I couldn't care less about where it was assembled. The parts are still made in China, which is where the quality is real labor comes from. I'll be impressed if they open up actual factories here in the US, and stop using Ireland to funnel cheaper tax rates.
I bet you the parts were actually made in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. If the iMac is anything like the iPad, China has little high tech industry to contribute to it, just cheap human labor. Those three countries make most of the parts and get more money than China out of the purchase price. China gets all the crap because its the last stop before sale and has its name on the product.
The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it.
Why not?
Probably because the only reason they stuck around at a job with crappy pay to begin with instead of going elsewhere, was because of the promise of a good retirement package. That would make it a classic bait and switch.
It's not only teachers. A year or two ago, I read something similar with a city and their police department. Pensions were killing strangling the system. When asked why the city promised such retirement benefits, they simply said it was because that was the only way they could hire more police at those wages. Needless to say, when the city talked about cutting their pensions, the police who worked those years at crappy pay got uppity.
Which was eight years after the time period I was talking about. Gorbachev may have been a member of the politburo, but did not become a party secretary or Chairman till way after the things I was talking about. Reagan promised Star Wars in 1983. Gorbie did't even become Party secretary for five more years. Certainly what I said was a crude generalization in a quickly composed post to an internet forum that can't do such a moment of history justice, but if you want to talk about Reagan's policies and the USSR, you have to go back to Brezhnev or Andropov.
I want a freakin' dinosaur but nobody'll give me $120m/year to make it happen.
You've got it backwards. If you want something, you are the person to give somebody else for that thing. If you really wanted a "freakin' dinosaur", you have to give somebody $120m/yr to make it happen.
You want to carry a stack of 1 and 5 dollar coins in your pocket? Or will it be in a sack tied to your belt?
Having gone to many trips through the countries of Europe, I can say that you typically don't have a stack of coins in your pocket. Now that your change is worth something, you spend it first and only go to paper afterwards, rather than just using your pocket as a dump for all your change which gets emptied out at the end of the day. If you do get an uncomfortable amount of change in your pocket, that is just a reminder to use it first the next time you buy something and the problem is resolved. Because you use your coins first, you also tend to use all those small denominations too for exact change. Even if you pay with paper, you still pay off the change bit if you have it because you've already checked your pocket for enough money. End result is that I have less coins in my pocket than I usually do back in the States.
The law protects whistleblowers, the question is whether Manning is a whistleblower. A whistleblower is someone who tells the public or the authorities about corrupt or illegal behavior. Little if any of what Manning exposed qualifies as corrupt or criminal, so he's not protected as a whistleblower. Even the most famous release, the "collateral murder" video of an Apache attack helicopter slaughtering journalists in Iraq, wouldn't qualify because it was an accidental killing; it doesn't even qualify as negligence, since the pilots and the military can argue that when journalists are embedded with heavily armed insurgents carrying AK-47s and RPGs, they can hardly be expected to recognize them as press....
Its been a while since I've looked at that case, but IIRC, the really bad part wasn't that it happened, but that they lied about it and tried to cover it up. Yes, it was bad that a journalist got mistaken as a combatant and killed. However, instead of stating that and looking bad, the military covered it up, but the act of covering it up just made them look worse when the coverup was revealed.
Ironically, decades later, Ronald Reagan used a non-functioning decoy (SDI) to wreck the Soviet economy and win the cold war...
The Soviet politburo has declared the cold war unwinnable in the late 70s, much before Reagan ever thought of SDI.
Reagan did not win the cold war, he negotiated a peaceful end to it, given the victory the USA had secured before him.
No, if they wanted a peaceful end, the Soviets could have done that with Jimmy Carter on their own terms as that was what Jimmy Carter was actively trying to do by cutting back our military so they could shore up their economy without worrying about the cold war. Instead, they decided to up the ante which brought in Reagan, SDI, Berlin Wall, speeches, etc till the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a non-zero chance that instead of allowing the collapse, the USSR would opt for war to hold things together. Against their own if not against the outside world as a common enemy. Carter threw the dice and lost. Reagan happened to throw the dice and won.
Meh. Business users will be talked into signing up for service contracts, being given all the versions and allowed to install whatever we want like we already do. If it is horrid for business users, it will be because application vendors are constantly driving OS upgrades rather than MS.
I think the OP's point is that some research is simply not worth the paperwork and grant money. I mean knowing precisely how broken a video can be before people stop watching is interesting, but theire are more interesting, and possibly more important, things out there. Studies like these divert resources from those research projects especially now during hard economic times.
