The off-the-shelf copies are all upgrades. Apple has been clear about that all along. There was never a copy of 10.4 for Intel Macs sold retail because every single Intel Mac came with a copy of 10.4 (so you never needed an upgarade disk).
Apple has already announced (and shipped with 10.5.0) better 64bit support, but just not for Carbon. And since all of Adobe's products (except Lightroom) are Carbon applications, they have no access to GUI-integrated (single process) 64bit support.
Adobe has been dragging its feet on a port to Cocoa (about which everyone saw the writing on the wall a long time ago), aided by Apple's thinking that it was going to give 64bit Carbon a future (rescinded quite some time ago). I don't know why this is at all surprising to anyone.
This is one of those mis-conceptions Europeans have about the US. We have so much space over here that we rarely approach the same population densities as in Europe. If you take a look at population denisty maps you will see Europe blanketed with densities of over 100 people/sq km, where the US only gets that directly in the largest urban areas (Boston through Washington DC, Chicago, Detriot, and LA), and the density falls off quickly after that.
If you look at the 3G coverage maps, you will see that those in the US map nicly to that, but leave the majority of the population (living in areas with less than 100 people/sq km) without. So we do have coverage comparable to Europe, where the population density is the same. The issue is that Europ's population density is so much greater than that in the US we are forced to make differnt technical decisions.
Oh... and you are forgetting that some of the 4G trials are going on here in the US, and there is 3.5G coverage (some.. not good) in the big markets in the US as well. But the technologies are not pushed much, since you can't count on the covereage being everywhere you want it to be.
First off, the US has not "eradicated" any group. The closest we got was the Native Americans, and they are still around (I will skip the complicated discussion on the morality of that). And if either the US or Israil wanted to eradicate everyone from any of those places, they would. I am not saying that they are nice places to live, but people do live there. Leave the hyperbole at the door please!
What the poster was saying is that most of Israel's neighbors have had an official government policy in the past 10 years or so (many still do) of wanting the eradication of Israel, and some of them apply that to all Israelis as well. Just to be clear: we are talking about the state sponsoring (on paper) of genocide here. The politicians of those countries may just be pandering with those words, but the pandering has the price of real lives lost in this conflict, and generations of time left wasted.
And on the whole nuclear weapons bit. Yes we are the only country that has used nuclear weapons is vastly overblown in my mind. Not because the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not horrific, but because in the scale of horrors done during WWII they are not the worst. If you just concentrate on bombing during WWII then you have to realize that a single night of the fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 people. That is more people than were killed in Nagasaki, and more than died directly in the blast in Hiroshima (more died later, but then that number has to compete with all of the bombing raids on Tokyo).
The nuclear blasts were horrific, but were not the worst things in the war by far. And when you start to open the comparisons out a bit farther, there are true genocides out there that make the wartime atrocities pale by comparison.
And the "gold standard" DNA scan is still going to miss the DNA Methylation that is increasingly important in disease studies. It turns out that methylation is also (at least in part) inheritable. It is going to be a long time before complete DNA read-outs are available, and then a while more before methylation read-outs follow them.
Then there is the whole understanding the results part...
But another retirement is that the theory be testable/falsifiable and that it make predictions. The problem with string theory to this point is that they are predicting that it has so-and-so many dimensions (different depending on the flavor you choose), but none of the values for the dimensions are supplied. You have to fill-in-the-blanks for the dimensional values (if they are limited in scale, or infinity if they are not) in order to start to use the theory anywhere but on a white-board, and so far no-one has figured out values that seem to make sense. And since you have x numbers of degrees of freedom, you can pretty much find one of these theories that models any particular set of data. If the model chances, then you change your numbers.
Something may come out of string theory, but for the moment it is something that should stay on the whiteboard, and not be bandied about as a real theory.
I think you are partially right, that the iPhone is still in flux, and thus difficult to make a real API for. But I also think that the more important point is that since the iPhone uses the MacOS X kernel and lower layers that the same team that was working on the iPhone also has the 10.5 rollout on its plate, and so has not had time to work on the API for the iPhone.
