Depends on where you are. The supermarket closest to me has three aisles of non-alcoholic beverages, one each of soda, juice and water/flavored water. But yeah, we eat a lot of junk food compared to most places.
First, what is the purpose of your degree, to you? If it's to enable getting a job, then you should know that the order in which résumés are generally evaluated, all other factors being equal, is people with an advanced degree, then people with a bachelor's degree in the field (in the case of IT, that could be IT, MIS, computer engineering or any given engineering), then people with a bachelor's degree relevant to the core business of the company, then people without a degree but with a lot of relevant experience, then anyone else. Generally, the last category is never even looked at, except in the most desparate job markets, or where you know someone. So, again with all things being equal, the closer you are to the front of that queue, the more likely you are to not be overlooked before getting an interview. Some jobs will become unavailable to you with each step further to the right. Those that disappear are not always the best quality jobs, but remember that this point is predicated on your intent being to use your degree to get a job.
If on the other hand, your purpose in getting a degree is to learn as much as possible about your chosen field, then you don't need to worry much about the degree. Take a bunch of classes that interest you, and I do not mean just in computers (Steve Jobs famously attributed his design sense to a calligraphy class he audited), and then when you have nearly the requisite number of hours for a degree, go see a counselor about how to get a degree (any degree) with what you've done. Most likely, you'll have to take a few filler classes (math and economics are likely, because you should end up pretty close to a math or business degree, depending on your interests) to make up the difference and get the degree at that point.
If, instead, your purpose is to get a good education, switch to liberal arts (if necessary, switch colleges) with an emphasis on classical learning, languages and literature. Avoid schools whose idea of liberal arts is grievance studies, and whose idea of Western culture is an unbroken trail of oppression, and look for one that really grounds you in Western culture. The most salient benefit of such a course of study is that you will learn how to learn on your own, as well as how to express yourself well, how to set and obtain goals, how to lead and how to maintain a balanced and well-lived life. Unless your goal is a profession (by which I mean the real ones: law, medicine, engineering), this will give you the basis to do anything at all you are good at with the rest of your life, and do it well. And if your goal is one of the professions, this is an excellent basis for a graduate degree in said profession.
Second, assuming that you've decided you do want a degree, for any of the above reasons, I fail to see how that should stand in your way. Whether or not you are getting a degree, it is useful to have a job. It's experience for after college, money for now. So why not build up a website on a topic of interest to you, and make it the best you can? (I have a colleague who built a website about touring motorcycles to learn how to administer databases, for example.) Being interesting to you will keep you focused and improve the quality of what you produce. Once you've got the site the way you want it, use it plus your being enrolled in college to get either an internship or part-time web job (if you want to work in corporate settings) or small contracts (if you want to do contracting). This will build up your ésumé as you study, and will give you something to stay interested in while you're taking courses that you don't yet see a use for. (Who knew that taking linear algebra or structures and properties of materials would help me be a better system architect? Which is not to say every course will prove useful for every person, but you'd be surprised at what comes up decades after college.)
Finally, having decided on a degree path and having gotten a job that you want to do, the best advice I can offer is
I love my iPhone, but I do wish I could side load without having to pay Apple the developer fee. On the other hand, I also realize that the code signing requirement is one reason Android has malware and iPhone doesn't, so it's a mixed bag. But it would be nice to be able to opt out without jailbreaking.
It's not really just a problem with Flash, or with Flash and Java, or with Flash and Java and (pick a technology). The problem is that we do not really know how to build complex, integrated systems — which is what end users need to get what they want (in this case, games and multimedia of various kinds) — that are secure enough for the Internet environment, at low enough operational and development costs to make them practical. Perhaps a new compute architecture (and associated language changes) is needed, where memory for programs and memory for data are physically separated. This could potentially lead to slightly reduced functionality for dramatically improved security. But in any case, this is not just a case of something being badly built, it's an instance illustrating how nearly all the software we use is in some sense badly built.
So, I see you are coming at the issue with an open mind...
I think that the thing that bothers me about those who see Science (capitalized for a reason) as the only means of knowing things is the same thing that bothers me about young Earth creationists: the utter lack of humility.
