Granted this is Slashdot, but it's still pretty disappointing that I had to navigate to the bottom of the page just to find one person who correctly pointed out that these are toys.
When I was a child I had a toy rocket ship. It was the '70s, so it didn't do shit. I imagine that even if it could light up and produce a little smoke, no one would have said I shouldn't be allowed to have this rocket ship since I shouldn't be learning how to pilot rocket ships before I learned to walk. Kids today have toy personal computers too as well as toy frying pans, toy ovens, and all sorts of other things kids shouldn't have real life access to.
But the real deal products mentioned in the article being targeted to preteens is more interesting. Obviously preteens can't enter into a legal contract for a cell subscription, so the phones must originate with a legal guardian. In this case, why not add a kid to an adult's family plan and then give them an extremely basic phone? Verizon had a small cell phone with just 4 speed dial keys, each pre-programmable. There is sense in giving a little kid (or an adult with limited capacity) a phone such as this as with one key press, they can instantly call a guardian. Perhaps down the road that is the direction these working phones will go. There's surely a market for Transformers shaped phones. I'm not sure able text messaging however. Each of the devices listed in the article had parental controls, so even in the most conservative use case, a kid could only text a parent.
I think the larger point that's being made is that the most vocal opponents of tax financed social welfare programs often use very heated and dangerous language to frame things like welfare and government health insurance as communist and anti-American, while saying that proponents are evil liberal communists "democrats", and that recipients are stupid and lazy.
Many feel that these programs would run more efficiently but for the net effect of tax dodgers and the political pressure, opponents put on anyone trying to fund these programs well.
It's not the idea that using it while complaining about it is bad. It's that this particular poster has a really extremist position on the subject and related subjects (national healthcare), and so his name calling people for disagreeing with him, and then attacking the very idea of social welfare while whining that his aid can't come fast enough; really makes him look like a troll.
He did make one good point, however unintentional. If you're going to have a program such as this, it should be more efficient so as to get benefits out to applicants ASAP. Obviously though that's a wholly different argument about bureaucracies.
Well, actually yeah it does. Democrats, and Republicans alike, have encouraged spammers by not pushing for serious spam legislation. I agree though, it's not a political story, but I love that a DNC website is being abused by spammers. I hope for a followup news story that says RNC owned phones are abused by telemarketers.
You realize that democrat.org isn't a government organization, right? You realize that it's jump point to the DNC, which is a political party, and not a government organization, right? And you realize that the very people who would take control of the internet away from private networks would not be representatives of a political party, but the military, right? Even for a troll, you're stupid.
And at that point, we have to start questioning the choice of those value words rather than assume they must be true. Sensationalism sells otherwise boring stories.
Right. but I would refrain from using words like "conspiracy" or "collusion", anything which paints this as criminal so quickly. Businesses can form alliances. They do form alliances against other businesses, and historically consumers and regulators have allowed this. Microsoft is paranoid, but so is any highly successful company that's being threatened by game-changing competitors. It's clear Google is a different kind of competitor, otherwise Microsoft would have been able to deal with Google sooner.
These meetings could very well be the stuff of movies, men in trenchcoats meeting at the docks at midnight to discuss putting a hit on Google; OR they can be one of a hundred strategy meetings that competitors in a common industry hold together annually. Until I see Ballmer tossing molotov cocktails, I'm just going to assume that this was an ordinary business meeting with donuts and bad coffee.
But companies have long formed alliances with each other, and those alliances, despite whatever consumer benefit was advertised, have always been for the sole purpose of giving member businesses an advantage viz-a-vis either the marketplace or a stronger, more entrenched competitor. It's business 101. Sure, we care when competitors working together causes harm to consumers, but we really don't care when that cooperation hurts another player in the industry.
Microsoft, being traditionally the dominant player, has long been a target of formal alliances and unofficial cooperation.
I think outside the community, the perception is that Microsoft isn't all that evil anymore, if they ever were. The last several years of corporate scandals have really changed consumer attitudes about what constitutes an evil company. Look at News Corps, or as an extreme example, Xi (formerly Blackwater). Those companies are far worse than Microsoft ever was.
