It's clear this is all nonsense. Xbox is only really valuable to Microsoft. And it is valuable to Microsoft. You can tell this was written by someone without a clue by this quote:
That caused Nokia's share of the overall mobile-device market to dive into the single digits.
Abandoning symbian did not destroy Nokia. Just ask Blackberry what it's like to compete with iOS and Android. Blackberry even went so far as to make their phones essentially an Android phone but with extra features and they still bombed. The Symbian implosion would have been as brutal and swift as the black berry implosion. The only thing keeping Windows Phone a viable third candidate is a giant pile of cash and determination on Microsoft's part. It'll probably pay off but Nokia had nowhere near the funds to survive a fight like that.
Everything I've heard from my friends in the phone space is that hardware manufacturers are all feeling under siege. Samsung has managed to grab some market share but they don't expect them to hold on very long with the waves of Chinese clones and companies like MediaTek who are getting very very fast at implementing the latest ARM, Broadcom and Imagination IP significantly faster than Samsung etc.
Nokia picked the right approach. They completely cornered the Windows Phone market. Look at Motorola. They are owned by Google and they can't break into the Android market with great hardware and software. Why? Because of people who tell me they have a "Galaxy" phone. I heard the BBC say the number two phone platforms were Apple and Galaxy--with Windows Phone in third place. They didn't even call it Android. Lumia might be doing only so-so in the US but they're doing very well overseas. Largely because the US is a subsidized phone market. But even that is changing.
Nokia controls almost the entire Windows Phone market. When Microsoft's giant dump trucks of cash start translating into market share the Lumia line was well positioned to take the vast majority of the sales.
People who think Nokia died because they went Windows Phone are ignoring the plight of Motorola, LG, Sony and HTC all of whom embraced android and are doing poorly in the US.
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the espionage that threatens the talks.
Actually NEITHER threaten the talks. Indonesia should be interested in their citizens not being enslaved even if the person offering to help them spied of them.
It's like refusing the fire fighter's help while your house is on fire because you don't like the current mayor. You're mostly just spiting yourself.
As to indignation. They can give us a break. Every country spies on pretty much every other country. If Indonesia's intelligence agency isn't spying on Australia... it's not for lack of effort I'm sure.
Sure, Windows 8 is fine... after you replace the UI shell.
Please tell me why that makes Windows 8 OK?
Let me guess... you have no problem though with dumping Gnome for KDE or vice versa though? Complaining about Windows not being exactly the way you want it out of the box... coming from linux advocates is comical at best.
I do some work on the side for a hardware raytracing company and you're mostly right. Shameless plug: http://caustic.com./ And speaking as a VFX artist ray tracing is way easier. When you aren't cheating everything it becomes much simpler to get to "realistic". Global Illumination also goes a long way to help. I can take a game asset with textures and geometry and normal maps etc and render it with a raytracing engine and it looks dramatically better.
The problem with current technology is that there is something of a divide in performance. Present ray tracing technology is about 5x too slow to match a good rasterized game. You could deliver 10-20 fps at decent resolution with ray tracing but wouldn't get any noticeable benefit. To really get that silky smooth GI you need another 20-30x faster or so (even with a dedicated ray tracing chip).
The challenge then is to improve ray tracing chips fast enough to catch up to GPUs. I think in 3-4 years you'll see a number of games which deliver exceptional ray traced images. Rivaling film renders in real-time. But 3-4 years in spite of this author's nonsense is a long time in GPU technology. In the last 3-4 years we've seen tessellation, the first instances of GI and dynamic light reflections. These make a huge difference. They're total hacks but game developers can't sit still and as much of a pain as they are--they work. It would be more of a paint to rewrite their engines from scratch to take advantage of a whole new rendering pipeline.
