The parent comment throws together a mish-mash of accurate and inaccurate statements, and finishes with somewhat naive bullet points.
--> GWB's axis of evil speech was idiotic. --> Iran as been researching nuclear weapons technology since prior to the revolution. Some puppet. --> North Korea has been utterly focused on developing a nuclear bomb since at least 1993, when they dropped out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. --> And if I could catch a leprechaun, I'd have enough gold to pay off the US debt: The internal politics of the US is such that nothing will be done to reign in Israel in the larger sense, for much the same reasons that nothing will be done to change the relationship with Cuba. In the short run, I'm sure plenty of pressure is being applied not to attack Iran right now. --> Sanctions are having a noticeable effect. Previous Irani negotiation offers included a number of pre-conditions that left little to negotiate. Those pre-conditions have disappeared in the last few months. What's unknown is the degree to which the Iranis actually want to negotiate, vs. buying more time to do whatever it is they're doing.
I suspect you're correct... and it's because there isn't a surfeit of Canadians overstaying (or lacking) their permitted time in the US. Anyway, upstate is crawling with you guys. The system would grind to a halt if the BP started giving all of you the treatment.
US, Canadian, and UK law enforcement have a major jones for nailing creators and consumers of child pr0n, who are disproportionately male. As such, when a male comes forward with pr0n on his equipment, the default position will usually be to consider him a suspect until they have a better grasp of the situation.
Given the policy, and that the police aren't mind readers, they may never obtain that grasp, and thus a male in Mr. Robinson's position will likely always be under suspicion. God help him if he ever has family problems that reach the authorities in the future (divorce, child acting out, etc).
Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson seems to be victim to his own naiveté. A typical/. commenter might wonder: what did he expect to accomplish by reporting the results of a file download to the police? They are likely not equipped to deal with cyber crimes, so even if all concerned agreed that Mr. Robinson had inadvertently discovered a criminal child pr0n provider, they'd be hard pressed to do anything about it unless Scotland Yard got involved.
In general, there's nothing wrong with the concept of eating as our pre-agricultural fore-bearers did. What's open to question is whether it's the best way, which is the claim at issue. Hunter-gatherer societies don't have to live to be 100, they just have to live and be healthy long enough to reproduce, get their children to reproductive age, and plug them into their culture. That left a lot of slack in the system as to what kind of diet would work. Some worked just fine. Many pre-contact indigenous Australians could expect to live to 70, baring accidents or warfare.
Good God no, where did you get that idea? BPA has all kinds of interesting effects on the body, depending on the level of exposure. As the exposure level goes down, it may be that hormonal signaling is the only symptom left to arise, and that exposure below that required to cause hormonal signaling is totally asymptomatic.
>> There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science...
Meaning, there are lots of things whose function we don't have a very clear understanding of. That's fine, as far as it goes. Even a bird can fly without taking a class in aerodynamics.
What a bird cannot do is fly in a vacuum. We know why. We know why because it has been experimentally tested and verified using scientific method.
This is the situation with homeopathy. It doesn't do anything more than we can do with tap water and a pseudo-shamanistic floor show. We know why. We know why because the various claims that have been made for it have been disproved by both tests specific to homeopathy research, and utterly unrelated tests which happen to overlap whatever hand waving homeopaths have thought up.
We do a bit of SE/PO on Maui as well, if not on the same scale (we don't have as many telescopes). An added benefit of homegrown talent: the graduates stick around. They rarely get "island fever", and their families and childhood friends are here. Positions staffed by mainland hires tend to suffer very high turnover.
I agree with the parent poster, your ideal option is to leave.
That probably isn't your easiest option, naturally. You do have the option of making the best of your current job, while looking for other opportunities. If you're in a low performing district, I'd imagine you can get away with pushing the crap you get on down the supply chain, and playing the part of the BOFH when the users start bitching. Making sure to keep a solid email and written memo trail to CYA is excellent advice.
Keep in mind that a low performing district is symptomatic of a poorly run organization. Wealth != superior IQ, and despite the challenges outside of school, the kids are capable of being taught, if the organization is willing to focus on it. Unfortunately, humans are susceptible to subconsciously writing off kids they assume are stupid. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make the overall situation better. This leads directly to improvements in your situation.
