The fact that this stuff hasn't led to protesting in the streets really reflects just how complacent the US population is. Or how afraid of the government we really are, knowing just how well equipped and militarized the government has become thanks to 60+ years of growth in the military-industrial complex.
Or how little you can actually show harm from what's happened.
Really, I get the theoretical concept of liberty violated here, but given a private corp actually receives this data by willing consumers (as a byproduct of the info needed to run the service), maybe nobody actually gives a crap, compared to real problems like unemployment, student loan debt, tax loopholes for corps, etc.
If your first thought is "holy crap the government asked for this data from a private company, that's terrible!?!!!" maybe it should actually be "holy crap why does a private company have this in the first place?"
He's also had Bush's Congress to work with. As much as I wish he'd done better, I look at the GOP and it's fixation on introducing bills to ban abortions and I understand why the country is so fucked up. The folks making the laws are morons.
I hate to break it to you, but they are. Not the mythical one that exists in your mind, but the one involving check and balances. The laws were created by Congress, approved by the courts, duly executed by the executive. If you don't like it, then talk to CONGRESS which is the root of basically everything.
Yeah yeah, I hear you screaming about the 4th Amendment and whatever. Here's the deal - are you an attorney? a judge? in a position to interpret or rule on the law? No? Then guess what, STFU because your input into this whole process boils down to VOTING for CONGRESS.
(And no, replies of "you won't accomplish anything because of this reason" are not constructive.)
You're asking for the impossible, there are simply too many issues a modern superpower has to deal with to make EVERYBODY happy. What you propose, voting out the incumbent, boils down to direct democracy where whoever shouts the loudest over the issue they are most passionate about, gets heard.
I mean that's one way to do it, but you won't make any progress excluding politicians for not holding the single viewpoint you find important. 50 other citizens are going to care about 50 other things that aren't even on your list.
I for one don't give a crap if the phone company hands over my metadata. Hell, maybe the NSA can check my billing records to find out if I've been overcharged or being ripped off and charge the phone company back on my behalf. On the other hand I'm more interested in infrastructure issues, lightening up on the drug sentencing (small amounts of pot, etc.), the incestuous relationship between big corporations, wall street, and lawmakers, etc. I only have so much time in the day and if I'm choosing some hill to martyr on, phone company metadata isn't even going to be in the top 20 things I give a flying crap about.
I think there's an assumption there which is false, that being: 0) everybody working at NSA is fully devoted to working on stuff you think is questionable.
There are a ton of people there in the military, that are linguists, and probably are military linguists spending their time translating intercepts and locating foreign military targets. You know, "sht" that actually does protect the country should it come to war somewhere. Beating the terrorist drum probably just gets Congress off their back as far as funding (which if you think about it is actually the fault of Congress) for the stuff too boring to describe. This stuff in the papers, yeah probably the vast majority of people there aren't remotely close to touching any part of it.
Brilliant move! De-emphasize the divisions that bring in the big bucks *and* have a unique advantage over competitors for legacy reasons, while placing even more emphasis on the divisions that lose money and have mediocre market share.
Well, this is the "chain is only as strong as its weakest link" strategy. We'll see how that pans out (in these circumstances)...
Sorry, but leaks and hacks aren't the same thing. If by leaks you mean some employee took info out, well that's espionage and unfortunately not 100% preventable without mind reading.
So why is the US government putting our top secret hush hush designs ON THE F"ING INTERNET
The U.S. Government? Every incident I've read of has been some kind of intrusion at a defense contractor. Meaning, corporate America is dropping the ball on security. But that's because corporations are all about profits and security is just an expense...
Anyway, has there been any published info about an intrusion at an actual U.S. Government facility, not a private company? Honestly, I haven't seen any press about that, maybe I missed it.
There's a couple of logic holes here. First, who wrote that mil-spec software? Was it a contractor or private corporation? Ah, so the real blame on unreliable expensive software is with some private corporation, not the government, right? As for COTS being more effective, that's great assuming the critical infrastructure can be run on COTS.
As far as this bug bounty, it is a terrible idea. Sorry corporate America, if you want to keep your code private and reap the corresponding profits, you also get to assume the expense of fixing it and various liabilities if applicable. If your stuff isn't fit for infrastructure, then you get cut out of the bidding/purchase process entirely and replaced with some entity that is willing to. You don't get to socialize the cost of your bugs and private the profits, that's total bullshit.
