He ruled in one form.or another for two decades and during that time largely remade Europe. Even in defeat ideas like the Napoleonic Code and constitutional government (if at times still supporting authoritarian regimes) spread across the Continent. Napoleon is probably one of the most influential.men in European history.
That's a frequent claim, but honestly I see little evidence of it, at least as far as political conservatism. Liberals seem to remain Liberals, conservatives seem to remain conservatives. Some things certainly become more conservative as we get older, like musical or culinary tastes, but that's only in relation to changes in taste in the wider society.
I don't know a lot of liberals who change their views on health care or the status of homosexuals and the like. Those core values seem largely set by the time we're in our 20s and I think it becomes much much harder to alter those core philosophical views.
When I was young, in my late teens and early 20s I was actually fairly conservative; I rejected gay rights, believed in private health care, had a pretty simple view of the notion of the expansiveness of rights, but by the time I was in my late 20s I'd largely flipped; had no problem with building on traditional liberties, and in general didn't view the government as somehow fundamentally evil, and so forth.
Yes, we're talking about TV. I pay Netflix so I have the luxury of having entire seasons at my disposal, and if I want to binge watch, that's no skin off of anyone else's back. If you like the way network TV rolls out series, then by all means, continue to use that medium.
I see little evidence that the Republicans are pro-Russian at all. Yes, Trump clearly is, but that hasn't translated into support from Congressional Republicans. Realpolitik means they can't usually come out and openly defy their own President (with the exception of McCain, who clearly stopped caring what his party thought a long time ago), but that doesn't translate into them being pro-Russian. At the moment they're trying to navigate the potential scandal in a way that doesn't sink their own electoral fortunes.
People don't want to wait, and thus Netflix is giving people exactly what they want. When I rewatched Enterprise on Netflix (well, I'd give up by season 3 in the original run) I actually enjoyed it more since I could watch the two part episodes in one go.
Perhaps it isn't necessary, but the office is entrenched in the Constitution, and altering any aspect of the Constitution that deals with the Monarchy would require the approval of Parliament and all ten provinces, and if you know anything about Canadian history, you'll know how fraught with danger attempting to amend the Constitution is.
The 2008 prorogation wasnt the first time a Canadian GG granted such a request. Sir John A MacDonald requested and was granted a prorogation to evade censure over The Pacific Scandal.
I stretched a bit, yes. The GG is the Queen's vice regal representative, so is an acting head of state, except when the Queen is in residence in Canada.
We've purchased a couple of refurbished Thinkpads. Very nice units, very rugged, and with the extra battery capacity, and they were about $300CDN (about 240 Euros) a piece. They're off-lease units, so a few scuffs here and there and no dead pixels. From what I can see the whole refurb market is in real growth. That isn't new computer sales, of course, but you can get a pretty good machine for a lot less than a new one, for most people these kinds of machines are more than they'll ever need.
Absolutely. The problem is that over the last five or six years the hardware has become so good that it's become harder to build software that can break it. And in some ways Microsoft's push towards mobile has meant they've done a lot of work to reduce the resource footprint of Windows, meaning that newer versions of Windows have to some extent reversed the tendency of the OS and its software to consume RAM and cycles. If the competition with iOS and Android have done one thing, they've forced Microsoft to build an OS than be scaled downward.
Not just kids. My wife has a laptop that's probably opened the lid on three times in the last six months, and now she complains that every time she does, it has to download dozens of updates. Mostly she uses her phone and tablet, and she's not even sure she wants a new tablet, except sometimes she likes to watch movies, particularly when she's sick and in bed, so maybe we'll upgrade to a decent 8" tablet. Even I crack open my notebook a lot less than I used to. Most of my email is done on my phone these days, it's just a lot simpler.
