But I will say that I know the laptops are not upgradeable. The memory is soldered to the board since the last revision.
True, although the SSDs are (unofficially) upgradeable - OWC do a third-party SSD upgrade. The Mac Mini has (officially) upgradeable RAM and (unofficially) upgradeable hard drives. The new-ish 27" iMac (but not the 21") has upgradeable RAM (but not HD/SSD, although I understand its not too bad if you don't mind un-gluing and re-gluing the screen =:-) ) . I'm not saying that list doesn't leave something to be desired (the non-upgradeable SDD/HDD puts me off buying an iMac) but its not a simple case of "you can't upgrade Macs".
With so much in such a small space/size and an unusual factor as well, I have a very bad feeling about your ability to upgrade practically any parts in this thing.
From the pictures released so far, RAM and the SSD look like they're upgradable, and in some pictures you can see a 'lock' slider on the case.
Looks like the SSD might even be a regular x4 PCIe socket. Also, you can see an empty set of solder pads for a second SSD socket on the second GPU card (doesn't mean that it will support it, of course, just that the possibility can't be ruled out).
Apart from that, those kick-arse Workstation GPUs are probably going to account for 2/3 of the cost of the system - they're not going to turn useless overnight and by the time that they do there will probably be new revisions of the Xeon, PCIe, Thunderbolt etc. so it would probably be more economical to sell the old machine and buy new.
The fly in the ointment is for people who need NVidia rather than AMD (e.g. because they need CUDA) - but we don't know yet whether Apple will offer a NVidia option.
Central filesystem so apps can share data in a simple manner.
That would break simplicity.
The current solutions for importing/exporting files from Apple applications don't really qualify as "simple". Ever tried to share a file via iTunes or WebDAV? Having a filesystem that didn't raise its head until you chose 'share' wouldn't break simplicity - or maybe providing a standard API that let apps share through DropBox, Google Drive etc. (Flap, oink!)
I tried iCloud but it insists on moving everything off your iOS device into the cloud. If I wanted to do that I'd use Google Docs so I could share things with non-Mac users!
Allow printing to any fucking printer.
It can do printing, but only with printers that follow the spec. Printers that don't work requires extra drivers, that we shouldn't need in the first place anyway.
No, but there's no reason why Airprint can't work with any shared printer on your Mac. When AirPrint was first announced Apple were going to support this - then they signed an exclusive with HP and disappeared the feature. There's third-party software to do this (e.g. Printopia). At one point, I found instructions for adding the appropriate zeroconf and CUPS settings to my Linux box so I could print to it (but a later iOS update borked that).
You pass up that $5 Bluray of Terminator 2 at Bestbuy, but you'll buy any number of $9 Kindle titles. Because... you know.... books are expensive.
Or maybe because you've already seen Terminator 2 once at the cinema and several more times on TV or video, and pretty much know all the words. If it were a recently released film, it would be much more than $5 on Blu-ray and that would be after they'd had a cinema release at $10 seat (with advertising and overpriced snacks paying the theatre's rent), then they'd have more bites at the cherry with pay TV, streaming and network TV.
...and that's for something that will keep you amused for two hours, while a $9 book will provide bedtime reading for a whole week.
Meanwhile - Amazon are accusing of Apple of anti-competetive behaviour because Apple's deal with publishers interfered with their right to put competitors out of business by dumping popular books on the market below cost. Wuh?
Instead of making folks discard completely non-threatening items, TSA should look into *actual* security.
Or airlines should make checking baggage quicker, cheaper and more secure, so people don't have to bring their pocket knives and hockey sticks into the cabin.
Instead, the policy seems to be to charge extra for checked luggage (and try to deny any liability for losing/damaging/pilfering it) and fail to enforce even their already-generous carry-on limits. Then they act all surprised and flustered when everybody tries to get on the plane with a big f-off wheelie bag or two and, by the time 3/4 of the passengers have boarded, all the overhead bins are full and they're begging people to check luggage at the plane door. So, my small shoulder bag with my laptop and other valuables ends up halfway across the cabin from me (so much for security) or crammed under the seat in front using up most of my 10 angstroms of cattle-class legroom.