This involves the kind of grunt work our current President got a taste of when he first moved to Chicago, and can be a real PITA. Plug into the PTAs, the district board, talk to the teachers, etc. Get to know more about what makes your district tick, and then offer to be part of the solution. In a positive way, scratch other people's backs, and eventually you'll be able to suggest how they can help you.
Consider that the core product your district is trying to deliver to students is sufficient mastery of the 3 Rs to be productive adults, and for a lucky few, a chance to not spin, crash, and burn during their first year in college. You may find that most teachers and staff consider any computers outside of the office staff to be a waste of resources, and in most cases, they won't be wrong. So, it may be that your best course is to help get the computers out of the classrooms, and focus on administrative IT. That also helps you get IT out from under the "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction", since the business rationale for that person's oversight is removed.
@Joe_Dragon's suggestion re: informing the higher ups of Microsoft's licensing terms is good.
If they ignore the advice, and El Fantasmo drops a dime on the district, he'll still need to anticipate looking for another job. Unless the written licensing memo makes it all the way up the chain, including the district superintendent and board (if any), there's probably going to be someone with firing authority to scapegoat IT if the resulting BSA audit ends up costing the district any money.
I'm not surprised that the office responsible for the PO is getting you the lowest end crap they can find, it's a pre-Dilbert cliche.
I'd consider the advice from the AC and @crath to be spot on.
To help you gather the intel on who is ripping you off, I'd suggest adding an on-line update feature, if you don't have it already. It helps you get the patches out, it helps the customer keep the product up to date, and - even if you gather nothing else but a serial number and an IP address - it lets you know where you stand, pirate-wise. An iOS developer wrote an excellent post within the last year (which I can't manage to dig up in a couple minutes) which laid out his strategy:
> Collect data on serial number use vs. IP address.
> In subsequent patches, incorporate nag-ware, keeping the nag to a dull roar.
> Consider offering a pricing scheme to get some of the unlicensed users in from the cold... in your case, as an alternative to a BSA audit.
Is collecting a serial number and IP address spyware, in exchange for software updates? I don't think so, YMMV. I'd consider it legitimate marketing data, which you can use to attempt to convert some non-paying users.
For the hard core that won't convert, a bit of sleuthing is required. If some Google and Manta search shows they're probably some bozo editing very high quality vids of their cat for YouTube, write 'em off. If it's a profitable shop turning over more than (say) US$600,000 in business a year, sic the BSA on 'em.
Those who RTTFA (read the third fine article) may have noted the discrepancy between what Mr. Mark Bregman of Symantec does when he travels to China, versus what he sells to the rest of us: he uses a dedicated laptop for China trips, and wipes the device before and after travel. On the other hand, he defends farming out coding to China based on 1) all the big s/w vendors do it, and 2) why worry about malicious code from China, when there have been terrorist attacks on the US committed by US citizens?
Rebuttals, off the cuff: 1) Evidently, capitalists don't just sell the rope that hangs them, they'll also teach you how to tie the noose. 2) Timothy McVeigh and 8 "pro-life" murders over the course of 20 years, vs. opportunity to open back doors into virtually every PC in the United States. I think we need to check whether Mr. Bregman has registered as a lobbyist for the China Central News Agency.
I missed out on the Redhat IPO, so I pitched all of my IRA (but not the 403(b) or 401(k)) into the Google IPO at $80. I've never taken profits to re-diversify, but it's been working out damn well. My continued thanks to Brin and Page for leaving money on the table and allowing retail investors to get a taste.
The Facebook IPO looks to be old school, with the 0.1% getting the lion's share of the initial (and perhaps sole) profits from any run up in market price. I have little control over what my index funds admins elect to do, but I don't see any point in retail investors buying until after the feeding frenzy is over and we've got a few months to see where their P/E settles in.
Abstract:Apple is making boatloads of money selling stuff to people. Reconfiguring the company into an enterprise services firm is an unacceptable risk.
'Waaaay back in the day, I was invited to an Apple roadmap presentation for the various big Mac users in the greater LA area (mainly aerospace corps). Dating myself, the main heads up was the upcoming Mac IIfx. The current sealed lips paradigm wasn't always graven in stone.