Within the geek community, I'd say there are more interesting companies to fear and loathe. Microsoft's moves in business resemble a company trying to stay relevant and not start down that downward slope. It's hard to hate an injured animal. Microsoft's power was always limited to the beige box. It never reached very far beyond that. There are now other companies that don't need the beige box. Google with its purported altruistic intentions masking secretly evil motivations, is a far more fun company to hate. And of course, Facebook is just old-school James Bond villainous.
That's unfortunate. I'm sure there are example of homeschooled people who ultimately ended up more cultured and more socially aware. In *my* case, and perhaps I should have specified that, I would have ended up inept. How do you really teach another culture when you aren't exposed to it first hand? I am trying to learn a little more about Persian culture. I found that books haven't been as helpful as hanging out at a Persian restaurant with Persian friends and just absorbing.
All TiVo did was put a shiny plastic box on a device that I myself built years before. Hell, I had VCRs hooked up to controllers and custom made computer software years before that!
Nah, TiVo is a business which has failed to evolve. Therefore it deserves to die.
That's not a fair thing to say. Sure, "no social life" often means "no prom", "no dates", etc. But, it also means "no exposure to anyone with an alternative lifestyle, culture, perspective on life, opinion", etc. Granted, high schools aren't famous for being a place where kids can be exposed to new perspectives, but personally, I'm very happy with the public school education that allowed me to directly into a large private polytech university. And I'd do it again. Were I homeschooled, I would have been severely crippled when it comes to understanding other people's life experiences.
I would say it's the latter: Adobe doesn't want to prematurely guarantee that CS3 will work on Snow Leopard. Furthermore, I'd say Adobe would prefer that customers think they'll need to upgrade to CS4.
What about Leopard is broken beyond repair exactly?
In the Mac world, a lot of things can change in between operating system versions. Numbers like 10.5 and 10.6 don't describe patch levels or minor versions for the same operating system; rather they identify completely distinct operating systems with different SDKs and features.
If you're experienced with Windows, think of this as an equivalent question: Does my software which runs on XP continue to run on Vista?
That's a total exaggeration. There is a lot of noise out there about this happening, but I have to wonder if it's all originating from dishonest brokers who watched no more than a minute of MSNBC coverage. I was watching MSNBC when they showed the guy. I saw his face, I noted he was black myself, and I watched the many news segments that followed in the days after where MSNBC discussed the subject and used his video appearance as B roll. He's become a poster boy on that network. Incidentally, he wasn't just there. "Chris B." as he went by was there as part of a publicity stunt staged by Ernie Hancock, a Libertarian blogger and long-time associate of the Arizona Black Viper militia, a group that attempted to bomb federal buildings in the '90s. I wouldn't be surprised if "Chris B" was a member of Black Viper himself.
Incidentally, I love the photoshop image of Christ holding an assault rifle. I'm pro gun myself, but how disconnected with reality and ignorant of history do you have to be to think Christ would have carried a gun if he could?
I agree with the first part of what you said. I don't honestly understand what you were saying in the second half. But to your original point: yes, if that's racist then all those McDonald's billboards on the Chicago southside that feature blacks and all those TV court show billboards that feature blacks and hispanics, must be racist as well. There aren't many blacks in Eastern Europe, but there are some, mostly of recent African origin. There are blacks in Germany too. I think that surprises many Americans. Poland really has a better record on white-black relations than say Russia. In Poland, there's most russophobia. If the switch was intentionally race-based, which it's not necessarily, then if anything, Microsoft is guilty of underestimating Polish attitudes.
Better yet, let's review the FCC's anti-public good performance going back to the mid-90s. FCC has consistently worked on behalf of private interests to the harm of the public.
The FCC under Clinton did as much damage to the public as the FCC under Bush. Just looking at the FCC's most recent failures, I am not optimistic about FCC doing anything in the public good regarding net neutrality. At best, we'll get some immediate treat that will keep consumers happy in the interim at the cost of a loss of consumer rights further down the road.
Yes. It will help if the OP thinks about Mac OS X not as a single version of an operating system called Mac OS, but as a family of operating systems, just as Windows is a family of operating systems.