In other news the independent movie Radio Free Albemuth is having a kickstarter campaign to fund theatrical release. Why don't we get news about this?
Why the fetish about a theatrical release? I couldn't care less about a US theatrical release*, but I'd happily pay a reasonable sum of cashy money now for a download (but not $25 *if* it hits target and *when* they get around to releasing the download outside the US).
(*and probably even people who live in the US could care less about a US theatrical release)
Be afraid: the Prometheus BluRay had a throw-away extra that retconned Blade Runner into the Alien universe by linking Weyland and Tyrell. Be very afraid.
I have a question – why would answering that question make a good movie?
Exactly.
If you've read the book, in which it turns out that Deckard was (probably) real but just about everything he valued in life was just as fake as an android's memories, and even the VK test has more to do with the synthetic 'empathy' religion of the day than anything scientific, the answer to "is Decker a replicant" is "why worry?"
Don't get me wrong - the movie is a SF classic in its own right, but It totally misses the point of the book.
Note that the Master has died more than thirteen times. If he can do it, why can't the Doctor?
The Master used up his regenerations and started to go all gross and zombified - I think that was where the 12 regenerations stuff actually came from. He got out of it by stealing someone else's body. The Doctor is the Good Guy and can't do that sort of thing.
Not just Nerds. The installation of a new Doctor may not be up there with a new Prime Minister or Pope, but it still gets mainstream coverage in the UK.
I like that idea but it would paint the show into a corner. It would mean that the next doctor would need to regenerate into John Hurt. Logistically that would be risky.
Except they're already in a corner, and need a plot device to get past the established "12 regeneration limit" (which probably seemed like plenty back in the 1970s). If Moffat was going to try and sweep that under the carpet, he wouldn't have name-checked the Valeyard. A big show-down with Doc #13 would be a good opportunity to do a bit of temporal re-writing.
One option would be to have either #11, #12 or #13 die 'for real' and a new individual take on the title "The Doctor" which would fit some of the foreshadowing such the importance of the chosen name, the previous reference to 'The fall of the 11th' suggesting that its actually #11 who died on Trenzelore, the fact that Clara only met 11 Doctors when the whirly-lighty-thing was meant to contain all the Doctors past and future...
The 50th anniversary special in November is a good excuse for a bit of continuity wanking.
If John Hurt is a previously unrecognized Doctor, then Matt Smith would be the 12th incarnation of the Doctor.
"Previously unrecognized"? You're not thinking wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey enough.
Interestingly enough, the Valeyard was specifically referred to as the 13th incarnation in the Trial of the Time Lord. I think an Evil Doctor/Valeyard is the big baddie of the 50th Anniversary Special.
...and the Valeyard was name-checked in The Name of the Doctor.
I'd originally assumed that Hurt was going to be Doctor #8.5 who ended the Time War by comitting genocide, got killed in the process and regenerated into #9 (Ecclestone) who was wracked with guilt over what he'd done. But, hang on, he's got a freakin' time machine! It could have been #13/Valeyard who did the genocide: #9 was wracked with guilt over what he'd just discovered his future self, er, will have been going to have done.
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
If you can read it, then you have physical access to the encryption keys/algorithms used to protect it, so it is nigh-on impossible to stop someone, somewhere cracking the encryption.
Some people will read your book without buying it.
...and if they like it, many of those people will go on to buy your next book.
Seriously - look at your bookshelf, look at your CD collection. How many of those purchases happened because somebody previously lent you a book by that author, or gave you a MP3 or C90* of an album by that artist? DRM throws a spanner in that, while doing nothing to prevent large-scale organised 'piracy'.
Of course, although word-of-mouth is good news for artists, I'm sure that publishers/record companies would rather we made our decisions based on their expensive publicity and fake-viral advertising - since that's the only real service they can offer in an age when anybody can cheaply publish anything on the internet. Maybe that's closer to the real motivation for DRM.
(*Kids - a C90 is how we used to copy CDs before MP3 came along. Now get off my lawn).
