Just because the company's run like a cult doesn't mean the employees are communists.
Just because employees form a union doesn't mean they are communists.
Having friend that have helped form unions, heard stories about when my current job switched to unions, and been a place where the employees decided to form a union, I'd have to say that it has nothing to do with being a communist. The number one cause of unions are dick bosses jerking around the employees. Most people just want to show up, do their work, and go home at the end of their shift for whatever pay they already signed up for. It's when managers start telling people they have to work and additional shift with no dinner because somebody else didn't show up (usually because they quit because they suffered the same treatment too many times) that employees really start wanting some hard rules and are willing to take a 3-5% pay cut to belong to a union. Managers expect employees to jump anytime they say jump and don't care if they have lives out of work. Thing is, I've heard the stories from the old managers that are still around, and they wouldn't go back to non-union either. Now that everybody is operating under set rules, it actually solves many more problems than their "jump" orders ever did. When my IT unit tried to unionize, it was started by the two Rush Limbaugh watching ex-army guys when the boss started telling them they could just work five ten hour days from now on because he wanted late coverage as well as the early coverage they were doing.
All that said, the idea that engineers are executed on failures is wishful thinking. The path to success goes through multiple failures, and the best possible scenario for anyone who doesn't want to see North Korea obtain long range missile capabilities would be for the regime to punish failure severely.
True, but it still doesn't mean they aren't doing it. North Korea is a very messed up place. They send plenty of their upper class kids to western schools and get fine degrees from places that are not going to just sign off on them because they are somebodies brat. Still, they may have some great agricultural majors directing the country, but they still follow irrigation and plowing methods that increase soil erosion and hurt their crops in the long term because the eldest Kim advised they do it that way. If one of the Kims happened to do an on site inspection and happened to give some "helpful advice" (there's an actual term for it, but I'd have to go look it up and I'm not sure I even have that book still), then they'll follow that advise no matter what and if anything goes wrong, its still their fault.
I would counter that most politics, and most morality, is actually someone's economics. People seem to rarely follow a policy or a morality that they think will not somehow make them money.
Yeah, and look what eventually happened to the Athenian Empire.:D
They became the model of Hellenistic culture as we understand it while other city states such as Sparta are largely only known of via Athenian authors?
Microsoft knows there are millions of computers out there that cannot be upgraded without destroying the ability to perform the work they were bought to perform. And they don't care.
And that's fraudulent.
Oh no, they care. They want you to go out and set up and Active Directory domain to put all your computers on and manage them that way.For many years, things that should have been a system setting or at most a registry setting have been going over to Active Directory. I keep running into issues where the published MS solution begins with "Have your Active Directory administrator..." I wouldn't doubt that this is just the beginning of making all consumer PCs connect to and be managed by a giant consumer domain controlled by MS.
Getting stuff into space isn't the hard problem. The hard problem is the months it takes to get to the asteroid belt, find the ones with stuff we want, and then push those lumps back here or mine it there and ship it back here.
Spoken as someone truly lacking a clue: getting out of this gravity well remains, by far, the hardest part of the problem.
Nope, they have a clue. Getting out of earth's gravity well and out of orbit is pretty much a known thing. Landing on, let alone prospecting and mining an asteroid have yet to be done. Even compared to the energy requirements of getting away from earth, those of moving an industrial sized asteroid to Earth orbit are much more massive if done in less than a few decades. It might be easier to build mining and refining ship and send it there and only ship back what we want, but we don't really know right now because zero G mining and refining in a vacuum has never been done, especially for rare metals in various types of S or M type asteroids. Most likely it will require a large in space infrastructure to get the job done.
yeah fuck that guy. and fuck the editors for repeatedly spamming his articles.
You probably mean "fuck those posters" who keep commenting on his articles and making it so editors want to post them because they see the people commenting on them. As an AC, I bet you are mdsolar coming here to troll people to complain to drive up the post count.
I'm sure a dozens of us have have similar stories -- old fax cards come to mind.
