And not all prospective students have the kind of resources necessary for hobby projects.
They don't have access to the internet so they can download their language of choice to a cheapo system and start playing? Nonsense. You can get that at the local public library, or any public school, and if you demonstrate you're curious and committed enough, someone "in the know" will eventually help you get started. And it's all for free (money-wise, anyway) -- the "prospective student" just needs to be interested in learning the stuff, and demonstrate that.
Apparently the security personnel who fondled the kid in this instance were in fact private contractors and not TSA. Doesn't matter . . . they still have to abide by the retarded Federal regs.
That's because the Israelis are actually serious about preventing terrorism. TSA is just a jobs program, kickbacks to those who make and sell the expensive security tech which really doesn't do anything, and purposeful expansion of the size of government and control over the lives of US citizens.
I guess when Google ignores authors' rights and digitizes millions of books at a time, it's OK, but God forbid if someone downloads a few.mp3s. The duplicity is shocking. Just another example of a fucking corporation having more rights than the individual.
Do you *really* think he never had the choice of, "For once, let's let France and the UK take care of this, and stay out of it 100%"? Exactly how is firing hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at $1.5 million *each* less expensive than letting the frogs and the brits have a go on their own? And that's before we start adding on planes, bombs, and the personnel and logistics required to support them. Yeah, what BHO did was definitely the cheapest option. Funny how I keep hearing this excuse from BHO's supporters: "Doing *nothing* would cost more." We heard it with the trillions spent on the stimulus, and the 2,200 page healthcare turd. Yet conveniently, no one can produce any facts to prove any of these claims of impending doom tied to inaction. Meanwhile, we continue to spending more money that we don't have on defense and entitlements -- the real money, the non-descretional spending -- while Boehner and Reid put on a little "shutdown" show arguing over a paltry $30 billion in order to score a few points. It's pathetic, but the voters in this country have exactly what they deserve.
Funny, that chart's data ends a year ago. That's a nice touch too, how it cuts off right at March 2010, padded by ~50K temporary Census jobs, to give it a pretty upward spike at the very end. But where's today's chart showing all of the last year, so we can revel in the full extent of the Savior's impact?
Seriously dude, your partisan hate is waaaay over the top. Anyone claiming a decade long Republican (or Democrat) conspiracy to destroy the US -- and who really believes that -- is part of the reason the fuckers in DC, on both sides, get away with what they do. They want to divide the citizenry to make us think that one side is really better or different than the other. That way, they get to take turns fucking things up and kiss ass to the special interests that got them elected in the first place, and switch back every two to six years, when the idiot citizenry gets bored or pissed at who spent more on TV commercials. And you've fallen for it, hook, line and sinker, just like all the slackjawed right wing drones watching Fox News. But guess what? In the real world, BHO is no different than GWB -- he's just a better salesman, he's black instead of white, and has a little D instead of a little R after his name. But he still doesn't give a *fuck* about you, and like all other politicians, he only cares about getting reelected. And, just like GWB, he's quite happy to trample all over the Constitution do whatever the hell he wants. Because, you know, he's *President.* Sorry to burst your bubble, but he's definitely *not* "change" -- he's the goddamned same as all the others.
We're still in Iraq. We're still in Afghanistan. He's started a third war in Libya. Gitmo is still open. Unemployment is still way too high. We're still broke and spending more than we ever have. The Patriot Act is still around and the Administration continues to press on with other initiatives which erode the rights of American citizens. So, exactly how is BHO "head and shoulders above GWB"?
So, exactly how long does Mr. Obama get a pass for everything he does because he was preceded by Bush? 4 years? 8? While that might fly with the core Democrats, I doubt the independents who helped put him in in 2008 will be so forgiving in 2012. This last election should have been a wakeup call that the majority are sick of this endless spending (and yeah, I'm including the two stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and want it to stop. Seems the White House didn't get the message.