The other challenge is that the reason many films look so good is because of 2D cheats in the composite. If you look at a raw render out of Arnold, Brazil, Renderman or Vray it's not really like what shows up on screen. There is a lot of sweetening, a lot of one-off lighting tricks in post and in the render which only look great from the one angle. Games have to look good from every angle. I don't know that they'll ever achieve that. They'll look more photographic but the ultra polish of a film comes from lighting TDs, cinematographers and compositors all working in tandem to polish a shot for days or weeks. If things just looked good from every direction all the time--the VFX work on a feature film would be dramatically reduced. So in that regard game developers are going to have it way harder than film people. Not only does it have to render at 60 fps... but you can't cheat detail. You have to make it look good from 300 yards as you drive your car down main street... all the way to jumping out and walking up to 2" away and reading the headline.
and c) Tesla had no legacy needs when he set out to create an alternative energy vehicle. People are acting as if Musk has a huge vested interest in batteries before Tesla. He does *NOW* but Tesla is only a couple years old. Why would he have invested so much in Batteries if he could have chosen Hydrogen just as easily a couple years ago.
The huge selling point for me for electric vehicles is that I can just plug it into one of 30Billion power sockets around the world. And I fully expect the consumer electronics industry to continue dumping billions into lithium ion technology. I don't see that level of continued investment in hydrogen fuel cells.
- Massive increases to Federal regulations across most sectors of the economy which raise the cost of business and threaten uncertainty?
First of all there have not been massive increases in Federal Regulation. The extremely minor changes that have been made only reinforce the parent's perspective that he's beholden to corporate interests.
Secondly I love the conservative cry that Obama is creating uncertainty... when they spend half a decade trying to overturn legislation. The word "uncertainty" means they don't know what it's going to be like next year. How could threatening to overturn legislation every other month create more uncertainty than just letting the law stand. If anyone is creating uncertainty it's the threat of reversing existing policy every other day.
Lastly, of course Obama and Bush are in the pocket for corporations. The system is such that corporations whether we like them or not are critical to our economy. They've made themselves essential to our country. Even if a politician did want to remove their influence they would cause huge damage to our economy in the process. IT's a lose lose.
This whole thing is feigned outrage. France and Germany are doing everything in their power to spy on Obama. The US is just better at it.
We have agreements with some countries on spying where we won't spy on them if they don't spy on us. When a proposal came up for the French and the US to have such an agreement both sides' intelligence agencies didn't want it.
If you want Economy seating from the 90s, luggage fees from the 90s and Economy seat pitch from the 90s.... you can pay 90s prices and fly Economy Plus.
People need to remember that Economy isn't Economy anymore, it's like sub-economy. And it's great. If you want the very bare bones cheapest ticket--fly economy. If you want to spend what we used to spend... fly Economy Plus (or even business).
This feels more like me complaining that Comcast screwed me on my latest bill on my company blog. Sure I was screwed and lied to by Comcast... but that's for my facebook wall and personal blog, not representing the thoughts/beliefs/accusations of my company.
If I say on my facebook page that so and so is a sexist asshole then I'm only exposing myself to defamation lawsuits. If I do it on my corporate page then I'm exposing a large company to legal threats.
She is well within her rights to call out assholes. She's not well within her rights to drag a company's legal department into it without talking to them first. This isn't about women or men or sexism... this is a great example of naive employees putting their employers into really uncomfortable predicaments. Something that is common in employees of all genders.
You need to either settle for what you're worth or endeavor (through school, training, etc) to make yourself worth more.
That's easy for someone like you or to say, who presumably make more than $60k per year. But the reason I make 6 figures isn't because I chose to make 6 figures, it's because I got lucky and happened to both have the interests and innate ability in said interests to command those kinds of wages.
The problem isn't that people are too lazy to make themselves worth more. The problem is that we don't need an entire population of Doctors, Developers and Stock Brokers. Some people due to their economic status as children didn't have the access or exposure to the necessary prequalifications for a high paying career. Some people are just too dumb. Some people are really good at things that don't pay very well. There are a lot of people out there who are really good at Basketball. I'm terrible at Basketball. But even the people who are really good at Basketball still probably aren't good enough to qualify for the minuscule job market for professional basketball players. And highschool PE teachers isn't a $60k a year job.
