Even more insane is that a company that makes purely luxury products has the largest market cap in what everyone has been touting as a "great recession". At least Exxon makes stuff we need...
You don't need a phone or computer? And just consider them 'purely luxury products'? Sorry, I can't even do my job without a phone and computer and there are very few (well paying at least) jobs that you could do without a phone or computer.
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
Contracting for Microsoft for your 90 day mandatory break. Of course, they usually pay well enough that some people do treat it as a three month vacation. Others look for a job once it's up and take it if they find it. While you are not guaranteed your position in your old group back, my friends that do it tell me that you usually know if you'll get in at the end of the 90 days when you leave and even if not, your contracting agency will usually find you a different spot.
With power as finely balanced as it is in the US, a party doesn't need anything like a third of the vote.
Usually what happens, is that if a 3rd party were to get some percentage of the vote, one party or both would just start adopting their platform planks to their own party. It's not like either party actually stand for anything. They simply go with the majority feelings and then divide up the single issue voters for money and guaranteed votes.
If the government really wanted to increase recycling, the first thing they should regulate would be how enclosures are put together. Make philips type screws mandatory everywhere, no glue, torx screws, or any other fastener that requires special tools.
Because phillips head screws are there for one reason, to cam out and strip rather than damage what they go into for easy use by machines. Otherwise they are a crappy type of screw. If you consider torx special tools, I'm really surprised that you also don't consider anything besides a flat head as special. Even then, there are different sizes and you'd still have to go buy a special kit to get the small ones to get into something. Really, torx and robertson heads have been in every cheap changable screwdriver I have bought for the last decade. They're hardly special anymore and all have their uses rather than trying to make things easier for lowest common denominator.
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
And if it were the Federal Government could have ended slavery for a LOT less money and an ENORMOUSLY lower number of lost lives by just buying all the slaves and freeing them, as was suggested at the time by Peter Cooper.
This would meet the constitutional requirements - or of a minor constitutional tweak was deemed necessary it would likely have succeeded if tried.
Nope, Lincoln did try it and was rejected well past the South beginning to lose the Civil War. At the siege of Richmond, when the South asked to discuss terms of surrender as a stalling tactic, Lincoln said if they got rid of slavery and rejoined the US as if nothing had happened, he would agree to whatever terms the South wanted, easily including things like paying compensation for the slaves and payment for other damage done during the war.
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war. It just so happened that the economics of the South were based on slave labor. So while Congressmen in both chambers of Congress from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were debating economic strife, the underlying issue was that the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad but were free to walk away from their jobs.
Nothing was good about either side in those times, but the North was slightly less bad.
And General Grant agreed in his memoirs on the causes of the Civil War, that it was economic in nature, but for different reasons. First, just ten years before Texas had won independence and a treaty favoring them with Mexico at the cost of the US. The war to do that was mostly paid for by the North. Second, the South, with most of its workers being forced to remain uneducated and unskilled labor by law, prevented them from ever becoming an economic power to rival the North whose workforce was becoming more educated and skilled as time went by. In the end, while he states that he had no doubt that soon after the Constitution was written, any state that wanted to could have left, however, after all this time, there was no way the South could profit from the United States and then take that profit and leave without approval of the same United States. Likewise, the United States could not continue to allow the South to drag them down by preventing their work force from becoming educated and skilled.
Somehow, the situation, while not as extreme, seems like it hasn't changed much in current years.
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
IIRC, Lincoln was questioned on the conditions between Northern factory workers and Southern slaves, his response was that none of the children of the factory workers were forced by law to be factory workers when they grew up.
If Steve Jobs was around and decided that Apple should not be part of EPEAT, then Apple would remain off EPEAT for good regardless of consumer opinion or corporate backlash. Instead the new Apple appears to pander to the same.
Apple lost its balls with Steve.
Microsoft is the definitive champion of a business model involving brash announcements, gathering of opinion, and eventual backpedaling, hopefully Tim Cooke is not looking to take over that title.