Much of the commentary strikes me as theology for twelve year olds working it out for themselves. Hell, I'm not a Christian and I can answer most of the"gotchas" from a Christian point of view. Rather than just bitch about it, though, let me give one example.
Whether the Bible is or is not based on divine revelation, it was written by pre-industrial people for pre-industrial people.
So an omnipotent and omniscient being's intent is undone by mere mortals. Good to know we're that powerful. Why didn't The Holy Spirit just take over the body of the writer and make it all perfect and then simply stop anyone from altering those words? I mean, you are infinitely powerful but that's too much effort?
In what way would a book written to be understood by those without the foundation for, say, modern chemistry or physics constitute "mere mortals" undo[ing] "an omnipotent and omniscient being's intent"? A Christian likely would say that God framed His words to be understood in a meaningful way by the people who were the audience of those words, knowing that those who followed after would understand that context, and be able to recontextualize the words to their own knowledge, abilities and experiences. The fact that you choose to be deliberately obtuse to this (in, ironically, much the same way that young Earth creationists are obtuse to it) says things about you, not the book or the mind(s) behind it. More directly, though, take a child of five and a forty year old physicist. It is not possible to describe physics precisely enough for the physicist yet comprehensible to the child. That is a human limitation not in the writing, but in the facility of understanding. It would be a much more reasonable argument to ask why there are no more modern prophets to give God's words modern form and meaning. The Mormons, at the very least, have an answer to that one. The Catholics and the Orthodox do as well, but their hierarchies and doctrines kind of get in the way of them actually realizing that.
Look, there are many ways of knowing something to be true enough given the venue. The rules of evidence in law are different from those in medicine, and different again from those in science, and different again from those in religion. As long as the rules of evidence in law are used in coming to a final judgment, rather than attempting to dictate, say, the value of pi, all is well. The rules of medicine are useful for determining a course of treatment, and knowing when that course needs to be changed. They would hardly be helpful in determining the rules of biochemistry on which the rules of medicine depend. Similarly, the rules of science work for those things which are natural, repeatable, measurable, objective and observable, but can say little about that which is not, say, observable. (For example, science takes as a fundamental assumption that the laws of science are true in every time and place. If that's not so, then much of our scientific reasoning is out the window.) Religion deals with morality, ethics, the nature of things beyond the boundaries of the universe and other concepts which are generally not objective, or not natural, or in some other way not within the realm of science. Certainly, there are places where different domains of knowledge and different ways of knowing overlap, and in those cases, we argue to an understanding. But to claim that any one way of seeing is the One True Way, and all others are heresies at best and infidel at worst, hardly seems likely to lead to valid understanding of what is true, and it's ironic that it more often comes from those who see Science as nearly a religion, than from those who actually are religious.
What the US does or does not do is irrelevant to my point, in that I made no claims about it, nor about why Iranians might feel the way they do about Americans. You are raising a straw man argument. In what way is American propaganda, assuming arguendo that you are even right about it existing in the sense you mean, necessary to explain American attitudes towards Iran? Why is it that historical events, in particular the 1979 hostage crisis, are insufficient in explaining those attitudes?
"Stable" is not a synonym for "desirable." I made no moral evaluations or claims. I merely note that a stable Persian Gulf region (including Iran) is in our and the Iranian people's interests, and that Iran was stable between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, as was the Persian Gulf region more generally. So how is that a "rosy" view, and how does it have anything to do with the moral quality of how that stability was acquired and maintained?
I don't prefer to get my history education from the movies, thanks. I don't really know much about the 1953 coup. I don't know why the US and Britain wanted Mossadegh overthrown, or if it was or was not a good decision to work with Tudeh and the other party whose name I forget (that was formerly associated with Mossadegh) and the Shah and the other coup plotters. Undoubtedly, it has become an anti-US rallying cry in Iran, regardless of any of the merits or demerits, since the Shah's rule started becoming unpopular in the mid 1970s. None of that, however, speaks to my point, which is that propaganda is not a necessary or sufficient explanation for why Americans feel the way that they do about Iran. How Iranians feel about Americans, and why, is a different topic.