I would only support this bug bounty for open source software, whereby the bugs and fixes are usable by anyone that wants to.
This sounds like a terrible idea. There are times the government should get involved in something, and time they shouldn't. This is one of those times they shouldn't.
It isn't the charter of any federal agency to shore up the products of private corporations. Corporations should be doing that anyway, and under the typical free market is awesome attitude most users here have, the expense of paying for bug discovery and fixes should factor into the corporation's pricing, profits, potential liability (haha) and so on. If the government starts picking up the tab, corporations will just quit doing their own QA.
Citizen's now have to pay so Microsoft can fix it's product? Don't they make billions of profit every quarter? How about investing some of that into... I don't know... better development and QA??
Plus, with the government offering a bounty, that effectively means the people wind up paying for fixes for products they many not use.
This is just more corporate welfare for irresponsible/lazy ones that are unwilling to properly invest in security.
Fatal flaw with your logic: If people anticipated prices going up, then prices would already be that high, minus the price of time. This is a mathematical theorem.
There's a fatal flaw to your fatal flaw: the universe does NOT force economies to obey Black-Ssholes. It's an empirical formula attempting to model derivative pricing, not a fundamental law of physics.
Maybe you remember Long Term Capital Management, which made some bets based on economic "laws" and even had Scholes as a partner? Yeah, they went under.
In high school I read a short story of his, Mazirian the Magician from the short story collection The Dying Earth - now that volume is titled Mazirian the Magician following Vance's preference. It blew me away and the sequel, Cugel the Clever, originally The Eyes of the Overworld, was even better. It set the tone for the "hostile world vs man having to outsmart everybody he meets" Vance was always excellent with.
Later when Lyonesse came out, I read it in two or three days, I just couldn't put it down. His Lyonesse trilogy was incredible; my favorite fantasy novel is still book 1, Lyonesse, now titled "Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden". Other favorites include the Cadwal Chronicle trilogy, Maske: Thaery, and the Planet of Adventure series.
When the VIE (Vance Integral Edition) formed and looked for volunteers, I ignored it at first, much to my regret. Later I joined in when they were almost done, and proofread a few short stories (wrapping up a final book) and an index. Had I joined earlier, I might have been a proofreader for Lyonesse, my favorite novel, and listed in the VIE credits. Lost opportunity there!
A favorite scene from Lyonesse involves Aillas visiting Murgen a powerful wizard. Murgen's enemies have booby trapped the road to his home, and every day he must discover, outwit, and defeat various traps. Aillas asks "why do you let you enemies, all lesser wizards, do this to you?" Murgen responds "It is beneath my dignity to notice their efforts". Murgen is saying that he's too great a wizard to complain about their attempts... I just love that quote/scene. Something along those lines at least, I can't remember the word for word quote. I think of it sometimes for inspiration when I'm stuck on a problem... and how not finding the solution is beneath my dignity so I must work harder to fix it right.;)
Anyway, Vance is a towering figure, great plots, language, and characters.
Perhaps I am an oddity, but I find basketball much more annoying to watch than baseball, and football really isn't any better. In terms of continuous action, I would put forth that the NHL is actually the most "gameplay" for the length of a game.
I'm with you!
I can't fully explain why, but I enjoy watching an occasional football game. It's like a violent chess match - both sides pick plays, execute them, how it turns out depends on physical abilities and sometimes sneaky play. The downtime is pretty high though.
Baseball is like watching live (in person) with friends - you can chat, eat/drink, kinda half pay attention to the game and still keep up. There are so many games a season prices are lower than football. The rules are pretty easy to understand and umpire rulings aren't that mysterious. At worst, a slow mo replay might be controversial as to whether the a runner is safe or not. The strike zone can be a bit shall we say, ill defined.
Hockey definitely is a lot of action, the clock doesn't stop too much. One issue is I can't see the puck and it has a bit of the soccer scoring issue, but overall a decent time.