We had an old SCSI film scanner that had been moved to an XP computer when XP was new. The corp IT department was really trying to upgrade everything to Win7 and I'd get a call every couple of months for about a year about it asking to upgrade. I'd have to explain that we'd need a Centronics 50 pin SCSI card for the new computer and even then, we're not sure if there are even drivers for Win7 for the scanner. It was working fine, we weren't using film, and all our current film will be scanned in by the end of the year, so I'd tell them "we're not replacing it till we're done. Talk to you manager, he knows all about it."
Still, the best was the supply ordering system which was based on special Win95 computers, wall mounted with bar code scanners and touch screen. I don't even want to know what flat panel touch screens cost back when this system was new. To give you and idea of how old this system was, it ran off of a Novell network that was only being run for these few computers on a series of old beige boxes stuck in corners in a couple of com closets. The supply department didn't know how to support them any more, IT wouldn't touch them, so that left it to me as the departmental application support to fix anything that went wrong. Luckily, I only had to reprogram a bar code reader once (required calling the company and having them pass me on to a different company) and power cycle the Novell box in the closet about once a year till they finally got a new system about five years ago.
The only chance of "hearing" from an alien civilization is that they keep on wasting absolutely excessive amounts of energy on beaming absolutely useless radio signals to the entire universe. Would we do that for thousands or millions of years? No. Would they? No.
Most likely case for this would be radar. It's useful in navigational, both air, sea and space, purposes pretty much constantly. The wavelengths we use are pretty much used for a reason and would probably be used by space aliens too doing the same thing. One of Hawking's latest projects it to detect these signals if there. If a civilization uses radar equivilant to what we use for air traffic currently, we should be able to detect it on any of the 1000 closest starts. If talking about space based radar looking for asteroids, tracking stallelites, and perhaps space craft, this range goes up significantly. If used by a galactic civilixation, we should be able to detect it from distant galaxies out of the background noise.
Tachyons have never been observed. Even if they can exist, there is no known means to generate them. The only reason to believe such a particle is even possible is that they are a valid solution to certain equations in special relativity.
The only thing I've really heard reading physics books that lead me to believe their was some actual science behind it was an off hand mention in a Michael Kaku book that somebody showed that they could exist and probably did in the early universe, but hopefully can't any more because it would indicate the universe was at a false vacuum, and they would eventually cause instability to make it go to a more stable state (and changing the laws of physics and probably destroying/recreating the universe in the process).
We don't know everything about the universe. We also should discuss the possibility of FTL.
What is wrong with this is that we've already discussed entanglement in regard to FTL and we already know it doesn't work that way. This is like looping around to the same wrong answer time and time again. Let's move on to something that hasn't been ruled out.
Well, there are several books on the subject out there by respected physicists. Sticking within stuff we have reason to believe actually might exist, it's still far out stuff and no practical way to test it. Technically, in things like hyperspace and worm holes, it's usually not even FTL as nothing is travelling faster than light, but rather just taking a shorter path to get to where it's going. We see this effect all the time in gravitational lensing where two light-like paths exist to the same object but they are different lengths. Still, we have no idea if extra dimensions really even exist let alone a practical way to go through them, and worm holes and warp drives require massive warping of Reinmannian space in such ways that the math may work out, but there's no conceptual way to actually do it and it may not even be possible if the structures needed (exotic matters, miniatures black holes, cosmic threads, etc) can't exist. Space can warp, but it's damn hard to make it do so and we might as well consider it flat for these purposes.
As stated, he appears to have a case. However, in my experience, the concept of a limited license time for a professional photography job is *extremely unusual*, Normally, if you do a job, the employer owns the results and can do with them what they want forever.
I imagine what happened is that the hotel wanted the best photographer they could. Asked for work for hire and upon hearing his prices probably asked for a cheaper deal to which he offered the limited license and they agreed. Then they broke the contract. The price they paid really wasn't that much. It's wedding photographer prices and even then that might not be as work for hire. For a professional, with their own equipment, some staff, a day's work on site and several off with post production at an office, that's not that much.
