Uhhh, your own link says, I bold for emphasis "These firms are not legally obligated to pre-fund health-care benefits, but about a quarter do so."
So 75% of your businesses DO NOT do this, and while I can't find any data on Fed Ex and UPS retirement funding I wouldn't be surprised if they don't, which leaves USPS in a bad way because just like I said they are having to carry a burden the majority do not. Now if you want to pass a law that says they ALL have to do this, or phase it in for USPS over time? Fine and dandy but the way they did it frankly smells like somebody wanted to kill USPS and I honestly would not be surprised to find out that lobbyists for UPS and Fed Ex were connected to whomever pushed for this.
Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger.
You might also want to look up "shotgun DNA GMO" to see how completely fucked up their splicing is, they take a LOT more genetic material than they actually want and fire it into the cell. What will all the extra do? Will it cause mutation down the line? They don't know and from the way they have been acting really don't seem to give a fuck and why should they? they can simply bribe the white house or congress, just like Cheney's buds at Halliburton did when they bought that asbestos company and were allowed to get all the assets while dumping the cleanup and liability on the taxpayer. Must be nice to be able to buy your way out of anything like that.
The one and ONLY one place where I would agree to this is where you are looking at total extinction, such as the case for bananas,which for those that don't know we only have a couple of Big Mike banana plants in a small greenhouse in South america (this is where the "yes we have no bananas" song came from, the wiping out of the Big Mike in the 1920s by Palm Blight) and it looks like the blight is adapting to the inferior Cavendish that we had to use as a replacement. if gene splicing would bring back the Big Mike, which is superior in every way, and save the Cavendish? Then and ONLY then would i be for this, because its a choice of that or nothing.
Well you can feel free to send them my previous post because i have watched it happen in a nice private school where they made all the students buy laptops for one year, thinking it was some educational "magic bullet".
Instead it ended up exactly as I had predicted to some of the parents, kids ended up using them for goofing off and IMing each other instead of doing their work, scores went DOWN not up, and the teachers ended up making the students leave them under the desk or in a bookbag until class was over.
And again just as i predicted the ONLY one that benefited was the company that sold them on the idea, THEY made out like bandits, the students? All they got was a new playtoy.
At the end of the day there is NO magic bullet, believe me, as someone who has raised two wonderful boys this is something I know about. It takes long hours, parent participation, hard work, and good teachers and NONE of that comes in a shiny box from Cupertino. you mark my words if anybody bothers to even do a 1 year study they'll find that the grades went DOWN because the kids have one more distraction, their scores won't improve a single bit, the ONLY ones that gain from this are Apple and its shareholders.
I do have to wonder though...how many that were praising it would have been equally supportive if it was a Windows 8 laptop?
And thank you for proving my point, anybody who says they didn't care for watching hours of crap floating in space MUST be "herpa de derp, splosions" rabble, right?
But I enjoyed Gattaca, pretty much zero action scenes in that, The Man From Earth, gripping movie without so much as a fist fight and the entire "set" is a single room in a cabin, and of course classics like Citizen Kane, no CGI boomfests there, so maybe, JUST maybe, like the rest of the critics you are giving Kubrick a "get out of jail free" card he doesn't deserve? Again watch the opening to the 2010 review where Matthew reads POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and then shows they are word for word copies of NEGATIVE reviews of other movies. again just like only Malick is allowed to make a Malick movie because he gets a get out of jail free card by the critics so too did Kubrick have critics swoon no matter what he made. kubrick could have made "guy eats a pickle" and been up for a dozen awards, that is how much the critics loved him.
I take it we have some "invisible hand" nutbars with mod points today?
Like it or not here are some facts, FACT the USPS was doing just fine UNTIL that law was passed that required them to fund a LIFETIME of retirement for each and every person that has worked or will work for them, NO other company has to do this and UPS and Fed Ex sure as fuck don't do this, FACT we have had several activists use the "starve the beast" meme that the AC pointed out, the Tea Party is just the latest, Grover Norquist and his "No new taxes EVAR" pledge being one of the most prominent examples, and FACT we haven't seen a damned thing passed this past 20+ years that wasn't either written by or sponsored by a lobbyist or lobbying group so you know damned good and well such a major change to the USPS had to be wanted by SOMEBODY with money or else it wouldn't have gotten done in the first place!
But you keep buying the "invisible hand" bullshit which even the libertarians know doesn't even exist in the stock market much less anywhere else, but I bet my last soon to be inflated to worthless dollar that if you follow the money either Fed Ex or UPS paid for the retirement law or a "starve the beast" true believer like Norquist and his followers paid to have it passed.
Not to mention the only one that will be getting squat out of this long term will be Apple, the iPads themselves will end up stolen, on eBay, or in a junk drawer somewhere with a dead battery. I have seen it before with a local private school demanding all the students get laptops, the laptops ended up being used more for time wasting than schoolwork, teachers began banning them from class because the students were watching stupid cat videos instead of working, the whole thing turned out to be a waste to everyone but the ones selling the hardware.
as a geek i naturally love tech but this fad of trying to fix education with tech? Just not gonna work. What you need is good teachers, involvement from the parents in the lives of the kids, and kids that actually want to be there and learn. None of that can come in a box, I don't care if it comes from Cupertino or not.