I can't stand basketball though. One reason is I can't follow any of the calls. The actual rules involving travelling never seemed enforced, there are so many technical fouls (zone vs man-to-man, illegal defense - wtf is that? I can see in football some dude lined up over the line, but in basketball he was... defending "improperly" in a game with continuous motion?), play stops on a judgement call (offensive charging vs defensive blocking) or some other foul that seems totally arbitrary. In a close game, the only way the team behind can get the ball is the foul strategy, which I find to me tedious as hell.
Everything considered baseball might win out for cost, need to pay attention, understanding the game, and general relaxing where you don't really need to watch with full attention. Really the only thing that bugs the crap out of me in baseball is near continuous spitting from pitchers, especially when the camera is zoomed focused on them.;) Another advantage of watching in person, you don't see that as much!
I agree... I do hate the fact that universities are basically the feeder systems for so many sports (football, basketball). At least hockey and baseball have minor leagues, however I'm not sure what proportion of pro hockey/baseball come from minor leagues vs colleges.
Fundamentally, the mission of university is education and while sports are fine, I think the system as whole should downgrade to where university sports are on more of an intramural level. That, and the NFL and NBA should setup their own minor league systems.
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
We do, but society has always had various spectacles for the public. 2000 years ago it was watching Christians vs the Lions at the Colosseum. Back then, popular gladiators or whatever got preferential treatment as well... granted, the stakes were higher.;)
Viewed as entertainment, it's all fine. Like many other things, I just wish all the externalized costs were properly accounted for and not shoved off somewhere else.
It is simple, from the viewpoint of private businesses - they'll just post noticed and waivers that say "we aren't responsible for video recording somebody else does". Kind of like the generic "not responsible for theft" at coat checks, and so on.
They aren't going to care, aren't going to get into enforcing laws, and will generally offload everything and say if A records B on these premises, your legal fight is with A and not us at all. Leave if you don't like this policy.
So again, private companies recording stuff is bad because *mumble mumble* the government?
It just seems like you have a MISPLACED anger/concern. You are apparently totally fine with these corps recording whatever and whenever they want, but at the same time that they aren't powerful enough to resist government requests?
As for your fear about abuse of power - what the heck do you think will happen if corporations ARE powerful enough to resist government requests for video feeds? You think they are going to self regulate and make you happy? Hint: they'll throw your ass under the bus for another dollar of profit.
Actually, the length of the meter was chosen to be 1/10 millionth of the length from the equator to the north pole on the Prime Meridian. In other words, it is 10,000 km. That distance was then described in wavelengths of cesium or whatever, since that's easier to measure in a lab.
The fact that I have to go back to the main screen to do anything with the menu bar, task bar, and a file manager that hasn't changed in 15 years started driving me insane.
Why is that bad (the not changing much in 15 years)? Seems like all the complaints about the direction Windows and Linux desktop environments are taking is that change isn't necessarily good.
The Japanese language does have tone accents which do distinguish meanings. Although context will sort things out in all but extreme cases, improper tone is one of the primary markers of a non-native speaker. Perhaps Japanese grammar is complicated compared with Chinese or Korean (I wouldn't know) it is certainly far more regular (ie easier) than European languages (like English.) Now the writing system on the other hand...
All in all, it probably takes the same amount of effort to learn either eg English or Japanese as a second-language.
No. You need to study/speak a language like Mandarin to really appreciate that tones are fundamentally different that merely pronouncing vowels differently or having an accent or conveying mood (occasionally). English speakers might pronounce 'tomato' differently between the US and UK, might raise their voices at the end when angry or yelling, Japanese might "swallow" a trailing -u, everyone might have a regional accent that pronounces words "funny" compared to elsewhere, but none of that is tonal in the sense that Mandarin is a tonal language.
In Mandarin, tones are part of the correct pronunciation of a word. Different tone = different word. As in "shi" with a rising tone can mean "10" and "shi" with a falling tone can mean "vision" and "shi" with a neutral tone can mean "poem". Japanese and English are not like this.
Yes, somebody with a US southern drawl may pronounce ten, the number, close to tan, the color, but that's a regional access a not a tone. Somebody emphasizing a syllable or raising the voice (mad or asking a question) is also not a tone - it is not part of the correct pronunciation of the word.