It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
Well, the reason they don't like information being destroyed is because of this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If that information is being destroyed, then the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false, and then we've got to readdress all of physics as one of the foundation premises is wrong. Unless, of course, the black hole goes to another universe, then we are not in a closed system and all is good once again. However, keep in mind that any time that physicist like Hawking say things like "information", "entropy", or "universe" it is probably being simplified several steps from what they really mean which is represented by mathematical equations involving English and Greek letters, very few numbers, and often symbols you wouldn't recognize without some graduate physics courses in tensor calculus. Anytime you read something like this, you are really getting the physics explaination you can understand like when a computer tech explains to the secretary that her computer doesn't work any more because the magic smoke got out. As a car analogy, your questions about destroying information are like interjecting into a conversation of car mechanics speaking of torque, rpms, and horsepower about why you can't just make the car go faster by carving a hole out of the floor of the car so you can push the pedal down farther.
They will be working. they'll be acting as consumers needed to keep our economy up to the point it needs to be to keep supply chains open for a modern society.
Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment...
You're using it wrong. If you haven't realized that you are carrying around a small pocket computer that can do lots of things and a phone function is just one of them, you really don't need a smart phone. Really, even the phone function is becoming less and less important, just like broadcast TV; a fairly mature platform that is pretty much used mainly by old people.
If you don't intend to replace them, why bother with standardized sizes? Design one to perfectly fit your phone/tablet/laptop and glue it stuck, really if batteries didn't lose capacity and fail after a few years it wouldn't be an issue.
We're not planing to replace the battery, but the phone/tablet/laptop. When a better appliance comes out, you pull your lifetime battery out of your old device and put it in your new device.
And yet she doesn't support the $15/hr minimum wage.
And yet, that is still a better argument to vote for Hillary than any of her supporters gave at the caucus I attended. I was actually wanting to hear some good, reasoned arguments for Hillary as I can't find any on the internet. Instead, I got "Hillary as president would be empowering for women" multiple times. Now, some of those were pretty good speeches and I wouldn't ignore that as something like a tiebreaker, but as another (naturalized) caucus goer stated, "That's what I thought when I voted for Maggie in the 80's".
Which was the president that invited the Dixiecrats who were upset about the Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Bill to head over to the Republican party. Add in Reagan giving importance to and milking the same for money during his administration and you pretty much have the reason that the two parties have switched ideaologies.
" they come equipped with almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips"
That must be a joke, right? Apple computers are expensive, but at least they give you the latest technology, isn't it?
It's not quite that bad, but it's bad. Apple hasn't even kept up with yearly updates on the Mac side of things. The Mac book was over a year old when this came out. The Mac Book Air is 407 days since last revision. Mac Mini is getting close to two years and the Mac "Pro" is close to three years old.
Can someone explain exactly how culpable the president is? As someone who doesn't live in the US I alternately hear that he is totally responsible for all the bad stuff and yet the office has no real power and it's all down to the two houses (which I note are currently controlled by the Republicans, who seem to oppose Obama on pretty much everything).
With that in mind, it seems like a miracle that he managed to get a socialist policy like Obamacare through, even if it was watered down. How much power and responsibility for the actions of the US does he really have?
That is an interesting question. I don't think there is any doubt the President is the most powerful political person in the government, but might not be saying all that much. The President is the head of the Executive branch of the government. They doesn't write laws or decide what they mean but they enforce them. So all the stuff the three letter agencies are doing pretty much goes back to him, but deniable plausible deniability has been a thing since at least Nixon. He probably doesn't know what they are doing, but certainly isn't trying to stop them in doing it even though it's mostly public knowledge. He could probably give orders and start cleaning house, firing anybody who disobeyed, but they'd probably just made sure he was even more in the dark and once the new President, they'd still be there and the new guy would be in the dark. His main job is being the head of the country and representing the USA to the rest of the world and their governments. The State department makes treaties, which have the power of law, but those still have to be confirmed by the legislative branch. His other big job is commander of the armed forces, however pretty much needs congress's approval. However, in the case of war and many other things, congress has written the laws so that the President can use various powers and do other things without congress's approval, at least for a limited time. They often gripe when the president uses those powers, but you see very little effort to try and take them back. The President also has the bully pulpit which is pretty powerful, as anybody who could get on TV, give a speech about whatever they wanted, and do so pretty much any time they want. As the President was voted into office supposedly by the majority of voting people in the US, there is some mandate in that. Also, usually, the President is the head of his political party. Not sure what that means in real terms, but generally, their party will stand behind him if told to, however, there's nothing binding in that.