One side note: the whole US exploitation of oil thing really puzzles me. Since most oil from the Middle East has always got to Europe and Asia, it hardly seems credible to assert oil "was pumped in []our direction" as a reason for US actions. Certainly, the US has acted to maintain a stable oil supply, to the extent that we could, and especially since the oil crises of the 1970s. Doing so is pretty vital to maintaining economic growth, as energy and growth are inextricably linked. Yet somehow, the various "wars for oil" have always ended up with other countries getting both the oil and the contracts to extract it. As an explanation of US motives, it's rather lacking. Certainly, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few decades, as the US is poised to become the planet's largest energy producer and exporter in the wake of fracking and price-competitive methods for getting oil out of oil sands and oil shales. (With Canada not far behind, for that matter.) Somehow, I suspect that the same people deriding the US for being involved in the Middle East to stabilize oil supplies, will also deride the US for pulling out of the Middle East once we no longer need to stabilize Middle Eastern oil supplies.
You might be misunderstanding. Persians and Americans are actually natural allies: we both want a stable Persian Gulf region, and together could provide it, as we did prior to 1979. But the Ayatollahs running Iran at the moment, since 1979, want an unstable Persian Gulf region, because that gives them openings to advance their religious interests. So even though there is a natural underlying affinity on a national level, on a political level there can be only conflict. The hostage crisis, where Iranian thugs took captive American embassy staff for well over a year, has not been forgotten in the US, and it colors our perceptions of Iran, and specifically of their leadership, to this day. On top of that, you have the Iranians committing acts of war against the US in Iraq (not only supplying and training our enemies, but planning and sometimes participating directly in attacks) and in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers), as well as apparently developing a nuclear weapons program aimed directly at destroying a key US ally, Israel, and really, after all of that, does there need to be "propaganda" to explain why American attitudes towards the Iranian government are what they are?
All that said, yes, I generally despise theocrats I've never met, autocrats I've never met, dictators I've never met, and monarchs (other than titular only) that I've never met. I despise the enemies of human liberty generally. Is that really very amazing? And do you not also despise the enemies of liberty? Yet, why does that mean that I, or anyone else, is clamoring for war? It is possible to despise an ideology, and to attempt strenuously to oppose and in all ways limit that ideology, without clamoring for war. War is only necessary when irreconcilable differences over non-trivial differences exist. But just because we might not want war, does not mean we must start accepting those who would kill us if only they could.
What are the current big, unanswered questions in mesozoic paleontology? That is, what are the questions we have, but do not yet have more than guessed answers for?
People try to maximize their well being. People respond to incentives. If you give them perverse incentives, they respond perversely. Companies, in that respect, act like people, except that it's the executives and board of directors working to maximize their and their shareholders' well being. So who is surprised when companies respond perversely to perverse incentives? If you want companies to act sanely about money, you have to stop forcing them to comply with insane rules. (The several suggestions in this comment section to add more insane rules would just result in a different insane corporate behavior.)
Not at all true. Places without right to work end up with a few detrimental characteristics for workers. High wages plus union lock in plus deliberate work slowdowns, for example, mean that there are fewer jobs to go around (companies can't afford to hire more people), so it's great for those few employed, but it's terrible for the many you can't see who would have a job if they existed (which they would if the companies had to pay less for them). In addition, having been a contractor in both right to work and non-right to work states, I find that employers in right to work states are much more relaxed about working conditions. There is a lot more schedule and work condition flexibility in right to work states. Finally, as a general rule, companies in right to work states tend to pay higher rates for non-union job types (including IT, my field), because they have less personnel overhead in the categories that would be forced-union in a non-right to work state. So yeah, it's anecdotal, but my experience over 20 years has been that right to work is good for everyone except for a relatively small number of union workers.
Militias were common in the early US. Their roles were eventually subsumed by police forces and the National Guard. But most of the units in the early Civil War were, for example, mobilized state militia units. The laws on the books still make every able-bodied adult male within a certain age range legally members of the unorganized militia, with a duty to uphold the law and defend their local areas against invasion until the Army can get there. The only state that I know of which still maintains a separate organized militia that regularly musters is Texas (the State Guard), but there may be others.