Japanese grammar is more complicated that English or Mandarin in a few ways (I don't know about Korean, I never studied that language), but at the same time it is highly regular. One example is verb/adjective conjugation. In English, if a car is red or was red, the adjective "red" stays the same, present or past tense. Similarly, in Mandarin, the chejì would be hóng, same word form. In Japanese, the kuruma would be akai or akakatta (or akakunai or akakunakatta to complete the conjugations). On the other hand, there are basically 2 kinds of adjectives in Japanese (-i and -na) and they follow fairly regular patterns with only a handful of exceptions.
English is complicated because so many words have multiple meanings, wildly different (spring as coiled metal, a season of the year, jumping) so almost everything requires context to decode, it is highly idiomatic, has a large number of exceptions to almost any grammar rule from conjugations to pluralizing and so on, pronunciation is a crap shoot with general rules about sounds and again as many exceptions as their are rules. One thing about Japanese and Mandarin is the pronunciation is consistent (and you start by studying pinyin or hiragana/katakana) even if it is difficult.
However the money apple makes isn't owned by apple. It is owned by the company shareholders - who will pay tax on any dividends or capital gains from sold shares in any case.
You've confused their share price (what shareholders own) and their cash balance (shareholders definitely do NOT own). These are unrelated or at best, indirectly or doubly indirectly related.
Nobody fights for the users because they are the product, as they are utilizing Tumblr's services for free and are thus not customers.
Besides, this is a private corporation in corporate America, which is by definition infinitely wise in how they allocate their hard earned resources because they are guided by the never-erring invisible hand. If this somehow turns out to be a huge mistake (gasp!), they will be suitable punished by the market, whereby punished means senior executive make their payday anyway while the stock price is pummeled and the shareholders take the loss.
It depends on how you go against it. Do you have credible research of your own, that can be reviewed and tested? Or are you just inventing controversy and fake contradictions?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that this stuff hasn't led to protesting in the streets really reflects just how complacent the US population is. Or how afraid of the government we really are, knowing just how well equipped and militarized the government has become thanks to 60+ years of growth in the military-industrial complex.
Or how little you can actually show harm from what's happened.
Really, I get the theoretical concept of liberty violated here, but given a private corp actually receives this data by willing consumers (as a byproduct of the info needed to run the service), maybe nobody actually gives a crap, compared to real problems like unemployment, student loan debt, tax loopholes for corps, etc.
If your first thought is "holy crap the government asked for this data from a private company, that's terrible!?!!!" maybe it should actually be "holy crap why does a private company have this in the first place?"
Obama's had 4.5 years now to fix Bush's problems
He's also had Bush's Congress to work with. As much as I wish he'd done better, I look at the GOP and it's fixation on introducing bills to ban abortions and I understand why the country is so fucked up. The folks making the laws are morons.
Impossible stuff like following the Constitution?
I hate to break it to you, but they are. Not the mythical one that exists in your mind, but the one involving check and balances.
The laws were created by Congress, approved by the courts, duly executed by the executive. If you don't like it, then talk to CONGRESS which is the root of basically everything.
Yeah yeah, I hear you screaming about the 4th Amendment and whatever. Here's the deal - are you an attorney? a judge? in a position to interpret or rule on the law? No? Then guess what, STFU because your input into this whole process boils down to VOTING for CONGRESS.
(And no, replies of "you won't accomplish anything because of this reason" are not constructive.)
You're asking for the impossible, there are simply too many issues a modern superpower has to deal with to make EVERYBODY happy. What you propose, voting out the incumbent, boils down to direct democracy where whoever shouts the loudest over the issue they are most passionate about, gets heard.
I mean that's one way to do it, but you won't make any progress excluding politicians for not holding the single viewpoint you find important. 50 other citizens are going to care about 50 other things that aren't even on your list.
I for one don't give a crap if the phone company hands over my metadata. Hell, maybe the NSA can check my billing records to find out if I've been overcharged or being ripped off and charge the phone company back on my behalf. On the other hand I'm more interested in infrastructure issues, lightening up on the drug sentencing (small amounts of pot, etc.), the incestuous relationship between big corporations, wall street, and lawmakers, etc. I only have so much time in the day and if I'm choosing some hill to martyr on, phone company metadata isn't even going to be in the top 20 things I give a flying crap about.