The scientists were wrongly prosecuted. They reported their assessment based on a review of the data available to them. They did not state whether or not there would be an earthquake.
Well, I remember a big discussion here on/. a few years ago about the subject where transcripts and such were drug out. I remember them doing a bit more than that. They essentially held a press conference outside of official channels to discredit a kook, and instead of sticking to the "nobody can predict earthquakes" line they started with, but by the end at least one person was telling the public "go home, have a glass of wine, don't worry about it" and then there was another earthquake. Now the guy was a kook, and they were right in the beginning that nobody can predict earthquakes, but there had been an earthquake the day before and common behavior in this earthquake frequent area was to sleep outside the night after an earthquake incase of aftershocks. This time there were after shocks. If the scientists had stuck to their original line of "nobody can predict earthquakes' or just not had the press conference at all, they would have been off the hook, but instead, rather than looking stupid with a weak statement, they supplied false indication of the risks.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because the company's run like a cult doesn't mean the employees are communists.
Just because employees form a union doesn't mean they are communists.
Having friend that have helped form unions, heard stories about when my current job switched to unions, and been a place where the employees decided to form a union, I'd have to say that it has nothing to do with being a communist. The number one cause of unions are dick bosses jerking around the employees. Most people just want to show up, do their work, and go home at the end of their shift for whatever pay they already signed up for. It's when managers start telling people they have to work and additional shift with no dinner because somebody else didn't show up (usually because they quit because they suffered the same treatment too many times) that employees really start wanting some hard rules and are willing to take a 3-5% pay cut to belong to a union. Managers expect employees to jump anytime they say jump and don't care if they have lives out of work. Thing is, I've heard the stories from the old managers that are still around, and they wouldn't go back to non-union either. Now that everybody is operating under set rules, it actually solves many more problems than their "jump" orders ever did. When my IT unit tried to unionize, it was started by the two Rush Limbaugh watching ex-army guys when the boss started telling them they could just work five ten hour days from now on because he wanted late coverage as well as the early coverage they were doing.
All that said, the idea that engineers are executed on failures is wishful thinking. The path to success goes through multiple failures, and the best possible scenario for anyone who doesn't want to see North Korea obtain long range missile capabilities would be for the regime to punish failure severely.
True, but it still doesn't mean they aren't doing it. North Korea is a very messed up place. They send plenty of their upper class kids to western schools and get fine degrees from places that are not going to just sign off on them because they are somebodies brat. Still, they may have some great agricultural majors directing the country, but they still follow irrigation and plowing methods that increase soil erosion and hurt their crops in the long term because the eldest Kim advised they do it that way. If one of the Kims happened to do an on site inspection and happened to give some "helpful advice" (there's an actual term for it, but I'd have to go look it up and I'm not sure I even have that book still), then they'll follow that advise no matter what and if anything goes wrong, its still their fault.
All politics is someone's morality.
I would counter that most politics, and most morality, is actually someone's economics. People seem to rarely follow a policy or a morality that they think will not somehow make them money.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ, you scraped right through the bottom of the barrel.
This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.
New enough that they haven't created an account yet and are having to post as an Anonymous Coward.
Yeah, and look what eventually happened to the Athenian Empire. :D
They became the model of Hellenistic culture as we understand it while other city states such as Sparta are largely only known of via Athenian authors?