But... hang on a bit... how come 20 years ago this wasn't an issue?
20 years ago hospitals could hand out antibiotics like candy to deal with bacterial infections. So they got complacent. Now they are suffering the consequences in the form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
The danger is, in an insanely litigious society, employers will feel obliged to trawl for evidence of past misdemeanours to protect against future liabilities.
For example, a company employs a 30-year old bus driver. Bus driver gets drunk and runs down a pedestrian. Ambulance-chasing lawyer finds online video of driver, age 16, getting falling-down drunk, and uses this to support a case that the bus company negligently employed an alcoholic. Consequence: bus companies' lawyers and insurers pressure companies to screen potential employees' history for evidence of alcohol abuse. In fact that doesn't need to actually happen - some lawyer or insurance adjuster just needs to dream up the scenario and do a little policy-based-evidence-making to secure their place on the board of the new start-up 'Acme Screening Services Corp.'
Of course, the existence of an on-line teenage pissup video is a completely meaningless as evidence of alcoholism in adult life, but rationality has never really featured in corporate arse-covering.
I think that, in the internet age, we need to rethink the idea of libel and defamation law to focus on the use and interpretation of defamatory information, rather than on the publishers. In the good old days, if the Respectable Daily News claimed that Mr Insert Name cheated at solitaire, readers had some justification for treating it as a reputable source, and if it proved false it made sense to haul the editor into court.
Now, the internet has cut the traditional publisher/editor out of the loop. In the case of someone tweeting a false accusation, its nonsense going after Twitter (who have no real editorial control) or the Tweetee (who could be anyone). No, the people guilty of defamation are the ones who form any sort of serious opinion based on a totally unreliable source.
Likewise to find a teenager's hangover pic, sext, racist joke, juvenile political rant etc. on Facebook, and treat it as any sort of credible evidence that the now adult person may be an alcoholic/pervert/racist/whatever should be treated as defamation.
Kids do that sort of thing. That's why we don't let them vote, drive cars or buy alcohol without a fake ID.
Well, you could say the same about the whole notion that handguns are good for personal defence or ensuring the liberty of your country. On the screen, the would-be mugger is running off in terror while you recite a few choice Dirty Harry quotes. Back in reality, the mugger gets your wallet and a gun to use on his next victim.
Same goes for a few plucky freedom-fighters overthrowing a corrupt government: fantasy, unless your little militia has some tanks, fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, missiles etc. (or the backing of some foreign power that does). All your little cache of semi-autos can do is give the Powers That Be an excuse for a crackdown on "terrorists".
I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
This is just the government playing to the peanut gallery. If it was easy to change the law without breaching international treaties, pissing off lots of party donors and making the tax code even more labyrinthine than it already is (then watching ninja accountants find brand new loopholes and wheezes) then it would have been done years ago. So, they just wheel in a few high-profile household name firms, give them a public handbagging, maybe shame them into handing over a few bottle caps and bits of knotted string, so it looks as if they're getting tough on the issue, then.... crickets.
Of course, its not worth doing the same to the legion of more obscure companies doing the self-same thing (who, together, must have far more turnover than this handful of big names) because they don't have the same headline-grabbing power.
Meanwhile, they're offering tax breaks to Disney for filming bits of the new Star Wars films in the UK. That's good - I'm sure that there's no way that Disney is going to make a brass farthing out of this obscure little arthouse flick if they don't get government support. Of course, if Disney didn't get the tax breaks, I'm sure they can build a lens flare machine in Canada, New Zealand, Grand Fenwick or somewhere and piss on our childhood heroes from there.
Trouble is, in this globalised world, governments don't have the power they once did.
Not saying I like what Google or Amazon or Starbucks are doing... just that they are the high-profile tip of an iceberg that isn't going to go away any time soon.
You're welcome to come to Canada or take a trip to the UK anytime you want to see the "benefits" of not-for-profit healthcare. Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer
Well, part of the problem in the UK is successive governments with anti-national healthcare agendas trying to introduce half-cocked "internal markets" and other privatisation-by-stealth initiatives. Last time I had a MRI it was outsourced to a private contractor operating on the hospital grounds.
