The U.S. has started a war every year for 200 years. Wow, that's quite a record. Care to back that up?
The U.S. having nukes won't cause an arms race in the Mid-East. Iran having nukes will because the Sunni's won't stand for being subject Iranian blackmail, like what is happening to the Sunni's in Syria from their Alawite masters (and offshoot of Shi'ism). Hezbollah or Hamas being slipped a nuke is a real danger, or worse, one of the Sunni regimes managing to lose one to another terrorist organization.
Strictly speaking, Russia has the most resources on the planet, but I agree they are not the most resourceful. Looking at the proportion of money the U.S. spends on arms to the proportion spent on entitlements, the entitlements win hands down.
Yes, the U.S. did use nukes on a civilian pop. Japan at the time was determined to fight to the last person in the country, they were busy arming the pop. with even pitchforks for the coming U.S. invasion which the U.S. was prepared to launch. It was decided that if Japan could be convinced to stop, that was preferable to the millions that would have died from an invasion. Japan knew an invasion was planned, the U.S. didn't hide it, yet they failed to stop. After the atrocities Imperial Japan inflicted in China, Indo-China, the Philippines, etc., Imperial Japan could not be left to its own devices for fear they would simply re-arm and do it all over again.
There are no western theocracies. A theocracy has a state religion and it run by religious zealots. That doesn't depict any western nation.
Your problem is that you are so devoted to your ideology of "American is the root of all evil in the world" that you are blind to the sort that seems to flourish in the mid-east. I don't know if it is endemic, some was imported from Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was made a Gruppenfuhrer in the German SS. He though Hitler had the right idea with the "Jewish Problem". Yassir Arafat was his nephew and Yassir idolized him. Some of the Mufti's buddies made their way to Syria and Iraq after the war and help found the Baathist regimes in those countries. They imported their anti-Jewish zeal to complement the homegrown kind.
Yep, because an Iran with nukes definitely won't cause the Arab nations to also build them. What couldn't be more suited to the stability of the mid-east with plenty of nukes to go around, a few to go missing, a few to accidentally be set off thinking their Muslim brothers of that "other" Muslim tradition were aiming to do the same. Our future is so bright we'll have to wear shades.
A theocracy is one that has a state religion with laws to back it up. Last I checked, the U.S. had laws to allow you to have any religion you like or none at all.
Learn the difference, it might make your arguments more persuasive.
No, that isn't it. The disaster will be all the TV shows predicting disaster will go away, I love those. Worse, Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair will expand to the size of small planet and then catch on fire. It will be a holocaust of immense proportions. I'm looking forward to a gonzo-whopper of a End-O-the-Hair Moronic Convergence.
Acknowledging Business School Product has been shipping STEM jobs overseas just like manufacturing, there is another problem that won't be cured by updating STEM departments. Young kids today have the attention span of gnat. The plethora of instant feedback devices that ping you every fucking 5 minutes, TV commercials, video games, etc.
Most of the kids coming up to college simply do not have what it takes to do a STEM degree.
Gitmo is a concentration camp? Really? They get 3 meals a day, shower facilities, etc. Sounds like a high security prison to me. A concentration camp generally has harsh living conditions.
That's separate from the question of why it is there. Are they prisoners of war? Al Qaeda and its affiliates have declared war on the U.S. The U.S. should respond in kind, then they'd have justification for keeping the prisoners. Until then, they should let them go so the U.S. can have another go at killing them on the battlefield. This time, the U.S. should promise never to take them prisoners again unless there is a declaration of war.
I see, so growing up a lil' Kimme in that family is somehow going to give him a vastly different outlook? Why? He's been indoctrinated from age -1. His experience is that N. Korea only gets something out of the West when they scream and kick, light off a few missiles, do the Nuke-1-2-Test-A-Step, etc.
S. Korea has his measure, screw up and we'll make sure we'll screw you back. Obama is just another Clinton rube, he'll bite on anything for diplomatic win.
You've been watching too many movies, self-destruct systems to you mean the thing goes boom in a shower of parts and dust. Self-destruct actually means critical systems get bricked in a way that they can not be reverse engineered. There's not enough room on those UAVs to pack it with enough explosives for your movie shot.