But, that was before Windows 95 almost ate Apple's lunch, and Macs got kicked to the curb across "the enterprise"... almost simultaneously across North America. Almost as quickly, the ecosystem of Mac-related enterprise solution vendors ditched the platform. When Jobs returned to refocus the company's direction, the focus was on what he had left to work with: consumers (with bones thrown to graphics/video/audio pros). You could see this in his original product mix: iMac, iBook, the restyled G4 mini-towers, and eventually the iPod.
This ended up working so well that quite a few consumers really wanted to haul their Apple gear back to the enterprise... which is how Apple first got there, one MacPlus at a time. Now, with the iPhones and Pads, people aren't just sneaking their toys in, they're putting in purchase orders, and the IT departments are forced to adjust.
It's not completely unreasonable for them to ask Apple to rework their products to make this a bit easier. It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath: Apple isn't equipped to service the enterprise, and doesn't want to spend the money to make it happen. The boys and girls in Cupertino would need to spend tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to set up the hardware/software/people infrastructure - more or less from scratch - to provide reasonable enterprise marketing and support.
And why? There's not all that much profit in selling to the enterprise, except in services. Virtually *all* of the non-Asian computer vendors have reconfigured themselves into enterprise services companies that just happened to sell some hardware/software for them to integrate, and the Asian companies are on the same path.
Apple, meanwhile, is making a boatload of money selling hardware/software to people. There is plenty of foreseeable risk and little known upside to reengineering themselves into the likes of IBM/HP/Dell.
Many comments have already given excellent examples of how destructive SOPA/PIPA (and for that matter) ACTA are to our ability to use the internet, so I won't rehash them.
However, you may need to address the reason these battles are fought: the idea that copyright violation/piracy is theft.
As Matt Yglesias put it, the difference between theft and copyright violation is the difference between stealing a jar of spaghetti sauce from The Sauce Factory, and reading the label to replicate the recipe at home. In the first case, I've taken a physical thing from The Sauce Factory, and they can't sell it. In the second case, they have the recipe for the sauce, and I have the recipe for the sauce. If I use the recipe to make the sauce instead of buying it, I may have denied The Sauce Factory a possible sale. That is what SOPA/PIPA/ACTA are all about, making it easier for someone with an idea to keep selling the idea, known in the trade as collecting rent.
So, what would Jesus do? If your friend is an observant Christian, an excellent analogy is Feeding the multitude: Jesus' disciples had bought some bread. Via the agency of the Lord, the idea of bread is used to miraculously multiply the supply to feed the multitude of people that had followed Jesus from nearby towns. Instead of sending the people home to buy their bread from the bakers, he freely provides it, thus denying the grain farmers and bakers the sales, or rent, that they would otherwise have collected money from. In modern copyright terms, this made Jesus a pirate. Was Jesus wrong to use the knowledge of breadmaking to make more?
> the.gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
Reply, abstracted - Libertarian bullshit.
In a liberal democracy, a government provides those goods and services which in some way meet a cost-value metric of the citizens and their representatives, or they eventually go away. As with any large private organization, when inertia develops, it can take a while to eliminate funding for goods and services that don't pass the metric.
The broad brush claim that (in this case) the US Federal government is strictly a cost center is libertarian dogma (or a GOP primary season talking point), not a fact-based argument.
You make good points. However, neither a 3D printer nor a lathe/mill is really geared for someone who isn't prepped to put in a lot of time learning the tool. Then, there's the issue of right-tool-for-the-job. I think 3D printers are still best suited as a prototyping tool, although once tuned up they can also work well for creating plastic parts that would be a wee bit of a challenge on a mill (eg. gears). I've seen print tests with porcelain mix that put out complex shapes ready to fire... a niche I doubt you'd see handled by a mill.
Finally, we're starting to see complete printing kits below the US$500 mark. If they prove out their promises to assemble and print (decently) within a weekend or a day, it may prove the tipping point that leads to mass marketed $200 printers from - hell, pick a name - HP, Samsung, Lenovo, or currently-unknown-Chinese brand. At that point, 3D printers and low end mills wouldn't be an either-or choice... buy both.
