This whole business is a war between old-school resource robber-barons, and new-global capital, [...] Both spend tens-of-millions shaping perception [...] None of these players are charities...
I hope you don't believe that just because an organization is a charity, their opinions are unbiased and reliable. Non-profits, though officially not partisan, are often quite political and often lie to advance their agendas.
Yeah, but all this is going to happen in the middle of a civil war? All the Al Qaeda types are just going to sit back and watch the Russian troops show up and take their positions? And once the troops are in place, won't everyone know where the chemical (and I have read, biological) weapons are? Are they going to build specialized (and vulnerable) incinerators to destroy them, or load them onto convoys of trucks and take them to ships on the coast while everyone watches peacefully?
I would argue that when both the rich and the poor alike used public schools, they were better.
I would argue that was before teacher's unions and political correctness took them over, both of which are reasons why the rich (and many others) took their kids out or moved to a better neighborhood with better public schools.
I would argue that in places where more people use public transportation (look to Boston, New York, San Francisco, Europe), it is better.
Possibly, but I'm not sure that it is better because more people use it. That's the author's argument: more (or total) participation results in better quality.
I would argue that Social Security is a pretty successful and popular program.
Only if you ignore that fact that many people (and an ever-growing number of them) would do much better taking the money they put into it and investing it, and that the whole program is unsustainable in the long run.
I don't know how you got a +5 mod. Your argument is actually quite pathetic: 'Public schools are a bit like communism. Communism has historically failed catastrophically. Therefore, public schools are doomed.'
That's not what I wrote, and not what I meant, so no wonder you don't understand why I got that mod. I was not attacking public schools as such, I was attacking the idea that [large system] will necessarily be better if everyone is forced to use it. However, it is true that that way of thinking is central to communism (and socialism and fascism).
it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve
If every single person took public transportation, would public transportation improve?
If every single person lived in public housing, would public housing improve?
If every single person was on food stamps, would food stamps improve?
The StratoSolar concept uses a buoyant platform to raise PV cells to 20km altitude. That way they get more light, are above the weather, and operate at higher efficiency due to the cold.
Nearly every spam I get these days uses the t.co link shortener to disguise the destination of the links. I report every one through Spamcop, which reports them to abuse@twitter.com, but it never seems to make a difference.
Google seems to do pretty well at locating pages, despite many fine pages lacking meta tags (and despite many poor spam articles trying to abuse meta tags.)
I believe the SEO types have been saying for years that meta keyword tags are useless because they were too easy to game, so Google and other search engines basically ignore them now.
"Extremism" says it all. Presumably they mean "Islamists" at the moment. [...] Usually I hate "slippery slope" arguments, but yeah- slippery slope...
They're already a ways down that slope. Britain’s bar on anti-Muslim activists travelling to the country could do more harm than good. In the UK today, a Muslim cleric calling for jihad in Syria or the imposition of sharia in the UK is more acceptable than American writers who warn against the dangers of such people. I.e., advocating totalitarian Islam is OK, but opposing it is "extremist" "hate speech" against a religion.
These companies don't 'take deals' unless it is the absolute last option.
Not true. A quick settlement is often far cheaper than drawn-out litigation for which a company must pay a legal team thousands of dollars per hour. This happens in lawsuits all the time, with corporations, government entities, and individuals. Patent trolls and bringers of nuisance lawsuits depend on this behavior.
I don't have an opinion about this case, but just wanted to say that it's a bad idea to assume "it was cheaper to settle quickly" is evidence of guilt.
The people with porn Tumblrs don't need to move, they just need an easy way to be found. Why not a retro, Yahoo-style directory? That's how lots of us found things before search engines got so good. Just start tumblrporn.com (lawyers permitting) and list all the blogs Yahoo doesn't want indexed, in categories. Sell ads. Profit!
15 years ago it was common to question whether Apple could survive in the face of the Windows monopoly. Heck, the joke was that their official name was "Beleaguered Apple Computer," because it seemed like every news article referred to them that way. Then they had a string of hits: the iMac, OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Microsoft seems to be totally on the defensive, with flops like the Zune and PlaysForSure and now Surface tablets. They are hanging on in the enterprise, and I suppose the Xbox might be making them some money after billions were invested, but that's about it. A year or so ago Apple began making more money from the iPhone alone than Microsoft makes from everything they do put together. Microsoft seems like yesterday's news. How the mighty have fallen.
Here's a chart showing how the exchanges are supposed to work. Just a system in which the public looks at different health plans from different providers would be complex enough, but note the links to the IRS, Treasury, Social Security, HHS, Homeland Security, and state Medicaid systems. This thing must be giving nightmares to even top IT pros.