Meanwhile the total personal income for 2012 in the US was $13.4 Trillion. Total number of workers is about 154 million. If we had a purely distributed wealth economy where everyone got a cut of the pot we would each make: 13.4T/154M = ~$86,500 per year.
Let's say the educated employees deserve more. These are our upper middle class and the unskilled labor deserves less. Let's say an education should about double your wages.
40% now makes $116,500k+ or more. 60% now makes $66,500 or less
But let's split that off too. Let's say professional degrees and middle management deserve more.
Let's take another $20k from the HS dropouts and $10k from the college grads.
Now: 10% now make $196k. 30% now make $106k 50% now make $66k 10% now make $46k
That's about what America would look like if we didn't let the free market assign you wage, we just gave everyone who stuck out college a guaranteed salary and every doctor/lawyer/masters/phd a guaranteed salary.
$25k would be almost half of the "base income" in that hypothetical scenario.
But let's address other libertarian anarcho-capitalist concerns. Without big buck potential nobody would start the next Microsoft. Personally I think a $200,000 salary would make a lot of people really happy since 99.5% of the population would see a HUGE pay increase. The number of people making six figure salaries would increase. The number of people buying cars would increase. The number of people upgrading their ipad every year would dramatically increase.
With 40% of the population suddenly making $100k a year if you did start the next Microsoft we could say you get stock. But have to pay a 60% dividend tax. You would still easily be a millionaire (or even billionaire) and the increase in customer purchase power would probably offset the 60% tax on dividends (plus you still make $200k a year) which should be enough to live off of. And unlike the status quo where bill gates can afford to risk his livelihood to start a company knowing his wealthy father will bail him out--more people will take risks and reach out hoping to maybe do a little better.
You can start a company, pay people whatever you think is fair. That is your right.
Actually they can't really. If one company has an identical product for 1c less then people will go with the one that costs 1c less. That's what's good about capitalism. What's bad about that is that price isn't the only metric consumers should consider, however it's hard to create an ad campaign around "we pay our workers $1 more".
It's the same thing with airline fees. Everyone bitches about airline fees and then they find a $10 cheaper ticket and they ignore the company which might be trying to respect their customers.
Give me a break, there is a huge difference between NPR and Breitart. Breitbart has no journalistic standards and will run a story (e.g. the Acorn pimp scandal) well after the facts are clearly counter to what he's pushing. NPR prides itself on striving to be as non partisan and objective as possible.
I'm so sick and tired of this false equivalency. Is there bias in every source of news? Yes. Even when you endeavor and pride yourself on trying to live up to an ideal you will screw up. Everyone is human and everyone will foul up. But Breitbart sets out with an agenda and will say whatever conveniently supports his beliefs.
It's like comparing a psuedoscientific nut job like Burzynski to the American Cancer Society. Sure they both research cancer treatments. But Burzynski simply fabricates his research and the other while imperfect and sometimes recommending people take treatments that turn out to be ineffective are actually practicing real medicine and science.
NPR and Fox news are not equivalent entities. Breitbart and CNN are not equivalent entities.
Not only that but my private insurance carrier's website was down on Oct 1 as well. It just doesn't make sense to purchase the extra capacity when it's going to stabilize after a few days. After all people have 3 months to sign up and it's not going to "run out" of insurance.
No it's so that random administrators don't all decide that *their* __Insert_Thing____ is essential. Sure it's "just electricity" but Amazon and Google are largely "just electricity". And their budgets aren't exactly small. "Just electricity" could be millions of dollars per year. When your budget is now supposedly $0. Every $ over a $ thye shouldn't legally be spending.