That's what the current restructuring is about - its supposedly about letting GPs (who aren't government employees) run the system, but since GPs have no idea how to manage a national healthcare system, the reality is that they'll outsource it to big multinational infrastructure companies. The result is a system that combines the efficiency and business sense of government with the humanitarian and social values of big business.
So, really, its a no-score draw: If you can't criticise private healthcare based on the US where its been corrupted by back-door nationalisation, then you can't criticise public healthcare based on the UK where its been corrupted by back-door privatisation.
Personally, on balance, I prefer to get my healthcare from a doctor rather than a salesman, without worrying about whether I can afford it, even if I have to wait a bit for non-urgent treatment.
...and yes, any healthcare system has to make sensible decisions about when to stop throwing money at dying patients. Its not a nice thing to have to do, but no healthcare system has infinite resources - either the money comes from taxpayers or peoples' insurance premiums. Part of the reason why you don't see "pure" free market healthcare systems is people get all upset if people are turfed out on the street to die when there is no longer a business case for treating them.
Pro-tip for astronauts: If the ISS computer suggests another spacewalk to put back the original part so they can wait to see if it fails... watch your back!.
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But I will say that I know the laptops are not upgradeable. The memory is soldered to the board since the last revision.
True, although the SSDs are (unofficially) upgradeable - OWC do a third-party SSD upgrade. The Mac Mini has (officially) upgradeable RAM and (unofficially) upgradeable hard drives. The new-ish 27" iMac (but not the 21") has upgradeable RAM (but not HD/SSD, although I understand its not too bad if you don't mind un-gluing and re-gluing the screen =:-) ) . I'm not saying that list doesn't leave something to be desired (the non-upgradeable SDD/HDD puts me off buying an iMac) but its not a simple case of "you can't upgrade Macs".
I care about upgradeability because of the huge premium hardware vendors charge for RAM, HDD and other upgrades.
Good job that the Apple slideshow clearly shows an openable case (it has an 'unlock' slider on the back) with the RAM and SSD in sockets, then.
With so much in such a small space/size and an unusual factor as well, I have a very bad feeling about your ability to upgrade practically any parts in this thing.
From the pictures released so far, RAM and the SSD look like they're upgradable, and in some pictures you can see a 'lock' slider on the case.
Looks like the SSD might even be a regular x4 PCIe socket. Also, you can see an empty set of solder pads for a second SSD socket on the second GPU card (doesn't mean that it will support it, of course, just that the possibility can't be ruled out).
Apart from that, those kick-arse Workstation GPUs are probably going to account for 2/3 of the cost of the system - they're not going to turn useless overnight and by the time that they do there will probably be new revisions of the Xeon, PCIe, Thunderbolt etc. so it would probably be more economical to sell the old machine and buy new.
The fly in the ointment is for people who need NVidia rather than AMD (e.g. because they need CUDA) - but we don't know yet whether Apple will offer a NVidia option.
It's innovation like cylinders instead of cubes that goes to prove that Apple has what it takes in the post-Jobs world.
Nonsense - its just a cube with rounded corners. Obvious. :-)
Central filesystem so apps can share data in a simple manner.
That would break simplicity.
The current solutions for importing/exporting files from Apple applications don't really qualify as "simple". Ever tried to share a file via iTunes or WebDAV? Having a filesystem that didn't raise its head until you chose 'share' wouldn't break simplicity - or maybe providing a standard API that let apps share through DropBox, Google Drive etc. (Flap, oink!)
I tried iCloud but it insists on moving everything off your iOS device into the cloud. If I wanted to do that I'd use Google Docs so I could share things with non-Mac users!
Allow printing to any fucking printer.
It can do printing, but only with printers that follow the spec. Printers that don't work requires extra drivers, that we shouldn't need in the first place anyway.