Microsoft knows there are millions of computers out there that cannot be upgraded without destroying the ability to perform the work they were bought to perform. And they don't care.
And that's fraudulent.
Oh no, they care. They want you to go out and set up and Active Directory domain to put all your computers on and manage them that way.For many years, things that should have been a system setting or at most a registry setting have been going over to Active Directory. I keep running into issues where the published MS solution begins with "Have your Active Directory administrator..." I wouldn't doubt that this is just the beginning of making all consumer PCs connect to and be managed by a giant consumer domain controlled by MS.
Getting stuff into space isn't the hard problem. The hard problem is the months it takes to get to the asteroid belt, find the ones with stuff we want, and then push those lumps back here or mine it there and ship it back here.
Spoken as someone truly lacking a clue: getting out of this gravity well remains, by far, the hardest part of the problem.
Nope, they have a clue. Getting out of earth's gravity well and out of orbit is pretty much a known thing. Landing on, let alone prospecting and mining an asteroid have yet to be done. Even compared to the energy requirements of getting away from earth, those of moving an industrial sized asteroid to Earth orbit are much more massive if done in less than a few decades. It might be easier to build mining and refining ship and send it there and only ship back what we want, but we don't really know right now because zero G mining and refining in a vacuum has never been done, especially for rare metals in various types of S or M type asteroids. Most likely it will require a large in space infrastructure to get the job done.
yeah fuck that guy. and fuck the editors for repeatedly spamming his articles.
You probably mean "fuck those posters" who keep commenting on his articles and making it so editors want to post them because they see the people commenting on them. As an AC, I bet you are mdsolar coming here to troll people to complain to drive up the post count.
Bull.
The electoral college is not a democratic institution. It is a bandaid solution for problem that no longer exists.
What? We're no longer worried about a few highly populated states overpowering the smaller less populated ones?
I thought that back when it was just three DVDs at one time; one movie and two series at any time kept me in plenty of TV watching.
I'm sure a dozens of us have have similar stories -- old fax cards come to mind.
We had an old SCSI film scanner that had been moved to an XP computer when XP was new. The corp IT department was really trying to upgrade everything to Win7 and I'd get a call every couple of months for about a year about it asking to upgrade. I'd have to explain that we'd need a Centronics 50 pin SCSI card for the new computer and even then, we're not sure if there are even drivers for Win7 for the scanner. It was working fine, we weren't using film, and all our current film will be scanned in by the end of the year, so I'd tell them "we're not replacing it till we're done. Talk to you manager, he knows all about it."
Still, the best was the supply ordering system which was based on special Win95 computers, wall mounted with bar code scanners and touch screen. I don't even want to know what flat panel touch screens cost back when this system was new. To give you and idea of how old this system was, it ran off of a Novell network that was only being run for these few computers on a series of old beige boxes stuck in corners in a couple of com closets. The supply department didn't know how to support them any more, IT wouldn't touch them, so that left it to me as the departmental application support to fix anything that went wrong. Luckily, I only had to reprogram a bar code reader once (required calling the company and having them pass me on to a different company) and power cycle the Novell box in the closet about once a year till they finally got a new system about five years ago.
The only chance of "hearing" from an alien civilization is that they keep on wasting absolutely excessive amounts of energy on beaming absolutely useless radio signals to the entire universe. Would we do that for thousands or millions of years? No. Would they? No.
Most likely case for this would be radar. It's useful in navigational, both air, sea and space, purposes pretty much constantly. The wavelengths we use are pretty much used for a reason and would probably be used by space aliens too doing the same thing. One of Hawking's latest projects it to detect these signals if there. If a civilization uses radar equivilant to what we use for air traffic currently, we should be able to detect it on any of the 1000 closest starts. If talking about space based radar looking for asteroids, tracking stallelites, and perhaps space craft, this range goes up significantly. If used by a galactic civilixation, we should be able to detect it from distant galaxies out of the background noise.
Tachyons have never been observed. Even if they can exist, there is no known means to generate them. The only reason to believe such a particle is even possible is that they are a valid solution to certain equations in special relativity.