Democracy isn't about throwing a fit and refusing to do your damned job (passing a budget) because the *other guy* got something you didn't like.
This is the blow back from extremist rhetoric. If you say someone doing something is going to descend the country into a post apocalyptic wasteland it either better damn well bring upon the second horseman of the apocalypse like you claim or not happen.
It's like your accountant telling you"If you ____ you will go out of business in the next year!" Now maybe he believes it and maybe he doesn't but at the end of the year either you're firing him or you didn't do it.
The biggest danger for the GOP from Obamacare isn't that it's going to harm the country. The biggest danger for republicans is that it will work and that people will like it. Then they're revealed for the frauds that they are. "You told me this would kill my Nanna! She's now on a government healthcare plan that's better than ever!"
The RT strategy is for people who want an "ipad". And by "ipad" I mean a device to browse the web, watch movies and play music in the living room.
The RT is worlds better than a Tab or Ipad. I had a Tab for a year before buying the surfaceRT and the surface RT ended up being way more functional than I anticipated (I planned to buy it and then sell it when the Surface Pro launched) instead I made it my primary mobile computing device and wouldn't need x86 except for editing RED files, recording audio and Photoshop.
He traded child pornography on numerous occasions with someone online. Both of whom were caught and pled guilty. They probably found evidence in their investigation which linked him to the leaks. These links weren't exposing wrong doing or malfeasance they were just straight up classified leaks that could expose undercover agents. It's believed he leaked them for monetary gain not even any noble patriotism. That's not a whistleblower, that's a pedophile who got caught selling classified documents.
How is it that a Surface with RT and remote desktop, a full blown USB port, desktop copies of Office, a keyboard, full version of Outlook, a command line etc is more of a toy than the ipad?
How is the RT version any less of a tablet than an iPad? If anything it has all of the capabilities of an ipad+ more features. The only thing I can see that it's lacking is app selection and over the last year that's a gap that's been pretty well closed.
Or Oracle is hosting a large event which generally produces a lot of news related to the host.
You will also probably see a good bit of Apple News during Apple World Wide Developer Conference. Probably a good deal of Microsoft news during BUILD and a good deal of iD news during Quake Con. Companies have discovered that hosting their own conferences allows them to flood the news for a day instead of attending group conventions like GDC or CES and having to share the headlines with a 100 other companies.
Every time you see something that discounts global warming impacts EG: Growth of ice in Antarctica increasing. It rapidly gets dismissed as "oh that is just natural variation" but you get the opposite EG: Loss of ice in the Arctic and it is end of the world global warming doom all the way down.
Who said anything about natural variation? One thing you should expect with a global climate change is for wind patterns and currents to change.
So yes this is someone saying "Global warming can cause increases in ice and decreases in ice." But that's not ridiculous in the slightest. If you have a refrigerator you can safely say "this refrigerator will reduce the temperature inside the fridge while raising the net temperature of the system."
Last year everyone was screaming about an ice free North Pole, and here we are.
Yeah... and this year the North Pole still has substantially lower ice and decreasing on average every year.
So here we are... with decreasing Arctic ice. Saying that ice every where will always decrease isn't something that scientists say. In fact the least confident statements by scientists are the specifics of global warming. Everyone realizes that you can't say what will happen to Seattle or Mumbai. But you can with confidence say what the *trends* will be.
The trends are less ice. The outcome is less ice. By volume and by surface area across the planet ice is dramatically receding. Last year we saw historic ice loss in the Arctic in particular. This year we see historic ice loss but not quite as much as last year.
Slashdot Mirror
It's clear this is all nonsense. Xbox is only really valuable to Microsoft. And it is valuable to Microsoft. You can tell this was written by someone without a clue by this quote:
That caused Nokia's share of the overall mobile-device market to dive into the single digits.