Yep, a lot of the war time spending was kept off the books if by that you mean the actual budgets passed by Congress, but that does not mean we do not know what it was. The $4T seems to include all the spending, I think is on the high side but that might include ancillary costs like health care for wounded vets going forward.
What does Bush's failure to balance the budget have to do with Obama's failure to balance the budget? Are you saying that since Bush got away with it, we should give Obama a pass? A lot of conservatives were upset with Bush's failure to balance the budget. Obama created a commission, Simpson-Bowles, which made their recommendations...and Obama ignored it. In fact, he's still ignoring the biggest drains on the budget, i.e., the entitlements. You could take all of Defense's appropriations and still only halve the deficit.
Republicans are doing with they always do, trying to buy the next election with tax cuts (even keeping Bush's is attempting to buy the next election). The Democrats are doing what they always do, trying to buy the next election with social spending. Both will fail and drive up the deficit. There are no adults left in the room...well, not enough of them anyhow.
Suppose you are an OEM. People buy your box because it runs winders. Offering Expressgate, et.al. increases the number of things that can go wrong, and also need to be supported. For what precisely? The 'precisely' bit is important, without an accurate gauge of what it will do for the OEM's bottom line, they won't touch it.
So which is it, Apple wants ludicrous margins or the margins are so thin Apple shouldn't bother. Why would they go into a business with thin margins? What does it do for them? Will it help them sell more Macs to business? Especially when MS owns most the software business uses? So they should take on HP and Dell and MS all at one time? You can just see Tim Cook smacking his forehead and wondering why he didn't think of that.
What happened to MS wasn't entirely due to their cash cows, it is the sheer size of the company; it's trying to be everything to everyone and as a consequence loses focus and tends not to do anything well. Sounds like you are encouraging Apple to do the same. If they bought into an industry, then they wind up in a competition with dubious merits, the big guys won't allow themselves to be bought out. Picking an industry and entering with homegrown stuff is damn hard, Apple had to line up a lot of dominoes to be successful in the new industries they've entered.
Tim Cook is responsible for Apple's supply chain, the envy of the industry right now. And he's been running parts of Apple for awhile now as people below mentioned. It is not fair to claim he's been coasting on Jobs' success since neither one of us actually knows how much of Apple's decisions were Cook's or how much Job's took Cook's advice. For all we know, they could have been making decisions in tandem since Jobs knew the end was coming for at least a few years.
Yes, there are too many in academia that get tenure and then eat their brains. However, forcing academia to focus strictly on teaching means that new research fails to get done. Where will the new advances come from? Industry...yeah, right, Business School Product cannot put a dollar value on pure research so they axed that long ago. If it doesn't make it into the next product cycle, it gets no more funding.
So after you've rearranged the deck chairs on the good ship Research about as many ways as possible, what will you do for advancement? It isn't like the world doesn't have a slew of new and old problems that will sink us if we do not solve them.
How about we apply your focus to the people in the early 1900's who dreamed up quantum mechanics? Oooo....no quantum mechanics, they were too busy teaching. So, no lasers, no computers, no iPhones, etc. How about Evariste Galois and the others in abstract algebra and number theory. There goes your ability to order stuff from Amazon. In fact, there goes the whole modern financial piping because your money doesn't stay in your bank over night, it goes on wild ride around the planet all protected by math.
How about the people who worked on models of computation before there were computers to approximate them? Oooops, no computers, but damn they did a fine job teaching.
Err...how about Einstein and that silly theory of relativity? You know the one, its what make you GPS systems accurate. Should have made his sorry ass teach instead.
unless after years and years of study you publish a single earth shattering paper. It has happened in the past, but it won't in the future as long as unenlightened people run the research institutions where wiggling your tail for suitors is more important than thinking hard about hard problems.
That said, who decides whether someone is just whacking off or knowledgeably pursuing a valid avenue of research? This is why we have departments in universities, rather than let professors just work. Those departments need to properly review their flock.