We have a Roku and an AppleTV connected to a shiny new dumb (but big and with a pretty picture) TV. The Roku gives us Amazon prime video and a USB connection so we can burn stuff we already own. The AppleTV gives us YouTube, and iTMS for renting or buying movies, and access to our music in the cloud so we don't need a radio tuner. If all of these were in one device it would be great, but...
it still would not really do what is needed. What is needed is a TV that will show you what you want when you want, with you only paying for that. In other words, either Hulu+ with ALL the episodes of ALL the shows, plus Netflix with ALL the movies, or some service with all the shows and movies on an a la carte basis. It doesn't exist because the content companies won't license it to anyone that way. They only want to license with 50 crap shows and one that someone would pay for. They don't want to be disintermediated like the music companies are being; they'd rather fail like newspapers.
The thing is, if they would license a la carte, they could quickly figure out where profit lies and charge more for that and less for other stuff. Anything then not making money could go away. Their business model would be better and their portfolio going forward more profitable. But they are too scared, which means that in a few years, they will start being undercut and replaced by things like Dr Horrible and The Guild, and more mainstream versions of the same idea, which will kill them entirely.
Apple cares about making as much money for its shareholders as possible. Period.
That is the purpose — the only purpose — of a business.
Apple signed it, along with most other mobile device equipment vendors, then reneged on their promise and released the Lightning connector anyway.
Wrong. The agreement does not require that the micro-USB be integrated to the device. An adapter (which Apple provides) is sufficient.
Apple does not care about the environment,
Wrong. Apple is a leader in making electronic devices greener, reusing and recycling them, and making its own facilities more environmentally friendly. That sounds like shilling, and it sounds like a press release, but it's nonetheless true. Not high on my list of concerns, personally, but I do hate inaccurate criticism of all kinds.
it does not care about standards,
It seems Apple cares about some standards, but not others. In particular, Apple cares about those standards that advance its business by making its customers' lives easier/better when using Apple devices, and not otherwise. And this makes them different from any other company how, exactly?
it does not care about FRAND licensing of its patents,
Based on what evidence. As far as I know, Apple patents that have been incorporated into standards have been FRAND licensed. It's just that most of Apple's patents don't get incorporated into industry standards.
and it sure as hell doesn't care about its customers.
Actually, I'd argue that Apple cares about its customers deeply. That they continue their astonishing sales and profit growth indicates that their customers agree. I assume you are not one of them, in which case Apple probably only cares about you if it could win you over without losing more of its current or prospective customers. Their performance since about 1998 indicates that they are pretty good judges of that.
Why are people so eager to allow tyranny over everyone to save "ONE kid"? I mean, if these people are so dangerous, kill them or keep them incarcerated forever or exile them. If they are not dangerous enough to do one of those things to them, then at some point the punishment has to end.
Ah, so you're one of those people who believes that someone who would commit mass murder (already illegal) will refuse to break laws against illegal gun possession? Are you a moron?
It's certainly something one should be prepared to do. I don't expect to ever have to use a firearm defending myself or my family, but I am prepared to do so if I must. What you haven't yet said anything about is how to get from here to there: how do you create a society of humans in which self defense, even lethal self defense, is simply never necessary?
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.
If I'm already down, or not at home when a break in comes, I want my wife or my sons able to fire the weapon. And at the point that the safety has to be complex enough to know multiple biometric signatures, it will have a higher than acceptable failure rate. Even the single signature devices would likely be more failure prone than acceptable. Especially since I can clear a jam and keep going. How do I override a biometric sensor failure? By design, being able to do that would be a flaw.