MSFT didn't kill OS/2, they didn't have to as it was made by IBM, end of story.
For those that don't know their history after the courts ruled that building a COTS X86 box wasn't an illegal copy of an IBM PC so long as they didn't copy the copyrighted IBM BIOS the guys at IBM tried to take back the X86 market by pushing the MCA bus which was proprietary as hell and would have cost so much for the other OEMs to license that they wouldn't have been able to compete with IBM. To keep from getting slaughtered the "gang of nine" got together and created EISA and licensed it under RAND and it quickly became the standard everyone supported.
So needless to say when IBM came around to offering OS/2, after it had already failed to gain traction under IBM thanks to IBM sticking with the 286 (which they had a license to second source and produce) instead of 486 (which they did not) the OEMs looked at anything offered by IBM akin to plague blankets and said "not no but HELL no" so OS/2 withered and died.
But I do find it ironic that everyone tries to pin the death of OS/2 and BeOS on "the big bad MSFT" when if you look at the actual history of their company nearly every success is preceded by "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" such as IBM trying to screw the OEMs with MCA and sticking with 286 after it was obsolete to BeOS starting out only supporting a rare niche processor (the AT&T Hobbit chip) to PPC (too expensive and never got the economy scale than X86 has).
Hell even the ones everybody knows about, wordperfect being replaced by MS Office and IE killing netscape can be traced back to dumb moves on behalf of the parent companies like Wordperfect having bad DOS ports of their WP Office Suite long after Windows became a hit to Netscape shitting all over itself with NS4 thus letting MSFT have the browser win by default, it ALL comes back to "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" which let MSFT have a free shot at the title.
Well considering our "choices were "Yes we can! (but I won't)" or "Mr 47%" who had billions hidden in offshore accounts and who gave us such memorable stuff as "When I was in HS I had to drive an ugly car!" (turned out that "ugly car" was a brand new luxury car straight from daddy's factory) and his wife's doozy "We know what its like to struggle, in college we had to live on our stock dividends!" I'd say we really didn't have a choice in the matter, while Obama may be a lousy POTUS at least he isn't as clueless as Thurson Howell the Third that the other guys were running.
And that is different than a good 90% of the papers who are just buying from AP wire services...how exactly? I quit buying my local paper because all it was was wire stories and a bunch of op-ed crap that was so right wing that fascists would have said "Wow dude, maybe you're a little too hard core for our org".
so I really can't blame the kids because if more of the papers, which at least across the south I've found to be generally the case, are like ours why would you bother to pay for what you can get fresh from AP for free across a billions websites?
Besides that there really is no need, a human that is good at drawing blood and setting up IVs is really not that rare and unlike the robot will actually listen to what you tell them.
Hell if you went ONLY by bloodflow you'd think that big vein in my left arm would be the one to go for, as its hardly ever been stuck and even ray Charles can see it, but there is a reason why its almost never been used and that is because I had a major bike wreck when i was 16 and a lot of the impact was focused on my left arm. Now if you try to stick me in that left arm? All you'll do is end up having the vein to collapse and leave me with a VERY sore arm while not getting a drop of blood out. Jerome who draws the blood at my doctor's office already knows this so even though its harder to see the one on the right thanks to my freckles he always goes for the right which never fails to let him draw all the blood doc wants every time I show up.
So I really don't see the point of this, if anything its not the patient that is at risk when drawing blood its the one doing the drawing and its not like they are getting paid crazy money so its really not gonna save much when you figure in the cost of the unit. finally as you point out if the machine ever screws up you could seriously hurt somebody so this seems, at least to me, like a solution in search of a problem.
Bingo if this administration had any ethics Holder would be in a cell right now looking at charges of murder and treason for handing out weapons to drug cartels in Fast & Furious, the fact that he isn't just shows how little rule of law means to this administration. as you have pointed out he has lied numerous times under oath, we have the proof he lied, yet it is ignored by the MSM and the administration. Snowden would have to be a fool to listen to them but that isn't what its about, its about giving Russia a free pass so they can punt Snowden without looking like they are caving to US demands.
Because unlike every other business on the planet Dubya passed a law that says the USPS has to have the ENTIRE retirement plan, to the very last penny for every single employee, funded for something like 40 years?
I have to wonder if this law getting passed couldn't be traced back to Fed Ex and UPS wanting the business that USPS was doing so found a way to stick them with a bill that they could never pay while remaining able to compete. After all you don't see Fed Ex and UPS funding 40 years worth of retirement per employee in their retirement accounts do you? It lets them tie a boat anchor to USPS so that USPS ends up in a bind and either has to cut service or raise prices, both of which benefits UPS and Fed Ex.
I'm sorry but I have to agree with Confused Matthew that 2001 sucks balls. You look at Kubrick's entire body of work there is ONE that stands out like a sore thumb as being completely unlike the rest, like the old Sesame Street "one of these things is not like the others" and that is 2001.