Thank you for finally providing some *relevant* facts, and without trying to imply that I'm a liar.
Not only do the articles point out the same concerns I've already mentioned, they bring up the possibility that firearms will get into bars due to the unclear definition of a restaurant. This isn't the '70s. The bar, pub, and restaurant models have mostly merged into a single hybrid model.
Some places are obviously bars. And some are obviously restaurants, but a huge number are "hot spots" or "new old favorites": places like PF Chang's, BJ's, Pink Taco, Cheesecake Factory, Blue Wasabi, Red Robin, etc. You don't have to be over 18 to enter, you can dine-in, and you can order a range of alcoholic drinks. I know for a fact that several of these restaurants make most of their money at the bar. A restaurant that sells alcohol can in fact be a bar.
Then you have the question of denying service to patrons carrying weapons. What if the weapons are concealed? I've never been asked if I was packing before, and I doubt I'll be asked after. And even if I were asked, I have no legal obligation to say I am carrying. I might just lie and say I'm not. Most restauranteurs aren't going to hire trained bouncers with metal detectors due to the image and the cost. And most aren't going to start having the hostess due a weapons check at the door.
In all actuality though, it's not totally a bad idea. But you might as well just let me carry in any building I want because this limitation of bar vs restaurant really doesn't work.
There is some sense there, yes. Game journalism does seem mostly focused the Ziff Davis soft reporting approach to technology. You don't find many articles that seriously discuss games in terms of game theory and with real social context. It all comes down to features reviews. My gaming history began with arcades, Atari VCS, and Vectrex, not to mention a slew of battery powered handhelds. I would love to see real discussion of these things, but how many game journalists are old enough to even have an appreciation for Atari VCS/2600? Most game journalists I've seen are in their 20s, so they necessarily see the NES as old school, and not say Zork.
It's not really a myth though it does look like it might be when we use mostly the big corporate titans as examples. In those companies, it looks like risk is diffused across rule-by-committee management models, corporate bailouts, and tax exemptions. In most companies, however, it is true that the single person (or few people) in charge bear the greatest risks. There are the financial risks: capital investment, salaries, etc.; but there is also the risk of the endeavor itself. I see the CEO as the leader and chief visionary (obviously that's not always true). The CEO has to think about things lower-level employees don't such as threats on the horizon from other competitors, trends, externalities, etc. The CEO has to develop plans for the company and steer the company. That requires an investment of self that most people will not do. I'm not saying most poor guys with an inkling of sense won't want to do this, but frankly, most people regardless of background can be real corporate leaders.
By "risk" we don't just mean the money. We mean all the tangible and intangible costs that come from running a company that don't exist when you're just the wheel in a cog.
What you said about birthright is absolutely true. There are some companies out there that take pride in the classic good 'ol boy system or just plain nepotism. So it seems that the promise of our style of capitalism isn't that you'll be able break through the door of companies where you just don't belong, rather that you can create a company of your own with your own doors
And you either didn't even bother to read the article you linked to, or you're dishonestly trying to pass off a bill proposal in Ohio as potential Arizona law in order to hijack public concern there.
The discussion was about Arizona, not Ohio. Ohio HB 203 is completely irrelevant here. You might as well link to an article about midwifery laws in territorial Hawaii. The issue in Phoenix which is being debated and which there is public concern is guns in bars, not guns in restaurants which serve alcohol.
My party? I never told you I was a Democrat. And that you think I must surely be since I disagree with your reactionary statement shows a fundamental weakness in all water carriers like you.
I'm actually a Reagan Republican. As it stands today, I'm an independent voter. I don't like the Democrats because they're inept when they're not corrupt, and I don't like the Republicans because they're irresponsible and malicious when they're not corrupt.
Pay better attention to the actual words people utter and the point they are making instead of the knee-jerk inferences the lunatic fringe out there want you make.
You are either a dupe or a liar, which is it? That little statistic you quoted did not come from any May 2009 BBC source. It came from this BBC article, dated May 27, 2004:
That was more than five years ago. Things have changed. Quality of life as improved. Sadly, the statistics for US wait times vary greatly. It's as if things are so scatterbrained in the US that we can't even properly document our progress.