I can understand the comfort thing, but at some point we have to decide either that people are so dangerous that they must be removed from the population, or that we have punished them enough and need to let them alone. The alternative is that the state gets to persecute and hound people forever, once convicted, continually piling on new punishments without court action, merely to assuage people's desire to "do something." And any time there are crimes that are so stigmatized (terrorism and "sex crimes" being the current boogymen) that anything can be done to punish the offenders, the natural tendency is to expand the original, horrible crimes beyond all recognition. It's the same thing as calling a handgun a "weapon of mass destruction," which originally meant chemical, nuclear and biological weapons that, when used as intended, could kill thousands at a single use. I simply think it's a bad idea to turn over to government the ability to persecute people indefinitely and infinitely, because that power will always be abused, and eventually I (or you) will be the victims of that abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Car wars? Really? I mean, I know about defensive driving, but your speculations might go a bit far down that road.
Depends on where you are. The supermarket closest to me has three aisles of non-alcoholic beverages, one each of soda, juice and water/flavored water. But yeah, we eat a lot of junk food compared to most places.
First, what is the purpose of your degree, to you? If it's to enable getting a job, then you should know that the order in which résumés are generally evaluated, all other factors being equal, is people with an advanced degree, then people with a bachelor's degree in the field (in the case of IT, that could be IT, MIS, computer engineering or any given engineering), then people with a bachelor's degree relevant to the core business of the company, then people without a degree but with a lot of relevant experience, then anyone else. Generally, the last category is never even looked at, except in the most desparate job markets, or where you know someone. So, again with all things being equal, the closer you are to the front of that queue, the more likely you are to not be overlooked before getting an interview. Some jobs will become unavailable to you with each step further to the right. Those that disappear are not always the best quality jobs, but remember that this point is predicated on your intent being to use your degree to get a job.
If on the other hand, your purpose in getting a degree is to learn as much as possible about your chosen field, then you don't need to worry much about the degree. Take a bunch of classes that interest you, and I do not mean just in computers (Steve Jobs famously attributed his design sense to a calligraphy class he audited), and then when you have nearly the requisite number of hours for a degree, go see a counselor about how to get a degree (any degree) with what you've done. Most likely, you'll have to take a few filler classes (math and economics are likely, because you should end up pretty close to a math or business degree, depending on your interests) to make up the difference and get the degree at that point.
If, instead, your purpose is to get a good education, switch to liberal arts (if necessary, switch colleges) with an emphasis on classical learning, languages and literature. Avoid schools whose idea of liberal arts is grievance studies, and whose idea of Western culture is an unbroken trail of oppression, and look for one that really grounds you in Western culture. The most salient benefit of such a course of study is that you will learn how to learn on your own, as well as how to express yourself well, how to set and obtain goals, how to lead and how to maintain a balanced and well-lived life. Unless your goal is a profession (by which I mean the real ones: law, medicine, engineering), this will give you the basis to do anything at all you are good at with the rest of your life, and do it well. And if your goal is one of the professions, this is an excellent basis for a graduate degree in said profession.
Second, assuming that you've decided you do want a degree, for any of the above reasons, I fail to see how that should stand in your way. Whether or not you are getting a degree, it is useful to have a job. It's experience for after college, money for now. So why not build up a website on a topic of interest to you, and make it the best you can? (I have a colleague who built a website about touring motorcycles to learn how to administer databases, for example.) Being interesting to you will keep you focused and improve the quality of what you produce. Once you've got the site the way you want it, use it plus your being enrolled in college to get either an internship or part-time web job (if you want to work in corporate settings) or small contracts (if you want to do contracting). This will build up your ésumé as you study, and will give you something to stay interested in while you're taking courses that you don't yet see a use for. (Who knew that taking linear algebra or structures and properties of materials would help me be a better system architect? Which is not to say every course will prove useful for every person, but you'd be surprised at what comes up decades after college.)
Finally, having decided on a degree path and having gotten a job that you want to do, the best advice I can offer is
I love my iPhone, but I do wish I could side load without having to pay Apple the developer fee. On the other hand, I also realize that the code signing requirement is one reason Android has malware and iPhone doesn't, so it's a mixed bag. But it would be nice to be able to opt out without jailbreaking.
It's not really just a problem with Flash, or with Flash and Java, or with Flash and Java and (pick a technology). The problem is that we do not really know how to build complex, integrated systems — which is what end users need to get what they want (in this case, games and multimedia of various kinds) — that are secure enough for the Internet environment, at low enough operational and development costs to make them practical. Perhaps a new compute architecture (and associated language changes) is needed, where memory for programs and memory for data are physically separated. This could potentially lead to slightly reduced functionality for dramatically improved security. But in any case, this is not just a case of something being badly built, it's an instance illustrating how nearly all the software we use is in some sense badly built.