With all his other works you had story, characters, plot, or sure it may be a dark or twisted story but its there, if you cut out all the "crap floating in space to music" where there is NOTHING happening but a ship going from one place to another place with little to no dialog? You'd lose a good 70%+ of the movie. I truly believe he became so enamored of the effects, which to be fair had NEVER been attempted anywhere close to that level of realism before, that he simply put everything else on the backburner and never came back to it. And the man was never a good writer to begin with, watch the afterword at the bottom of the link I posted for a piece of an interview with Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death, where he can list point after point in favor of Kubrick as a director but when it comes to his writing his details on his praise all end and he comes up with an excuse instead.
So I'm sorry Kubrickians but there is a REASON why nobody else has made a film in the vein of 2001, because anybody else would have been called to the carpet for making a movie with no plot, narrative, story, frankly if it wasn't for the (sadly too damned short) parts with HAL there really wouldn't be any real characters at all, just bland empty vessels. It reminds me of how nobody but Terrence Malick can make a Terrence Malick movie because only Terrence Malick gets a free pass from the critics to be as pretentious as he possibly can without getting called to the carpet.
Just look at the opening of Matthew's 2010 review where he simply reads POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and shows how they are almost word for word identical to NEGATIVE reviews of other movies, Kubrick was one of the handful of artists that were/are "critic proof" but with 2001 you have something a little dark and ugly because many of those critics use it like the emperor's clothes, such as what Terry Gilliam does here, basically making it sound like those that don't love and watch 2001 from end to end (honestly I haven't met anybody who doesn't fast forward through the draggiest parts to get to HAL) are basically rabble who just "don't get it".
So I really don't get how a director becomes "critic proof" but I think that is the case with 2001, what would be considered a negative in any other film, dragging scenes, no real narrative, bland characters, scenes continuing well past any need for them to, is somehow a positive when it comes to 2001. No film before or since that I know of has been given such a huge get out of jail free card and the fact that it is so beloved to this day really baffles the hell out of me.
Dude you don't even have to go to that much trouble, just have the talking heads say things like "Is it true that Snowden was visiting child pornography websites before the data breech?" and there ya go, no pesky evidence needed, just look at how easily the MSM was able to change the conversation from the dirty dealings of the government to whether not wearing a condom could be considered rape.
No intent to Godwin but Stalin and the crazy Austrian couldn't have dreamed of a propaganda machine as powerful as we have now nor one that is so in bed with the government as ours is. Follow the owners of these media conglomerates and see how many of them have subsidiaries that have major government contracts, everything from weapons to trash disposal, they are in bed to the tune of billions.
But sadly Gilbert Godfried predicted the future with his "Did Glenn Beck rape a girl in 1996?" bit as that is literally ALL the talking heads have to do, say an "anon source" told them that so and so is a pedo and no more info or evidence is required and Snowden would have his reputation destroyed and anything he gave would be ignored because all people would see if a dirty pedo.
It won't matter friend as the PTB has learned they have another "mother may I" magic word that works even better than terrorist, and that is pedo. If you think the whole "peed on a bush and became a sex offender" bit is bad you should look at the CP laws and how vaguely they have been written. According to a friend that works in the state crime lab you could draw a stick figure and stick a label under it saying "nekkid 10 year old" and be looking at several years in prison and otherwise sane people will happily let the feds have ANY power they ask for just by invoking the "for the children" meme, hell we've seen otherwise rational people on this very site willing to ignore any and all violations of privacy if it was "to stop teh pedos".
So I'm convinced we'll see more of our privacy wiped off the map and what is more the crowds will cheer when it happens because the feds will say the magic word. Hell we have at least 2 guys in prison right now for thoughtcrime by using the magic word, the guy who supposedly wrote the "pro pedo" book and a guy who was writing any disturbing thoughts he had in a diary by order of his therapist of all people, and in BOTH cases the ONLY thing they did was what I am doing right now and put their thoughts on a page, that's it, that's ALL they did.
Now if that doesn't scare the hell out of you while illustrating just how powerful a word they have on their side? Well I don't know what will, I know it scares the hell out of me.
You know why you hate TMRepo, which BTW you should be fucking ASHAMED of comparing a JOKE SITE to Stromfront you douchebag, but you know why you hate it? Because like all good jokes its FUNNY BECAUSE ITS TRUE.
I can answer ALL of your arguments with the top 20 TMRepos, you know why? Its the SAME FUCKING EXCUSES the FOSSies have been using for a fricking decade, that's why! How do you think TMRepo came to be? a guy got tired of hearing the same old FOSSie bullshit and decided to just start listing them and tada! TMRepo.
Know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and that is Linux in a nutshell which is why me and every other B&M retailer and OEM have run away screaming from your mess, why even Dell hides it on a back page and gives you multiple warning before they will even sell it to you and just FYI unlike the Windows versions NO SUPPORT because even they know that shit is gonna break. I mean for the love of God fricking God Windows 8, the most hated windows since MSBob, got more users by its second month than Linux has in its entire history, what more proof do you fucking need that your current bullshit direction ain't working?