Interesting. Let me add on a real-world example of one case where offshoring has driven an IT segment out of the country, and it's not coming back:
A US company, at volume, can obtain relatively low-skilled image manipulation and data entry rates as low as $0.50 - $0.75 / hour by sending work overseas to various countries in Southeast Asia. These aren't slave kids chained to a desk and beaten with rubber hoses in some sweat shop -- they're ordinary, relatively poor but bright people given a shot to do something IT-related in a normal office environment. Next step up is India and China -- $1 - $3 / hour. As the owner of a startup, I currently pay US workers $9-11 / hour to do the same thing because our company haven't yet achieved the necessary volume of work to offshore. Once we do -- you guessed it -- we will offshore as well, because all of our competitors, both at home and abroad, do it, and if we don't join them, they'll kill us on price in the long term. Some are suggesting an isolationist / nationalist policy of forcing US companies to stop offshoring -- "stop sending jobs overseas!" While that may seem like a fix, it won't affect our out-of-US competitors selling into the international markets (or even into the US), and we along with other US companies will be simply priced out of deals. Additionally, the higher costs will just get passed on to the customers, resulting in less work getting done because the funds budgeted for projects don't go as far.
The bottom line is that our standard of living in the US relative to much of the rest of the world is quite high, and it requires a certain wage scale. You can't find anyone here to work for $0.50 / hour because no one can live on that here. But $0.50 / hour is more money than the average person makes in certain other countries, so it's easy to find people to work there for such a wage. In 2011, offshoring is a requirement for doing many kinds of business in order to compete at all. There is no fix.
. . . a comprehensive, all-encompassing attempt was an absolutely terrible idea. It was doomed to fail from the start. The reason that the reform that was passed was 2,000+ pages was because it was so full of corporate handouts and other special interest nastiness which further screws the taxpayer. That was the highest priority, and beyond that, increasing the number of Democrat voters by increasing the size of the insured pool. Real, meaningful healthcare reform would have actually addressed the cost-related issues in small, incremental amounts, with demonstrable benefits, rather than just handing over trillions to corporations at the citizens' expense, while claiming benefit to the unwashed masses -- all so Obama can declare to his supporters that he passed "the most meaningful healthcare reform in the country's history," just in time for the 2012 reelection campaign. Yeah, meaningful alright, as in prohibitively expensive and overreaching to the point of being unconstitutional.
Why was big pharma left out of the dance? How about tort reform? If we're looking to cut costs, the drug makers and fucking lawyers would sure be at the top of my list.
I'm surprised it has yet been mentioned in this thread: time and again, the universities and publishers have conspired against the adoption of open source textbooks and other teaching materials. They'd rather have access to that sweet, sweet revenue gained by forcing kids to buy a new copy of the English 101 textbook every fall. In reality, how much does the English 101 course material change year-to-year? It's a perfect example of something that could be maintained online by a working group and distributed freely, and updated as needed . . . but since they're addicted to the revenue like crack, they can't get rid of the books, even though they're inferior in every way to an electronic text, and add an unnecessary expense to the already exhorbitant cost of higher education.
I'm not suggesting that this model fits all textbooks, but probably 80% of your typical undergrad courseload is fair game, for starters. It's all about the money.
Sure . . . Apple is good at the prosumer-and-above A/V niche. Always has been. But that is a niche, and only a tiny fraction of their business as a whole. They're not going to do billions in revenue selling copies of FCP, or Mac Pros to Pro Tools users, even if those things are (perhaps) the best tools out there. The market is too small for that.
Apple has had its success during the last decade through reinventing itself as a high-margin consumer electronics provider (iPod, iPhone, and now maybe iPad) with the highest perceived quality out there. There is a *ton* of hype around those products. No one markets mainstream electronics to consumers with relatively high disposable income better than Apple. That's not going to change anytime soon. With a few exceptions, Microsoft doesn't really do hardware, so the comparison between Apple and Microsoft is kinda lame anyway.
You can go back 15 years and see people claiming the same thing about Windows 95 -- "the end of Microsoft." Or four years and read about iPod versus Zune -- "the end of Microsoft." Or Google versus Bing more recently. Why exactly do you think it will be different this time around?
Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards
Are you sure you're not talking about Apple here? Doesn't iTunes make users jump through hoops to get MP3s that will play anywhere? Can I (easily, for a non-technical user) run OS X on non-Apple hardware? Come on -- calling Microsoft "locked" compared to that is just silly.
Because most people are too stupid and / or lazy to be bothered to mess with the privacy controls. Facebook knows this, and exploits it (like many other sites) to build their pool of demographic / advertising data. That's why the controls are generally buried several menus deep and hard to find. It's no different than being subscribed to an online vendor's email newsletter by default unless you *uncheck* that box during checkout. Every time Facebook adds a new feature, it gives them another chance to add to the pool and increase their ad revenue. And you can't blame them really, being that the service is free for its users and selling ads is their primary revenue source.