Abandoning symbian did not destroy Nokia. Just ask Blackberry what it's like to compete with iOS and Android. Blackberry even went so far as to make their phones essentially an Android phone but with extra features and they still bombed. The Symbian implosion would have been as brutal and swift as the black berry implosion. The only thing keeping Windows Phone a viable third candidate is a giant pile of cash and determination on Microsoft's part. It'll probably pay off but Nokia had nowhere near the funds to survive a fight like that.
Everything I've heard from my friends in the phone space is that hardware manufacturers are all feeling under siege. Samsung has managed to grab some market share but they don't expect them to hold on very long with the waves of Chinese clones and companies like MediaTek who are getting very very fast at implementing the latest ARM, Broadcom and Imagination IP significantly faster than Samsung etc.
Nokia picked the right approach. They completely cornered the Windows Phone market. Look at Motorola. They are owned by Google and they can't break into the Android market with great hardware and software. Why? Because of people who tell me they have a "Galaxy" phone. I heard the BBC say the number two phone platforms were Apple and Galaxy--with Windows Phone in third place. They didn't even call it Android. Lumia might be doing only so-so in the US but they're doing very well overseas. Largely because the US is a subsidized phone market. But even that is changing.
Nokia controls almost the entire Windows Phone market. When Microsoft's giant dump trucks of cash start translating into market share the Lumia line was well positioned to take the vast majority of the sales.
People who think Nokia died because they went Windows Phone are ignoring the plight of Motorola, LG, Sony and HTC all of whom embraced android and are doing poorly in the US.
Like Stephen Colbert--the best parody of a ludicrous position is often to just embrace it and take it 3 steps further.
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the espionage that threatens the talks.
Actually NEITHER threaten the talks. Indonesia should be interested in their citizens not being enslaved even if the person offering to help them spied of them.
It's like refusing the fire fighter's help while your house is on fire because you don't like the current mayor. You're mostly just spiting yourself.
As to indignation. They can give us a break. Every country spies on pretty much every other country. If Indonesia's intelligence agency isn't spying on Australia... it's not for lack of effort I'm sure.
Sure, Windows 8 is fine... after you replace the UI shell.
Please tell me why that makes Windows 8 OK?
Let me guess... you have no problem though with dumping Gnome for KDE or vice versa though? Complaining about Windows not being exactly the way you want it out of the box... coming from linux advocates is comical at best.
Re-installs all the garbage you've spent hours uninstalling (bing/news/finance/etc)
Hours uninstalling? That's not even hyperbole that's just an outright lie. This is how long it takes to uninstall all of the metro apps:
1) Click Start.
2) Right click on every app.
3) Click uninstall at the bottom.
Shouldn't take more than 10 seconds.
I do some work on the side for a hardware raytracing company and you're mostly right. Shameless plug: http://caustic.com./ And speaking as a VFX artist ray tracing is way easier. When you aren't cheating everything it becomes much simpler to get to "realistic". Global Illumination also goes a long way to help. I can take a game asset with textures and geometry and normal maps etc and render it with a raytracing engine and it looks dramatically better.
The problem with current technology is that there is something of a divide in performance. Present ray tracing technology is about 5x too slow to match a good rasterized game. You could deliver 10-20 fps at decent resolution with ray tracing but wouldn't get any noticeable benefit. To really get that silky smooth GI you need another 20-30x faster or so (even with a dedicated ray tracing chip).
The challenge then is to improve ray tracing chips fast enough to catch up to GPUs. I think in 3-4 years you'll see a number of games which deliver exceptional ray traced images. Rivaling film renders in real-time. But 3-4 years in spite of this author's nonsense is a long time in GPU technology. In the last 3-4 years we've seen tessellation, the first instances of GI and dynamic light reflections. These make a huge difference. They're total hacks but game developers can't sit still and as much of a pain as they are--they work. It would be more of a paint to rewrite their engines from scratch to take advantage of a whole new rendering pipeline.