I think there's an assumption there which is false, that being: 0) everybody working at NSA is fully devoted to working on stuff you think is questionable.
There are a ton of people there in the military, that are linguists, and probably are military linguists spending their time translating intercepts and locating foreign military targets. You know, "sht" that actually does protect the country should it come to war somewhere. Beating the terrorist drum probably just gets Congress off their back as far as funding (which if you think about it is actually the fault of Congress) for the stuff too boring to describe. This stuff in the papers, yeah probably the vast majority of people there aren't remotely close to touching any part of it.
Brilliant move! De-emphasize the divisions that bring in the big bucks *and* have a unique advantage over competitors for legacy reasons, while placing even more emphasis on the divisions that lose money and have mediocre market share.
Well, this is the "chain is only as strong as its weakest link" strategy. We'll see how that pans out (in these circumstances)...
Sorry, but leaks and hacks aren't the same thing.
If by leaks you mean some employee took info out, well that's espionage and unfortunately not 100% preventable without mind reading.
So why is the US government putting our top secret hush hush designs ON THE F"ING INTERNET
The U.S. Government? Every incident I've read of has been some kind of intrusion at a defense contractor. Meaning, corporate America is dropping the ball on security. But that's because corporations are all about profits and security is just an expense...
Anyway, has there been any published info about an intrusion at an actual U.S. Government facility, not a private company? Honestly, I haven't seen any press about that, maybe I missed it.
I can't type a path in here?
Did you try shift-command-g, or from the menu Go->Go To Folder...?
There's a couple of logic holes here.
First, who wrote that mil-spec software? Was it a contractor or private corporation? Ah, so the real blame on unreliable expensive software is with some private corporation, not the government, right?
As for COTS being more effective, that's great assuming the critical infrastructure can be run on COTS.
As far as this bug bounty, it is a terrible idea. Sorry corporate America, if you want to keep your code private and reap the corresponding profits, you also get to assume the expense of fixing it and various liabilities if applicable. If your stuff isn't fit for infrastructure, then you get cut out of the bidding/purchase process entirely and replaced with some entity that is willing to. You don't get to socialize the cost of your bugs and private the profits, that's total bullshit.
I would only support this bug bounty for open source software, whereby the bugs and fixes are usable by anyone that wants to.
This sounds like a terrible idea. There are times the government should get involved in something, and time they shouldn't. This is one of those times they shouldn't.
It isn't the charter of any federal agency to shore up the products of private corporations. Corporations should be doing that anyway, and under the typical free market is awesome attitude most users here have, the expense of paying for bug discovery and fixes should factor into the corporation's pricing, profits, potential liability (haha) and so on. If the government starts picking up the tab, corporations will just quit doing their own QA.
Citizen's now have to pay so Microsoft can fix it's product? Don't they make billions of profit every quarter? How about investing some of that into... I don't know... better development and QA??
Plus, with the government offering a bounty, that effectively means the people wind up paying for fixes for products they many not use.
This is just more corporate welfare for irresponsible/lazy ones that are unwilling to properly invest in security.
Fatal flaw with your logic: If people anticipated prices going up, then prices would already be that high, minus the price of time. This is a mathematical theorem.
There's a fatal flaw to your fatal flaw: the universe does NOT force economies to obey Black-Ssholes. It's an empirical formula attempting to model derivative pricing, not a fundamental law of physics.
Maybe you remember Long Term Capital Management, which made some bets based on economic "laws" and even had Scholes as a partner? Yeah, they went under.
I am sad, Vance is one of my favorite authors.
In high school I read a short story of his, Mazirian the Magician from the short story collection The Dying Earth - now that volume is titled Mazirian the Magician following Vance's preference. It blew me away and the sequel, Cugel the Clever, originally The Eyes of the Overworld, was even better. It set the tone for the "hostile world vs man having to outsmart everybody he meets" Vance was always excellent with.
Later when Lyonesse came out, I read it in two or three days, I just couldn't put it down. His Lyonesse trilogy was incredible; my favorite fantasy novel is still book 1, Lyonesse, now titled "Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden". Other favorites include the Cadwal Chronicle trilogy, Maske: Thaery, and the Planet of Adventure series.