So, I see you are coming at the issue with an open mind...
I think that the thing that bothers me about those who see Science (capitalized for a reason) as the only means of knowing things is the same thing that bothers me about young Earth creationists: the utter lack of humility.
Much of the commentary strikes me as theology for twelve year olds working it out for themselves. Hell, I'm not a Christian and I can answer most of the"gotchas" from a Christian point of view. Rather than just bitch about it, though, let me give one example.
In what way would a book written to be understood by those without the foundation for, say, modern chemistry or physics constitute "mere mortals" undo[ing] "an omnipotent and omniscient being's intent"? A Christian likely would say that God framed His words to be understood in a meaningful way by the people who were the audience of those words, knowing that those who followed after would understand that context, and be able to recontextualize the words to their own knowledge, abilities and experiences. The fact that you choose to be deliberately obtuse to this (in, ironically, much the same way that young Earth creationists are obtuse to it) says things about you, not the book or the mind(s) behind it. More directly, though, take a child of five and a forty year old physicist. It is not possible to describe physics precisely enough for the physicist yet comprehensible to the child. That is a human limitation not in the writing, but in the facility of understanding. It would be a much more reasonable argument to ask why there are no more modern prophets to give God's words modern form and meaning. The Mormons, at the very least, have an answer to that one. The Catholics and the Orthodox do as well, but their hierarchies and doctrines kind of get in the way of them actually realizing that.
Look, there are many ways of knowing something to be true enough given the venue. The rules of evidence in law are different from those in medicine, and different again from those in science, and different again from those in religion. As long as the rules of evidence in law are used in coming to a final judgment, rather than attempting to dictate, say, the value of pi, all is well. The rules of medicine are useful for determining a course of treatment, and knowing when that course needs to be changed. They would hardly be helpful in determining the rules of biochemistry on which the rules of medicine depend. Similarly, the rules of science work for those things which are natural, repeatable, measurable, objective and observable, but can say little about that which is not, say, observable. (For example, science takes as a fundamental assumption that the laws of science are true in every time and place. If that's not so, then much of our scientific reasoning is out the window.) Religion deals with morality, ethics, the nature of things beyond the boundaries of the universe and other concepts which are generally not objective, or not natural, or in some other way not within the realm of science. Certainly, there are places where different domains of knowledge and different ways of knowing overlap, and in those cases, we argue to an understanding. But to claim that any one way of seeing is the One True Way, and all others are heresies at best and infidel at worst, hardly seems likely to lead to valid understanding of what is true, and it's ironic that it more often comes from those who see Science as nearly a religion, than from those who actually are religious.
What the US does or does not do is irrelevant to my point, in that I made no claims about it, nor about why Iranians might feel the way they do about Americans. You are raising a straw man argument. In what way is American propaganda, assuming arguendo that you are even right about it existing in the sense you mean, necessary to explain American attitudes towards Iran? Why is it that historical events, in particular the 1979 hostage crisis, are insufficient in explaining those attitudes?
"Stable" is not a synonym for "desirable." I made no moral evaluations or claims. I merely note that a stable Persian Gulf region (including Iran) is in our and the Iranian people's interests, and that Iran was stable between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, as was the Persian Gulf region more generally. So how is that a "rosy" view, and how does it have anything to do with the moral quality of how that stability was acquired and maintained?
I don't prefer to get my history education from the movies, thanks. I don't really know much about the 1953 coup. I don't know why the US and Britain wanted Mossadegh overthrown, or if it was or was not a good decision to work with Tudeh and the other party whose name I forget (that was formerly associated with Mossadegh) and the Shah and the other coup plotters. Undoubtedly, it has become an anti-US rallying cry in Iran, regardless of any of the merits or demerits, since the Shah's rule started becoming unpopular in the mid 1970s. None of that, however, speaks to my point, which is that propaganda is not a necessary or sufficient explanation for why Americans feel the way that they do about Iran. How Iranians feel about Americans, and why, is a different topic.