Almost worse is trying to publish research in computer science that ties up a lot of approaches into a more general prescription. Who will review your paper? Why, the people who have a stake in the approaches you are generalizing. Now why would they want to allow your paper to succeed their "seminal" work?
"More likely he envisioned worker run factories and such." Yes, and that would work until the first major crisis hit the factory. One faction of workers wants to go one way, one wants to go another. And you know they'd do it, just look at how political parties get formed. The only reason a modern company "works" is because there is usually one guy at the top, rightly or wrongly, calling the shots so everyone has more or less the same marching orders. I don't like it any more than the next guy, but that's still preferable to a company which has factions fighting each other without a cop to beat people over the head and make them stop. That is also why large corporations sometimes fail, they are too big for any one person to set a direction (hint, Microsoft).
Why does anyone need to be the size of Pfizer? If we're talking drug companies, because it takes billions of dollars to get a drug on the market, that's why. Less than 1% of the substances tested actually make it as a selling drug, much less than 1%. Your documentation alone on your brand new drug, when delivered to the FDA, will take semis full of material. Your lab space needs to be huge because you'll be testing all the other 99+% as well. You'll need state of the art equipment, you'll need state of the art scientists. And that still won't guarantee you will be profitable enough to stay in business.
"Might I mention Apple products are overbloated on the price department too.", only if software has no value for you. But then if you are using MS or Linux, I can understand that.
I presume you don't read many scientific papers. Reading them on fondleslabs is a pain in the tookus. Hardcopy is handy, you can take it anywhere, it never runs low on power, and it is easy on your eyes. It is also wonderful for scribbling in margin notes. You can lend or give someone the paper easily, no DRM to fight.
Mind you I would rather keep my library of papers in digital format, I have thousands. But for reading, there's nothing like hardcopy.
Slashdot Mirror
So, your kids and grandkids mean nothing to you? How...interesting...
The U.S. has started a war every year for 200 years. Wow, that's quite a record. Care to back that up?
The U.S. having nukes won't cause an arms race in the Mid-East. Iran having nukes will because the Sunni's won't stand for being subject Iranian blackmail, like what is happening to the Sunni's in Syria from their Alawite masters (and offshoot of Shi'ism). Hezbollah or Hamas being slipped a nuke is a real danger, or worse, one of the Sunni regimes managing to lose one to another terrorist organization.
Strictly speaking, Russia has the most resources on the planet, but I agree they are not the most resourceful. Looking at the proportion of money the U.S. spends on arms to the proportion spent on entitlements, the entitlements win hands down.
Yes, the U.S. did use nukes on a civilian pop. Japan at the time was determined to fight to the last person in the country, they were busy arming the pop. with even pitchforks for the coming U.S. invasion which the U.S. was prepared to launch. It was decided that if Japan could be convinced to stop, that was preferable to the millions that would have died from an invasion. Japan knew an invasion was planned, the U.S. didn't hide it, yet they failed to stop. After the atrocities Imperial Japan inflicted in China, Indo-China, the Philippines, etc., Imperial Japan could not be left to its own devices for fear they would simply re-arm and do it all over again.
There are no western theocracies. A theocracy has a state religion and it run by religious zealots. That doesn't depict any western nation.
Your problem is that you are so devoted to your ideology of "American is the root of all evil in the world" that you are blind to the sort that seems to flourish in the mid-east. I don't know if it is endemic, some was imported from Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was made a Gruppenfuhrer in the German SS. He though Hitler had the right idea with the "Jewish Problem". Yassir Arafat was his nephew and Yassir idolized him. Some of the Mufti's buddies made their way to Syria and Iraq after the war and help found the Baathist regimes in those countries. They imported their anti-Jewish zeal to complement the homegrown kind.
Yep, because an Iran with nukes definitely won't cause the Arab nations to also build them. What couldn't be more suited to the stability of the mid-east with plenty of nukes to go around, a few to go missing, a few to accidentally be set off thinking their Muslim brothers of that "other" Muslim tradition were aiming to do the same. Our future is so bright we'll have to wear shades.