When the VIE (Vance Integral Edition) formed and looked for volunteers, I ignored it at first, much to my regret. Later I joined in when they were almost done, and proofread a few short stories (wrapping up a final book) and an index. Had I joined earlier, I might have been a proofreader for Lyonesse, my favorite novel, and listed in the VIE credits. Lost opportunity there!
A favorite scene from Lyonesse involves Aillas visiting Murgen a powerful wizard. Murgen's enemies have booby trapped the road to his home, and every day he must discover, outwit, and defeat various traps. Aillas asks "why do you let you enemies, all lesser wizards, do this to you?" Murgen responds "It is beneath my dignity to notice their efforts". Murgen is saying that he's too great a wizard to complain about their attempts... I just love that quote/scene. Something along those lines at least, I can't remember the word for word quote. I think of it sometimes for inspiration when I'm stuck on a problem... and how not finding the solution is beneath my dignity so I must work harder to fix it right. ;)
Anyway, Vance is a towering figure, great plots, language, and characters.
Perhaps I am an oddity, but I find basketball much more annoying to watch than baseball, and football really isn't any better. In terms of continuous action, I would put forth that the NHL is actually the most "gameplay" for the length of a game.
I'm with you!
I can't fully explain why, but I enjoy watching an occasional football game. It's like a violent chess match - both sides pick plays, execute them, how it turns out depends on physical abilities and sometimes sneaky play. The downtime is pretty high though.
Baseball is like watching live (in person) with friends - you can chat, eat/drink, kinda half pay attention to the game and still keep up. There are so many games a season prices are lower than football. The rules are pretty easy to understand and umpire rulings aren't that mysterious. At worst, a slow mo replay might be controversial as to whether the a runner is safe or not. The strike zone can be a bit shall we say, ill defined.
Hockey definitely is a lot of action, the clock doesn't stop too much. One issue is I can't see the puck and it has a bit of the soccer scoring issue, but overall a decent time.
I can't stand basketball though. One reason is I can't follow any of the calls. The actual rules involving travelling never seemed enforced, there are so many technical fouls (zone vs man-to-man, illegal defense - wtf is that? I can see in football some dude lined up over the line, but in basketball he was... defending "improperly" in a game with continuous motion?), play stops on a judgement call (offensive charging vs defensive blocking) or some other foul that seems totally arbitrary. In a close game, the only way the team behind can get the ball is the foul strategy, which I find to me tedious as hell.
Everything considered baseball might win out for cost, need to pay attention, understanding the game, and general relaxing where you don't really need to watch with full attention. Really the only thing that bugs the crap out of me in baseball is near continuous spitting from pitchers, especially when the camera is zoomed focused on them. ;) Another advantage of watching in person, you don't see that as much!
I agree... I do hate the fact that universities are basically the feeder systems for so many sports (football, basketball). At least hockey and baseball have minor leagues, however I'm not sure what proportion of pro hockey/baseball come from minor leagues vs colleges.
Fundamentally, the mission of university is education and while sports are fine, I think the system as whole should downgrade to where university sports are on more of an intramural level. That, and the NFL and NBA should setup their own minor league systems.
IMO our society has a ridiculous fixation on sports.
We do, but society has always had various spectacles for the public. 2000 years ago it was watching Christians vs the Lions at the Colosseum. Back then, popular gladiators or whatever got preferential treatment as well... granted, the stakes were higher. ;)
Viewed as entertainment, it's all fine. Like many other things, I just wish all the externalized costs were properly accounted for and not shoved off somewhere else.
It is simple, from the viewpoint of private businesses - they'll just post noticed and waivers that say "we aren't responsible for video recording somebody else does". Kind of like the generic "not responsible for theft" at coat checks, and so on.
They aren't going to care, aren't going to get into enforcing laws, and will generally offload everything and say if A records B on these premises, your legal fight is with A and not us at all. Leave if you don't like this policy.
So again, private companies recording stuff is bad because *mumble mumble* the government?
It just seems like you have a MISPLACED anger/concern. You are apparently totally fine with these corps recording whatever and whenever they want, but at the same time that they aren't powerful enough to resist government requests?