You got your excellent statistic from Fox News didn't you, you lovable little scamp? Glenn Beck maybe? He's a drug addicted idiot who frequently talks about assassinating public figures. I don't think he's a very reliable source. Especially since he fraudulently attributed those 2004 numbers to 2009.
By the way, the guy he's interviewing is Daniel Hannan, a fringe extremist Tory who is very hardcore about dismantling the NHS and killing universal healthcare, something 95% of Britons are against. A growing number of Britons are becoming dissatisfied with certain aspects of the NHS, and want to see improved management and organization; however, the UK public is still overwhelmingly happy to have their system.
A few more reliable stats for you; unless of course you think those communist Liberals at the CIA are revising not just history, but the future as well:
US infant mortality rate: 6.26 / 1000 (deaths per thousand live births) US life expectancy: 75.65 / 80.69 (male / female)
UK infant mortality rate: 4.85 / 1000 UK life expectancy: 76.52 / 81.63
Look, I'm not saying I'm for Obama's system. I think he's a meek president who will, at best, be a transitional president, and at worst be an open and unapologetic continuance of Bush administration policies. However, I would at least like to be presented with some real facts from both sides. And in any case, criticisms of his plan ought to be based on honesty and not Kool-Aid.
What happens when he has a typo or transcribes a column wrong and borks an entire train? Customers get angry because they miss expected connections and blame MTA not Schoenfeld.
I doubt that really is a concern. I imagine that MTA is a bit like Chicago Transit Authority, operating with a "So, what. We're sorry for your inconvenience. Now live with it." MTA surely could care less about Schoenfeld's accuracy. If he has a history of inaccuracy, he will lose readers and his iPhone app will lose users. If they were only suing to force Schoenfeld to make a very clear disclaimer that neither he nor his site and app are associated with MTA, then I'd think MTA did care about inaccuracies. Maybe MTA has an iPhone app of their own in development which they hoped to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted this is Slashdot, but it's still pretty disappointing that I had to navigate to the bottom of the page just to find one person who correctly pointed out that these are toys.
When I was a child I had a toy rocket ship. It was the '70s, so it didn't do shit. I imagine that even if it could light up and produce a little smoke, no one would have said I shouldn't be allowed to have this rocket ship since I shouldn't be learning how to pilot rocket ships before I learned to walk. Kids today have toy personal computers too as well as toy frying pans, toy ovens, and all sorts of other things kids shouldn't have real life access to.
But the real deal products mentioned in the article being targeted to preteens is more interesting. Obviously preteens can't enter into a legal contract for a cell subscription, so the phones must originate with a legal guardian. In this case, why not add a kid to an adult's family plan and then give them an extremely basic phone? Verizon had a small cell phone with just 4 speed dial keys, each pre-programmable. There is sense in giving a little kid (or an adult with limited capacity) a phone such as this as with one key press, they can instantly call a guardian. Perhaps down the road that is the direction these working phones will go. There's surely a market for Transformers shaped phones. I'm not sure able text messaging however. Each of the devices listed in the article had parental controls, so even in the most conservative use case, a kid could only text a parent.
I think the larger point that's being made is that the most vocal opponents of tax financed social welfare programs often use very heated and dangerous language to frame things like welfare and government health insurance as communist and anti-American, while saying that proponents are evil liberal communists "democrats", and that recipients are stupid and lazy.
Many feel that these programs would run more efficiently but for the net effect of tax dodgers and the political pressure, opponents put on anyone trying to fund these programs well.
It's not the idea that using it while complaining about it is bad. It's that this particular poster has a really extremist position on the subject and related subjects (national healthcare), and so his name calling people for disagreeing with him, and then attacking the very idea of social welfare while whining that his aid can't come fast enough; really makes him look like a troll.
He did make one good point, however unintentional. If you're going to have a program such as this, it should be more efficient so as to get benefits out to applicants ASAP. Obviously though that's a wholly different argument about bureaucracies.
Well, actually yeah it does. Democrats, and Republicans alike, have encouraged spammers by not pushing for serious spam legislation. I agree though, it's not a political story, but I love that a DNC website is being abused by spammers. I hope for a followup news story that says RNC owned phones are abused by telemarketers.