No, but there's no reason why Airprint can't work with any shared printer on your Mac. When AirPrint was first announced Apple were going to support this - then they signed an exclusive with HP and disappeared the feature. There's third-party software to do this (e.g. Printopia). At one point, I found instructions for adding the appropriate zeroconf and CUPS settings to my Linux box so I could print to it (but a later iOS update borked that).
You pass up that $5 Bluray of Terminator 2 at Bestbuy, but you'll buy any number of $9 Kindle titles. Because... you know.... books are expensive.
Or maybe because you've already seen Terminator 2 once at the cinema and several more times on TV or video, and pretty much know all the words. If it were a recently released film, it would be much more than $5 on Blu-ray and that would be after they'd had a cinema release at $10 seat (with advertising and overpriced snacks paying the theatre's rent), then they'd have more bites at the cherry with pay TV, streaming and network TV.
...and that's for something that will keep you amused for two hours, while a $9 book will provide bedtime reading for a whole week.
Meanwhile - Amazon are accusing of Apple of anti-competetive behaviour because Apple's deal with publishers interfered with their right to put competitors out of business by dumping popular books on the market below cost. Wuh?
Instead of making folks discard completely non-threatening items, TSA should look into *actual* security.
Or airlines should make checking baggage quicker, cheaper and more secure, so people don't have to bring their pocket knives and hockey sticks into the cabin.
Instead, the policy seems to be to charge extra for checked luggage (and try to deny any liability for losing/damaging/pilfering it) and fail to enforce even their already-generous carry-on limits. Then they act all surprised and flustered when everybody tries to get on the plane with a big f-off wheelie bag or two and, by the time 3/4 of the passengers have boarded, all the overhead bins are full and they're begging people to check luggage at the plane door. So, my small shoulder bag with my laptop and other valuables ends up halfway across the cabin from me (so much for security) or crammed under the seat in front using up most of my 10 angstroms of cattle-class legroom.
In other news the independent movie Radio Free Albemuth is having a kickstarter campaign to fund theatrical release. Why don't we get news about this?
Why the fetish about a theatrical release? I couldn't care less about a US theatrical release*, but I'd happily pay a reasonable sum of cashy money now for a download (but not $25 *if* it hits target and *when* they get around to releasing the download outside the US).
(*and probably even people who live in the US could care less about a US theatrical release)
and to be directed by Ridley Scott
Be afraid: the Prometheus BluRay had a throw-away extra that retconned Blade Runner into the Alien universe by linking Weyland and Tyrell. Be very afraid.
I have a question – why would answering that question make a good movie?
Exactly.
If you've read the book, in which it turns out that Deckard was (probably) real but just about everything he valued in life was just as fake as an android's memories, and even the VK test has more to do with the synthetic 'empathy' religion of the day than anything scientific, the answer to "is Decker a replicant" is "why worry?"
Don't get me wrong - the movie is a SF classic in its own right, but It totally misses the point of the book.
The child, the friend, the wife, who's the other one? The baby?
Well, yes. And its quite likely that they used more than one baby.
Plus there was another young girl for the first school scene, although that could be dismissed as mundane flashback stuff.
Note that the Master has died more than thirteen times. If he can do it, why can't the Doctor?
The Master used up his regenerations and started to go all gross and zombified - I think that was where the 12 regenerations stuff actually came from. He got out of it by stealing someone else's body. The Doctor is the Good Guy and can't do that sort of thing.
Well yes, a thread like Riversong Birth to Death lasted years
During which the character River/Melody died 3 times and was portrayed by at least 4 completely different-looking actresses. Its that kinda show...
I know computers are clever these days
...and all they'd need to fake would be a 30 second regeneration scene.
If anything was News for Nerds, this is it.
Not just Nerds. The installation of a new Doctor may not be up there with a new Prime Minister or Pope, but it still gets mainstream coverage in the UK.
I like that idea but it would paint the show into a corner. It would mean that the next doctor would need to regenerate into John Hurt. Logistically that would be risky.
Except they're already in a corner, and need a plot device to get past the established "12 regeneration limit" (which probably seemed like plenty back in the 1970s). If Moffat was going to try and sweep that under the carpet, he wouldn't have name-checked the Valeyard. A big show-down with Doc #13 would be a good opportunity to do a bit of temporal re-writing.