BTW know why I can produce so many citations and all you can produce is insults? because just like TMRepo I've heard the same excuses from FOSSies for so damned long i know EXACTLY what to type into a search engine to cut through your lies, but you hang onto your bullshit but if you have the balls take the Hairyfeet challenge, I dare you, double dare you to film it and upload it, you'll find that even giving Linux just HALF the support cycle of Linux it WILL fail, know why? Because the "let the devs do it" driver horseshit is just that,total fucking horseshit and IT DOES NOT WORK, it will NEVER work, and THAT is why even the other free OSes refuse to use his fucked up driver model!
While this is true talking to a friend in the state police I frankly wouldn't be comfortable running a tor node or a freenet server as frankly the idea of it really hasn't been tested in a court of law and with the fucked up way many of the CP laws are written you could be looking at decades in PMITA prison if the courts rule against you, awful lot to risk just to be the test case.
The way it was explained to me was like this...If I hand you a safe and tell you to deliver it, even if you don't have the key, and you willingly deliver it without bothering to find out what is inside and the cops stop you and find the safe full of CP? They can bust YOU for transportation and facilitation, even though you didn't have access to it yourself. According to my friend at the crime lab nobody really knows if the same will apply to Tor and Freenet and the like simply because no court has laid down what does and doesn't apply and how vaguely a lot of these CP laws are written leaves some of the cops saying yes, some saying no, the courts are really gonna have to chime in to get the laws defined as to what and what doesn't count as transportation and facilitation.
So considering how truly insane the amount of time you can get for getting convicted of anything to do with CP I'd be seriously wary of touching this stuff until the courts stick their 2c in, i don't know about you but i don't have a couple of hundred thou to spend in lawyer fees to fight it, not to mention you can give up working while its going on as nobody wants a pervo working for them. Most of the guys here forget that the laws really haven't caught up with the tech and this is one of those grey areas where the courts haven't laid down a precedent and without one you are literally risking the rest of your life behind bars, that is a hell of a thing to risk just to support Tor or Freenet.
I'll get hate but screw it, the reason linux goes nowhere is the same reason you name the distro and it won't pass the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which is already tilted badly in Linux' favor, and that is Linus Torvalds gives more care about religious dogma than designing an OS that works and since the vast majority of the public are NOT what I call "FOSSies" and do not give a rat turd about GPL purity Linux goes nowhere. I mean for God's sake guys, there is several orders of magnitude more people willing to risk tens of thousands in fines and possible jail time to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free, doesn't that set off a lightbulb above your head?
The simple fact of the matter is that NOBODY uses Torvalds fucked up "Let the devs do it" driver model, not even the other free as in freedom OSes like BSD and Solaris and the reason why is it DOES NOT WORK, hell you can use basic math to show why it'll never work, ready? You have MAYBE 400 guys working with Torvalds and qualified to write and debug low level systems drivers, following so far? Now add in the fact that there is probably a good 10,000 new devices coming out per quarter MINIMUM and a good 100,000+ drivers that are ALREADY in the tree....see the problem yet? if you mainlined those devs on Bolivian Marching Powder so they NEVER slept and ONLY worked on drivers you'd have each driver getting around 20 minutes worth of time every 3 years or so, which is why you end up with drivers like these that were half assed and piss poor to begin with, only having half the hardware functional, and are poorly supported on top of that.
But what do we get when we point this out, and what I'm sure to hear here? We don't need no steekin ABI and then you expect, with a straight face and without a trace of irony, for Joe and jane Average to do forum hunts, google for fixes, and be able to tweak piles of CLI crapola because thanks to Torvalds fucked up way of dealing with drivers, which worked in 93 when you had a couple of hundred drivers but just can't scale to the number we have today, leaves even Eric Raymond unable to get a printer to work over the network, a feature that the other guy has been doing since WinXP in 01 trivially. In fact the ONLY response you can show from the kernel devs is a RELIGIOUS argument, in fact the dev even wrote "and I hope we break none free drivers often!" which if that doesn't show you its about the GPL religion over having a functional OS then I don't know what will.
At the end of the day you have to be either the most arrogant prick on the planet or fucking deluded to look and see that EVERY SINGLE OTHER OS does it one way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, fuck even OS/2 and your "dear leader" goes for the exact opposite approach, one that NOBODY other than him uses, and then to believe he is actually right and they are wrong, that he is fucking smarter than ALL those OS devs put together? I'm sorry but that is bullshit and ironically the community knows it too even if they won't say it out loud. after all what does everybody on the forums tell you to buy from graphics? Nvidia a NON FREE DRIVER because what do you know, the driver actually WORKS. sadly Nvidia is the only company it seems willing to blow that much money supporting Linux, the rest aren't gonna pay an entire dev team to fix what Torvalds and Co. break and Joe and jane sure as fuck ain't gonna put with updates shitting all over drivers and forum hunts for fixes.
Uhhh...the creation of Libre Office came about because Oracle was being their usual dickish selves, I doubt you are gonna see that same attitude anywhere in the Apache foundation so that isn't the problem. The problem is that Apache is more of a BSD license and Libre is GPL, no point in starting up THAT old flamewar so lets just say they agree to disagree and move on.