The reality is a lot of the casual and entertainment aspects of computing which I used to do on my PC is now being done on my portable devices. The way people use computers has shifted a great deal in the last seven or eight years, so I imagine the consumer computing purchases have fallen through the floor. From what I can tell a lot of companies aren't chomping at the bit for new hardware. My company does a lot of government work, and I've seen a lot of government computers in my travels still running Windows 7. The road warriors will tend to get the new hardware, and I've certainly seen a lot more Surfaces and thin-line Dell notebooks and the like, so I imagine there are segments of the market that our doing well.
The other thing i've seen quite a bit of is the off-lease and refurb resellers doing a very good trade. You can buy a pretty decently speced desktop or notebook on the refurb sites, and we've purchased a few refurb computers here and there.
People may be, but the big drivers of PC sales, particularly in the over $500 range or businesses, and in particular the enterprise, and quite frankly the extra cycles and RAM that come with newer desktops don't really confer much advantage for many applications. It's one thing if it's the guys in the engineering department who need hefty workstations, or the guys editing videos or running financial simulations, but the bulk of most offices are people churning out documents, emailing and working on fairly modest spreadsheets, and most of the hardware put out in five or six years ago (or even longer, as I can attest), can do that without issue. Even if you're making money hand over fist, why would you replace perfectly good hardware? Not replacing hardware means you make even more money.
We're running Dells we bought in 2009 or thereabouts, upgraded to Windows 10 (I know I know). Other than the odd PSU or hard drive blowing up, the machines seem to be working fine for what they are; workstations dedicated to word processing, email and a bit of browsing. I wouldn't want to open really large spread sheets on them, but other than that, they do the job. Every year that we don't have to buy replacement hardware is basically money in the bank for us, and we have a replacement budget in place for total failures like the motherboard. I would expect that in the next year or two these units may begin to fail, so we're looking at new purchases in 2018-19, at which point they'll be ten years old.
And when we talk about replacements, we're not likely talking about new desktops, but rather going to PCs-on-a-stick like the Lenovo Ideacenters. Again, for many of these computers, we're really talking about wordprocessing, email and browsing, and the advantage of these units is there almost disposable, and providing they last three or four years (we've had some test units running without issue 24 hours a day running videos and slideshows on large flat screen monitors for over a year now), we'd still be ahead of the game on the hardware side.
So our medium and long term strategies don't involve replacing $400-$600 desktops with similar models. We'll still be buying laptops for the road warriors and certain departments, like finance, where a bit more muscle is needed to run spreadsheets, will still see traditional PCs, but our days of buying a bunch of $500 Dell or HP desktops or towers on a regular refresh are pretty much done, and really, I would expect by the time we do do our big upgrades in 2019, small form inexpensive PCs will probably be a helluva lot more capable. Who knows, maybe in four or five years maybe we won't be buying Windows machines at all.
Russia was party to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Russia went back on that agreement, and apart from showing the duplicitous nature of the Kremlin, it also ably demonstrates that once you have nukes, never give them up, because they remain the most singularly effective way of guaranteeing territorial integrity.
As how Crimea became part of Ukraine, well is that any different than how Poland and other neighboring countries were granted pieces of Germany after WWI? Would you go on record stating that you think the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia were justified?
At least from the Russian perspective, the end of any kind of detente came with the bombing of Serbia. At the time, Russia, broken and incapable of any kind of force projection, was forced to abandon a policy that it had essentially held for centuries; that of being the protector of the Slavic peoples. Couple this with NATO enlargement, where a number of former Warsaw Pact countries, understandably in my view, joined up, and then began entering the EU, you can see where they came to believe that the West was out to permanently castrate Russia. This is an understandable sentiment as well.
That all being said, Russia has been a right pain in the ass to the West for a few centuries now, and there's never been a great deal of trust on either side. Further, it's hard to see how there can be any trust so long as Putin and the Oligarchs are basically running the country as their personal piggy bank, and where the infant organs of a democratic state have been so quickly undermined. When they get caught interfering with multiple Western elections with the clear intent to either destabilize or get Russia-friendly candidates elected to high office, I'd say meaningful rapprochement is a long way off. Even in the US, where Trump does seem far more Kremlin-friendly than virtually any predecessor, Congress has made it awfully clear that it will not remove sanctions, and indeed would like to see even more sanctions.