I think you have a short memory. The Apple community has always been very vocal about stuff they don't like and having Apple backpedal. Way back when "Apple is dying" days, there would be an update, or a change and the Apple community would be up in arms across all the Apple fan sites. A week or two later there would be a "Sorry, didn't know you wanted that. There we put it back." announcement.
There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology?
The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
Hardly. One, they'll probably be interested in what we aren't writing down. The most common things are usually never documented because they are so common and no one thought they needed to be documented. Two, we lie and only write down what we want people to know, or at best with what we have deluded ourselves to believe.
Heck, we can feed everybody in the world who doesn't have a secure supply of food for 1/10th the US military budget. But when was the last time Starvin Marvin donated generously to a PAC, eh?
True, but then we'd need ten times the military budget to actually get it to the people who need it. If it was as simple as just giving people food, we'd already do it. Instead, if we hand out food, it gets collected and used or sold again by dictators, warlords, and corrupt officials and the people who need it never see the money or the food.
Probably because:
It has an antagonistic title.
It's made by an AC.
It makes a vague statement without support.
Just as a broken clock is correct twice a day, a troll can troll with statements that can be supported. However, the clock is still broke, and the troll is still just trying to antagonize rather than actually add to a conversation. If Mr. AC had bothered to put a non-sensational title, or even left the title but written a well supported explaination of why he believes as he did, it probably would have been fine. For example, there is a big difference between saying "Impeach the President!" and "The President should be impeached because of reasons A, B, and C", followed by links showing those reasons and the relevant US laws. As it is, it looks like a hater troll upmodded by other haters.
Isn't red-shift the result of relative velocities, not energy loss? (Which removes the mystery of where it goes)
Both actually. Red shift can be caused by the result of relative velocities but it can also be caused by moving out of a gravitational field which results in energy loss. For that matter, it can also be caused by the expansion of space over time via Hubble's Law.
One thing you often see on shirt-pocket computers is bluetooth.
ANother thing you see with shirt pocket computers is them sliding out of your pocket and into the toilet as you bend over to flush. Tried that format with my phone. Never again.
Looks like Reddit's systems weren't ready for the leap second. It been down since around midnight (UTC). You'd think a site as big as that would be ready for such an event.
Have you tried truing it off and turning it on again?
You do realize that Romney drafted a very similar plan?
Ya, but if elected president, he never would have seriously expected it to make it through congress. Just run it up the flag pole, get shot down, and go on with business able to tell people he tried. Just like the last two presidents.
>>>Only if a small startup can eat your [monopoly]
You mean like Google?
In the 90s they were the "small startup" you describe, and they faced-off against the mighty monopoly that is Microsoft.
No, they faced-off with Yahoo! back when Yahoo was a verb. They mostly won because they were quicker and better with streamlined front page and better algorithms and Yahoo didn't change in time.
Ten cents and hour doubling every month will make you more in a year and a half than the $100k/year would in those same time, and impossibly more after that. I'd see it as a question judging how long you wanted to work at Microsoft. If you were in for a career, you'd end up making more than Bill. If you wanted to jump ship in a year with MS on your resume to make more some place else, then 1 would be the answer. Different people want different things. Some just want to jump jobs every year or two for better raises and to keep things interesting. Some are looking to stick around for the long haul. Projects also look for both sorts of people. Since we probably don't know what he wants, I'd be honest and discuss how long I wanted to stay with MS and what my future plans were.
What I would have answered would have depended on when I interviewed. Earlier, I'd take the money and run. Later, when asked what I saw myself doing two years from now in an interview, my response was "still sitting here doing the same thing. I've played the.com job jumping game for years now and am ready to settle down." That was the answer they were looking for as they had to refill that position every year. They paid me more than I asked and here I still am ten years later.
There is a story from my ancestral homeland in which the boys of a tribe were given a Cocoa bean, which they were required to eat, and then sent out into the forest to fend for himself. If he survived the caffeine and the forest he was allowed to rejoin the tribe.
In my homeland of Oklahoma, every boy is given a handgun, bottle of whiskey, and a motorcycle on their 16th birthday. Those that survive are allowed to breed.
Pretty standard MS vaporware, IMHO. They succeeded in the past in getting folks to wait for crap that didn't work so well by doing just this kind of thing. It'll probably work this time too.