The other challenge is that the reason many films look so good is because of 2D cheats in the composite. If you look at a raw render out of Arnold, Brazil, Renderman or Vray it's not really like what shows up on screen. There is a lot of sweetening, a lot of one-off lighting tricks in post and in the render which only look great from the one angle. Games have to look good from every angle. I don't know that they'll ever achieve that. They'll look more photographic but the ultra polish of a film comes from lighting TDs, cinematographers and compositors all working in tandem to polish a shot for days or weeks. If things just looked good from every direction all the time--the VFX work on a feature film would be dramatically reduced. So in that regard game developers are going to have it way harder than film people. Not only does it have to render at 60 fps... but you can't cheat detail. You have to make it look good from 300 yards as you drive your car down main street... all the way to jumping out and walking up to 2" away and reading the headline.
I'll bleed you for a fraction of the price of a "Doctor". Leeches for a fraction of the price of "medicine" too!
and c) Tesla had no legacy needs when he set out to create an alternative energy vehicle. People are acting as if Musk has a huge vested interest in batteries before Tesla. He does *NOW* but Tesla is only a couple years old. Why would he have invested so much in Batteries if he could have chosen Hydrogen just as easily a couple years ago.
The huge selling point for me for electric vehicles is that I can just plug it into one of 30Billion power sockets around the world. And I fully expect the consumer electronics industry to continue dumping billions into lithium ion technology. I don't see that level of continued investment in hydrogen fuel cells.
- Massive increases to Federal regulations across most sectors of the economy which raise the cost of business and threaten uncertainty?
First of all there have not been massive increases in Federal Regulation. The extremely minor changes that have been made only reinforce the parent's perspective that he's beholden to corporate interests.
Secondly I love the conservative cry that Obama is creating uncertainty... when they spend half a decade trying to overturn legislation. The word "uncertainty" means they don't know what it's going to be like next year. How could threatening to overturn legislation every other month create more uncertainty than just letting the law stand. If anyone is creating uncertainty it's the threat of reversing existing policy every other day.
Lastly, of course Obama and Bush are in the pocket for corporations. The system is such that corporations whether we like them or not are critical to our economy. They've made themselves essential to our country. Even if a politician did want to remove their influence they would cause huge damage to our economy in the process. IT's a lose lose.
This whole thing is feigned outrage. France and Germany are doing everything in their power to spy on Obama. The US is just better at it.
We have agreements with some countries on spying where we won't spy on them if they don't spy on us. When a proposal came up for the French and the US to have such an agreement both sides' intelligence agencies didn't want it.
If you want Economy seating from the 90s, luggage fees from the 90s and Economy seat pitch from the 90s.... you can pay 90s prices and fly Economy Plus.
People need to remember that Economy isn't Economy anymore, it's like sub-economy. And it's great. If you want the very bare bones cheapest ticket--fly economy. If you want to spend what we used to spend... fly Economy Plus (or even business).
This feels more like me complaining that Comcast screwed me on my latest bill on my company blog. Sure I was screwed and lied to by Comcast... but that's for my facebook wall and personal blog, not representing the thoughts/beliefs/accusations of my company.
If I say on my facebook page that so and so is a sexist asshole then I'm only exposing myself to defamation lawsuits. If I do it on my corporate page then I'm exposing a large company to legal threats.
She is well within her rights to call out assholes. She's not well within her rights to drag a company's legal department into it without talking to them first. This isn't about women or men or sexism... this is a great example of naive employees putting their employers into really uncomfortable predicaments. Something that is common in employees of all genders.
You need to either settle for what you're worth or endeavor (through school, training, etc) to make yourself worth more.
That's easy for someone like you or to say, who presumably make more than $60k per year. But the reason I make 6 figures isn't because I chose to make 6 figures, it's because I got lucky and happened to both have the interests and innate ability in said interests to command those kinds of wages.