You realize that democrat.org isn't a government organization, right? You realize that it's jump point to the DNC, which is a political party, and not a government organization, right? And you realize that the very people who would take control of the internet away from private networks would not be representatives of a political party, but the military, right? Even for a troll, you're stupid.
And at that point, we have to start questioning the choice of those value words rather than assume they must be true. Sensationalism sells otherwise boring stories.
Right. but I would refrain from using words like "conspiracy" or "collusion", anything which paints this as criminal so quickly. Businesses can form alliances. They do form alliances against other businesses, and historically consumers and regulators have allowed this. Microsoft is paranoid, but so is any highly successful company that's being threatened by game-changing competitors. It's clear Google is a different kind of competitor, otherwise Microsoft would have been able to deal with Google sooner.
These meetings could very well be the stuff of movies, men in trenchcoats meeting at the docks at midnight to discuss putting a hit on Google; OR they can be one of a hundred strategy meetings that competitors in a common industry hold together annually. Until I see Ballmer tossing molotov cocktails, I'm just going to assume that this was an ordinary business meeting with donuts and bad coffee.
But companies have long formed alliances with each other, and those alliances, despite whatever consumer benefit was advertised, have always been for the sole purpose of giving member businesses an advantage viz-a-vis either the marketplace or a stronger, more entrenched competitor. It's business 101. Sure, we care when competitors working together causes harm to consumers, but we really don't care when that cooperation hurts another player in the industry.
Microsoft, being traditionally the dominant player, has long been a target of formal alliances and unofficial cooperation.
I think outside the community, the perception is that Microsoft isn't all that evil anymore, if they ever were. The last several years of corporate scandals have really changed consumer attitudes about what constitutes an evil company. Look at News Corps, or as an extreme example, Xi (formerly Blackwater). Those companies are far worse than Microsoft ever was.
Within the geek community, I'd say there are more interesting companies to fear and loathe. Microsoft's moves in business resemble a company trying to stay relevant and not start down that downward slope. It's hard to hate an injured animal. Microsoft's power was always limited to the beige box. It never reached very far beyond that. There are now other companies that don't need the beige box. Google with its purported altruistic intentions masking secretly evil motivations, is a far more fun company to hate. And of course, Facebook is just old-school James Bond villainous.
That's unfortunate. I'm sure there are example of homeschooled people who ultimately ended up more cultured and more socially aware. In *my* case, and perhaps I should have specified that, I would have ended up inept. How do you really teach another culture when you aren't exposed to it first hand? I am trying to learn a little more about Persian culture. I found that books haven't been as helpful as hanging out at a Persian restaurant with Persian friends and just absorbing.
All TiVo did was put a shiny plastic box on a device that I myself built years before. Hell, I had VCRs hooked up to controllers and custom made computer software years before that!
Nah, TiVo is a business which has failed to evolve. Therefore it deserves to die.
That's not a fair thing to say. Sure, "no social life" often means "no prom", "no dates", etc. But, it also means "no exposure to anyone with an alternative lifestyle, culture, perspective on life, opinion", etc. Granted, high schools aren't famous for being a place where kids can be exposed to new perspectives, but personally, I'm very happy with the public school education that allowed me to directly into a large private polytech university. And I'd do it again. Were I homeschooled, I would have been severely crippled when it comes to understanding other people's life experiences.
I would say it's the latter: Adobe doesn't want to prematurely guarantee that CS3 will work on Snow Leopard. Furthermore, I'd say Adobe would prefer that customers think they'll need to upgrade to CS4.
What about Leopard is broken beyond repair exactly?
In the Mac world, a lot of things can change in between operating system versions. Numbers like 10.5 and 10.6 don't describe patch levels or minor versions for the same operating system; rather they identify completely distinct operating systems with different SDKs and features.
If you're experienced with Windows, think of this as an equivalent question: Does my software which runs on XP continue to run on Vista?