Notice the timing: the MacOS X development team is just winding down from the marathon to get MacOS X 10.5 out the door, and so now are available to do things like this. Personally I think that February is pushing it a bit for this. I was surprised that it would be so soon.
I am going to second this. There are a lot of great RegExp libraries available for Cocoa that have some great developers behind them. The shining one to me would be OmniGroup's OFRegularExpression (http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/). It has an easy license to work with, and is easy to embed in a project. Why should Apple spend resources trying to rebuild what is already there (or spend money updating it) when OmniGroup already has an interest in keeping it up-to-date?
XCode also works for C, C++, Objective-C++ (mixed Obj-C and C++), Java (depreciated, other than for WebObjects development), AppleScript (AppleScript Studio), and can work for Perl, Ruby, and Python (all for creating native apps thorough the bridges to Obj-C). All of this is focused on producing MacOS X Apps.
And once you get into Obj-C you will find a great environment, especially if you can stay in the Cocoa world and not dip down into Carbon.
I am not sure where you are coming up with the distinction that the iPhone is more tethered to the docking station than a gPhone would be. Let's go through your examples:
mail: iPhone gets mail over EDGE or WiFi. Check.
docs: iPhone doesn't really do them (by design), except in email. But if they alter Google Docs to work with touch-screen browsers, the iPhone probably gets that as well (since it would be through a web page on the gPhone).
YouTube: the iPhone gets that (or at least a large sub-set) through EDGE and WiFi. Check.
maps: Yep, EDGE and Wifi again. Check.
reader: Sadly the iPhone does not have a direct RSS reader, but you can always use any of the web-based ones.
talk: I assume you mean instant messaging, and there is a little problem with keeping a data connection open all the time. It drains the battery fast. I have done this on my Palm, and was unsurprised that it is not in the iPhone. I don't see a way around this with current technology.
President Bill Clinton did not commit perjury. If you actually look into the allegation that he did beyond what is said on Fox news (or sadly on the congressional floor), you will quickly learn that the question that Bill Clinton was asked amounted to "did you have intercourse with Monica Lewinsky", to which his answer was that he did not. I have never heard anyone say that that is not the case.
There is a good argument that President Bill Clinton misled the public by saying that he "did not have a relationship" with Monica Lewinsky, but I don't really think that it was more than her giving him blowjobs, and there is a valid question of whether that constitutes a "relationship" (most of the women I know would not include that as enough for a relationship).
But, perjury means lying under oath. And it is very clear that President Bill Clinton did not do that in this case. The whole thing with congress and the impeachment hearings was pure politics, and dirty politics at that.
Now... If you want to argue that President Bill Clinton perjured himself in that case, then you have to say that President George W. Bush has committed perjury on multiple counts: he has mislead and not informed Congress on the domestic spying thing (that is illegal under US law), there was the whole "Weapons of Mass Destruction" thing where he may not have directly lied but definitely construed things so that people would think things that were untrue, and there are a whole raft of other issues where he has directly lied to the US public.
President Bill Clinton misled people about his private life, President George W. Bush has lied about things that have gotten us into a war and people killed. Now who should be condemn more?
I don't agree that this is a matter of ethics, but think that the network restrictions should be legislated away for economic reasons (break up monopolies).
And thus far there is nothing but a couple of vague rumors that Apple is going to allow anything but Apple applications on the iPhone. It is unlikely that there is any financial arrangement between Apple and Google to get the current "Google applications" on the iPhone, and thus far they are the only non-Apple apps on the iPhone (without jailbreak).
Now Apple does have a real reason to object to the way that most of the unlocked (this is talking about switching carriers) phones were unlocked. In those cases people changed the radio id on the phone to all be the same id. From my understanding this is actually illegal in the UK, and something that the FCC probably frowns on enormously. You can argue that Apple gave the unlockers no choice (despite the fact the other people have found ways to do it without doing that), but you can't argue that the unlockers come out clean on this round.
And on the subject of "bricking", these people were playing around with Firmware. The software side I am all in favor of, but firmware is something you play with at your own risk. These people took the risk, and are now paying the price. Anyone who jailbroke their phone and it is having a problem, well they I have sympathy for. And from all the reports I have seen Apple is taking care of at least those people, they are just not being public about it.