Now that said I think we should all give the Libre Office team another year and a half before we even start judging their work, because frankly Sun left that code in pretty damned bad shape and when you are talking about a project THAT size? Well its gonna take a good while just to clean out the cruft and straighten out the messes. Considering the short amount of time they have had it its already getting better, its just a shame the LO guys can share improvements with the Apache guys but due to license incompatibilities I just don't see that happening.
Its not gonna help as they have blown too big of a bubble and built entire industries on Wall Street around the bubble. Oh and those that are right wing may not want to watch that video as guess what started the bubble? Ronald Reagan with the 401K and 403B. Basically this "supercharged" the stock market with billions of new dollars flowing in, the market exploded in growth...then the jobs all got sent overseas, people stopped putting money into 401Ks and 403Bs because they didn't have it or it wasn't offered (the "temp job generation") and so the government rather than let the bubble burst started putting fed printed money straight into the market. at the end of the day it WILL burst and when it does it'll make the great depression look like a flash crash.
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please? It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't, it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained, it wasn't, what you have is the government and the corp in bed together and running a plant WAY past its prime and not taking good care of it so no shit when something nasty came along it was fucked.
If you want us to get off fossil fuels there is really only ONE choice and that is nuclear, none of the renewables are capable of even scaling up to what we are using now, much less allowing for growth, so unless you are gonna just get rid of a large chunk of the population (which sadly I've met some greenies that would be more than happy to "final solution" the problem if it would "save mother earth") then we really have no choice, we MUST build new plants. If we reprocess and use the new designs frankly the risk of another Fukushima is extremely low and if we truly are gonna switch to all electric vehicles than all that power has to come from somewhere folks, and until we can get a HELL of a lot better with renewables there isn't much of a choice, its nuclear or keep on burning.
Hell you don't even have to do that as/. has built in filters that let you block any stories you don't want, this is how I keep from seeing the majority of Linux articles, just check the boxes, add a few keywords (in my case words like Redhat and Ubuntu, in this guys case words like Microsoft, Sharepoint,etc) and voila! No more crap you don't care about.
Now if there was only a way to filter out AC posts while not blocking registered users that were downmodded by groupthink I'd say this place was perfect, can't always get what you want though.
Not really as i have found in the shop there is ALWAYS a minority that will like ANYTHING, hell I've met users that hung on to the last possible second to Windows ME because they really liked it and I have a handful that will be on Vista right up to support ending in 2017, no matter how funky or off or just plain terrible something is you'll find somebody that loves that shit, see Troll 2 being a cult hit as an example.
That said i have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field, when it comes to Chrome OS becoming the "dominant" OS, total crock of shit. Maybe if you live in Asia where ultra high speed and free WiFi is as common as dirt but it will NEVER become anything more than a niche everywhere else because like all thin clients once you lose Internet it becomes a giant worthless brick. Hell even Torvalds who bought the crazy expensive ChromeBook (Pixel I think its called?) is talking about putting Linux on it as the limitations of a thin client is starting to become grating, after using a rich OS most folks aren't gonna be willing to put up with the limitations of a thin client and all the spying and sharing data with the feds certainly isn't gonna give folks a warm fuzzy when it comes to Google products.
Sadly you wanna see what the future is go to your average phone store, its walled gardens controlled by the carriers that never get updates and which you are forced to toss yearly as the carriers refuse to support anything but the latest and greatest and even those get piss poor support at best. Frankly it bums me out as we were getting all this incredible hardware for cheap...then here comes the smartphones and its back to the 90s, horrible data caps, proprietary everything, locked down hardware, most of these phones have more in common with game consoles than they do PCs.
Exactly, Gnome simply went the Windows 8 "Hey lets flip off our users and tell them to 'deal with it' because we don't give a fuck what they want" route and are now paying the price for that....and?
Its something any little shop guy could have told you, you give the people what they want or they go somewhere else. The gnome devs thought they had a captive audience, thought they could say "deal with it" and nobody would do anything about it, and instead the userbase evaporated...uh huh? I mean who couldn't have predicted flipping off your users would get them to abandon you? That the application devs would likewise go where the users are, so that you end up with the chart on TFA where the whole thing just nosedives.
I hope this serves as a lesson down the line, you can't force the customer to take shit if they have choices. Doesn't matter who you are, Gnome, Ubuntu, MSFT, you can't just throw a shitburger down in front of the customer if they can just go across the street and get a real burger, it just doesn't work. I hear that the gnome guys are trying to backpedal but its probably too late as once folks move away its DAMN hard to get them to move back so probably the best they can hope for now is to get that line to level off and stop the bleeding, but its gonna take years to bring that line back up if ever. For an example just look at how many abandoned Ubuntu for Mint, never to look back.
I'm sorry but copyrights as designed by the founding fathers was a GOOD thing, it allowed the little guy to make enough to live on while keeping the large cartels from just snatching everything that wasn't nailed down. what we have now is the exact opposite, a system which favors those very same cartels and screws the little guy, just look at the "standard record contract" which is just a damned joke its pathetic to see how badly things have been tilted towards the cartels.