No fucking excuse. I don't care who's doing the work. Why is this level of suck ever tolerated, anywhere? The government signs the checks . . . no one else. If it's a contractual issue that keeps NYC paying for this, they were retards to sign up in the first place. Litigate, or break the contract. But this can't go on any longer. With the insane taxes NY / NYC residents already pay (and taxpayers nationwide in the form of Federal stimulus $$$ that NY gets), this type of waste and incompetence (and undoubtedly fraud) is simply unexcusable. Heads should roll, politicians should lose their jobs, and members of the private firm should be blacklisted permanently to keep them from doing this somewhere else. There need to be *consequences* for the government AND the private firm doing the work. Part of the reason we're in so much trouble in this country is that so many don't want it to hurt anymore when you touch a hot stove.
But that's a straw man. It's not a Dem / Rep thing. There's no choice -- the current system spends billions either way, and these days, we just don't have it. That's what's messed up. We can't afford the bill that was just passed -- even if the government wasn't going to raid the new healthcare taxes and use them as a slush fund (which they will -- see Social Security).
There will always be poor people. There will always be uninsureds. But the bill that was passed increases the number of poor insureds, paid for by those of us who actually pay taxes, and does nothing of substance to reduce the cost of insurance. It just increases the size of the pool, but less people pay into it. That's why some of us get a bit prickly when the government arbitrarily defines what should be "spared," and that amount keeps going up. I would gladly support true cost-cutting measures -- and logic dictates that you have to reduce cost before increasing the size of the pool if you want to stay solvent. But the government hasn't done anything logical in a really long time.
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784.
The problem is that the "what may be annually spared" part is defined by the government and not the individual. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Jefferson quote stating that paying 50 cents on the dollar in taxes was what he meant.
Slashdot Mirror
And not all prospective students have the kind of resources necessary for hobby projects.
They don't have access to the internet so they can download their language of choice to a cheapo system and start playing? Nonsense. You can get that at the local public library, or any public school, and if you demonstrate you're curious and committed enough, someone "in the know" will eventually help you get started. And it's all for free (money-wise, anyway) -- the "prospective student" just needs to be interested in learning the stuff, and demonstrate that.
Apparently the security personnel who fondled the kid in this instance were in fact private contractors and not TSA. Doesn't matter . . . they still have to abide by the retarded Federal regs.
That's because the Israelis are actually serious about preventing terrorism. TSA is just a jobs program, kickbacks to those who make and sell the expensive security tech which really doesn't do anything, and purposeful expansion of the size of government and control over the lives of US citizens.
. . . here's a low-bandwidth version: o
Eat it. Karma is a bitch.
I guess when Google ignores authors' rights and digitizes millions of books at a time, it's OK, but God forbid if someone downloads a few .mp3s. The duplicity is shocking. Just another example of a fucking corporation having more rights than the individual.
Do you *really* think he never had the choice of, "For once, let's let France and the UK take care of this, and stay out of it 100%"? Exactly how is firing hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at $1.5 million *each* less expensive than letting the frogs and the brits have a go on their own? And that's before we start adding on planes, bombs, and the personnel and logistics required to support them. Yeah, what BHO did was definitely the cheapest option. Funny how I keep hearing this excuse from BHO's supporters: "Doing *nothing* would cost more." We heard it with the trillions spent on the stimulus, and the 2,200 page healthcare turd. Yet conveniently, no one can produce any facts to prove any of these claims of impending doom tied to inaction. Meanwhile, we continue to spending more money that we don't have on defense and entitlements -- the real money, the non-descretional spending -- while Boehner and Reid put on a little "shutdown" show arguing over a paltry $30 billion in order to score a few points. It's pathetic, but the voters in this country have exactly what they deserve.
Funny, that chart's data ends a year ago. That's a nice touch too, how it cuts off right at March 2010, padded by ~50K temporary Census jobs, to give it a pretty upward spike at the very end. But where's today's chart showing all of the last year, so we can revel in the full extent of the Savior's impact?