If you look at the history of USAF Aircraft you would know that this is a silly thing. The only aircraft that was ever revealed out of the mists of secrecy with more than a handful of flying aircraft was the F-117, and that was only ever a one-trick pony where every single one was different from the last (read: it was never in "production"). In order to bring a fighter to main-line production level requires such a large industry that you might as well try to hide building an aircraft carrier.
And it does take an inordinate amount of time and development effort to come out with a fighter. The current round that we are working on is the JSF project (an attempt to create common components for an airframe to be shared amongst the US armed forces). This project will produce fighters that will be less capable than the F-22 as a pure fighter, but cheaper and more tailored to their respective missions.
There is little point to produce a better-than-the-F-22 fighter: no one can currently come close to beating it, and even more than that: no one is anywhere near being able to produce enough fighters to compete in a resource war with the US. Remember in WW2 just about everything that the US produced was inferior to both what the Germans and Japanese produced. The only reason we were a major factor in winning those wars is because we produced more of everything. We overwhelmed them with numbers. And right now we are massively overwhelming in the air and what we have is technically superior to anything any one else can field, plus we are right up there with training. we are not invincible, but have the power to push over anyone when it comes to a war.
There is a natural limiter here: batteries are very heavy and a battery-powered (heavier-than-air) aircraft is unlikely to ever get close to this record. That is something that is unlikely to change before things change enough to make this sort of record meaningless anyways.
Do you really think that the IT department made that decision? Or do you think that the CEO/CFO/CIO read a recent report that workers spend too much of their time browsing the we for personal reasons and decided that the IT department was going to make the change? Then he decided that the message should come from the IT department for IT reasons so that it would not be challenged by other workers and he could escape without anyone coming to him to complain.
Sometimes networking guys get weird ideas in their heads (and have a tendency to just start making changes, but they tend to do so without talking to anyone), but I have yet to hear about a true IT person coming up with the idea to filter web traffic.
It may seem like a minor difference, but the Internet at large is not "TCP/IP" only but rather IP only. You can layer TCP on top of it quite easily, and most of the routers out there have special optimization for TCP, but it is not required by any stretch of the imagination. TCP is a very common layer, but many connections are UDP, and you can technically have any other packet type you want, as long as it fits on top of IP.
Now it may be that firewalls will not let packets other than TCP or UDP in, but that is not an Internet limitation.
There are a couple of protocols out there that beat TCP for almost every use-case, and in 10 years they might be more popularly used. The internet at large does not have to change a bit to handle these protocols.
Actually, I have a nice job and work hard at it. I am not living on someone else's dime, and do resent those people who do. I have a great work ethic (a Midwestern one), but I have seen the pathological earnings disparities that our society has in place. There is absolutely no reason why there should be a 300:1 ratio in CEO pay to common worker pay (this is becoming more common). I ask you this: what can one person do in one hour (every hour) that is worth 300 times what another one earns? Does a CEO contribute more to the bottom line of a company than 300 workers? Can you really make an argument that they do?
50 times seems a little excessive to me, but I can live with that, but 300? And we are not talking about someone who is not working hard here on the lower end, we are talking about people who do some of the most draining work out there. You can make all the arguments you want about the people at the "top" having put in more years of training (but we all know that college is a fun time in life compared to a working life), but they are not sacrificing 300 times that of another person. And when you look at the people who are earning the most money in this society they are often not the people who have spent a lot of their lives earning the really hard advanced degrees.
As an example, the average post-doc (person who has gotten a doctorate in science, and is now working in a lab until they get enough seniority/prestige to get their own lab... which often takes a decade) is getting 40-60K a year. While business people coming out of undergrad school will make more than that in their first job. Why? Because the people who control the money have said that the path they have taken in life is worth more money (justifying why they can get more money themselves). This is a system that is getting more and more out-of-hand every year in this country.
Oddly, this is the sort of thing that Karl Marx predicted. He got many things wrong, but he did predict that this sort of thing would be the path that Capitalism would take. He thought it would eventually get so top-heavy that it would topple, something that I think will eventually happen if we continue on the path we are on. Television has slowed that collapse, and I don't believe that I will live to see it (and I don't know about Marx's vision of a workers' parricide either), but it stupid to ignore the growing problem.