No, we wouldn't have gone. At the Apollo program's peak, the US was willing to spend 0.8% of GDP on getting men on the Moon. But, it doesn't make sense to talk "Apollo" in isolation. This was but a part of a massive reaction to contemporary Soviet technical advances. Today, Apollo's portion of GDP would equal $1t, or 30% of the 2011 Federal budget.
Without the space race, we may have put someone in orbit by now, but still be thinking about landing on the moon. Robotic probes would have rolled over enough of the Moon's surface that the Federal government would conclude that there was no point to the added expense of a human being (remember to mouse over). Republicans wouldn't even be wasting their breath telling fairy tales about restarting a Moon effort, were it not for the lingering inertia of moon-shot infrastructure in key electoral districts.
Private efforts? Please. Without the force-fed Federal expenditures that created our aerospace knowledge base, the risk to R&D investments - starting basically from scratch - would have been too high relative to expected rewards.
Within the payload limits, there's no reason not to over-engineer the hell out of a space platform. Value engineering a rover closer to the mission plan would have saved time/money, but would have added to the risks of failure. Utter mission failure is the major cost sink for working in space, so it pays to add sigmas when possible.
The critical variable is the limited number of opportunities for interplanetary launches as a function of time and lining up rockets. NASA could be lofting $1000 Aibos with high gain antennas stuck in their okoles. but, if our little pals don't return any data, you didn't save $300m on the probe, you pissed away $120m on the launch.
You're thinking of the Fisker Karma, dumb-ass, which is being built in Finland. The mass market car Fisker is developing - the target of the vast majority of the Federal investment - will be built in the US.
You probably think Newt is a respected philosopher, too.
Based solely on the published income tax brackets, Americans have the mistaken impression that their overall tax system is progressive. This isn't true. An example of this thinking is illustrated by the parent comment:
Point 1: "the top N% pay FAR more in absolute tax dollars...", this is generally true. Point 2: "...as well as more in percentage of their income, than the bottom 100-N%, for pretty much any value of N", this is baloney.
In fact, there are a number of flat and regressive taxes in the US, such that each quintile of tax payers pays taxes roughly in proportion to their income, as noted by the Citizens For Tax Justice report: America's Tax System Is Not As Progressive As You Think.
Currently, we're extremely efficient at cranking gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. Assuming for a moment that fake tree manufacturing was extremely energy efficient and carbon neutral, that's a lot of work just to keep up with conveyor-belting coal into power plants and pouring fuel into our vehicles.
However, tree manufacture won't be all that efficient, meaning we'd need several times more fake trees to compensate. Nice out-of-the-box try there, boys, but this dog won't hunt.
Once again, the actual solutions to so much as reduce the rate of gain in atmospheric carbon loading revolves around 1) reduce the consumption of carbon-based fuels, and 2) (unless we're all going back to organic gardening) energy source substitution. Geoengineering is an expensive diversion from reality.
Per the Apple iPad 2 spec: Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
We didn't get a *real* good look at the display post-flight, but it seems the system was still usable after a cold soak down around at -23 F. Ok, so it wasn't that far out of spec, the system probably enjoy some solar heating, and it was a *dry* cold.
Did I forget to wind my watch, or is it 2000 all over again? Picking between different flavors of vanilla, and a few trillion dollars, a few thousand lives, some wonderful Federal legislation, zero wage growth, zero oversight of the financial markets...
The problem is that to create real political change requires a hell of a lot more personal commitment than checking an alternative box every few years, or posting about Nader/Paul/Bo, etc.
Bahraini officials gave Mr. Mitchell a ticket out of the country because he is a professional from an Anglophone nation. He could have disappeared into the Bahrani justice system as easily as a Bahrani citizen, but dealing with the cleanup would have been more a PITA than the responsible officials thought it was worth. Being a First World passport holder frequently has its benefits.
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The parent comment throws together a mish-mash of accurate and inaccurate statements, and finishes with somewhat naive bullet points.
--> GWB's axis of evil speech was idiotic.
--> Iran as been researching nuclear weapons technology since prior to the revolution. Some puppet.