Seriously dude, your partisan hate is waaaay over the top. Anyone claiming a decade long Republican (or Democrat) conspiracy to destroy the US -- and who really believes that -- is part of the reason the fuckers in DC, on both sides, get away with what they do. They want to divide the citizenry to make us think that one side is really better or different than the other. That way, they get to take turns fucking things up and kiss ass to the special interests that got them elected in the first place, and switch back every two to six years, when the idiot citizenry gets bored or pissed at who spent more on TV commercials. And you've fallen for it, hook, line and sinker, just like all the slackjawed right wing drones watching Fox News. But guess what? In the real world, BHO is no different than GWB -- he's just a better salesman, he's black instead of white, and has a little D instead of a little R after his name. But he still doesn't give a *fuck* about you, and like all other politicians, he only cares about getting reelected. And, just like GWB, he's quite happy to trample all over the Constitution do whatever the hell he wants. Because, you know, he's *President.* Sorry to burst your bubble, but he's definitely *not* "change" -- he's the goddamned same as all the others.
he is still head and shoulders above GWB
We're still in Iraq. We're still in Afghanistan. He's started a third war in Libya. Gitmo is still open. Unemployment is still way too high. We're still broke and spending more than we ever have. The Patriot Act is still around and the Administration continues to press on with other initiatives which erode the rights of American citizens. So, exactly how is BHO "head and shoulders above GWB"?
I bet Ms. Janet Napolitano is wet just hearing about this*.
I doubt it. Remember, we're talking about the same person who refused to go through the body scanners so we wouldn't see her giant cock.
So, exactly how long does Mr. Obama get a pass for everything he does because he was preceded by Bush? 4 years? 8? While that might fly with the core Democrats, I doubt the independents who helped put him in in 2008 will be so forgiving in 2012. This last election should have been a wakeup call that the majority are sick of this endless spending (and yeah, I'm including the two stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and want it to stop. Seems the White House didn't get the message.
Interesting. Let me add on a real-world example of one case where offshoring has driven an IT segment out of the country, and it's not coming back:
A US company, at volume, can obtain relatively low-skilled image manipulation and data entry rates as low as $0.50 - $0.75 / hour by sending work overseas to various countries in Southeast Asia. These aren't slave kids chained to a desk and beaten with rubber hoses in some sweat shop -- they're ordinary, relatively poor but bright people given a shot to do something IT-related in a normal office environment. Next step up is India and China -- $1 - $3 / hour. As the owner of a startup, I currently pay US workers $9-11 / hour to do the same thing because our company haven't yet achieved the necessary volume of work to offshore. Once we do -- you guessed it -- we will offshore as well, because all of our competitors, both at home and abroad, do it, and if we don't join them, they'll kill us on price in the long term. Some are suggesting an isolationist / nationalist policy of forcing US companies to stop offshoring -- "stop sending jobs overseas!" While that may seem like a fix, it won't affect our out-of-US competitors selling into the international markets (or even into the US), and we along with other US companies will be simply priced out of deals. Additionally, the higher costs will just get passed on to the customers, resulting in less work getting done because the funds budgeted for projects don't go as far.
The bottom line is that our standard of living in the US relative to much of the rest of the world is quite high, and it requires a certain wage scale. You can't find anyone here to work for $0.50 / hour because no one can live on that here. But $0.50 / hour is more money than the average person makes in certain other countries, so it's easy to find people to work there for such a wage. In 2011, offshoring is a requirement for doing many kinds of business in order to compete at all. There is no fix.
. . . a comprehensive, all-encompassing attempt was an absolutely terrible idea. It was doomed to fail from the start. The reason that the reform that was passed was 2,000+ pages was because it was so full of corporate handouts and other special interest nastiness which further screws the taxpayer. That was the highest priority, and beyond that, increasing the number of Democrat voters by increasing the size of the insured pool. Real, meaningful healthcare reform would have actually addressed the cost-related issues in small, incremental amounts, with demonstrable benefits, rather than just handing over trillions to corporations at the citizens' expense, while claiming benefit to the unwashed masses -- all so Obama can declare to his supporters that he passed "the most meaningful healthcare reform in the country's history," just in time for the 2012 reelection campaign. Yeah, meaningful alright, as in prohibitively expensive and overreaching to the point of being unconstitutional.
Why was big pharma left out of the dance? How about tort reform? If we're looking to cut costs, the drug makers and fucking lawyers would sure be at the top of my list.
Not sure about Twitter but Google's ties to the Obama administration are well documented:
http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfidential/2010/11/11/mr-issa-take-note-of-google-and-obama-coziness/
and
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/23/googleburton/
No broadband tech has lived for more than 3 years so far.
Oh dear Lord! We call that profession "The Widow-maker" - or we would, if any of the proprietors were married.
"I am Subotai! Thief and archer! I am Hyrkanian . . . the great order of Kerlait!"
"So what are you doing here?"