Or apparently how doing so often produces the exact opposite of what you wanted. Trump didn't drain the swamp, he channeled an overflowing septic tank into the swamp. If he's done anything, he's made it clear that maybe the elites that were there before weren't that bad, compared to the kind of bottom dwellers he brought along.
I'd like to compare the Trumps to a Mafia family, but it would be some sort of Mafia family where everyone is either a Sonny or a Fredo; either idiots or people like impulse control, or both.
What's really amusing is to watch how the "elites" that Trump is supposed to have driven into the weeds are quietly fucking him over at every opportunity. The Republican-dominated Congress has made it awfully clear, though Trump is too fucking stupid to see it, that it has no intention of assisting him with the more absurd aspects of his election platform. Repealing the ACA seems doomed at this point, so the great irony that's likely to occur is that the health care bill that ends up on Trump's desk will be one to shore up Obamacare.
Welcome to the most impotent presidency since the 19th century.
So you punish the elites, you elected a big-mouthed halfwit whose only real redeeming quality is that for all of that, he's still a braniac compared to his Chauncy Gardner-esque eldest son.
Yes, boy oh boy, the elites have sure been taught a lesson! My goodness, how very fucking smart you are! Congratulations on sticking it to the man...
If Trump can do it, it proves that there are absolutely no barriers to the Presidency. The office is being so heavily devalued now that I can't imagine why Zuckerberg would even want it. Being Mayor of New York City has more prestige these days.
Slashdot Mirror
He ruled in one form.or another for two decades and during that time largely remade Europe. Even in defeat ideas like the Napoleonic Code and constitutional government (if at times still supporting authoritarian regimes) spread across the Continent. Napoleon is probably one of the most influential.men in European history.
That's a frequent claim, but honestly I see little evidence of it, at least as far as political conservatism. Liberals seem to remain Liberals, conservatives seem to remain conservatives. Some things certainly become more conservative as we get older, like musical or culinary tastes, but that's only in relation to changes in taste in the wider society.
I don't know a lot of liberals who change their views on health care or the status of homosexuals and the like. Those core values seem largely set by the time we're in our 20s and I think it becomes much much harder to alter those core philosophical views.
When I was young, in my late teens and early 20s I was actually fairly conservative; I rejected gay rights, believed in private health care, had a pretty simple view of the notion of the expansiveness of rights, but by the time I was in my late 20s I'd largely flipped; had no problem with building on traditional liberties, and in general didn't view the government as somehow fundamentally evil, and so forth.
In the sense that education inevitably seems to reduce conservatism
How does "claims" turn into "shows"?
Yes, we're talking about TV. I pay Netflix so I have the luxury of having entire seasons at my disposal, and if I want to binge watch, that's no skin off of anyone else's back. If you like the way network TV rolls out series, then by all means, continue to use that medium.
I see little evidence that the Republicans are pro-Russian at all. Yes, Trump clearly is, but that hasn't translated into support from Congressional Republicans. Realpolitik means they can't usually come out and openly defy their own President (with the exception of McCain, who clearly stopped caring what his party thought a long time ago), but that doesn't translate into them being pro-Russian. At the moment they're trying to navigate the potential scandal in a way that doesn't sink their own electoral fortunes.
People don't want to wait, and thus Netflix is giving people exactly what they want. When I rewatched Enterprise on Netflix (well, I'd give up by season 3 in the original run) I actually enjoyed it more since I could watch the two part episodes in one go.
Perhaps it isn't necessary, but the office is entrenched in the Constitution, and altering any aspect of the Constitution that deals with the Monarchy would require the approval of Parliament and all ten provinces, and if you know anything about Canadian history, you'll know how fraught with danger attempting to amend the Constitution is.