A theocracy is one that has a state religion with laws to back it up. Last I checked, the U.S. had laws to allow you to have any religion you like or none at all.
Learn the difference, it might make your arguments more persuasive.
No, that isn't it. The disaster will be all the TV shows predicting disaster will go away, I love those. Worse, Giorgio Tsoukalos' hair will expand to the size of small planet and then catch on fire. It will be a holocaust of immense proportions. I'm looking forward to a gonzo-whopper of a End-O-the-Hair Moronic Convergence.
Acknowledging Business School Product has been shipping STEM jobs overseas just like manufacturing, there is another problem that won't be cured by updating STEM departments. Young kids today have the attention span of gnat. The plethora of instant feedback devices that ping you every fucking 5 minutes, TV commercials, video games, etc.
Most of the kids coming up to college simply do not have what it takes to do a STEM degree.
Gitmo is a concentration camp? Really? They get 3 meals a day, shower facilities, etc. Sounds like a high security prison to me. A concentration camp generally has harsh living conditions.
That's separate from the question of why it is there. Are they prisoners of war? Al Qaeda and its affiliates have declared war on the U.S. The U.S. should respond in kind, then they'd have justification for keeping the prisoners. Until then, they should let them go so the U.S. can have another go at killing them on the battlefield. This time, the U.S. should promise never to take them prisoners again unless there is a declaration of war.
I see, so growing up a lil' Kimme in that family is somehow going to give him a vastly different outlook? Why? He's been indoctrinated from age -1. His experience is that N. Korea only gets something out of the West when they scream and kick, light off a few missiles, do the Nuke-1-2-Test-A-Step, etc.
S. Korea has his measure, screw up and we'll make sure we'll screw you back. Obama is just another Clinton rube, he'll bite on anything for diplomatic win.
You've been watching too many movies, self-destruct systems to you mean the thing goes boom in a shower of parts and dust. Self-destruct actually means critical systems get bricked in a way that they can not be reverse engineered. There's not enough room on those UAVs to pack it with enough explosives for your movie shot.
Yep, a lot of the war time spending was kept off the books if by that you mean the actual budgets passed by Congress, but that does not mean we do not know what it was. The $4T seems to include all the spending, I think is on the high side but that might include ancillary costs like health care for wounded vets going forward.
What does Bush's failure to balance the budget have to do with Obama's failure to balance the budget? Are you saying that since Bush got away with it, we should give Obama a pass? A lot of conservatives were upset with Bush's failure to balance the budget. Obama created a commission, Simpson-Bowles, which made their recommendations...and Obama ignored it. In fact, he's still ignoring the biggest drains on the budget, i.e., the entitlements. You could take all of Defense's appropriations and still only halve the deficit.
Republicans are doing with they always do, trying to buy the next election with tax cuts (even keeping Bush's is attempting to buy the next election). The Democrats are doing what they always do, trying to buy the next election with social spending. Both will fail and drive up the deficit. There are no adults left in the room...well, not enough of them anyhow.
Suppose you are an OEM. People buy your box because it runs winders. Offering Expressgate, et.al. increases the number of things that can go wrong, and also need to be supported. For what precisely? The 'precisely' bit is important, without an accurate gauge of what it will do for the OEM's bottom line, they won't touch it.
So which is it, Apple wants ludicrous margins or the margins are so thin Apple shouldn't bother. Why would they go into a business with thin margins? What does it do for them? Will it help them sell more Macs to business? Especially when MS owns most the software business uses? So they should take on HP and Dell and MS all at one time? You can just see Tim Cook smacking his forehead and wondering why he didn't think of that.
Hmmm...so Apple has kept us all in the dark about their product pipeline except...errr...you. Care to share the memo on their pipeline depth?
What happened to MS wasn't entirely due to their cash cows, it is the sheer size of the company; it's trying to be everything to everyone and as a consequence loses focus and tends not to do anything well. Sounds like you are encouraging Apple to do the same. If they bought into an industry, then they wind up in a competition with dubious merits, the big guys won't allow themselves to be bought out. Picking an industry and entering with homegrown stuff is damn hard, Apple had to line up a lot of dominoes to be successful in the new industries they've entered.