"Dinner for wolves."
[both laugh]
I'm surprised it has yet been mentioned in this thread: time and again, the universities and publishers have conspired against the adoption of open source textbooks and other teaching materials. They'd rather have access to that sweet, sweet revenue gained by forcing kids to buy a new copy of the English 101 textbook every fall. In reality, how much does the English 101 course material change year-to-year? It's a perfect example of something that could be maintained online by a working group and distributed freely, and updated as needed . . . but since they're addicted to the revenue like crack, they can't get rid of the books, even though they're inferior in every way to an electronic text, and add an unnecessary expense to the already exhorbitant cost of higher education.
I'm not suggesting that this model fits all textbooks, but probably 80% of your typical undergrad courseload is fair game, for starters. It's all about the money.
Reality check to them: you're never going to get by selling the same thing everybody else does for double the price because it's in a trendy setting.
Starbucks might disagree with you.
Sure . . . Apple is good at the prosumer-and-above A/V niche. Always has been. But that is a niche, and only a tiny fraction of their business as a whole. They're not going to do billions in revenue selling copies of FCP, or Mac Pros to Pro Tools users, even if those things are (perhaps) the best tools out there. The market is too small for that.
Apple has had its success during the last decade through reinventing itself as a high-margin consumer electronics provider (iPod, iPhone, and now maybe iPad) with the highest perceived quality out there. There is a *ton* of hype around those products. No one markets mainstream electronics to consumers with relatively high disposable income better than Apple. That's not going to change anytime soon. With a few exceptions, Microsoft doesn't really do hardware, so the comparison between Apple and Microsoft is kinda lame anyway.
You can go back 15 years and see people claiming the same thing about Windows 95 -- "the end of Microsoft." Or four years and read about iPod versus Zune -- "the end of Microsoft." Or Google versus Bing more recently. Why exactly do you think it will be different this time around?
Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards
Are you sure you're not talking about Apple here? Doesn't iTunes make users jump through hoops to get MP3s that will play anywhere? Can I (easily, for a non-technical user) run OS X on non-Apple hardware? Come on -- calling Microsoft "locked" compared to that is just silly.
God, I just lost 40 IQ points reading the garbage summary. Can you be any more biased?
Because most people are too stupid and / or lazy to be bothered to mess with the privacy controls. Facebook knows this, and exploits it (like many other sites) to build their pool of demographic / advertising data. That's why the controls are generally buried several menus deep and hard to find. It's no different than being subscribed to an online vendor's email newsletter by default unless you *uncheck* that box during checkout. Every time Facebook adds a new feature, it gives them another chance to add to the pool and increase their ad revenue. And you can't blame them really, being that the service is free for its users and selling ads is their primary revenue source.
No fucking excuse. I don't care who's doing the work. Why is this level of suck ever tolerated, anywhere? The government signs the checks . . . no one else. If it's a contractual issue that keeps NYC paying for this, they were retards to sign up in the first place. Litigate, or break the contract. But this can't go on any longer. With the insane taxes NY / NYC residents already pay (and taxpayers nationwide in the form of Federal stimulus $$$ that NY gets), this type of waste and incompetence (and undoubtedly fraud) is simply unexcusable. Heads should roll, politicians should lose their jobs, and members of the private firm should be blacklisted permanently to keep them from doing this somewhere else. There need to be *consequences* for the government AND the private firm doing the work. Part of the reason we're in so much trouble in this country is that so many don't want it to hurt anymore when you touch a hot stove.
But that's a straw man. It's not a Dem / Rep thing. There's no choice -- the current system spends billions either way, and these days, we just don't have it. That's what's messed up. We can't afford the bill that was just passed -- even if the government wasn't going to raid the new healthcare taxes and use them as a slush fund (which they will -- see Social Security).
There will always be poor people. There will always be uninsureds. But the bill that was passed increases the number of poor insureds, paid for by those of us who actually pay taxes, and does nothing of substance to reduce the cost of insurance. It just increases the size of the pool, but less people pay into it. That's why some of us get a bit prickly when the government arbitrarily defines what should be "spared," and that amount keeps going up. I would gladly support true cost-cutting measures -- and logic dictates that you have to reduce cost before increasing the size of the pool if you want to stay solvent. But the government hasn't done anything logical in a really long time.
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784.
The problem is that the "what may be annually spared" part is defined by the government and not the individual. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Jefferson quote stating that paying 50 cents on the dollar in taxes was what he meant.