So.... take a better look at history (look at Steinbecks writing for some more graphic examples of what this sort of imbalance already has done in this country... and why we changed the rules back then), and get a better grip on the "really, real world".
But you are missing the fundamental point of inflation: it is a good thing for everyone. Inflation means that you have to keep you money moving and this keeps the economy growing and moving. This means that it keeps getting bigger, which should be good for everyone, and over the course of history this has been true. But at the moment the problem is that the wealthy are getting an increasingly big portion of the pie every year... much quicker growth than the pie is expanding, and so the not-rick are falling behind inflation.
People have forgotten the lessons we learned from early in the century (or multiple times before in the past) that having an out-of-whack wealth distribution is not good for society and is almost synonymous with injustice (which eventually bites even the wealthy... and that in the bloody visage of revolution).
So inflation is not the real problem, wealth distribution is.
I do agree with your statement that the poor in the US are significantly better off than the poor in some other countries, and probably not as well off as they are in other (mostly European) countries. But why does that matter. Being rich or poor is never about absolute values, but rather about comparison with those around you. And that comparison is getting more and more out of hand in the US.
And your point about how many times a dollar is taxes is completely off the mark. Inheritance tax is all about money that is changing hands: from the deceased to their inheritors. It is a form of unearned income. Some people love to frame the conversation by talking about how inheritance taxes end family farms (which few people want to continue, or can really compete with the mega-farms), or small businesses. But in most cases there are already methods to slowly transfer these using businesses or other methods.
These dollars are only being taxed once as they go from one person (deceased) to another. And since that person is getting money without doing any work for it (being born is not doing work in this sense), we are talking about them just getting a little less "free" money. And history does show quite clearly that inheritance is the best way of concentrating money in the hands of the few. Inheritance tax is a great way of combating this, and allows a variable amount of how much can pass from generation to generation.
I don't see that that study is adjusted for cost-of-living or property values. Running a school in NYC and South Dekota are not going to come anywhere near each-other. Adjust for that sort of thing, and you have a better chance of learning something from the statistic.
"Unix" (notice the capitol U) is a specific certification whose criteria Apple has met (and paid for the right to use that designation). Generally people refer to things that have their roots in the old Bell Labs UNIX as "unix" or "unix-like" (notice the lower case u's). This is more of a philosophy of how things should work ("everything is a file, even when its not").
Minor note: these phones have AGPS. It does the same thing, but works by using the cell towers rather than GPS satellites. As long as you are in cell coverage it is effectively the same thing (except AGPS works much better in large cities), but you have to be in cell coverage for it to work.
A little more detail in this case would help illuminate why the guy was so angry. He made an agreement with Microsoft that in return for him licensing Spyglass Mosaic to them to be transformed into Internet Explorer that they would give him a fee and then a percentage of the profits. THey then bundle it with the OS and thus argued that they did not owe him any profits. It was a very dishonest thing for Microsoft to do, and they eventually settled for a relative pittance (after burying the guy's lawyers in court under a mountain of procedural work).
Actually... Bill Clinton did not commit perjury. Arguably he did lie during a press conference, and he certainly did intend to deceive during that press conference, but "perjury" is a word with a strict legal definition, and it does not hold in this case.
The details in the matter are that while under oath during a civil court case brought by Paula Jones then President Clinton was asked if he had had sex or an affair with Monica Lewinsky. He asked for clarification about what constituted sex and an affair, and sex was defined, BY THE PROSECUTOR, as penile-vaginal intercourse. He then answered that he had not had sex under this definition. I have never heard anyone say that Bill Clinton received more than a blow-job from Monica Lewinsky.
So please stop using the word "perjury". It is simply wrong to use in this case. You can say he lied (people may disagree on that point), and you can certainly say that he intended to mislead people (that cannot be disputed), but he did not perjure himself.
The subsequent disbarment was much more about the Whitewater investigations, and was highly politically charged. To the point that facts were mostly irrelevant in the case.