Translating the US tax code into software is probably a task rivaling some of the most complex software problems out there...
Absolutely. This is just one of the early signs of the train wreck that is Obamacare. You just can't have a bunch of different Congressional staffers write different parts of a gigantic, complex bill involving a huge part of the economy, cram it through Congress along party lines, and expect the thing to work. They've already had to kill three sections of it, and delay the employer mandate.
Far, far simpler government IT projects (internal systems for single departments, e.g. the FBI's Virtual Case File) have failed miserably. Obamacare requires a public-facing system that connects to many other systems at the federal and state level, and complies with HIPAA requirements. I'm no expert on huge IT projects, but I don't see how this is going to be up and running in October, if ever.
The NSA gets a great deal of information through metadata and traffic analysis, so how much does encryption really matter? It might even call more attention to yourself: If you are just somebody surfing an Islamist website or emailing your school friend in Pakistan, the NSA will note it but possibly ignore it, if there's nothing else suspicious to connect you to. But if you are sending streams of encrypted data to those same locations, wouldn't that raise red flags?
This sort of surveillance ("We need to look at these specific accounts") doesn't bother me: that's how search warrants are supposed to work. (Well, assuming they are looking for terrorists and not just harassing Tea Party people.) This seems quite different from some other recent disclosures, like the Verizon warrants: "Give us records of all calls made." Search warrants, to be constitutional, have to be specific. General warrants were abused by the British and are a specific reason the Fourth Amendment was written.
"Income equality" will happen after we achieve education equality, intelligence equality, motivation equality, health equality, physical attractiveness equality, and luck equality. So don't hold your breath.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole business is a war between old-school resource robber-barons, and new-global capital, [...] Both spend tens-of-millions shaping perception [...] None of these players are charities...
I hope you don't believe that just because an organization is a charity, their opinions are unbiased and reliable. Non-profits, though officially not partisan, are often quite political and often lie to advance their agendas.
Yeah, but all this is going to happen in the middle of a civil war? All the Al Qaeda types are just going to sit back and watch the Russian troops show up and take their positions? And once the troops are in place, won't everyone know where the chemical (and I have read, biological) weapons are? Are they going to build specialized (and vulnerable) incinerators to destroy them, or load them onto convoys of trucks and take them to ships on the coast while everyone watches peacefully?
This plan seems "impractical," to say the least.
You don't need to be an Apple fan to say that when Apple comes out with theirs, it'll look a heck of a lot nicer.
I would argue that when both the rich and the poor alike used public schools, they were better.
I would argue that was before teacher's unions and political correctness took them over, both of which are reasons why the rich (and many others) took their kids out or moved to a better neighborhood with better public schools.
I would argue that in places where more people use public transportation (look to Boston, New York, San Francisco, Europe), it is better.
Possibly, but I'm not sure that it is better because more people use it. That's the author's argument: more (or total) participation results in better quality.
I would argue that Social Security is a pretty successful and popular program.
Only if you ignore that fact that many people (and an ever-growing number of them) would do much better taking the money they put into it and investing it, and that the whole program is unsustainable in the long run.
I don't know how you got a +5 mod. Your argument is actually quite pathetic: 'Public schools are a bit like communism. Communism has historically failed catastrophically. Therefore, public schools are doomed.'
That's not what I wrote, and not what I meant, so no wonder you don't understand why I got that mod. I was not attacking public schools as such, I was attacking the idea that [large system] will necessarily be better if everyone is forced to use it. However, it is true that that way of thinking is central to communism (and socialism and fascism).
If every single person took public transportation, would public transportation improve?
If every single person lived in public housing, would public housing improve?
If every single person was on food stamps, would food stamps improve?
History indicates that way of thinking doesn't work out well.
And yet Russia can call us up and say "Hey, there are two Chechen refugee brothers in Boston who we think are terrorists" and NOTHING HAPPENS.
The StratoSolar concept uses a buoyant platform to raise PV cells to 20km altitude. That way they get more light, are above the weather, and operate at higher efficiency due to the cold.
Nearly every spam I get these days uses the t.co link shortener to disguise the destination of the links. I report every one through Spamcop, which reports them to abuse@twitter.com, but it never seems to make a difference.
The solution is simple. Make them responsible for all of those costs until their software can handle it. Watch how fast that update happens.
The Constitution, how does it work?
The Macbook Pro is the current example, it has not changed in specs or price point in close to three years.
This is incorrect. The last non-Retina MacBook Pro came out in June 2012, and the average time between releases is 267 days.
Google seems to do pretty well at locating pages, despite many fine pages lacking meta tags (and despite many poor spam articles trying to abuse meta tags.)