One option would be to have either #11, #12 or #13 die 'for real' and a new individual take on the title "The Doctor" which would fit some of the foreshadowing such the importance of the chosen name, the previous reference to 'The fall of the 11th' suggesting that its actually #11 who died on Trenzelore, the fact that Clara only met 11 Doctors when the whirly-lighty-thing was meant to contain all the Doctors past and future...
The 50th anniversary special in November is a good excuse for a bit of continuity wanking.
If John Hurt is a previously unrecognized Doctor, then Matt Smith would be the 12th incarnation of the Doctor.
"Previously unrecognized"? You're not thinking wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey enough.
Interestingly enough, the Valeyard was specifically referred to as the 13th incarnation in the Trial of the Time Lord. I think an Evil Doctor/Valeyard is the big baddie of the 50th Anniversary Special.
...and the Valeyard was name-checked in The Name of the Doctor.
I'd originally assumed that Hurt was going to be Doctor #8.5 who ended the Time War by comitting genocide, got killed in the process and regenerated into #9 (Ecclestone) who was wracked with guilt over what he'd done. But, hang on, he's got a freakin' time machine! It could have been #13/Valeyard who did the genocide: #9 was wracked with guilt over what he'd just discovered his future self, er, will have been going to have done.
So Hurt could be #13.
If you can read it, you can transcribe it as fast as you can read it (less than a day?)
If you can read it, then you have physical access to the encryption keys/algorithms used to protect it, so it is nigh-on impossible to stop someone, somewhere cracking the encryption.
Some people will read your book without buying it.
...and if they like it, many of those people will go on to buy your next book.
Seriously - look at your bookshelf, look at your CD collection. How many of those purchases happened because somebody previously lent you a book by that author, or gave you a MP3 or C90* of an album by that artist? DRM throws a spanner in that, while doing nothing to prevent large-scale organised 'piracy'.
Of course, although word-of-mouth is good news for artists, I'm sure that publishers/record companies would rather we made our decisions based on their expensive publicity and fake-viral advertising - since that's the only real service they can offer in an age when anybody can cheaply publish anything on the internet. Maybe that's closer to the real motivation for DRM.
(*Kids - a C90 is how we used to copy CDs before MP3 came along. Now get off my lawn).
Try it and see - retyping a page of text takes many times longer than just reading it.
If only there were some way of getting a computer to automatically recognise text in an image and convert it into ASCII at high speed...
But... hang on a bit... how come 20 years ago this wasn't an issue?
20 years ago hospitals could hand out antibiotics like candy to deal with bacterial infections. So they got complacent. Now they are suffering the consequences in the form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
"Sadly no one has yet written a language that forces you to actually understand the problem domain that you're coding."
Lisp?
True as long as the "problem domain" is lambda calculus.
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
The danger is, in an insanely litigious society, employers will feel obliged to trawl for evidence of past misdemeanours to protect against future liabilities.
For example, a company employs a 30-year old bus driver. Bus driver gets drunk and runs down a pedestrian. Ambulance-chasing lawyer finds online video of driver, age 16, getting falling-down drunk, and uses this to support a case that the bus company negligently employed an alcoholic. Consequence: bus companies' lawyers and insurers pressure companies to screen potential employees' history for evidence of alcohol abuse. In fact that doesn't need to actually happen - some lawyer or insurance adjuster just needs to dream up the scenario and do a little policy-based-evidence-making to secure their place on the board of the new start-up 'Acme Screening Services Corp.'
Of course, the existence of an on-line teenage pissup video is a completely meaningless as evidence of alcoholism in adult life, but rationality has never really featured in corporate arse-covering.
I think that, in the internet age, we need to rethink the idea of libel and defamation law to focus on the use and interpretation of defamatory information, rather than on the publishers. In the good old days, if the Respectable Daily News claimed that Mr Insert Name cheated at solitaire, readers had some justification for treating it as a reputable source, and if it proved false it made sense to haul the editor into court.