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The off-the-shelf copies are all upgrades. Apple has been clear about that all along. There was never a copy of 10.4 for Intel Macs sold retail because every single Intel Mac came with a copy of 10.4 (so you never needed an upgarade disk).
Apple has already announced (and shipped with 10.5.0) better 64bit support, but just not for Carbon. And since all of Adobe's products (except Lightroom) are Carbon applications, they have no access to GUI-integrated (single process) 64bit support.
Adobe has been dragging its feet on a port to Cocoa (about which everyone saw the writing on the wall a long time ago), aided by Apple's thinking that it was going to give 64bit Carbon a future (rescinded quite some time ago). I don't know why this is at all surprising to anyone.
This is one of those mis-conceptions Europeans have about the US. We have so much space over here that we rarely approach the same population densities as in Europe. If you take a look at population denisty maps you will see Europe blanketed with densities of over 100 people/sq km, where the US only gets that directly in the largest urban areas (Boston through Washington DC, Chicago, Detriot, and LA), and the density falls off quickly after that.
If you look at the 3G coverage maps, you will see that those in the US map nicly to that, but leave the majority of the population (living in areas with less than 100 people/sq km) without. So we do have coverage comparable to Europe, where the population density is the same. The issue is that Europ's population density is so much greater than that in the US we are forced to make differnt technical decisions.
Oh... and you are forgetting that some of the 4G trials are going on here in the US, and there is 3.5G coverage (some.. not good) in the big markets in the US as well. But the technologies are not pushed much, since you can't count on the covereage being everywhere you want it to be.
First off, the US has not "eradicated" any group. The closest we got was the Native Americans, and they are still around (I will skip the complicated discussion on the morality of that). And if either the US or Israil wanted to eradicate everyone from any of those places, they would. I am not saying that they are nice places to live, but people do live there. Leave the hyperbole at the door please!
What the poster was saying is that most of Israel's neighbors have had an official government policy in the past 10 years or so (many still do) of wanting the eradication of Israel, and some of them apply that to all Israelis as well. Just to be clear: we are talking about the state sponsoring (on paper) of genocide here. The politicians of those countries may just be pandering with those words, but the pandering has the price of real lives lost in this conflict, and generations of time left wasted.
And on the whole nuclear weapons bit. Yes we are the only country that has used nuclear weapons is vastly overblown in my mind. Not because the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not horrific, but because in the scale of horrors done during WWII they are not the worst. If you just concentrate on bombing during WWII then you have to realize that a single night of the fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 people. That is more people than were killed in Nagasaki, and more than died directly in the blast in Hiroshima (more died later, but then that number has to compete with all of the bombing raids on Tokyo).
The nuclear blasts were horrific, but were not the worst things in the war by far. And when you start to open the comparisons out a bit farther, there are true genocides out there that make the wartime atrocities pale by comparison.
And the "gold standard" DNA scan is still going to miss the DNA Methylation that is increasingly important in disease studies. It turns out that methylation is also (at least in part) inheritable. It is going to be a long time before complete DNA read-outs are available, and then a while more before methylation read-outs follow them.
Then there is the whole understanding the results part...
But another retirement is that the theory be testable/falsifiable and that it make predictions. The problem with string theory to this point is that they are predicting that it has so-and-so many dimensions (different depending on the flavor you choose), but none of the values for the dimensions are supplied. You have to fill-in-the-blanks for the dimensional values (if they are limited in scale, or infinity if they are not) in order to start to use the theory anywhere but on a white-board, and so far no-one has figured out values that seem to make sense. And since you have x numbers of degrees of freedom, you can pretty much find one of these theories that models any particular set of data. If the model chances, then you change your numbers.
Something may come out of string theory, but for the moment it is something that should stay on the whiteboard, and not be bandied about as a real theory.
I think you are partially right, that the iPhone is still in flux, and thus difficult to make a real API for. But I also think that the more important point is that since the iPhone uses the MacOS X kernel and lower layers that the same team that was working on the iPhone also has the 10.5 rollout on its plate, and so has not had time to work on the API for the iPhone.
Notice the timing: the MacOS X development team is just winding down from the marathon to get MacOS X 10.5 out the door, and so now are available to do things like this. Personally I think that February is pushing it a bit for this. I was surprised that it would be so soon.