That's a total exaggeration. There is a lot of noise out there about this happening, but I have to wonder if it's all originating from dishonest brokers who watched no more than a minute of MSNBC coverage. I was watching MSNBC when they showed the guy. I saw his face, I noted he was black myself, and I watched the many news segments that followed in the days after where MSNBC discussed the subject and used his video appearance as B roll. He's become a poster boy on that network. Incidentally, he wasn't just there. "Chris B." as he went by was there as part of a publicity stunt staged by Ernie Hancock, a Libertarian blogger and long-time associate of the Arizona Black Viper militia, a group that attempted to bomb federal buildings in the '90s. I wouldn't be surprised if "Chris B" was a member of Black Viper himself.
Incidentally, I love the photoshop image of Christ holding an assault rifle. I'm pro gun myself, but how disconnected with reality and ignorant of history do you have to be to think Christ would have carried a gun if he could?
I take offense to this, I don't see anywhere that Clinton is once, twice, three times a lady.
I agree with the first part of what you said. I don't honestly understand what you were saying in the second half. But to your original point: yes, if that's racist then all those McDonald's billboards on the Chicago southside that feature blacks and all those TV court show billboards that feature blacks and hispanics, must be racist as well. There aren't many blacks in Eastern Europe, but there are some, mostly of recent African origin. There are blacks in Germany too. I think that surprises many Americans. Poland really has a better record on white-black relations than say Russia. In Poland, there's most russophobia. If the switch was intentionally race-based, which it's not necessarily, then if anything, Microsoft is guilty of underestimating Polish attitudes.
Better yet, let's review the FCC's anti-public good performance going back to the mid-90s. FCC has consistently worked on behalf of private interests to the harm of the public.
The FCC under Clinton did as much damage to the public as the FCC under Bush. Just looking at the FCC's most recent failures, I am not optimistic about FCC doing anything in the public good regarding net neutrality. At best, we'll get some immediate treat that will keep consumers happy in the interim at the cost of a loss of consumer rights further down the road.
Yes. It will help if the OP thinks about Mac OS X not as a single version of an operating system called Mac OS, but as a family of operating systems, just as Windows is a family of operating systems.
Thank you for finally providing some *relevant* facts, and without trying to imply that I'm a liar.
Not only do the articles point out the same concerns I've already mentioned, they bring up the possibility that firearms will get into bars due to the unclear definition of a restaurant. This isn't the '70s. The bar, pub, and restaurant models have mostly merged into a single hybrid model.
Some places are obviously bars. And some are obviously restaurants, but a huge number are "hot spots" or "new old favorites": places like PF Chang's, BJ's, Pink Taco, Cheesecake Factory, Blue Wasabi, Red Robin, etc. You don't have to be over 18 to enter, you can dine-in, and you can order a range of alcoholic drinks. I know for a fact that several of these restaurants make most of their money at the bar. A restaurant that sells alcohol can in fact be a bar.
Then you have the question of denying service to patrons carrying weapons. What if the weapons are concealed? I've never been asked if I was packing before, and I doubt I'll be asked after. And even if I were asked, I have no legal obligation to say I am carrying. I might just lie and say I'm not. Most restauranteurs aren't going to hire trained bouncers with metal detectors due to the image and the cost. And most aren't going to start having the hostess due a weapons check at the door.
In all actuality though, it's not totally a bad idea. But you might as well just let me carry in any building I want because this limitation of bar vs restaurant really doesn't work.
There is some sense there, yes. Game journalism does seem mostly focused the Ziff Davis soft reporting approach to technology. You don't find many articles that seriously discuss games in terms of game theory and with real social context. It all comes down to features reviews. My gaming history began with arcades, Atari VCS, and Vectrex, not to mention a slew of battery powered handhelds. I would love to see real discussion of these things, but how many game journalists are old enough to even have an appreciation for Atari VCS/2600? Most game journalists I've seen are in their 20s, so they necessarily see the NES as old school, and not say Zork.