--> North Korea has been utterly focused on developing a nuclear bomb since at least 1993, when they dropped out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
--> And if I could catch a leprechaun, I'd have enough gold to pay off the US debt: The internal politics of the US is such that nothing will be done to reign in Israel in the larger sense, for much the same reasons that nothing will be done to change the relationship with Cuba. In the short run, I'm sure plenty of pressure is being applied not to attack Iran right now.
--> Sanctions are having a noticeable effect. Previous Irani negotiation offers included a number of pre-conditions that left little to negotiate. Those pre-conditions have disappeared in the last few months. What's unknown is the degree to which the Iranis actually want to negotiate, vs. buying more time to do whatever it is they're doing.
I suspect you're correct... and it's because there isn't a surfeit of Canadians overstaying (or lacking) their permitted time in the US. Anyway, upstate is crawling with you guys. The system would grind to a halt if the BP started giving all of you the treatment.
US, Canadian, and UK law enforcement have a major jones for nailing creators and consumers of child pr0n, who are disproportionately male. As such, when a male comes forward with pr0n on his equipment, the default position will usually be to consider him a suspect until they have a better grasp of the situation.
Given the policy, and that the police aren't mind readers, they may never obtain that grasp, and thus a male in Mr. Robinson's position will likely always be under suspicion. God help him if he ever has family problems that reach the authorities in the future (divorce, child acting out, etc).
Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson seems to be victim to his own naiveté. A typical /. commenter might wonder: what did he expect to accomplish by reporting the results of a file download to the police? They are likely not equipped to deal with cyber crimes, so even if all concerned agreed that Mr. Robinson had inadvertently discovered a criminal child pr0n provider, they'd be hard pressed to do anything about it unless Scotland Yard got involved.
In general, there's nothing wrong with the concept of eating as our pre-agricultural fore-bearers did. What's open to question is whether it's the best way, which is the claim at issue. Hunter-gatherer societies don't have to live to be 100, they just have to live and be healthy long enough to reproduce, get their children to reproductive age, and plug them into their culture. That left a lot of slack in the system as to what kind of diet would work. Some worked just fine. Many pre-contact indigenous Australians could expect to live to 70, baring accidents or warfare.
Good God no, where did you get that idea? BPA has all kinds of interesting effects on the body, depending on the level of exposure. As the exposure level goes down, it may be that hormonal signaling is the only symptom left to arise, and that exposure below that required to cause hormonal signaling is totally asymptomatic.
>> There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science...
Meaning, there are lots of things whose function we don't have a very clear understanding of. That's fine, as far as it goes. Even a bird can fly without taking a class in aerodynamics.
What a bird cannot do is fly in a vacuum. We know why. We know why because it has been experimentally tested and verified using scientific method.
This is the situation with homeopathy. It doesn't do anything more than we can do with tap water and a pseudo-shamanistic floor show. We know why. We know why because the various claims that have been made for it have been disproved by both tests specific to homeopathy research, and utterly unrelated tests which happen to overlap whatever hand waving homeopaths have thought up.
We do a bit of SE/PO on Maui as well, if not on the same scale (we don't have as many telescopes). An added benefit of homegrown talent: the graduates stick around. They rarely get "island fever", and their families and childhood friends are here. Positions staffed by mainland hires tend to suffer very high turnover.
I agree with the parent poster, your ideal option is to leave.
That probably isn't your easiest option, naturally. You do have the option of making the best of your current job, while looking for other opportunities. If you're in a low performing district, I'd imagine you can get away with pushing the crap you get on down the supply chain, and playing the part of the BOFH when the users start bitching. Making sure to keep a solid email and written memo trail to CYA is excellent advice.
Keep in mind that a low performing district is symptomatic of a poorly run organization. Wealth != superior IQ, and despite the challenges outside of school, the kids are capable of being taught, if the organization is willing to focus on it. Unfortunately, humans are susceptible to subconsciously writing off kids they assume are stupid. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make the overall situation better. This leads directly to improvements in your situation.