Tim Cook is responsible for Apple's supply chain, the envy of the industry right now. And he's been running parts of Apple for awhile now as people below mentioned. It is not fair to claim he's been coasting on Jobs' success since neither one of us actually knows how much of Apple's decisions were Cook's or how much Job's took Cook's advice. For all we know, they could have been making decisions in tandem since Jobs knew the end was coming for at least a few years.
Hmmm...very insightful analysis for an 8 year old. Do your parents know you are posting here?
Yes, there are too many in academia that get tenure and then eat their brains. However, forcing academia to focus strictly on teaching means that new research fails to get done. Where will the new advances come from? Industry...yeah, right, Business School Product cannot put a dollar value on pure research so they axed that long ago. If it doesn't make it into the next product cycle, it gets no more funding.
So after you've rearranged the deck chairs on the good ship Research about as many ways as possible, what will you do for advancement? It isn't like the world doesn't have a slew of new and old problems that will sink us if we do not solve them.
How about we apply your focus to the people in the early 1900's who dreamed up quantum mechanics? Oooo....no quantum mechanics, they were too busy teaching. So, no lasers, no computers, no iPhones, etc. How about Evariste Galois and the others in abstract algebra and number theory. There goes your ability to order stuff from Amazon. In fact, there goes the whole modern financial piping because your money doesn't stay in your bank over night, it goes on wild ride around the planet all protected by math.
How about the people who worked on models of computation before there were computers to approximate them? Oooops, no computers, but damn they did a fine job teaching.
Err...how about Einstein and that silly theory of relativity? You know the one, its what make you GPS systems accurate. Should have made his sorry ass teach instead.
unless after years and years of study you publish a single earth shattering paper. It has happened in the past, but it won't in the future as long as unenlightened people run the research institutions where wiggling your tail for suitors is more important than thinking hard about hard problems.
That said, who decides whether someone is just whacking off or knowledgeably pursuing a valid avenue of research? This is why we have departments in universities, rather than let professors just work. Those departments need to properly review their flock.
Almost worse is trying to publish research in computer science that ties up a lot of approaches into a more general prescription. Who will review your paper? Why, the people who have a stake in the approaches you are generalizing. Now why would they want to allow your paper to succeed their "seminal" work?
Yeah, you are right, no one has succeeded in actually building a working utopia, they simply aren't trying.
"More likely he envisioned worker run factories and such." Yes, and that would work until the first major crisis hit the factory. One faction of workers wants to go one way, one wants to go another. And you know they'd do it, just look at how political parties get formed. The only reason a modern company "works" is because there is usually one guy at the top, rightly or wrongly, calling the shots so everyone has more or less the same marching orders. I don't like it any more than the next guy, but that's still preferable to a company which has factions fighting each other without a cop to beat people over the head and make them stop. That is also why large corporations sometimes fail, they are too big for any one person to set a direction (hint, Microsoft).
Why does anyone need to be the size of Pfizer? If we're talking drug companies, because it takes billions of dollars to get a drug on the market, that's why. Less than 1% of the substances tested actually make it as a selling drug, much less than 1%. Your documentation alone on your brand new drug, when delivered to the FDA, will take semis full of material. Your lab space needs to be huge because you'll be testing all the other 99+% as well. You'll need state of the art equipment, you'll need state of the art scientists. And that still won't guarantee you will be profitable enough to stay in business.
Scale matters.
"Might I mention Apple products are overbloated on the price department too.", only if software has no value for you. But then if you are using MS or Linux, I can understand that.
I presume you don't read many scientific papers. Reading them on fondleslabs is a pain in the tookus. Hardcopy is handy, you can take it anywhere, it never runs low on power, and it is easy on your eyes. It is also wonderful for scribbling in margin notes. You can lend or give someone the paper easily, no DRM to fight.
Mind you I would rather keep my library of papers in digital format, I have thousands. But for reading, there's nothing like hardcopy.
Hmmmm..I failed to get the memo on Apple entering the printer business. Maybe you could reprint it here for us so we can all read it?