One side note: the whole US exploitation of oil thing really puzzles me. Since most oil from the Middle East has always got to Europe and Asia, it hardly seems credible to assert oil "was pumped in []our direction" as a reason for US actions. Certainly, the US has acted to maintain a stable oil supply, to the extent that we could, and especially since the oil crises of the 1970s. Doing so is pretty vital to maintaining economic growth, as energy and growth are inextricably linked. Yet somehow, the various "wars for oil" have always ended up with other countries getting both the oil and the contracts to extract it. As an explanation of US motives, it's rather lacking. Certainly, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few decades, as the US is poised to become the planet's largest energy producer and exporter in the wake of fracking and price-competitive methods for getting oil out of oil sands and oil shales. (With Canada not far behind, for that matter.) Somehow, I suspect that the same people deriding the US for being involved in the Middle East to stabilize oil supplies, will also deride the US for pulling out of the Middle East once we no longer need to stabilize Middle Eastern oil supplies.
You might be misunderstanding. Persians and Americans are actually natural allies: we both want a stable Persian Gulf region, and together could provide it, as we did prior to 1979. But the Ayatollahs running Iran at the moment, since 1979, want an unstable Persian Gulf region, because that gives them openings to advance their religious interests. So even though there is a natural underlying affinity on a national level, on a political level there can be only conflict. The hostage crisis, where Iranian thugs took captive American embassy staff for well over a year, has not been forgotten in the US, and it colors our perceptions of Iran, and specifically of their leadership, to this day. On top of that, you have the Iranians committing acts of war against the US in Iraq (not only supplying and training our enemies, but planning and sometimes participating directly in attacks) and in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers), as well as apparently developing a nuclear weapons program aimed directly at destroying a key US ally, Israel, and really, after all of that, does there need to be "propaganda" to explain why American attitudes towards the Iranian government are what they are?
All that said, yes, I generally despise theocrats I've never met, autocrats I've never met, dictators I've never met, and monarchs (other than titular only) that I've never met. I despise the enemies of human liberty generally. Is that really very amazing? And do you not also despise the enemies of liberty? Yet, why does that mean that I, or anyone else, is clamoring for war? It is possible to despise an ideology, and to attempt strenuously to oppose and in all ways limit that ideology, without clamoring for war. War is only necessary when irreconcilable differences over non-trivial differences exist. But just because we might not want war, does not mean we must start accepting those who would kill us if only they could.
Is "dinosaur" a misnomer? That is, are theropods and sauropods actually any more closely related than, say, birds and lizards?
Youth always discounts experience.
What are the current big, unanswered questions in mesozoic paleontology? That is, what are the questions we have, but do not yet have more than guessed answers for?
People try to maximize their well being. People respond to incentives. If you give them perverse incentives, they respond perversely. Companies, in that respect, act like people, except that it's the executives and board of directors working to maximize their and their shareholders' well being. So who is surprised when companies respond perversely to perverse incentives? If you want companies to act sanely about money, you have to stop forcing them to comply with insane rules. (The several suggestions in this comment section to add more insane rules would just result in a different insane corporate behavior.)
Not at all true. Places without right to work end up with a few detrimental characteristics for workers. High wages plus union lock in plus deliberate work slowdowns, for example, mean that there are fewer jobs to go around (companies can't afford to hire more people), so it's great for those few employed, but it's terrible for the many you can't see who would have a job if they existed (which they would if the companies had to pay less for them). In addition, having been a contractor in both right to work and non-right to work states, I find that employers in right to work states are much more relaxed about working conditions. There is a lot more schedule and work condition flexibility in right to work states. Finally, as a general rule, companies in right to work states tend to pay higher rates for non-union job types (including IT, my field), because they have less personnel overhead in the categories that would be forced-union in a non-right to work state. So yeah, it's anecdotal, but my experience over 20 years has been that right to work is good for everyone except for a relatively small number of union workers.