Well, in the OP perfect world where everybody else is lined up with their beliefs and values, perhaps. In the real world, I bet this is where the money is because that is where the people are spending it and therefore judge it interesting and important by voting with their money. Providing people what they want is what will stimulate trade which will help the economy. Planned guesses at what might help the economy are less than optimistic given past histories with such things.
We all hate moronic talking points - how about we agree to drop them? Chernobyl is an example of radiation problems. 3 Mile Island was a tamer example. And, now, Fukushima. The Greenies talk about all that radiation from coal, but they can't point to one example of a population center depopulated due to radiation from coal.
Try sticking to the REAL drawbacks of using coal.
The reason you have depopulated population centers around the nuclear plants where things have gone wrong is to prevent deaths that we are already seeing in the coal industry and coal power plants but are used to. Is your goal cheap energy, saving lives, or being green? The only one coal comes out better than nuclear is being cheap. All that mercury that we get warned about in fish, guess what percentage of that came from coal mines and power plants.
Admittedly, not a lot of money, but you don't sit at the $0.01 machines because you want the pay $2.00 per pull...
No, you sit at the one cent machines so you can spend a long time playing slots and getting free drinks by tipping the waitress that two dollars every time she brings you a drink. Since the waitresses typically have their section which would be all the penny slots and the other penny slot players are cheap bastards, she remembers the big tippers and starts bring their drinks much quicker.
I see them a lot in healthcare presentations and webpages dealing with such presentations, especially for radiology cine loops. They're made from a series of images anyway and they are pretty much bulletproof, working as intended on any computer in any location and presentation set up. Actual videos have not proved so lucky as if the computer at the distant place you are trying to present doesn't have the proper codec, you're SOL because even if they call in the IT guy, install VNC or whatever really quick, your presentation is shot. GIF may not be the newest or even best, but being older tech makes it pretty much reliable.
What I don't understand is why the TSA still exists. Everybody hates it and it costs us a ridiculous amount of money. Every time I've uttered the phrase "security theater" around normals, they've heard it before and agree with it. Why haven't any politicians jumped at the chance to cut it like the cancer it is and score major points with their electorate?
Is corruption really the answer, or am I missing something, here?
Not everybody hates it. Head to a red state and talk to the "real america" and they'll be proud to tell you they have the latest scanners and that the government is keeping us safe. What they really complain about is that they see no reason why they have to go through the scanners as they don't have brown skin.
Older users and laptops that weren't encrypted and the user doesn't want to mess with it.
Departments and users that buy their own equipment with their own budgets and never go through an IT department.
Personal laptops (bought and owned by users) used for work.
Department and users that buy the wrong laptops (no TPM) when their IT practices require it.
Combine all of the above and there are probably lots of laptops the IT department doesn't even know about unless it's lost with work data on it.
Pennsylvania is the same way. Every election cycle they talk about privatizing.. and every time it quietly gets shelves for, publicly, some moralistic reason.. but privately I suspect they just really do not want to give up the power, and the PA liqueur institution is pretty powerful (not to mention corrupt).
Enjoy it while it lasts. Washington had state sales and they went private. The prices the private stores charge you is the same the state stores do on most liquors (bottom and mid shelf) and that is before the additional taxes. If you like the good stuff, you can expect the private stores to charge you two to three times what the state stores did before the additional 30% taxes (20% liquor + ~10% sales), but that's only if you can find them in the stores as most don't have any sort of selection.
The Thief In Chief blew over an extra *trillion* *every* *year* and people weren't' smart enough to fire him.
Compared to that a billion is change.
Well, considering the other guy wanted to blow 1.7 trillion every year, the current guy would be the only fiscally sound option. He wanted to increase military spending and decrease taxes and never got around to saying how he would end up even beginning to balance the budget. In the end, The Economist had this to say about a Presidential candidate whose strength was supposed to be on the economy: "For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says." The don't really like Obama, but saw nothing more to like in Romney.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
Possibly, but I really don't see them asking enterprise what we want so they can give it to us as far as a desktop PC OS goes. We don't want great changes or neat tricks. If anything we want small slow changes so that users will probably never notice in the enterprise situation and if they do, will figure it out themselves or can be trained easily. We want our programs to work and not to have to upgrade them because of an OS*. The best thing they have done is made it more secure, which when judging that MS great leap forward is in security, you can make of that what you will.