The 2008 prorogation wasnt the first time a Canadian GG granted such a request. Sir John A MacDonald requested and was granted a prorogation to evade censure over The Pacific Scandal.
I stretched a bit, yes. The GG is the Queen's vice regal representative, so is an acting head of state, except when the Queen is in residence in Canada.
We've purchased a couple of refurbished Thinkpads. Very nice units, very rugged, and with the extra battery capacity, and they were about $300CDN (about 240 Euros) a piece. They're off-lease units, so a few scuffs here and there and no dead pixels. From what I can see the whole refurb market is in real growth. That isn't new computer sales, of course, but you can get a pretty good machine for a lot less than a new one, for most people these kinds of machines are more than they'll ever need.
I stopped rolling my own about six years ago. There was a point at which the savings couldn't justify the effort anymore.
Absolutely. The problem is that over the last five or six years the hardware has become so good that it's become harder to build software that can break it. And in some ways Microsoft's push towards mobile has meant they've done a lot of work to reduce the resource footprint of Windows, meaning that newer versions of Windows have to some extent reversed the tendency of the OS and its software to consume RAM and cycles. If the competition with iOS and Android have done one thing, they've forced Microsoft to build an OS than be scaled downward.
Not just kids. My wife has a laptop that's probably opened the lid on three times in the last six months, and now she complains that every time she does, it has to download dozens of updates. Mostly she uses her phone and tablet, and she's not even sure she wants a new tablet, except sometimes she likes to watch movies, particularly when she's sick and in bed, so maybe we'll upgrade to a decent 8" tablet. Even I crack open my notebook a lot less than I used to. Most of my email is done on my phone these days, it's just a lot simpler.
The reality is a lot of the casual and entertainment aspects of computing which I used to do on my PC is now being done on my portable devices. The way people use computers has shifted a great deal in the last seven or eight years, so I imagine the consumer computing purchases have fallen through the floor. From what I can tell a lot of companies aren't chomping at the bit for new hardware. My company does a lot of government work, and I've seen a lot of government computers in my travels still running Windows 7. The road warriors will tend to get the new hardware, and I've certainly seen a lot more Surfaces and thin-line Dell notebooks and the like, so I imagine there are segments of the market that our doing well.
The other thing i've seen quite a bit of is the off-lease and refurb resellers doing a very good trade. You can buy a pretty decently speced desktop or notebook on the refurb sites, and we've purchased a few refurb computers here and there.
People may be, but the big drivers of PC sales, particularly in the over $500 range or businesses, and in particular the enterprise, and quite frankly the extra cycles and RAM that come with newer desktops don't really confer much advantage for many applications. It's one thing if it's the guys in the engineering department who need hefty workstations, or the guys editing videos or running financial simulations, but the bulk of most offices are people churning out documents, emailing and working on fairly modest spreadsheets, and most of the hardware put out in five or six years ago (or even longer, as I can attest), can do that without issue. Even if you're making money hand over fist, why would you replace perfectly good hardware? Not replacing hardware means you make even more money.
We're running Dells we bought in 2009 or thereabouts, upgraded to Windows 10 (I know I know). Other than the odd PSU or hard drive blowing up, the machines seem to be working fine for what they are; workstations dedicated to word processing, email and a bit of browsing. I wouldn't want to open really large spread sheets on them, but other than that, they do the job. Every year that we don't have to buy replacement hardware is basically money in the bank for us, and we have a replacement budget in place for total failures like the motherboard. I would expect that in the next year or two these units may begin to fail, so we're looking at new purchases in 2018-19, at which point they'll be ten years old.
And when we talk about replacements, we're not likely talking about new desktops, but rather going to PCs-on-a-stick like the Lenovo Ideacenters. Again, for many of these computers, we're really talking about wordprocessing, email and browsing, and the advantage of these units is there almost disposable, and providing they last three or four years (we've had some test units running without issue 24 hours a day running videos and slideshows on large flat screen monitors for over a year now), we'd still be ahead of the game on the hardware side.