The only thing I've really heard reading physics books that lead me to believe their was some actual science behind it was an off hand mention in a Michael Kaku book that somebody showed that they could exist and probably did in the early universe, but hopefully can't any more because it would indicate the universe was at a false vacuum, and they would eventually cause instability to make it go to a more stable state (and changing the laws of physics and probably destroying/recreating the universe in the process).
We don't know everything about the universe. We also should discuss the possibility of FTL.
What is wrong with this is that we've already discussed entanglement in regard to FTL and we already know it doesn't work that way. This is like looping around to the same wrong answer time and time again. Let's move on to something that hasn't been ruled out.
Well, there are several books on the subject out there by respected physicists. Sticking within stuff we have reason to believe actually might exist, it's still far out stuff and no practical way to test it. Technically, in things like hyperspace and worm holes, it's usually not even FTL as nothing is travelling faster than light, but rather just taking a shorter path to get to where it's going. We see this effect all the time in gravitational lensing where two light-like paths exist to the same object but they are different lengths. Still, we have no idea if extra dimensions really even exist let alone a practical way to go through them, and worm holes and warp drives require massive warping of Reinmannian space in such ways that the math may work out, but there's no conceptual way to actually do it and it may not even be possible if the structures needed (exotic matters, miniatures black holes, cosmic threads, etc) can't exist. Space can warp, but it's damn hard to make it do so and we might as well consider it flat for these purposes.
As stated, he appears to have a case. However, in my experience, the concept of a limited license time for a professional photography job is *extremely unusual*, Normally, if you do a job, the employer owns the results and can do with them what they want forever.
I imagine what happened is that the hotel wanted the best photographer they could. Asked for work for hire and upon hearing his prices probably asked for a cheaper deal to which he offered the limited license and they agreed. Then they broke the contract. The price they paid really wasn't that much. It's wedding photographer prices and even then that might not be as work for hire. For a professional, with their own equipment, some staff, a day's work on site and several off with post production at an office, that's not that much.
It also seems odd to me that people would cling to the "information paradox" as if there were some good reason to believe it. If you truly believe that there is a singularity at the center of a black hole, why wouldn't you also believe that it can destroy information? Conversely, if you try to preserve information in a black hole, it seems to me that you are effectively already modeling an object other than a singularity.
Well, the reason they don't like information being destroyed is because of this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If that information is being destroyed, then the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false, and then we've got to readdress all of physics as one of the foundation premises is wrong. Unless, of course, the black hole goes to another universe, then we are not in a closed system and all is good once again. However, keep in mind that any time that physicist like Hawking say things like "information", "entropy", or "universe" it is probably being simplified several steps from what they really mean which is represented by mathematical equations involving English and Greek letters, very few numbers, and often symbols you wouldn't recognize without some graduate physics courses in tensor calculus. Anytime you read something like this, you are really getting the physics explaination you can understand like when a computer tech explains to the secretary that her computer doesn't work any more because the magic smoke got out. As a car analogy, your questions about destroying information are like interjecting into a conversation of car mechanics speaking of torque, rpms, and horsepower about why you can't just make the car go faster by carving a hole out of the floor of the car so you can push the pedal down farther.
I think people do need to work for an income...
They will be working. they'll be acting as consumers needed to keep our economy up to the point it needs to be to keep supply chains open for a modern society.
Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment...
You're using it wrong. If you haven't realized that you are carrying around a small pocket computer that can do lots of things and a phone function is just one of them, you really don't need a smart phone. Really, even the phone function is becoming less and less important, just like broadcast TV; a fairly mature platform that is pretty much used mainly by old people.
If you don't intend to replace them, why bother with standardized sizes? Design one to perfectly fit your phone/tablet/laptop and glue it stuck, really if batteries didn't lose capacity and fail after a few years it wouldn't be an issue.
We're not planing to replace the battery, but the phone/tablet/laptop. When a better appliance comes out, you pull your lifetime battery out of your old device and put it in your new device.