I am going to second this. There are a lot of great RegExp libraries available for Cocoa that have some great developers behind them. The shining one to me would be OmniGroup's OFRegularExpression (http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/). It has an easy license to work with, and is easy to embed in a project. Why should Apple spend resources trying to rebuild what is already there (or spend money updating it) when OmniGroup already has an interest in keeping it up-to-date?
XCode also works for C, C++, Objective-C++ (mixed Obj-C and C++), Java (depreciated, other than for WebObjects development), AppleScript (AppleScript Studio), and can work for Perl, Ruby, and Python (all for creating native apps thorough the bridges to Obj-C). All of this is focused on producing MacOS X Apps.
And once you get into Obj-C you will find a great environment, especially if you can stay in the Cocoa world and not dip down into Carbon.
If you bought it on or after Oct 1 Apple will cover you for a shipping fee (they are usually $20):
http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/
I am not sure where you are coming up with the distinction that the iPhone is more tethered to the docking station than a gPhone would be. Let's go through your examples:
mail: iPhone gets mail over EDGE or WiFi. Check.
docs: iPhone doesn't really do them (by design), except in email. But if they alter Google Docs to work with touch-screen browsers, the iPhone probably gets that as well (since it would be through a web page on the gPhone).
YouTube: the iPhone gets that (or at least a large sub-set) through EDGE and WiFi. Check.
maps: Yep, EDGE and Wifi again. Check.
reader: Sadly the iPhone does not have a direct RSS reader, but you can always use any of the web-based ones.
talk: I assume you mean instant messaging, and there is a little problem with keeping a data connection open all the time. It drains the battery fast. I have done this on my Palm, and was unsurprised that it is not in the iPhone. I don't see a way around this with current technology.
maybe more: maybe not.
President Bill Clinton did not commit perjury. If you actually look into the allegation that he did beyond what is said on Fox news (or sadly on the congressional floor), you will quickly learn that the question that Bill Clinton was asked amounted to "did you have intercourse with Monica Lewinsky", to which his answer was that he did not. I have never heard anyone say that that is not the case.
There is a good argument that President Bill Clinton misled the public by saying that he "did not have a relationship" with Monica Lewinsky, but I don't really think that it was more than her giving him blowjobs, and there is a valid question of whether that constitutes a "relationship" (most of the women I know would not include that as enough for a relationship).
But, perjury means lying under oath. And it is very clear that President Bill Clinton did not do that in this case. The whole thing with congress and the impeachment hearings was pure politics, and dirty politics at that.
Now... If you want to argue that President Bill Clinton perjured himself in that case, then you have to say that President George W. Bush has committed perjury on multiple counts: he has mislead and not informed Congress on the domestic spying thing (that is illegal under US law), there was the whole "Weapons of Mass Destruction" thing where he may not have directly lied but definitely construed things so that people would think things that were untrue, and there are a whole raft of other issues where he has directly lied to the US public.
President Bill Clinton misled people about his private life, President George W. Bush has lied about things that have gotten us into a war and people killed. Now who should be condemn more?
I don't agree that this is a matter of ethics, but think that the network restrictions should be legislated away for economic reasons (break up monopolies).
And thus far there is nothing but a couple of vague rumors that Apple is going to allow anything but Apple applications on the iPhone. It is unlikely that there is any financial arrangement between Apple and Google to get the current "Google applications" on the iPhone, and thus far they are the only non-Apple apps on the iPhone (without jailbreak).
Now Apple does have a real reason to object to the way that most of the unlocked (this is talking about switching carriers) phones were unlocked. In those cases people changed the radio id on the phone to all be the same id. From my understanding this is actually illegal in the UK, and something that the FCC probably frowns on enormously. You can argue that Apple gave the unlockers no choice (despite the fact the other people have found ways to do it without doing that), but you can't argue that the unlockers come out clean on this round.
And on the subject of "bricking", these people were playing around with Firmware. The software side I am all in favor of, but firmware is something you play with at your own risk. These people took the risk, and are now paying the price. Anyone who jailbroke their phone and it is having a problem, well they I have sympathy for. And from all the reports I have seen Apple is taking care of at least those people, they are just not being public about it.