So our medium and long term strategies don't involve replacing $400-$600 desktops with similar models. We'll still be buying laptops for the road warriors and certain departments, like finance, where a bit more muscle is needed to run spreadsheets, will still see traditional PCs, but our days of buying a bunch of $500 Dell or HP desktops or towers on a regular refresh are pretty much done, and really, I would expect by the time we do do our big upgrades in 2019, small form inexpensive PCs will probably be a helluva lot more capable. Who knows, maybe in four or five years maybe we won't be buying Windows machines at all.
The US is growing bluer regardless, and if SCOTUS kills gerrymandering, your victory dance may be shortlived.
Waiting for the coming of the Space Pope, myself.
Serbians were committing genocide. They deserved to bombed.
Russia was party to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Russia went back on that agreement, and apart from showing the duplicitous nature of the Kremlin, it also ably demonstrates that once you have nukes, never give them up, because they remain the most singularly effective way of guaranteeing territorial integrity.
As how Crimea became part of Ukraine, well is that any different than how Poland and other neighboring countries were granted pieces of Germany after WWI? Would you go on record stating that you think the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia were justified?
At least from the Russian perspective, the end of any kind of detente came with the bombing of Serbia. At the time, Russia, broken and incapable of any kind of force projection, was forced to abandon a policy that it had essentially held for centuries; that of being the protector of the Slavic peoples. Couple this with NATO enlargement, where a number of former Warsaw Pact countries, understandably in my view, joined up, and then began entering the EU, you can see where they came to believe that the West was out to permanently castrate Russia. This is an understandable sentiment as well.
That all being said, Russia has been a right pain in the ass to the West for a few centuries now, and there's never been a great deal of trust on either side. Further, it's hard to see how there can be any trust so long as Putin and the Oligarchs are basically running the country as their personal piggy bank, and where the infant organs of a democratic state have been so quickly undermined. When they get caught interfering with multiple Western elections with the clear intent to either destabilize or get Russia-friendly candidates elected to high office, I'd say meaningful rapprochement is a long way off. Even in the US, where Trump does seem far more Kremlin-friendly than virtually any predecessor, Congress has made it awfully clear that it will not remove sanctions, and indeed would like to see even more sanctions.
Or apparently how doing so often produces the exact opposite of what you wanted. Trump didn't drain the swamp, he channeled an overflowing septic tank into the swamp. If he's done anything, he's made it clear that maybe the elites that were there before weren't that bad, compared to the kind of bottom dwellers he brought along.
I'd like to compare the Trumps to a Mafia family, but it would be some sort of Mafia family where everyone is either a Sonny or a Fredo; either idiots or people like impulse control, or both.
What's really amusing is to watch how the "elites" that Trump is supposed to have driven into the weeds are quietly fucking him over at every opportunity. The Republican-dominated Congress has made it awfully clear, though Trump is too fucking stupid to see it, that it has no intention of assisting him with the more absurd aspects of his election platform. Repealing the ACA seems doomed at this point, so the great irony that's likely to occur is that the health care bill that ends up on Trump's desk will be one to shore up Obamacare.
Welcome to the most impotent presidency since the 19th century.
And self-enrichment should be?
So you punish the elites, you elected a big-mouthed halfwit whose only real redeeming quality is that for all of that, he's still a braniac compared to his Chauncy Gardner-esque eldest son.
Yes, boy oh boy, the elites have sure been taught a lesson! My goodness, how very fucking smart you are! Congratulations on sticking it to the man...
If Trump can do it, it proves that there are absolutely no barriers to the Presidency. The office is being so heavily devalued now that I can't imagine why Zuckerberg would even want it. Being Mayor of New York City has more prestige these days.