*We don't want to have to upgrade our OS because of programs either, but that is another rant about how enterprise wants stability rather than endless upgrades and updates with new features that all include new bugs. In the end, enterprise wants something that installs and works until there is a ROI reason to upgrade, which in some stable fields, might take decades because they're mature and not going anywhere soon, because constant upgrades are a costly pain.
Disclaimer: I am a nobody. A simple techie. I left Microsft last year because I felt they were in turmoil internally. Managment where I worked was heinous and ineffective.
This is true. I live in Seattle and have lots of friends that do or have worked for Microsoft. One of the most common ways to break the ice between two MS employees is "How was your last reorg?" They both laugh, talk about the groups they have belonged in, and then move on to more relevant conversation.
They don't seem to grok what people want. People WANT to move to the "cloud" -- as amorphous as that term is.
I'd have to disagree with this. People really don't care about the "cloud", as they just want their stuff to work, and preferably without having to memorize lots of logins and passwords for it to do so. Currently, the ideal way may seem to be the "cloud", but it still makes lots of people unhappy because it still don't work without them having to think about it and connection to the cloud is hardly constant. You could just as easily say that they want all their information to travel with them everywhere on their phone. That also has issues. In the end, whatever gives the most people the most stuff with the least effort will win, and the cloud may be that for a lot of people, but they really don't care about the cloud itself.
And in a few years when applying for jobs: "oh, you got an A? Good job. But it's a Black A, not an Asian A. So I'm going to call it a C. I'm sorry, but you don't qualify for this job".
Has anybody ever been asked for GPA when applying for a job? Is it really all that common? Sure, I've seen it on resumes, usually from people fresh out of school and want to flaunt their A's. I've never been in an interview or looked at a job application and been asked about grades. Do you have a degree? Yes, then check that off the list and they go on. Given the people that we hear about in the news getting fired because they lied about getting their degree, I suspect there is no real care or fact checking anyway.
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I couldn't care less about where it was assembled. The parts are still made in China, which is where the quality is real labor comes from. I'll be impressed if they open up actual factories here in the US, and stop using Ireland to funnel cheaper tax rates.
I bet you the parts were actually made in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. If the iMac is anything like the iPad, China has little high tech industry to contribute to it, just cheap human labor. Those three countries make most of the parts and get more money than China out of the purchase price. China gets all the crap because its the last stop before sale and has its name on the product.
The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it.
Why not?
Probably because the only reason they stuck around at a job with crappy pay to begin with instead of going elsewhere, was because of the promise of a good retirement package. That would make it a classic bait and switch.
It's not only teachers. A year or two ago, I read something similar with a city and their police department. Pensions were killing strangling the system. When asked why the city promised such retirement benefits, they simply said it was because that was the only way they could hire more police at those wages. Needless to say, when the city talked about cutting their pensions, the police who worked those years at crappy pay got uppity.
Evolution can occur on things that aren't coded in DNA. Software, for example.
OMG. I just realized what this means. The human race is being forked!
Which was eight years after the time period I was talking about. Gorbachev may have been a member of the politburo, but did not become a party secretary or Chairman till way after the things I was talking about. Reagan promised Star Wars in 1983. Gorbie did't even become Party secretary for five more years. Certainly what I said was a crude generalization in a quickly composed post to an internet forum that can't do such a moment of history justice, but if you want to talk about Reagan's policies and the USSR, you have to go back to Brezhnev or Andropov.
I want a freakin' dinosaur but nobody'll give me $120m/year to make it happen.
You've got it backwards. If you want something, you are the person to give somebody else for that thing. If you really wanted a "freakin' dinosaur", you have to give somebody $120m/yr to make it happen.
You want to carry a stack of 1 and 5 dollar coins in your pocket? Or will it be in a sack tied to your belt?
Having gone to many trips through the countries of Europe, I can say that you typically don't have a stack of coins in your pocket. Now that your change is worth something, you spend it first and only go to paper afterwards, rather than just using your pocket as a dump for all your change which gets emptied out at the end of the day. If you do get an uncomfortable amount of change in your pocket, that is just a reminder to use it first the next time you buy something and the problem is resolved. Because you use your coins first, you also tend to use all those small denominations too for exact change. Even if you pay with paper, you still pay off the change bit if you have it because you've already checked your pocket for enough money. End result is that I have less coins in my pocket than I usually do back in the States.