Now, the internet has cut the traditional publisher/editor out of the loop. In the case of someone tweeting a false accusation, its nonsense going after Twitter (who have no real editorial control) or the Tweetee (who could be anyone). No, the people guilty of defamation are the ones who form any sort of serious opinion based on a totally unreliable source.
Likewise to find a teenager's hangover pic, sext, racist joke, juvenile political rant etc. on Facebook, and treat it as any sort of credible evidence that the now adult person may be an alcoholic/pervert/racist/whatever should be treated as defamation.
Kids do that sort of thing. That's why we don't let them vote, drive cars or buy alcohol without a fake ID.
They're MOVIES. That's not REALITY.
Well, you could say the same about the whole notion that handguns are good for personal defence or ensuring the liberty of your country. On the screen, the would-be mugger is running off in terror while you recite a few choice Dirty Harry quotes. Back in reality, the mugger gets your wallet and a gun to use on his next victim.
Same goes for a few plucky freedom-fighters overthrowing a corrupt government: fantasy, unless your little militia has some tanks, fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, missiles etc. (or the backing of some foreign power that does). All your little cache of semi-autos can do is give the Powers That Be an excuse for a crackdown on "terrorists".
I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
This is just the government playing to the peanut gallery. If it was easy to change the law without breaching international treaties, pissing off lots of party donors and making the tax code even more labyrinthine than it already is (then watching ninja accountants find brand new loopholes and wheezes) then it would have been done years ago. So, they just wheel in a few high-profile household name firms, give them a public handbagging, maybe shame them into handing over a few bottle caps and bits of knotted string, so it looks as if they're getting tough on the issue, then.... crickets.
Of course, its not worth doing the same to the legion of more obscure companies doing the self-same thing (who, together, must have far more turnover than this handful of big names) because they don't have the same headline-grabbing power.
Meanwhile, they're offering tax breaks to Disney for filming bits of the new Star Wars films in the UK. That's good - I'm sure that there's no way that Disney is going to make a brass farthing out of this obscure little arthouse flick if they don't get government support. Of course, if Disney didn't get the tax breaks, I'm sure they can build a lens flare machine in Canada, New Zealand, Grand Fenwick or somewhere and piss on our childhood heroes from there.
Trouble is, in this globalised world, governments don't have the power they once did.
Not saying I like what Google or Amazon or Starbucks are doing... just that they are the high-profile tip of an iceberg that isn't going to go away any time soon.
You're welcome to come to Canada or take a trip to the UK anytime you want to see the "benefits" of not-for-profit healthcare. Let me know when you feel like waiting a month or so for a MRI or longer
Well, part of the problem in the UK is successive governments with anti-national healthcare agendas trying to introduce half-cocked "internal markets" and other privatisation-by-stealth initiatives. Last time I had a MRI it was outsourced to a private contractor operating on the hospital grounds.
That's what the current restructuring is about - its supposedly about letting GPs (who aren't government employees) run the system, but since GPs have no idea how to manage a national healthcare system, the reality is that they'll outsource it to big multinational infrastructure companies. The result is a system that combines the efficiency and business sense of government with the humanitarian and social values of big business.
So, really, its a no-score draw: If you can't criticise private healthcare based on the US where its been corrupted by back-door nationalisation, then you can't criticise public healthcare based on the UK where its been corrupted by back-door privatisation.
Personally, on balance, I prefer to get my healthcare from a doctor rather than a salesman, without worrying about whether I can afford it, even if I have to wait a bit for non-urgent treatment.
...and yes, any healthcare system has to make sensible decisions about when to stop throwing money at dying patients. Its not a nice thing to have to do, but no healthcare system has infinite resources - either the money comes from taxpayers or peoples' insurance premiums. Part of the reason why you don't see "pure" free market healthcare systems is people get all upset if people are turfed out on the street to die when there is no longer a business case for treating them.
Or was it a space station phantom leak?
Pro-tip for astronauts: If the ISS computer suggests another spacewalk to put back the original part so they can wait to see if it fails... watch your back!.