So what we need is NOT to abolish it but reform it, starting with putting copyright terms back to the original 25 years so that the cartels can't lock down our history behind paywalls, remove the ability to sell your copyrights, if the cartels want to lease the rights that is fine but what has happened is the record contracts now force the artist to give away their songs just to be heard so the ability to take someone's copyrights away should be removed, and once the copyright term is up the formerly copyrighted work shall be put in a large repository on the web free for all to use to enjoy and create more art.
If we were to do this frankly copyrights wouldn't be something everybody bitched about anymore, why you'd have all the great music of the first 80 years of the twentieth century to use in new projects, the artists wouldn't be forced to sign everything away, and the cartels wouldn't have our entire recorded history locked behind paywalls, it would be great.
Sadly our system is so corrupted and ruined by big money that I truly believe that only a total collapse will bring about any chance for change so until then I say until We, The People get a seat at the negotiating table you should treat copyright laws as what they are, laws bought with bribes and therefor null and void. Does ANYBODY believe the people would have voted for 150+ year copyrights? Or that copyrights would last nearly a century after the creator of the work has died? Of course not but the people didn't get a say, the cartels, especially Disney, just broke out their checkbook and bribed their way into having the laws changed. This is why they should be ignored, as unjust laws that came to be through illegal acts are crimes and should be treated as such.
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Uhhh, your own link says, I bold for emphasis "These firms are not legally obligated to pre-fund health-care benefits, but about a quarter do so."
So 75% of your businesses DO NOT do this, and while I can't find any data on Fed Ex and UPS retirement funding I wouldn't be surprised if they don't, which leaves USPS in a bad way because just like I said they are having to carry a burden the majority do not. Now if you want to pass a law that says they ALL have to do this, or phase it in for USPS over time? Fine and dandy but the way they did it frankly smells like somebody wanted to kill USPS and I honestly would not be surprised to find out that lobbyists for UPS and Fed Ex were connected to whomever pushed for this.
Show many ANY time in nature where plants have modified themselves with ANIMALS and FISH and then and ONLY then will I buy your bullshit, because in case you ain't been keeping up on current events they have been mixing everything from starfish to grasshopper into plants to increase yields and make them grow larger.
You might also want to look up "shotgun DNA GMO" to see how completely fucked up their splicing is, they take a LOT more genetic material than they actually want and fire it into the cell. What will all the extra do? Will it cause mutation down the line? They don't know and from the way they have been acting really don't seem to give a fuck and why should they? they can simply bribe the white house or congress, just like Cheney's buds at Halliburton did when they bought that asbestos company and were allowed to get all the assets while dumping the cleanup and liability on the taxpayer. Must be nice to be able to buy your way out of anything like that.
The one and ONLY one place where I would agree to this is where you are looking at total extinction, such as the case for bananas,which for those that don't know we only have a couple of Big Mike banana plants in a small greenhouse in South america (this is where the "yes we have no bananas" song came from, the wiping out of the Big Mike in the 1920s by Palm Blight) and it looks like the blight is adapting to the inferior Cavendish that we had to use as a replacement. if gene splicing would bring back the Big Mike, which is superior in every way, and save the Cavendish? Then and ONLY then would i be for this, because its a choice of that or nothing.
Well you can feel free to send them my previous post because i have watched it happen in a nice private school where they made all the students buy laptops for one year, thinking it was some educational "magic bullet".
Instead it ended up exactly as I had predicted to some of the parents, kids ended up using them for goofing off and IMing each other instead of doing their work, scores went DOWN not up, and the teachers ended up making the students leave them under the desk or in a bookbag until class was over. And again just as i predicted the ONLY one that benefited was the company that sold them on the idea, THEY made out like bandits, the students? All they got was a new playtoy.
At the end of the day there is NO magic bullet, believe me, as someone who has raised two wonderful boys this is something I know about. It takes long hours, parent participation, hard work, and good teachers and NONE of that comes in a shiny box from Cupertino. you mark my words if anybody bothers to even do a 1 year study they'll find that the grades went DOWN because the kids have one more distraction, their scores won't improve a single bit, the ONLY ones that gain from this are Apple and its shareholders.
I do have to wonder though...how many that were praising it would have been equally supportive if it was a Windows 8 laptop?
And thank you for proving my point, anybody who says they didn't care for watching hours of crap floating in space MUST be "herpa de derp, splosions" rabble, right?
But I enjoyed Gattaca, pretty much zero action scenes in that, The Man From Earth, gripping movie without so much as a fist fight and the entire "set" is a single room in a cabin, and of course classics like Citizen Kane, no CGI boomfests there, so maybe, JUST maybe, like the rest of the critics you are giving Kubrick a "get out of jail free" card he doesn't deserve? Again watch the opening to the 2010 review where Matthew reads POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and then shows they are word for word copies of NEGATIVE reviews of other movies. again just like only Malick is allowed to make a Malick movie because he gets a get out of jail free card by the critics so too did Kubrick have critics swoon no matter what he made. kubrick could have made "guy eats a pickle" and been up for a dozen awards, that is how much the critics loved him.