The problem isn't that people are too lazy to make themselves worth more. The problem is that we don't need an entire population of Doctors, Developers and Stock Brokers. Some people due to their economic status as children didn't have the access or exposure to the necessary prequalifications for a high paying career. Some people are just too dumb. Some people are really good at things that don't pay very well. There are a lot of people out there who are really good at Basketball. I'm terrible at Basketball. But even the people who are really good at Basketball still probably aren't good enough to qualify for the minuscule job market for professional basketball players. And highschool PE teachers isn't a $60k a year job.
Meanwhile the total personal income for 2012 in the US was $13.4 Trillion. Total number of workers is about 154 million. If we had a purely distributed wealth economy where everyone got a cut of the pot we would each make:
13.4T/154M = ~$86,500 per year.
Let's say the educated employees deserve more. These are our upper middle class and the unskilled labor deserves less. Let's say an education should about double your wages.
40% now makes $116,500k+ or more.
60% now makes $66,500 or less
But let's split that off too. Let's say professional degrees and middle management deserve more.
Let's take another $20k from the HS dropouts and $10k from the college grads.
Now:
10% now make $196k.
30% now make $106k
50% now make $66k
10% now make $46k
That's about what America would look like if we didn't let the free market assign you wage, we just gave everyone who stuck out college a guaranteed salary and every doctor/lawyer/masters/phd a guaranteed salary.
$25k would be almost half of the "base income" in that hypothetical scenario.
But let's address other libertarian anarcho-capitalist concerns. Without big buck potential nobody would start the next Microsoft. Personally I think a $200,000 salary would make a lot of people really happy since 99.5% of the population would see a HUGE pay increase. The number of people making six figure salaries would increase. The number of people buying cars would increase. The number of people upgrading their ipad every year would dramatically increase.
With 40% of the population suddenly making $100k a year if you did start the next Microsoft we could say you get stock. But have to pay a 60% dividend tax. You would still easily be a millionaire (or even billionaire) and the increase in customer purchase power would probably offset the 60% tax on dividends (plus you still make $200k a year) which should be enough to live off of. And unlike the status quo where bill gates can afford to risk his livelihood to start a company knowing his wealthy father will bail him out--more people will take risks and reach out hoping to maybe do a little better.
You can start a company, pay people whatever you think is fair. That is your right.
Actually they can't really. If one company has an identical product for 1c less then people will go with the one that costs 1c less. That's what's good about capitalism. What's bad about that is that price isn't the only metric consumers should consider, however it's hard to create an ad campaign around "we pay our workers $1 more".
It's the same thing with airline fees. Everyone bitches about airline fees and then they find a $10 cheaper ticket and they ignore the company which might be trying to respect their customers.
Give me a break, there is a huge difference between NPR and Breitart. Breitbart has no journalistic standards and will run a story (e.g. the Acorn pimp scandal) well after the facts are clearly counter to what he's pushing. NPR prides itself on striving to be as non partisan and objective as possible.
I'm so sick and tired of this false equivalency. Is there bias in every source of news? Yes. Even when you endeavor and pride yourself on trying to live up to an ideal you will screw up. Everyone is human and everyone will foul up. But Breitbart sets out with an agenda and will say whatever conveniently supports his beliefs.
It's like comparing a psuedoscientific nut job like Burzynski to the American Cancer Society. Sure they both research cancer treatments. But Burzynski simply fabricates his research and the other while imperfect and sometimes recommending people take treatments that turn out to be ineffective are actually practicing real medicine and science.
NPR and Fox news are not equivalent entities. Breitbart and CNN are not equivalent entities.
Not only that but my private insurance carrier's website was down on Oct 1 as well. It just doesn't make sense to purchase the extra capacity when it's going to stabilize after a few days. After all people have 3 months to sign up and it's not going to "run out" of insurance.