I believe the SEO types have been saying for years that meta keyword tags are useless because they were too easy to game, so Google and other search engines basically ignore them now.
"Extremism" says it all. Presumably they mean "Islamists" at the moment. [...] Usually I hate "slippery slope" arguments, but yeah- slippery slope...
They're already a ways down that slope. Britain’s bar on anti-Muslim activists travelling to the country could do more harm than good. In the UK today, a Muslim cleric calling for jihad in Syria or the imposition of sharia in the UK is more acceptable than American writers who warn against the dangers of such people. I.e., advocating totalitarian Islam is OK, but opposing it is "extremist" "hate speech" against a religion.
These companies don't 'take deals' unless it is the absolute last option.
Not true. A quick settlement is often far cheaper than drawn-out litigation for which a company must pay a legal team thousands of dollars per hour. This happens in lawsuits all the time, with corporations, government entities, and individuals. Patent trolls and bringers of nuisance lawsuits depend on this behavior.
I don't have an opinion about this case, but just wanted to say that it's a bad idea to assume "it was cheaper to settle quickly" is evidence of guilt.
http://pigroll.com/755_plug-in-usb.html
The people with porn Tumblrs don't need to move, they just need an easy way to be found. Why not a retro, Yahoo-style directory? That's how lots of us found things before search engines got so good. Just start tumblrporn.com (lawyers permitting) and list all the blogs Yahoo doesn't want indexed, in categories. Sell ads. Profit!
15 years ago it was common to question whether Apple could survive in the face of the Windows monopoly. Heck, the joke was that their official name was "Beleaguered Apple Computer," because it seemed like every news article referred to them that way. Then they had a string of hits: the iMac, OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Microsoft seems to be totally on the defensive, with flops like the Zune and PlaysForSure and now Surface tablets. They are hanging on in the enterprise, and I suppose the Xbox might be making them some money after billions were invested, but that's about it. A year or so ago Apple began making more money from the iPhone alone than Microsoft makes from everything they do put together. Microsoft seems like yesterday's news. How the mighty have fallen.
Medicare, which begin in 1965, is roughly the same in complexity, and we survived it.
If by "survived it" you mean "It vastly exceeded all cost projections and is helping lead us toward national bankruptcy," then yes.
Here's a chart showing how the exchanges are supposed to work. Just a system in which the public looks at different health plans from different providers would be complex enough, but note the links to the IRS, Treasury, Social Security, HHS, Homeland Security, and state Medicaid systems. This thing must be giving nightmares to even top IT pros.
Translating the US tax code into software is probably a task rivaling some of the most complex software problems out there...
Absolutely. This is just one of the early signs of the train wreck that is Obamacare. You just can't have a bunch of different Congressional staffers write different parts of a gigantic, complex bill involving a huge part of the economy, cram it through Congress along party lines, and expect the thing to work. They've already had to kill three sections of it, and delay the employer mandate.
Far, far simpler government IT projects (internal systems for single departments, e.g. the FBI's Virtual Case File) have failed miserably. Obamacare requires a public-facing system that connects to many other systems at the federal and state level, and complies with HIPAA requirements. I'm no expert on huge IT projects, but I don't see how this is going to be up and running in October, if ever.
The NSA gets a great deal of information through metadata and traffic analysis, so how much does encryption really matter? It might even call more attention to yourself: If you are just somebody surfing an Islamist website or emailing your school friend in Pakistan, the NSA will note it but possibly ignore it, if there's nothing else suspicious to connect you to. But if you are sending streams of encrypted data to those same locations, wouldn't that raise red flags?
as it has now has come out that Obama was not involved
Care to supply a citation that proves that particular negative?
Nazi doctors used X-rays to try to sterilize Jews.
This sort of surveillance ("We need to look at these specific accounts") doesn't bother me: that's how search warrants are supposed to work. (Well, assuming they are looking for terrorists and not just harassing Tea Party people.) This seems quite different from some other recent disclosures, like the Verizon warrants: "Give us records of all calls made." Search warrants, to be constitutional, have to be specific. General warrants were abused by the British and are a specific reason the Fourth Amendment was written.
Also note that at the same time the federal government is conducting sweeping, general surveillance of all Americans in the name of fighting terrorism, "Since October of 2011, the FBI has been forbidden to covertly gather information or set up sting operations at mosques unless they've been reviewed and approved by something the DoJ has tagged the Sensitive Operations Review Committee." I guess the Department of Justice didn't consider sweeping surveillance of all Americans to be as much of a "sensitive operation" as looking for Islamic terrorists in places they are likely to be.
"Income equality" will happen after we achieve education equality, intelligence equality, motivation equality, health equality, physical attractiveness equality, and luck equality. So don't hold your breath.