Except in those cases it was to hurt a small company by displaying a competing product so people would not buy from the small company. Then, when small company is desperate because they can't reach the break even point, MS would buy the small company and their product then kill their competing product. Somehow, I don't think that is going to work against Apple. But still, only the low end surface is competing against Apple and the iPad. The high end model is competing against the MacAir and really against all the MacAir Windows clones. They even said flat out that their pricing would be comparable to both the iPad and ultrabooks. They're only really keeping people from buying their own products already by going into competition with Windows tablets and ultrabooks. Perhaps they need to for a decent product to come out, but this is still changing how MS operates by entering into competition with their own resellers.
"Minimum wage" is a modern invention. It's a stupid idea that doesn't work.
LOL. It only prevents us from having riots in the streets like in the good ol' days of robber baron capitalism. You know, even rich people understand that if there are too many destitute poor people around them, sooner or later there's going to be a fight, and the poor are numerically superior...
Reminds me of a quote I read once:
"The poor were for Social Security because it beat starving to death.
The middle class were for Social Security because it was better than nothing.
The rich were for Social Security because it beat being drug into the street and killed."
Sad to see how at one time Americans took pride in quality and "Made in America"; now they just wanted the cheapest quantity possible.:-/
It's worse than that and it's not even Foxconn we should be worried about. We have not been able to even make our own parts for some time now. A decade or two ago, an American firm tried to make a "made in USA" VCR. Surprise, they found out that nobody in the US made the parts needed to go in them (heads and some other parts IIRC). They tried to buy them from Asia where they are all made and were refused. They were able to finally get them by taking the companies to court with anti-trust laws and winning. China/Foxconn don't even make that much off the iPad compared to others. The companies in S Korea that make the parts make more that twice what China makes off of each iPad.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more insane is that a company that makes purely luxury products has the largest market cap in what everyone has been touting as a "great recession". At least Exxon makes stuff we need...
You don't need a phone or computer? And just consider them 'purely luxury products'? Sorry, I can't even do my job without a phone and computer and there are very few (well paying at least) jobs that you could do without a phone or computer.
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
Contracting for Microsoft for your 90 day mandatory break. Of course, they usually pay well enough that some people do treat it as a three month vacation. Others look for a job once it's up and take it if they find it. While you are not guaranteed your position in your old group back, my friends that do it tell me that you usually know if you'll get in at the end of the 90 days when you leave and even if not, your contracting agency will usually find you a different spot.
With power as finely balanced as it is in the US, a party doesn't need anything like a third of the vote.
Usually what happens, is that if a 3rd party were to get some percentage of the vote, one party or both would just start adopting their platform planks to their own party. It's not like either party actually stand for anything. They simply go with the majority feelings and then divide up the single issue voters for money and guaranteed votes.
If the government really wanted to increase recycling, the first thing they should regulate would be how enclosures are put together. Make philips type screws mandatory everywhere, no glue, torx screws, or any other fastener that requires special tools.
Because phillips head screws are there for one reason, to cam out and strip rather than damage what they go into for easy use by machines. Otherwise they are a crappy type of screw. If you consider torx special tools, I'm really surprised that you also don't consider anything besides a flat head as special. Even then, there are different sizes and you'd still have to go buy a special kit to get the small ones to get into something. Really, torx and robertson heads have been in every cheap changable screwdriver I have bought for the last decade. They're hardly special anymore and all have their uses rather than trying to make things easier for lowest common denominator.
The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.
And if it were the Federal Government could have ended slavery for a LOT less money and an ENORMOUSLY lower number of lost lives by just buying all the slaves and freeing them, as was suggested at the time by Peter Cooper.
This would meet the constitutional requirements - or of a minor constitutional tweak was deemed necessary it would likely have succeeded if tried.
Nope, Lincoln did try it and was rejected well past the South beginning to lose the Civil War. At the siege of Richmond, when the South asked to discuss terms of surrender as a stalling tactic, Lincoln said if they got rid of slavery and rejoined the US as if nothing had happened, he would agree to whatever terms the South wanted, easily including things like paying compensation for the slaves and payment for other damage done during the war.