No it's so that random administrators don't all decide that *their* __Insert_Thing____ is essential. Sure it's "just electricity" but Amazon and Google are largely "just electricity". And their budgets aren't exactly small. "Just electricity" could be millions of dollars per year. When your budget is now supposedly $0. Every $ over a $ thye shouldn't legally be spending.
Democracy isn't about throwing a fit and refusing to do your damned job (passing a budget) because the *other guy* got something you didn't like.
This is the blow back from extremist rhetoric. If you say someone doing something is going to descend the country into a post apocalyptic wasteland it either better damn well bring upon the second horseman of the apocalypse like you claim or not happen.
It's like your accountant telling you"If you ____ you will go out of business in the next year!" Now maybe he believes it and maybe he doesn't but at the end of the year either you're firing him or you didn't do it.
The biggest danger for the GOP from Obamacare isn't that it's going to harm the country. The biggest danger for republicans is that it will work and that people will like it. Then they're revealed for the frauds that they are. "You told me this would kill my Nanna! She's now on a government healthcare plan that's better than ever!"
The RT strategy is for people who want an "ipad". And by "ipad" I mean a device to browse the web, watch movies and play music in the living room.
The RT is worlds better than a Tab or Ipad. I had a Tab for a year before buying the surfaceRT and the surface RT ended up being way more functional than I anticipated (I planned to buy it and then sell it when the Surface Pro launched) instead I made it my primary mobile computing device and wouldn't need x86 except for editing RED files, recording audio and Photoshop.
He traded child pornography on numerous occasions with someone online. Both of whom were caught and pled guilty. They probably found evidence in their investigation which linked him to the leaks. These links weren't exposing wrong doing or malfeasance they were just straight up classified leaks that could expose undercover agents. It's believed he leaked them for monetary gain not even any noble patriotism. That's not a whistleblower, that's a pedophile who got caught selling classified documents.
How is it that a Surface with RT and remote desktop, a full blown USB port, desktop copies of Office, a keyboard, full version of Outlook, a command line etc is more of a toy than the ipad?
How is the RT version any less of a tablet than an iPad? If anything it has all of the capabilities of an ipad+ more features. The only thing I can see that it's lacking is app selection and over the last year that's a gap that's been pretty well closed.
Or Oracle is hosting a large event which generally produces a lot of news related to the host.
You will also probably see a good bit of Apple News during Apple World Wide Developer Conference. Probably a good deal of Microsoft news during BUILD and a good deal of iD news during Quake Con. Companies have discovered that hosting their own conferences allows them to flood the news for a day instead of attending group conventions like GDC or CES and having to share the headlines with a 100 other companies.
Every time you see something that discounts global warming impacts EG: Growth of ice in Antarctica increasing. It rapidly gets dismissed as "oh that is just natural variation" but you get the opposite EG: Loss of ice in the Arctic and it is end of the world global warming doom all the way down.
Who said anything about natural variation? One thing you should expect with a global climate change is for wind patterns and currents to change.
This is from 2007.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/feb/18/climatechange.theobserversuknewspages
So yes this is someone saying "Global warming can cause increases in ice and decreases in ice." But that's not ridiculous in the slightest. If you have a refrigerator you can safely say "this refrigerator will reduce the temperature inside the fridge while raising the net temperature of the system."
Last year everyone was screaming about an ice free North Pole, and here we are.
Yeah... and this year the North Pole still has substantially lower ice and decreasing on average every year.
So here we are... with decreasing Arctic ice. Saying that ice every where will always decrease isn't something that scientists say. In fact the least confident statements by scientists are the specifics of global warming. Everyone realizes that you can't say what will happen to Seattle or Mumbai. But you can with confidence say what the *trends* will be.
The trends are less ice. The outcome is less ice. By volume and by surface area across the planet ice is dramatically receding. Last year we saw historic ice loss in the Arctic in particular. This year we see historic ice loss but not quite as much as last year.
http://www.mahurangi.org.nz/Climate/Image/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Extent-Observations-Model-Runs-20120919-500.jpg