As for your fear about abuse of power - what the heck do you think will happen if corporations ARE powerful enough to resist government requests for video feeds? You think they are going to self regulate and make you happy? Hint: they'll throw your ass under the bus for another dollar of profit.
Nice seque from a private corporation's product to some anti-government rant.
Non sequitur much?
And your next point is a bit confused - resist these times because they are internet connected and can be hacked? Like computers?? WTF???
I can't follow the path of your thinking.
The precise length of a meter is arbitrary
Actually, the length of the meter was chosen to be 1/10 millionth of the length from the equator to the north pole on the Prime Meridian. In other words, it is 10,000 km. That distance was then described in wavelengths of cesium or whatever, since that's easier to measure in a lab.
The fact that I have to go back to the main screen to do anything with the menu bar, task bar, and a file manager that hasn't changed in 15 years started driving me insane.
Why is that bad (the not changing much in 15 years)? Seems like all the complaints about the direction Windows and Linux desktop environments are taking is that change isn't necessarily good.
The Japanese language does have tone accents which do distinguish meanings. Although context will sort things out in all but extreme cases, improper tone is one of the primary markers of a non-native speaker. Perhaps Japanese grammar is complicated compared with Chinese or Korean (I wouldn't know) it is certainly far more regular (ie easier) than European languages (like English.) Now the writing system on the other hand...
All in all, it probably takes the same amount of effort to learn either eg English or Japanese as a second-language.
No. You need to study/speak a language like Mandarin to really appreciate that tones are fundamentally different that merely pronouncing vowels differently or having an accent or conveying mood (occasionally). English speakers might pronounce 'tomato' differently between the US and UK, might raise their voices at the end when angry or yelling, Japanese might "swallow" a trailing -u, everyone might have a regional accent that pronounces words "funny" compared to elsewhere, but none of that is tonal in the sense that Mandarin is a tonal language.
In Mandarin, tones are part of the correct pronunciation of a word. Different tone = different word. As in "shi" with a rising tone can mean "10" and "shi" with a falling tone can mean "vision" and "shi" with a neutral tone can mean "poem". Japanese and English are not like this.
Yes, somebody with a US southern drawl may pronounce ten, the number, close to tan, the color, but that's a regional access a not a tone. Somebody emphasizing a syllable or raising the voice (mad or asking a question) is also not a tone - it is not part of the correct pronunciation of the word.
Japanese grammar is more complicated that English or Mandarin in a few ways (I don't know about Korean, I never studied that language), but at the same time it is highly regular. One example is verb/adjective conjugation. In English, if a car is red or was red, the adjective "red" stays the same, present or past tense. Similarly, in Mandarin, the chejì would be hóng, same word form. In Japanese, the kuruma would be akai or akakatta (or akakunai or akakunakatta to complete the conjugations). On the other hand, there are basically 2 kinds of adjectives in Japanese (-i and -na) and they follow fairly regular patterns with only a handful of exceptions.
English is complicated because so many words have multiple meanings, wildly different (spring as coiled metal, a season of the year, jumping) so almost everything requires context to decode, it is highly idiomatic, has a large number of exceptions to almost any grammar rule from conjugations to pluralizing and so on, pronunciation is a crap shoot with general rules about sounds and again as many exceptions as their are rules. One thing about Japanese and Mandarin is the pronunciation is consistent (and you start by studying pinyin or hiragana/katakana) even if it is difficult.
However the money apple makes isn't owned by apple. It is owned by the company shareholders - who will pay tax on any dividends or capital gains from sold shares in any case.
You've confused their share price (what shareholders own) and their cash balance (shareholders definitely do NOT own). These are unrelated or at best, indirectly or doubly indirectly related.
Nobody fights for the users because they are the product, as they are utilizing Tumblr's services for free and are thus not customers.
Besides, this is a private corporation in corporate America, which is by definition infinitely wise in how they allocate their hard earned resources because they are guided by the never-erring invisible hand. If this somehow turns out to be a huge mistake (gasp!), they will be suitable punished by the market, whereby punished means senior executive make their payday anyway while the stock price is pummeled and the shareholders take the loss.
It depends on how you go against it. Do you have credible research of your own, that can be reviewed and tested? Or are you just inventing controversy and fake contradictions?