I take it we have some "invisible hand" nutbars with mod points today?
Like it or not here are some facts, FACT the USPS was doing just fine UNTIL that law was passed that required them to fund a LIFETIME of retirement for each and every person that has worked or will work for them, NO other company has to do this and UPS and Fed Ex sure as fuck don't do this, FACT we have had several activists use the "starve the beast" meme that the AC pointed out, the Tea Party is just the latest, Grover Norquist and his "No new taxes EVAR" pledge being one of the most prominent examples, and FACT we haven't seen a damned thing passed this past 20+ years that wasn't either written by or sponsored by a lobbyist or lobbying group so you know damned good and well such a major change to the USPS had to be wanted by SOMEBODY with money or else it wouldn't have gotten done in the first place!
But you keep buying the "invisible hand" bullshit which even the libertarians know doesn't even exist in the stock market much less anywhere else, but I bet my last soon to be inflated to worthless dollar that if you follow the money either Fed Ex or UPS paid for the retirement law or a "starve the beast" true believer like Norquist and his followers paid to have it passed.
Not to mention the only one that will be getting squat out of this long term will be Apple, the iPads themselves will end up stolen, on eBay, or in a junk drawer somewhere with a dead battery. I have seen it before with a local private school demanding all the students get laptops, the laptops ended up being used more for time wasting than schoolwork, teachers began banning them from class because the students were watching stupid cat videos instead of working, the whole thing turned out to be a waste to everyone but the ones selling the hardware.
as a geek i naturally love tech but this fad of trying to fix education with tech? Just not gonna work. What you need is good teachers, involvement from the parents in the lives of the kids, and kids that actually want to be there and learn. None of that can come in a box, I don't care if it comes from Cupertino or not.
MSFT didn't kill OS/2, they didn't have to as it was made by IBM, end of story.
For those that don't know their history after the courts ruled that building a COTS X86 box wasn't an illegal copy of an IBM PC so long as they didn't copy the copyrighted IBM BIOS the guys at IBM tried to take back the X86 market by pushing the MCA bus which was proprietary as hell and would have cost so much for the other OEMs to license that they wouldn't have been able to compete with IBM. To keep from getting slaughtered the "gang of nine" got together and created EISA and licensed it under RAND and it quickly became the standard everyone supported.
So needless to say when IBM came around to offering OS/2, after it had already failed to gain traction under IBM thanks to IBM sticking with the 286 (which they had a license to second source and produce) instead of 486 (which they did not) the OEMs looked at anything offered by IBM akin to plague blankets and said "not no but HELL no" so OS/2 withered and died.
But I do find it ironic that everyone tries to pin the death of OS/2 and BeOS on "the big bad MSFT" when if you look at the actual history of their company nearly every success is preceded by "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" such as IBM trying to screw the OEMs with MCA and sticking with 286 after it was obsolete to BeOS starting out only supporting a rare niche processor (the AT&T Hobbit chip) to PPC (too expensive and never got the economy scale than X86 has).
Hell even the ones everybody knows about, wordperfect being replaced by MS Office and IE killing netscape can be traced back to dumb moves on behalf of the parent companies like Wordperfect having bad DOS ports of their WP Office Suite long after Windows became a hit to Netscape shitting all over itself with NS4 thus letting MSFT have the browser win by default, it ALL comes back to "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" which let MSFT have a free shot at the title.
Well considering our "choices were "Yes we can! (but I won't)" or "Mr 47%" who had billions hidden in offshore accounts and who gave us such memorable stuff as "When I was in HS I had to drive an ugly car!" (turned out that "ugly car" was a brand new luxury car straight from daddy's factory) and his wife's doozy "We know what its like to struggle, in college we had to live on our stock dividends!" I'd say we really didn't have a choice in the matter, while Obama may be a lousy POTUS at least he isn't as clueless as Thurson Howell the Third that the other guys were running.
And that is different than a good 90% of the papers who are just buying from AP wire services...how exactly? I quit buying my local paper because all it was was wire stories and a bunch of op-ed crap that was so right wing that fascists would have said "Wow dude, maybe you're a little too hard core for our org".
so I really can't blame the kids because if more of the papers, which at least across the south I've found to be generally the case, are like ours why would you bother to pay for what you can get fresh from AP for free across a billions websites?
Besides that there really is no need, a human that is good at drawing blood and setting up IVs is really not that rare and unlike the robot will actually listen to what you tell them.
Hell if you went ONLY by bloodflow you'd think that big vein in my left arm would be the one to go for, as its hardly ever been stuck and even ray Charles can see it, but there is a reason why its almost never been used and that is because I had a major bike wreck when i was 16 and a lot of the impact was focused on my left arm. Now if you try to stick me in that left arm? All you'll do is end up having the vein to collapse and leave me with a VERY sore arm while not getting a drop of blood out. Jerome who draws the blood at my doctor's office already knows this so even though its harder to see the one on the right thanks to my freckles he always goes for the right which never fails to let him draw all the blood doc wants every time I show up.