It's not really a myth though it does look like it might be when we use mostly the big corporate titans as examples. In those companies, it looks like risk is diffused across rule-by-committee management models, corporate bailouts, and tax exemptions. In most companies, however, it is true that the single person (or few people) in charge bear the greatest risks. There are the financial risks: capital investment, salaries, etc.; but there is also the risk of the endeavor itself. I see the CEO as the leader and chief visionary (obviously that's not always true). The CEO has to think about things lower-level employees don't such as threats on the horizon from other competitors, trends, externalities, etc. The CEO has to develop plans for the company and steer the company. That requires an investment of self that most people will not do. I'm not saying most poor guys with an inkling of sense won't want to do this, but frankly, most people regardless of background can be real corporate leaders.
By "risk" we don't just mean the money. We mean all the tangible and intangible costs that come from running a company that don't exist when you're just the wheel in a cog.
What you said about birthright is absolutely true. There are some companies out there that take pride in the classic good 'ol boy system or just plain nepotism. So it seems that the promise of our style of capitalism isn't that you'll be able break through the door of companies where you just don't belong, rather that you can create a company of your own with your own doors
And you either didn't even bother to read the article you linked to, or you're dishonestly trying to pass off a bill proposal in Ohio as potential Arizona law in order to hijack public concern there.
The discussion was about Arizona, not Ohio. Ohio HB 203 is completely irrelevant here. You might as well link to an article about midwifery laws in territorial Hawaii. The issue in Phoenix which is being debated and which there is public concern is guns in bars, not guns in restaurants which serve alcohol.
My party? I never told you I was a Democrat. And that you think I must surely be since I disagree with your reactionary statement shows a fundamental weakness in all water carriers like you.
I'm actually a Reagan Republican. As it stands today, I'm an independent voter. I don't like the Democrats because they're inept when they're not corrupt, and I don't like the Republicans because they're irresponsible and malicious when they're not corrupt.
Pay better attention to the actual words people utter and the point they are making instead of the knee-jerk inferences the lunatic fringe out there want you make.
You are either a dupe or a liar, which is it? That little statistic you quoted did not come from any May 2009 BBC source. It came from this BBC article, dated May 27, 2004:
That was more than five years ago. Things have changed. Quality of life as improved. Sadly, the statistics for US wait times vary greatly. It's as if things are so scatterbrained in the US that we can't even properly document our progress.
You got your excellent statistic from Fox News didn't you, you lovable little scamp? Glenn Beck maybe? He's a drug addicted idiot who frequently talks about assassinating public figures. I don't think he's a very reliable source. Especially since he fraudulently attributed those 2004 numbers to 2009.
By the way, the guy he's interviewing is Daniel Hannan, a fringe extremist Tory who is very hardcore about dismantling the NHS and killing universal healthcare, something 95% of Britons are against. A growing number of Britons are becoming dissatisfied with certain aspects of the NHS, and want to see improved management and organization; however, the UK public is still overwhelmingly happy to have their system.
A few more reliable stats for you; unless of course you think those communist Liberals at the CIA are revising not just history, but the future as well:
US infant mortality rate: 6.26 / 1000 (deaths per thousand live births)
US life expectancy: 75.65 / 80.69 (male / female)
UK infant mortality rate: 4.85 / 1000
UK life expectancy: 76.52 / 81.63
CANADA infant mortality: 5.04 / 1000
CANADA life expectancy: 78.69 / 83.91
source: CIA World Fact Book (2009 estimates)
Look, I'm not saying I'm for Obama's system. I think he's a meek president who will, at best, be a transitional president, and at worst be an open and unapologetic continuance of Bush administration policies. However, I would at least like to be presented with some real facts from both sides. And in any case, criticisms of his plan ought to be based on honesty and not Kool-Aid.
What happens when he has a typo or transcribes a column wrong and borks an entire train? Customers get angry because they miss expected connections and blame MTA not Schoenfeld.
I doubt that really is a concern. I imagine that MTA is a bit like Chicago Transit Authority, operating with a "So, what. We're sorry for your inconvenience. Now live with it." MTA surely could care less about Schoenfeld's accuracy. If he has a history of inaccuracy, he will lose readers and his iPhone app will lose users. If they were only suing to force Schoenfeld to make a very clear disclaimer that neither he nor his site and app are associated with MTA, then I'd think MTA did care about inaccuracies. Maybe MTA has an iPhone app of their own in development which they hoped to sell.