My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war. It just so happened that the economics of the South were based on slave labor. So while Congressmen in both chambers of Congress from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were debating economic strife, the underlying issue was that the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad but were free to walk away from their jobs.
Nothing was good about either side in those times, but the North was slightly less bad.
And General Grant agreed in his memoirs on the causes of the Civil War, that it was economic in nature, but for different reasons. First, just ten years before Texas had won independence and a treaty favoring them with Mexico at the cost of the US. The war to do that was mostly paid for by the North. Second, the South, with most of its workers being forced to remain uneducated and unskilled labor by law, prevented them from ever becoming an economic power to rival the North whose workforce was becoming more educated and skilled as time went by. In the end, while he states that he had no doubt that soon after the Constitution was written, any state that wanted to could have left, however, after all this time, there was no way the South could profit from the United States and then take that profit and leave without approval of the same United States. Likewise, the United States could not continue to allow the South to drag them down by preventing their work force from becoming educated and skilled.
Somehow, the situation, while not as extreme, seems like it hasn't changed much in current years.
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
IIRC, Lincoln was questioned on the conditions between Northern factory workers and Southern slaves, his response was that none of the children of the factory workers were forced by law to be factory workers when they grew up.
2+2=5, for very large values of 2
That never made sense to me. It always seemed that 2+2 should equal 6 for very large values of 2.
Depends on the units.
If Steve Jobs was around and decided that Apple should not be part of EPEAT, then Apple would remain off EPEAT for good regardless of consumer opinion or corporate backlash. Instead the new Apple appears to pander to the same.
Apple lost its balls with Steve.
Microsoft is the definitive champion of a business model involving brash announcements, gathering of opinion, and eventual backpedaling, hopefully Tim Cooke is not looking to take over that title.
I think you have a short memory. The Apple community has always been very vocal about stuff they don't like and having Apple backpedal. Way back when "Apple is dying" days, there would be an update, or a change and the Apple community would be up in arms across all the Apple fan sites. A week or two later there would be a "Sorry, didn't know you wanted that. There we put it back." announcement.
There will be no future archaeologists. How can they assume a huge cultural discontinuity that would require archaeology? The only reason we have any archaeology is because people didn't write anything down.
Hardly. One, they'll probably be interested in what we aren't writing down. The most common things are usually never documented because they are so common and no one thought they needed to be documented. Two, we lie and only write down what we want people to know, or at best with what we have deluded ourselves to believe.
Heck, we can feed everybody in the world who doesn't have a secure supply of food for 1/10th the US military budget. But when was the last time Starvin Marvin donated generously to a PAC, eh?
True, but then we'd need ten times the military budget to actually get it to the people who need it. If it was as simple as just giving people food, we'd already do it. Instead, if we hand out food, it gets collected and used or sold again by dictators, warlords, and corrupt officials and the people who need it never see the money or the food.
HORDE of lobbyists.
Lok-tar!
Why did this get marked down?
Probably because:
It has an antagonistic title.
It's made by an AC.
It makes a vague statement without support.
Just as a broken clock is correct twice a day, a troll can troll with statements that can be supported. However, the clock is still broke, and the troll is still just trying to antagonize rather than actually add to a conversation. If Mr. AC had bothered to put a non-sensational title, or even left the title but written a well supported explaination of why he believes as he did, it probably would have been fine. For example, there is a big difference between saying "Impeach the President!" and "The President should be impeached because of reasons A, B, and C", followed by links showing those reasons and the relevant US laws. As it is, it looks like a hater troll upmodded by other haters.
Isn't red-shift the result of relative velocities, not energy loss? (Which removes the mystery of where it goes)
Both actually. Red shift can be caused by the result of relative velocities but it can also be caused by moving out of a gravitational field which results in energy loss. For that matter, it can also be caused by the expansion of space over time via Hubble's Law.
One thing you often see on shirt-pocket computers is bluetooth.
ANother thing you see with shirt pocket computers is them sliding out of your pocket and into the toilet as you bend over to flush. Tried that format with my phone. Never again.