This involves the kind of grunt work our current President got a taste of when he first moved to Chicago, and can be a real PITA. Plug into the PTAs, the district board, talk to the teachers, etc. Get to know more about what makes your district tick, and then offer to be part of the solution. In a positive way, scratch other people's backs, and eventually you'll be able to suggest how they can help you.
Consider that the core product your district is trying to deliver to students is sufficient mastery of the 3 Rs to be productive adults, and for a lucky few, a chance to not spin, crash, and burn during their first year in college. You may find that most teachers and staff consider any computers outside of the office staff to be a waste of resources, and in most cases, they won't be wrong. So, it may be that your best course is to help get the computers out of the classrooms, and focus on administrative IT. That also helps you get IT out from under the "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction", since the business rationale for that person's oversight is removed.
@Joe_Dragon's suggestion re: informing the higher ups of Microsoft's licensing terms is good.
If they ignore the advice, and El Fantasmo drops a dime on the district, he'll still need to anticipate looking for another job. Unless the written licensing memo makes it all the way up the chain, including the district superintendent and board (if any), there's probably going to be someone with firing authority to scapegoat IT if the resulting BSA audit ends up costing the district any money.
I'm not surprised that the office responsible for the PO is getting you the lowest end crap they can find, it's a pre-Dilbert cliche.
I'd consider the advice from the AC and @crath to be spot on.
To help you gather the intel on who is ripping you off, I'd suggest adding an on-line update feature, if you don't have it already. It helps you get the patches out, it helps the customer keep the product up to date, and - even if you gather nothing else but a serial number and an IP address - it lets you know where you stand, pirate-wise. An iOS developer wrote an excellent post within the last year (which I can't manage to dig up in a couple minutes) which laid out his strategy:
> Collect data on serial number use vs. IP address.
> In subsequent patches, incorporate nag-ware, keeping the nag to a dull roar.
> Consider offering a pricing scheme to get some of the unlicensed users in from the cold... in your case, as an alternative to a BSA audit.
Is collecting a serial number and IP address spyware, in exchange for software updates? I don't think so, YMMV. I'd consider it legitimate marketing data, which you can use to attempt to convert some non-paying users.
For the hard core that won't convert, a bit of sleuthing is required. If some Google and Manta search shows they're probably some bozo editing very high quality vids of their cat for YouTube, write 'em off. If it's a profitable shop turning over more than (say) US$600,000 in business a year, sic the BSA on 'em.
Those who RTTFA (read the third fine article) may have noted the discrepancy between what Mr. Mark Bregman of Symantec does when he travels to China, versus what he sells to the rest of us: he uses a dedicated laptop for China trips, and wipes the device before and after travel. On the other hand, he defends farming out coding to China based on 1) all the big s/w vendors do it, and 2) why worry about malicious code from China, when there have been terrorist attacks on the US committed by US citizens?
Rebuttals, off the cuff:
1) Evidently, capitalists don't just sell the rope that hangs them, they'll also teach you how to tie the noose.
2) Timothy McVeigh and 8 "pro-life" murders over the course of 20 years, vs. opportunity to open back doors into virtually every PC in the United States. I think we need to check whether Mr. Bregman has registered as a lobbyist for the China Central News Agency.
I missed out on the Redhat IPO, so I pitched all of my IRA (but not the 403(b) or 401(k)) into the Google IPO at $80. I've never taken profits to re-diversify, but it's been working out damn well. My continued thanks to Brin and Page for leaving money on the table and allowing retail investors to get a taste.
The Facebook IPO looks to be old school, with the 0.1% getting the lion's share of the initial (and perhaps sole) profits from any run up in market price. I have little control over what my index funds admins elect to do, but I don't see any point in retail investors buying until after the feeding frenzy is over and we've got a few months to see where their P/E settles in.
Abstract: Apple is making boatloads of money selling stuff to people. Reconfiguring the company into an enterprise services firm is an unacceptable risk.
'Waaaay back in the day, I was invited to an Apple roadmap presentation for the various big Mac users in the greater LA area (mainly aerospace corps). Dating myself, the main heads up was the upcoming Mac IIfx. The current sealed lips paradigm wasn't always graven in stone.