The law protects whistleblowers, the question is whether Manning is a whistleblower. A whistleblower is someone who tells the public or the authorities about corrupt or illegal behavior. Little if any of what Manning exposed qualifies as corrupt or criminal, so he's not protected as a whistleblower. Even the most famous release, the "collateral murder" video of an Apache attack helicopter slaughtering journalists in Iraq, wouldn't qualify because it was an accidental killing; it doesn't even qualify as negligence, since the pilots and the military can argue that when journalists are embedded with heavily armed insurgents carrying AK-47s and RPGs, they can hardly be expected to recognize them as press....
Its been a while since I've looked at that case, but IIRC, the really bad part wasn't that it happened, but that they lied about it and tried to cover it up. Yes, it was bad that a journalist got mistaken as a combatant and killed. However, instead of stating that and looking bad, the military covered it up, but the act of covering it up just made them look worse when the coverup was revealed.
Ironically, decades later, Ronald Reagan used a non-functioning decoy (SDI) to wreck the Soviet economy and win the cold war...
The Soviet politburo has declared the cold war unwinnable in the late 70s, much before Reagan ever thought of SDI.
Reagan did not win the cold war, he negotiated a peaceful end to it, given the victory the USA had secured before him.
No, if they wanted a peaceful end, the Soviets could have done that with Jimmy Carter on their own terms as that was what Jimmy Carter was actively trying to do by cutting back our military so they could shore up their economy without worrying about the cold war. Instead, they decided to up the ante which brought in Reagan, SDI, Berlin Wall, speeches, etc till the Soviet Union collapsed. There was a non-zero chance that instead of allowing the collapse, the USSR would opt for war to hold things together. Against their own if not against the outside world as a common enemy. Carter threw the dice and lost. Reagan happened to throw the dice and won.
And a completely horrid thing for business users.
Meh. Business users will be talked into signing up for service contracts, being given all the versions and allowed to install whatever we want like we already do. If it is horrid for business users, it will be because application vendors are constantly driving OS upgrades rather than MS.
I think the OP's point is that some research is simply not worth the paperwork and grant money. I mean knowing precisely how broken a video can be before people stop watching is interesting, but theire are more interesting, and possibly more important, things out there. Studies like these divert resources from those research projects especially now during hard economic times.
Well, in the OP perfect world where everybody else is lined up with their beliefs and values, perhaps. In the real world, I bet this is where the money is because that is where the people are spending it and therefore judge it interesting and important by voting with their money. Providing people what they want is what will stimulate trade which will help the economy. Planned guesses at what might help the economy are less than optimistic given past histories with such things.
We all hate moronic talking points - how about we agree to drop them? Chernobyl is an example of radiation problems. 3 Mile Island was a tamer example. And, now, Fukushima. The Greenies talk about all that radiation from coal, but they can't point to one example of a population center depopulated due to radiation from coal.
Try sticking to the REAL drawbacks of using coal.
The reason you have depopulated population centers around the nuclear plants where things have gone wrong is to prevent deaths that we are already seeing in the coal industry and coal power plants but are used to. Is your goal cheap energy, saving lives, or being green? The only one coal comes out better than nuclear is being cheap. All that mercury that we get warned about in fish, guess what percentage of that came from coal mines and power plants.
Admittedly, not a lot of money, but you don't sit at the $0.01 machines because you want the pay $2.00 per pull...
No, you sit at the one cent machines so you can spend a long time playing slots and getting free drinks by tipping the waitress that two dollars every time she brings you a drink. Since the waitresses typically have their section which would be all the penny slots and the other penny slot players are cheap bastards, she remembers the big tippers and starts bring their drinks much quicker.
What exactly is the "well regulated militia" doing in NYC?
Living there?
Also aren't pidgins a real nuisance in some cities that they try and exterminate them?
They're a nuisance elsewhere too. Pigeon and dove hunting is considered an alternative to just poisoning the damn things as they tend to eat crops.
Who even uses GIF anymore?
I see them a lot in healthcare presentations and webpages dealing with such presentations, especially for radiology cine loops. They're made from a series of images anyway and they are pretty much bulletproof, working as intended on any computer in any location and presentation set up. Actual videos have not proved so lucky as if the computer at the distant place you are trying to present doesn't have the proper codec, you're SOL because even if they call in the IT guy, install VNC or whatever really quick, your presentation is shot. GIF may not be the newest or even best, but being older tech makes it pretty much reliable.
Private industry can and will step in.
That is exactly what I'm afraid of, because when they do, it will only be the spammers that will be able to afford to send letters.
What I don't understand is why the TSA still exists. Everybody hates it and it costs us a ridiculous amount of money. Every time I've uttered the phrase "security theater" around normals, they've heard it before and agree with it. Why haven't any politicians jumped at the chance to cut it like the cancer it is and score major points with their electorate?