If you look at the history of USAF Aircraft you would know that this is a silly thing. The only aircraft that was ever revealed out of the mists of secrecy with more than a handful of flying aircraft was the F-117, and that was only ever a one-trick pony where every single one was different from the last (read: it was never in "production"). In order to bring a fighter to main-line production level requires such a large industry that you might as well try to hide building an aircraft carrier.
And it does take an inordinate amount of time and development effort to come out with a fighter. The current round that we are working on is the JSF project (an attempt to create common components for an airframe to be shared amongst the US armed forces). This project will produce fighters that will be less capable than the F-22 as a pure fighter, but cheaper and more tailored to their respective missions.
There is little point to produce a better-than-the-F-22 fighter: no one can currently come close to beating it, and even more than that: no one is anywhere near being able to produce enough fighters to compete in a resource war with the US. Remember in WW2 just about everything that the US produced was inferior to both what the Germans and Japanese produced. The only reason we were a major factor in winning those wars is because we produced more of everything. We overwhelmed them with numbers. And right now we are massively overwhelming in the air and what we have is technically superior to anything any one else can field, plus we are right up there with training. we are not invincible, but have the power to push over anyone when it comes to a war.
There is a natural limiter here: batteries are very heavy and a battery-powered (heavier-than-air) aircraft is unlikely to ever get close to this record. That is something that is unlikely to change before things change enough to make this sort of record meaningless anyways.
Do you really think that the IT department made that decision? Or do you think that the CEO/CFO/CIO read a recent report that workers spend too much of their time browsing the we for personal reasons and decided that the IT department was going to make the change? Then he decided that the message should come from the IT department for IT reasons so that it would not be challenged by other workers and he could escape without anyone coming to him to complain.
Sometimes networking guys get weird ideas in their heads (and have a tendency to just start making changes, but they tend to do so without talking to anyone), but I have yet to hear about a true IT person coming up with the idea to filter web traffic.
It may seem like a minor difference, but the Internet at large is not "TCP/IP" only but rather IP only. You can layer TCP on top of it quite easily, and most of the routers out there have special optimization for TCP, but it is not required by any stretch of the imagination. TCP is a very common layer, but many connections are UDP, and you can technically have any other packet type you want, as long as it fits on top of IP.
Now it may be that firewalls will not let packets other than TCP or UDP in, but that is not an Internet limitation.
There are a couple of protocols out there that beat TCP for almost every use-case, and in 10 years they might be more popularly used. The internet at large does not have to change a bit to handle these protocols.
Actually, I have a nice job and work hard at it. I am not living on someone else's dime, and do resent those people who do. I have a great work ethic (a Midwestern one), but I have seen the pathological earnings disparities that our society has in place. There is absolutely no reason why there should be a 300:1 ratio in CEO pay to common worker pay (this is becoming more common). I ask you this: what can one person do in one hour (every hour) that is worth 300 times what another one earns? Does a CEO contribute more to the bottom line of a company than 300 workers? Can you really make an argument that they do?
50 times seems a little excessive to me, but I can live with that, but 300? And we are not talking about someone who is not working hard here on the lower end, we are talking about people who do some of the most draining work out there. You can make all the arguments you want about the people at the "top" having put in more years of training (but we all know that college is a fun time in life compared to a working life), but they are not sacrificing 300 times that of another person. And when you look at the people who are earning the most money in this society they are often not the people who have spent a lot of their lives earning the really hard advanced degrees.
As an example, the average post-doc (person who has gotten a doctorate in science, and is now working in a lab until they get enough seniority/prestige to get their own lab... which often takes a decade) is getting 40-60K a year. While business people coming out of undergrad school will make more than that in their first job. Why? Because the people who control the money have said that the path they have taken in life is worth more money (justifying why they can get more money themselves). This is a system that is getting more and more out-of-hand every year in this country.
Oddly, this is the sort of thing that Karl Marx predicted. He got many things wrong, but he did predict that this sort of thing would be the path that Capitalism would take. He thought it would eventually get so top-heavy that it would topple, something that I think will eventually happen if we continue on the path we are on. Television has slowed that collapse, and I don't believe that I will live to see it (and I don't know about Marx's vision of a workers' parricide either), but it stupid to ignore the growing problem.