But, that was before Windows 95 almost ate Apple's lunch, and Macs got kicked to the curb across "the enterprise"... almost simultaneously across North America. Almost as quickly, the ecosystem of Mac-related enterprise solution vendors ditched the platform. When Jobs returned to refocus the company's direction, the focus was on what he had left to work with: consumers (with bones thrown to graphics/video/audio pros). You could see this in his original product mix: iMac, iBook, the restyled G4 mini-towers, and eventually the iPod.
This ended up working so well that quite a few consumers really wanted to haul their Apple gear back to the enterprise... which is how Apple first got there, one MacPlus at a time. Now, with the iPhones and Pads, people aren't just sneaking their toys in, they're putting in purchase orders, and the IT departments are forced to adjust.
It's not completely unreasonable for them to ask Apple to rework their products to make this a bit easier. It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath: Apple isn't equipped to service the enterprise, and doesn't want to spend the money to make it happen. The boys and girls in Cupertino would need to spend tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to set up the hardware/software/people infrastructure - more or less from scratch - to provide reasonable enterprise marketing and support.
And why? There's not all that much profit in selling to the enterprise, except in services. Virtually *all* of the non-Asian computer vendors have reconfigured themselves into enterprise services companies that just happened to sell some hardware/software for them to integrate, and the Asian companies are on the same path.
Apple, meanwhile, is making a boatload of money selling hardware/software to people. There is plenty of foreseeable risk and little known upside to reengineering themselves into the likes of IBM/HP/Dell.
Many comments have already given excellent examples of how destructive SOPA/PIPA (and for that matter) ACTA are to our ability to use the internet, so I won't rehash them.
However, you may need to address the reason these battles are fought: the idea that copyright violation/piracy is theft.
As Matt Yglesias put it, the difference between theft and copyright violation is the difference between stealing a jar of spaghetti sauce from The Sauce Factory, and reading the label to replicate the recipe at home. In the first case, I've taken a physical thing from The Sauce Factory, and they can't sell it. In the second case, they have the recipe for the sauce, and I have the recipe for the sauce. If I use the recipe to make the sauce instead of buying it, I may have denied The Sauce Factory a possible sale. That is what SOPA/PIPA/ACTA are all about, making it easier for someone with an idea to keep selling the idea, known in the trade as collecting rent.
So, what would Jesus do? If your friend is an observant Christian, an excellent analogy is Feeding the multitude: Jesus' disciples had bought some bread. Via the agency of the Lord, the idea of bread is used to miraculously multiply the supply to feed the multitude of people that had followed Jesus from nearby towns. Instead of sending the people home to buy their bread from the bakers, he freely provides it, thus denying the grain farmers and bakers the sales, or rent, that they would otherwise have collected money from. In modern copyright terms, this made Jesus a pirate. Was Jesus wrong to use the knowledge of breadmaking to make more?
> the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
Reply, abstracted - Libertarian bullshit.
In a liberal democracy, a government provides those goods and services which in some way meet a cost-value metric of the citizens and their representatives, or they eventually go away. As with any large private organization, when inertia develops, it can take a while to eliminate funding for goods and services that don't pass the metric.
The broad brush claim that (in this case) the US Federal government is strictly a cost center is libertarian dogma (or a GOP primary season talking point), not a fact-based argument.
You make good points. However, neither a 3D printer nor a lathe/mill is really geared for someone who isn't prepped to put in a lot of time learning the tool. Then, there's the issue of right-tool-for-the-job. I think 3D printers are still best suited as a prototyping tool, although once tuned up they can also work well for creating plastic parts that would be a wee bit of a challenge on a mill (eg. gears). I've seen print tests with porcelain mix that put out complex shapes ready to fire... a niche I doubt you'd see handled by a mill.
Finally, we're starting to see complete printing kits below the US$500 mark. If they prove out their promises to assemble and print (decently) within a weekend or a day, it may prove the tipping point that leads to mass marketed $200 printers from - hell, pick a name - HP, Samsung, Lenovo, or currently-unknown-Chinese brand. At that point, 3D printers and low end mills wouldn't be an either-or choice... buy both.