Is corruption really the answer, or am I missing something, here?
Not everybody hates it. Head to a red state and talk to the "real america" and they'll be proud to tell you they have the latest scanners and that the government is keeping us safe. What they really complain about is that they see no reason why they have to go through the scanners as they don't have brown skin.
Why is this an issue?
My guesses are:
Older users and laptops that weren't encrypted and the user doesn't want to mess with it.
Departments and users that buy their own equipment with their own budgets and never go through an IT department.
Personal laptops (bought and owned by users) used for work.
Department and users that buy the wrong laptops (no TPM) when their IT practices require it.
Combine all of the above and there are probably lots of laptops the IT department doesn't even know about unless it's lost with work data on it.
No it doesn't. You add a second admin key to all the laptops.. It's not rocket science..
No, the second key you add is the user's.
Pennsylvania is the same way. Every election cycle they talk about privatizing.. and every time it quietly gets shelves for, publicly, some moralistic reason.. but privately I suspect they just really do not want to give up the power, and the PA liqueur institution is pretty powerful (not to mention corrupt).
Enjoy it while it lasts. Washington had state sales and they went private. The prices the private stores charge you is the same the state stores do on most liquors (bottom and mid shelf) and that is before the additional taxes. If you like the good stuff, you can expect the private stores to charge you two to three times what the state stores did before the additional 30% taxes (20% liquor + ~10% sales), but that's only if you can find them in the stores as most don't have any sort of selection.
The Thief In Chief blew over an extra *trillion* *every* *year* and people weren't' smart enough to fire him.
Compared to that a billion is change.
Well, considering the other guy wanted to blow 1.7 trillion every year, the current guy would be the only fiscally sound option. He wanted to increase military spending and decrease taxes and never got around to saying how he would end up even beginning to balance the budget. In the end, The Economist had this to say about a Presidential candidate whose strength was supposed to be on the economy: "For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says." The don't really like Obama, but saw nothing more to like in Romney.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
Possibly, but I really don't see them asking enterprise what we want so they can give it to us as far as a desktop PC OS goes. We don't want great changes or neat tricks. If anything we want small slow changes so that users will probably never notice in the enterprise situation and if they do, will figure it out themselves or can be trained easily. We want our programs to work and not to have to upgrade them because of an OS*. The best thing they have done is made it more secure, which when judging that MS great leap forward is in security, you can make of that what you will.
*We don't want to have to upgrade our OS because of programs either, but that is another rant about how enterprise wants stability rather than endless upgrades and updates with new features that all include new bugs. In the end, enterprise wants something that installs and works until there is a ROI reason to upgrade, which in some stable fields, might take decades because they're mature and not going anywhere soon, because constant upgrades are a costly pain.
Disclaimer: I am a nobody. A simple techie. I left Microsft last year because I felt they were in turmoil internally. Managment where I worked was heinous and ineffective.
This is true. I live in Seattle and have lots of friends that do or have worked for Microsoft. One of the most common ways to break the ice between two MS employees is "How was your last reorg?" They both laugh, talk about the groups they have belonged in, and then move on to more relevant conversation.
They don't seem to grok what people want. People WANT to move to the "cloud" -- as amorphous as that term is.
I'd have to disagree with this. People really don't care about the "cloud", as they just want their stuff to work, and preferably without having to memorize lots of logins and passwords for it to do so. Currently, the ideal way may seem to be the "cloud", but it still makes lots of people unhappy because it still don't work without them having to think about it and connection to the cloud is hardly constant. You could just as easily say that they want all their information to travel with them everywhere on their phone. That also has issues. In the end, whatever gives the most people the most stuff with the least effort will win, and the cloud may be that for a lot of people, but they really don't care about the cloud itself.
Sorry, but this is patently false. Percentage values of product are a usual way of setting rates.
No wonder we don't have any wi-fi enabled cars.
And in a few years when applying for jobs: "oh, you got an A? Good job. But it's a Black A, not an Asian A. So I'm going to call it a C. I'm sorry, but you don't qualify for this job".
Has anybody ever been asked for GPA when applying for a job? Is it really all that common? Sure, I've seen it on resumes, usually from people fresh out of school and want to flaunt their A's. I've never been in an interview or looked at a job application and been asked about grades. Do you have a degree? Yes, then check that off the list and they go on. Given the people that we hear about in the news getting fired because they lied about getting their degree, I suspect there is no real care or fact checking anyway.