Looks like Reddit's systems weren't ready for the leap second. It been down since around midnight (UTC). You'd think a site as big as that would be ready for such an event.
Have you tried truing it off and turning it on again?
You're thinking of Eric Clapton.
I was thinking more of Eric Cartman.
You do realize that Romney drafted a very similar plan?
Ya, but if elected president, he never would have seriously expected it to make it through congress. Just run it up the flag pole, get shot down, and go on with business able to tell people he tried. Just like the last two presidents.
>>>Only if a small startup can eat your [monopoly]
You mean like Google? In the 90s they were the "small startup" you describe, and they faced-off against the mighty monopoly that is Microsoft.
No, they faced-off with Yahoo! back when Yahoo was a verb. They mostly won because they were quicker and better with streamlined front page and better algorithms and Yahoo didn't change in time.
Ten cents and hour doubling every month will make you more in a year and a half than the $100k/year would in those same time, and impossibly more after that. I'd see it as a question judging how long you wanted to work at Microsoft. If you were in for a career, you'd end up making more than Bill. If you wanted to jump ship in a year with MS on your resume to make more some place else, then 1 would be the answer. Different people want different things. Some just want to jump jobs every year or two for better raises and to keep things interesting. Some are looking to stick around for the long haul. Projects also look for both sorts of people. Since we probably don't know what he wants, I'd be honest and discuss how long I wanted to stay with MS and what my future plans were.
What I would have answered would have depended on when I interviewed. Earlier, I'd take the money and run. Later, when asked what I saw myself doing two years from now in an interview, my response was "still sitting here doing the same thing. I've played the .com job jumping game for years now and am ready to settle down." That was the answer they were looking for as they had to refill that position every year. They paid me more than I asked and here I still am ten years later.
I'm not sure why "forest school" needs to exist.
Well, they tried "city schools" but the kids kept coming back hooked on heroin.
There is a story from my ancestral homeland in which the boys of a tribe were given a Cocoa bean, which they were required to eat, and then sent out into the forest to fend for himself. If he survived the caffeine and the forest he was allowed to rejoin the tribe.
In my homeland of Oklahoma, every boy is given a handgun, bottle of whiskey, and a motorcycle on their 16th birthday. Those that survive are allowed to breed.
Pretty standard MS vaporware, IMHO. They succeeded in the past in getting folks to wait for crap that didn't work so well by doing just this kind of thing. It'll probably work this time too.
Except in those cases it was to hurt a small company by displaying a competing product so people would not buy from the small company. Then, when small company is desperate because they can't reach the break even point, MS would buy the small company and their product then kill their competing product. Somehow, I don't think that is going to work against Apple. But still, only the low end surface is competing against Apple and the iPad. The high end model is competing against the MacAir and really against all the MacAir Windows clones. They even said flat out that their pricing would be comparable to both the iPad and ultrabooks. They're only really keeping people from buying their own products already by going into competition with Windows tablets and ultrabooks. Perhaps they need to for a decent product to come out, but this is still changing how MS operates by entering into competition with their own resellers.
LOL. It only prevents us from having riots in the streets like in the good ol' days of robber baron capitalism. You know, even rich people understand that if there are too many destitute poor people around them, sooner or later there's going to be a fight, and the poor are numerically superior...
Reminds me of a quote I read once:
"The poor were for Social Security because it beat starving to death.
The middle class were for Social Security because it was better than nothing.
The rich were for Social Security because it beat being drug into the street and killed."
Sad to see how at one time Americans took pride in quality and "Made in America"; now they just wanted the cheapest quantity possible. :-/
It's worse than that and it's not even Foxconn we should be worried about. We have not been able to even make our own parts for some time now. A decade or two ago, an American firm tried to make a "made in USA" VCR. Surprise, they found out that nobody in the US made the parts needed to go in them (heads and some other parts IIRC). They tried to buy them from Asia where they are all made and were refused. They were able to finally get them by taking the companies to court with anti-trust laws and winning. China/Foxconn don't even make that much off the iPad compared to others. The companies in S Korea that make the parts make more that twice what China makes off of each iPad.