So.... take a better look at history (look at Steinbecks writing for some more graphic examples of what this sort of imbalance already has done in this country... and why we changed the rules back then), and get a better grip on the "really, real world".
But you are missing the fundamental point of inflation: it is a good thing for everyone. Inflation means that you have to keep you money moving and this keeps the economy growing and moving. This means that it keeps getting bigger, which should be good for everyone, and over the course of history this has been true. But at the moment the problem is that the wealthy are getting an increasingly big portion of the pie every year... much quicker growth than the pie is expanding, and so the not-rick are falling behind inflation.
People have forgotten the lessons we learned from early in the century (or multiple times before in the past) that having an out-of-whack wealth distribution is not good for society and is almost synonymous with injustice (which eventually bites even the wealthy... and that in the bloody visage of revolution).
So inflation is not the real problem, wealth distribution is.
I do agree with your statement that the poor in the US are significantly better off than the poor in some other countries, and probably not as well off as they are in other (mostly European) countries. But why does that matter. Being rich or poor is never about absolute values, but rather about comparison with those around you. And that comparison is getting more and more out of hand in the US.
And your point about how many times a dollar is taxes is completely off the mark. Inheritance tax is all about money that is changing hands: from the deceased to their inheritors. It is a form of unearned income. Some people love to frame the conversation by talking about how inheritance taxes end family farms (which few people want to continue, or can really compete with the mega-farms), or small businesses. But in most cases there are already methods to slowly transfer these using businesses or other methods.
These dollars are only being taxed once as they go from one person (deceased) to another. And since that person is getting money without doing any work for it (being born is not doing work in this sense), we are talking about them just getting a little less "free" money. And history does show quite clearly that inheritance is the best way of concentrating money in the hands of the few. Inheritance tax is a great way of combating this, and allows a variable amount of how much can pass from generation to generation.
Here is a nice link:
http://www.alternet.org/story/25480/
I don't see that that study is adjusted for cost-of-living or property values. Running a school in NYC and South Dekota are not going to come anywhere near each-other. Adjust for that sort of thing, and you have a better chance of learning something from the statistic.
"Unix" (notice the capitol U) is a specific certification whose criteria Apple has met (and paid for the right to use that designation). Generally people refer to things that have their roots in the old Bell Labs UNIX as "unix" or "unix-like" (notice the lower case u's). This is more of a philosophy of how things should work ("everything is a file, even when its not").
Minor note: these phones have AGPS. It does the same thing, but works by using the cell towers rather than GPS satellites. As long as you are in cell coverage it is effectively the same thing (except AGPS works much better in large cities), but you have to be in cell coverage for it to work.
A little more detail in this case would help illuminate why the guy was so angry. He made an agreement with Microsoft that in return for him licensing Spyglass Mosaic to them to be transformed into Internet Explorer that they would give him a fee and then a percentage of the profits. THey then bundle it with the OS and thus argued that they did not owe him any profits. It was a very dishonest thing for Microsoft to do, and they eventually settled for a relative pittance (after burying the guy's lawyers in court under a mountain of procedural work).
Actually... Bill Clinton did not commit perjury. Arguably he did lie during a press conference, and he certainly did intend to deceive during that press conference, but "perjury" is a word with a strict legal definition, and it does not hold in this case.
The details in the matter are that while under oath during a civil court case brought by Paula Jones then President Clinton was asked if he had had sex or an affair with Monica Lewinsky. He asked for clarification about what constituted sex and an affair, and sex was defined, BY THE PROSECUTOR, as penile-vaginal intercourse. He then answered that he had not had sex under this definition. I have never heard anyone say that Bill Clinton received more than a blow-job from Monica Lewinsky.
So please stop using the word "perjury". It is simply wrong to use in this case. You can say he lied (people may disagree on that point), and you can certainly say that he intended to mislead people (that cannot be disputed), but he did not perjure himself.
The subsequent disbarment was much more about the Whitewater investigations, and was highly politically charged. To the point that facts were mostly irrelevant in the case.