Militias were common in the early US. Their roles were eventually subsumed by police forces and the National Guard. But most of the units in the early Civil War were, for example, mobilized state militia units. The laws on the books still make every able-bodied adult male within a certain age range legally members of the unorganized militia, with a duty to uphold the law and defend their local areas against invasion until the Army can get there. The only state that I know of which still maintains a separate organized militia that regularly musters is Texas (the State Guard), but there may be others.
Notably, there also hadn't been one before, either.
it still would not really do what is needed. What is needed is a TV that will show you what you want when you want, with you only paying for that. In other words, either Hulu+ with ALL the episodes of ALL the shows, plus Netflix with ALL the movies, or some service with all the shows and movies on an a la carte basis. It doesn't exist because the content companies won't license it to anyone that way. They only want to license with 50 crap shows and one that someone would pay for. They don't want to be disintermediated like the music companies are being; they'd rather fail like newspapers.
The thing is, if they would license a la carte, they could quickly figure out where profit lies and charge more for that and less for other stuff. Anything then not making money could go away. Their business model would be better and their portfolio going forward more profitable. But they are too scared, which means that in a few years, they will start being undercut and replaced by things like Dr Horrible and The Guild, and more mainstream versions of the same idea, which will kill them entirely.
That is the purpose — the only purpose — of a business.
Wrong. The agreement does not require that the micro-USB be integrated to the device. An adapter (which Apple provides) is sufficient.
Wrong. Apple is a leader in making electronic devices greener, reusing and recycling them, and making its own facilities more environmentally friendly. That sounds like shilling, and it sounds like a press release, but it's nonetheless true. Not high on my list of concerns, personally, but I do hate inaccurate criticism of all kinds.
It seems Apple cares about some standards, but not others. In particular, Apple cares about those standards that advance its business by making its customers' lives easier/better when using Apple devices, and not otherwise. And this makes them different from any other company how, exactly?
Based on what evidence. As far as I know, Apple patents that have been incorporated into standards have been FRAND licensed. It's just that most of Apple's patents don't get incorporated into industry standards.
Actually, I'd argue that Apple cares about its customers deeply. That they continue their astonishing sales and profit growth indicates that their customers agree. I assume you are not one of them, in which case Apple probably only cares about you if it could win you over without losing more of its current or prospective customers. Their performance since about 1998 indicates that they are pretty good judges of that.
Why are people so eager to allow tyranny over everyone to save "ONE kid"? I mean, if these people are so dangerous, kill them or keep them incarcerated forever or exile them. If they are not dangerous enough to do one of those things to them, then at some point the punishment has to end.
Ah, so you're one of those people who believes that someone who would commit mass murder (already illegal) will refuse to break laws against illegal gun possession? Are you a moron?
And question answered.
It's certainly something one should be prepared to do. I don't expect to ever have to use a firearm defending myself or my family, but I am prepared to do so if I must. What you haven't yet said anything about is how to get from here to there: how do you create a society of humans in which self defense, even lethal self defense, is simply never necessary?
If I'm already down, or not at home when a break in comes, I want my wife or my sons able to fire the weapon. And at the point that the safety has to be complex enough to know multiple biometric signatures, it will have a higher than acceptable failure rate. Even the single signature devices would likely be more failure prone than acceptable. Especially since I can clear a jam and keep going. How do I override a biometric sensor failure? By design, being able to do that would be a flaw.
I can understand the comfort thing, but at some point we have to decide either that people are so dangerous that they must be removed from the population, or that we have punished them enough and need to let them alone. The alternative is that the state gets to persecute and hound people forever, once convicted, continually piling on new punishments without court action, merely to assuage people's desire to "do something." And any time there are crimes that are so stigmatized (terrorism and "sex crimes" being the current boogymen) that anything can be done to punish the offenders, the natural tendency is to expand the original, horrible crimes beyond all recognition. It's the same thing as calling a handgun a "weapon of mass destruction," which originally meant chemical, nuclear and biological weapons that, when used as intended, could kill thousands at a single use. I simply think it's a bad idea to turn over to government the ability to persecute people indefinitely and infinitely, because that power will always be abused, and eventually I (or you) will be the victims of that abuse.