical thinking reap what they sew.
Yes actually it is. I live in Michigan. You know, the state that has been in a single state recession since about 2003. The state where our state government, in it's infinite wisdom and despite this recession, has increased spending each and every year above the rate of inflation and thus this last year had to increase taxes to balance the budget even though the average wages in this state are declining due to to the massive pay and benefit concessions the unions are making to try and keep the auto industry afloat.
You may have also heard of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. You know, the mayor who fired two cops who were investigating allegations of misconduct by the mayor and his executive protection unit because he was afraid they would learn of his affair with his chief of staff. The mayor who lied on the stand about firing the cops, claiming they were only demoted, and who lied about the affair claiming it never happened when the two cops sued. The mayor who was on the losing side of the law suit who then claimed that racism played a factor and vowed to appeal the decision even though the officers, the mayor and his chief of staff were all African American. The mayor who, upon learning that the plaintiffs had uncovered text messages from city issued pagers that were sent between himself and his chief of staff that proved that he lied under oath about both firing the cops and about having an affair, suddenly agreed to settle the case for 8.4 million dollars and to craft a second, secret settlement agreement that would remain under seal that required that all copies of the text messages in question be turned over as a part of the settlement agreement. A mayor who then approached city council with the public portion of the settlement agreement and urged the council to settle the case without providing them any details of the secret agreement and the real reason why he was settling the case. A mayor who, after the local papers exposed the existence of the text messages and the second initially secret settlement agreement through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, has since been charged with multiple counts of perjury and obstruction of justice and who, while out on bond, assaulted a state police officer who was attempting to serve a subpoena to a family friend who will now stand trial on two counts of assaulting a police officer and who still, after all of this, refuses to leave office.
You may have also heard of our Governor, Jennifer Granholm. A governor who has state constitutional power to remove the mayor. A governor who sat back and did nothing as this scandal engulfed the largest city in the state and brought things to a standstill in the region because she is a white Democrat and she did not want to do anything to negatively effect African American voter turnout in this state for the presidential election when it looked like Hillary Clinton had a chance to be the party's nominee. A governor who finally choose to take action when it became clear that Barack Obama would be the nominee and thus African American voter turn out would be virtually guaranteed regardless of any action she may take against the mayor. A Governor who has sat back and done nothing since the existence of the text messages and the secret deal to try and cover them up were exposed in January and who will finally, on September 3rd, will hold a hearing to remove the mayor.
The alternative energy "plan" being pushed by our pathetic Governor calls for giving the two largest power companies in this state a virtual duopoly if they agree to certain targets for the generation of alternative energy when it is a well known fact in this state that both of these companies have allowed the infrastructure they are responsible for to decline, as have their response times when outages occur. It's like the bl
My parents both work for the local power company and this is a well known problem among those in the industry. I've been screaming about it forever. We can have all of the solar, wind, water and nuclear power in the world but it doesn't mean a thing if it can't be easily transferred from the places it can be generated to places where it's needed. Huge wind farms in the Midwest will only benefit the Midwest. A massive solar array in the Mojave dessert will only benefit states that are near it. Step #1 in the transition to alternative energy has to be to modernize and upgrade the power grid so energy generated in one region of the country can easily be transported to another and this is going to have to be a top down operation overseen by a single federal regulatory body. Leaving it in the hands of the states isn't going to cut it as the states have differing standards and regulatory environments.
I'm generally a libertarian but this is one area where the federal government is going to have to get involved to get everybody on the same page. It's akin to the interstate highway system. Without the direct involvement and oversight of the federal government that never would have happened and this won't either.
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Mod parent up. There is no indication that 2.0.2 was supposed to fix the 3G issues. None at all. It came out a day after Jobs said they were aware of the problem and working on an update to address it. I highly doubt given the timing that 2.0.2 was supposed to address this. If so it seems to me he would have said they had fixed the problem and were releasing an update.
About 20% of Americans think George W. Bush is doing a good job as President which just goes to show you that 20% of Americans are freaking idiots who will not accept reality no matter how clear the facts are. I'm sure there are idiots who still think the Earth is flat. It's probably some of the same tools who think the Earth was really created in 6 days and that George W. Bush is doing a good job.
I was a Republican and I'm voting for Obama. There are plenty of us around. The Republican party lost its way when it had control of the House, Senate and the White House. Fiscal and foreign policy sanity went out the window and as a result I'm now a Libertarian who will back Obama because I live in a swing state (Michigan) that will be critical for Obama to win if he's going to get to 270 electoral votes and I recognize the enormous stupidity in trying to peruse a security agreement with Iraq that will result in 50 permanent bases, perpetual violence and an eventual war with Iran. That is what we will get if McCain wins this election and that can not be allowed to happen.