And yet she doesn't support the $15/hr minimum wage.
And yet, that is still a better argument to vote for Hillary than any of her supporters gave at the caucus I attended. I was actually wanting to hear some good, reasoned arguments for Hillary as I can't find any on the internet. Instead, I got "Hillary as president would be empowering for women" multiple times. Now, some of those were pretty good speeches and I wouldn't ignore that as something like a tiebreaker, but as another (naturalized) caucus goer stated, "That's what I thought when I voted for Maggie in the 80's".
The EPA. . .was created by a republican president.
Which was the president that invited the Dixiecrats who were upset about the Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Bill to head over to the Republican party. Add in Reagan giving importance to and milking the same for money during his administration and you pretty much have the reason that the two parties have switched ideaologies.
" they come equipped with almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips"
That must be a joke, right? Apple computers are expensive, but at least they give you the latest technology, isn't it?
It's not quite that bad, but it's bad. Apple hasn't even kept up with yearly updates on the Mac side of things. The Mac book was over a year old when this came out. The Mac Book Air is 407 days since last revision. Mac Mini is getting close to two years and the Mac "Pro" is close to three years old.
Can someone explain exactly how culpable the president is? As someone who doesn't live in the US I alternately hear that he is totally responsible for all the bad stuff and yet the office has no real power and it's all down to the two houses (which I note are currently controlled by the Republicans, who seem to oppose Obama on pretty much everything).
With that in mind, it seems like a miracle that he managed to get a socialist policy like Obamacare through, even if it was watered down. How much power and responsibility for the actions of the US does he really have?
That is an interesting question. I don't think there is any doubt the President is the most powerful political person in the government, but might not be saying all that much. The President is the head of the Executive branch of the government. They doesn't write laws or decide what they mean but they enforce them. So all the stuff the three letter agencies are doing pretty much goes back to him, but deniable plausible deniability has been a thing since at least Nixon. He probably doesn't know what they are doing, but certainly isn't trying to stop them in doing it even though it's mostly public knowledge. He could probably give orders and start cleaning house, firing anybody who disobeyed, but they'd probably just made sure he was even more in the dark and once the new President, they'd still be there and the new guy would be in the dark. His main job is being the head of the country and representing the USA to the rest of the world and their governments. The State department makes treaties, which have the power of law, but those still have to be confirmed by the legislative branch. His other big job is commander of the armed forces, however pretty much needs congress's approval. However, in the case of war and many other things, congress has written the laws so that the President can use various powers and do other things without congress's approval, at least for a limited time. They often gripe when the president uses those powers, but you see very little effort to try and take them back. The President also has the bully pulpit which is pretty powerful, as anybody who could get on TV, give a speech about whatever they wanted, and do so pretty much any time they want. As the President was voted into office supposedly by the majority of voting people in the US, there is some mandate in that. Also, usually, the President is the head of his political party. Not sure what that means in real terms, but generally, their party will stand behind him if told to, however, there's nothing binding in that.
The scientists were wrongly prosecuted. They reported their assessment based on a review of the data available to them. They did not state whether or not there would be an earthquake.
Well, I remember a big discussion here on /. a few years ago about the subject where transcripts and such were drug out. I remember them doing a bit more than that. They essentially held a press conference outside of official channels to discredit a kook, and instead of sticking to the "nobody can predict earthquakes" line they started with, but by the end at least one person was telling the public "go home, have a glass of wine, don't worry about it" and then there was another earthquake. Now the guy was a kook, and they were right in the beginning that nobody can predict earthquakes, but there had been an earthquake the day before and common behavior in this earthquake frequent area was to sleep outside the night after an earthquake incase of aftershocks. This time there were after shocks. If the scientists had stuck to their original line of "nobody can predict earthquakes' or just not had the press conference at all, they would have been off the hook, but instead, rather than looking stupid with a weak statement, they supplied false indication of the risks.
we're all equal, right?
It's all part of the new GOP school program, No Scientist Left Behind.