No, we wouldn't have gone. At the Apollo program's peak, the US was willing to spend 0.8% of GDP on getting men on the Moon. But, it doesn't make sense to talk "Apollo" in isolation. This was but a part of a massive reaction to contemporary Soviet technical advances. Today, Apollo's portion of GDP would equal $1t, or 30% of the 2011 Federal budget.
Without the space race, we may have put someone in orbit by now, but still be thinking about landing on the moon. Robotic probes would have rolled over enough of the Moon's surface that the Federal government would conclude that there was no point to the added expense of a human being (remember to mouse over). Republicans wouldn't even be wasting their breath telling fairy tales about restarting a Moon effort, were it not for the lingering inertia of moon-shot infrastructure in key electoral districts.
Private efforts? Please. Without the force-fed Federal expenditures that created our aerospace knowledge base, the risk to R&D investments - starting basically from scratch - would have been too high relative to expected rewards.
Within the payload limits, there's no reason not to over-engineer the hell out of a space platform. Value engineering a rover closer to the mission plan would have saved time/money, but would have added to the risks of failure. Utter mission failure is the major cost sink for working in space, so it pays to add sigmas when possible.
The critical variable is the limited number of opportunities for interplanetary launches as a function of time and lining up rockets. NASA could be lofting $1000 Aibos with high gain antennas stuck in their okoles. but, if our little pals don't return any data, you didn't save $300m on the probe, you pissed away $120m on the launch.
You're thinking of the Fisker Karma, dumb-ass, which is being built in Finland. The mass market car Fisker is developing - the target of the vast majority of the Federal investment - will be built in the US.
You probably think Newt is a respected philosopher, too.
Hmm, got modded down. I guess the truth really does hurt.
Based solely on the published income tax brackets, Americans have the mistaken impression that their overall tax system is progressive. This isn't true. An example of this thinking is illustrated by the parent comment:
Point 1: "the top N% pay FAR more in absolute tax dollars...", this is generally true.
Point 2: "...as well as more in percentage of their income, than the bottom 100-N%, for pretty much any value of N", this is baloney.
In fact, there are a number of flat and regressive taxes in the US, such that each quintile of tax payers pays taxes roughly in proportion to their income, as noted by the Citizens For Tax Justice report: America's Tax System Is Not As Progressive As You Think .
Bracket----avg-$ %$---%tax 1st--20---12500 3.5---2.0 2nd--20---25300 7.1---5.2 3rd--20---40700 11.6--10.3 4th--20---66300 19.0--19.0 Next-10--100000 14.3--15.1 Next--5--140000 10.2--11.2 Next--4--241000 14.2--15.6 Top---1-1254000 20.3--21.5Currently, we're extremely efficient at cranking gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. Assuming for a moment that fake tree manufacturing was extremely energy efficient and carbon neutral, that's a lot of work just to keep up with conveyor-belting coal into power plants and pouring fuel into our vehicles.
However, tree manufacture won't be all that efficient, meaning we'd need several times more fake trees to compensate. Nice out-of-the-box try there, boys, but this dog won't hunt.
Once again, the actual solutions to so much as reduce the rate of gain in atmospheric carbon loading revolves around 1) reduce the consumption of carbon-based fuels, and 2) (unless we're all going back to organic gardening) energy source substitution. Geoengineering is an expensive diversion from reality.
Per the Apple iPad 2 spec: Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
We didn't get a *real* good look at the display post-flight, but it seems the system was still usable after a cold soak down around at -23 F. Ok, so it wasn't that far out of spec, the system probably enjoy some solar heating, and it was a *dry* cold.
Did I forget to wind my watch, or is it 2000 all over again? Picking between different flavors of vanilla, and a few trillion dollars, a few thousand lives, some wonderful Federal legislation, zero wage growth, zero oversight of the financial markets...
The problem is that to create real political change requires a hell of a lot more personal commitment than checking an alternative box every few years, or posting about Nader/Paul/Bo, etc.
Bahraini officials gave Mr. Mitchell a ticket out of the country because he is a professional from an Anglophone nation. He could have disappeared into the Bahrani justice system as easily as a Bahrani citizen, but dealing with the cleanup would have been more a PITA than the responsible officials thought it was worth. Being a First World passport holder frequently has its benefits.