So I really don't see the point of this, if anything its not the patient that is at risk when drawing blood its the one doing the drawing and its not like they are getting paid crazy money so its really not gonna save much when you figure in the cost of the unit. finally as you point out if the machine ever screws up you could seriously hurt somebody so this seems, at least to me, like a solution in search of a problem.
Bingo if this administration had any ethics Holder would be in a cell right now looking at charges of murder and treason for handing out weapons to drug cartels in Fast & Furious, the fact that he isn't just shows how little rule of law means to this administration. as you have pointed out he has lied numerous times under oath, we have the proof he lied, yet it is ignored by the MSM and the administration. Snowden would have to be a fool to listen to them but that isn't what its about, its about giving Russia a free pass so they can punt Snowden without looking like they are caving to US demands.
Because unlike every other business on the planet Dubya passed a law that says the USPS has to have the ENTIRE retirement plan, to the very last penny for every single employee, funded for something like 40 years?
I have to wonder if this law getting passed couldn't be traced back to Fed Ex and UPS wanting the business that USPS was doing so found a way to stick them with a bill that they could never pay while remaining able to compete. After all you don't see Fed Ex and UPS funding 40 years worth of retirement per employee in their retirement accounts do you? It lets them tie a boat anchor to USPS so that USPS ends up in a bind and either has to cut service or raise prices, both of which benefits UPS and Fed Ex.
I'm sorry but I have to agree with Confused Matthew that 2001 sucks balls. You look at Kubrick's entire body of work there is ONE that stands out like a sore thumb as being completely unlike the rest, like the old Sesame Street "one of these things is not like the others" and that is 2001.
With all his other works you had story, characters, plot, or sure it may be a dark or twisted story but its there, if you cut out all the "crap floating in space to music" where there is NOTHING happening but a ship going from one place to another place with little to no dialog? You'd lose a good 70%+ of the movie. I truly believe he became so enamored of the effects, which to be fair had NEVER been attempted anywhere close to that level of realism before, that he simply put everything else on the backburner and never came back to it. And the man was never a good writer to begin with, watch the afterword at the bottom of the link I posted for a piece of an interview with Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death, where he can list point after point in favor of Kubrick as a director but when it comes to his writing his details on his praise all end and he comes up with an excuse instead.
So I'm sorry Kubrickians but there is a REASON why nobody else has made a film in the vein of 2001, because anybody else would have been called to the carpet for making a movie with no plot, narrative, story, frankly if it wasn't for the (sadly too damned short) parts with HAL there really wouldn't be any real characters at all, just bland empty vessels. It reminds me of how nobody but Terrence Malick can make a Terrence Malick movie because only Terrence Malick gets a free pass from the critics to be as pretentious as he possibly can without getting called to the carpet.
Just look at the opening of Matthew's 2010 review where he simply reads POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and shows how they are almost word for word identical to NEGATIVE reviews of other movies, Kubrick was one of the handful of artists that were/are "critic proof" but with 2001 you have something a little dark and ugly because many of those critics use it like the emperor's clothes, such as what Terry Gilliam does here, basically making it sound like those that don't love and watch 2001 from end to end (honestly I haven't met anybody who doesn't fast forward through the draggiest parts to get to HAL) are basically rabble who just "don't get it".
So I really don't get how a director becomes "critic proof" but I think that is the case with 2001, what would be considered a negative in any other film, dragging scenes, no real narrative, bland characters, scenes continuing well past any need for them to, is somehow a positive when it comes to 2001. No film before or since that I know of has been given such a huge get out of jail free card and the fact that it is so beloved to this day really baffles the hell out of me.
Dude you don't even have to go to that much trouble, just have the talking heads say things like "Is it true that Snowden was visiting child pornography websites before the data breech?" and there ya go, no pesky evidence needed, just look at how easily the MSM was able to change the conversation from the dirty dealings of the government to whether not wearing a condom could be considered rape.
No intent to Godwin but Stalin and the crazy Austrian couldn't have dreamed of a propaganda machine as powerful as we have now nor one that is so in bed with the government as ours is. Follow the owners of these media conglomerates and see how many of them have subsidiaries that have major government contracts, everything from weapons to trash disposal, they are in bed to the tune of billions.
But sadly Gilbert Godfried predicted the future with his "Did Glenn Beck rape a girl in 1996?" bit as that is literally ALL the talking heads have to do, say an "anon source" told them that so and so is a pedo and no more info or evidence is required and Snowden would have his reputation destroyed and anything he gave would be ignored because all people would see if a dirty pedo.
"Maybe, just maybe, HMO and insurance companies could PROFIT from this by having more excuses to refuse to give you what you paid for"...FTFY.
It won't matter friend as the PTB has learned they have another "mother may I" magic word that works even better than terrorist, and that is pedo. If you think the whole "peed on a bush and became a sex offender" bit is bad you should look at the CP laws and how vaguely they have been written. According to a friend that works in the state crime lab you could draw a stick figure and stick a label under it saying "nekkid 10 year old" and be looking at several years in prison and otherwise sane people will happily let the feds have ANY power they ask for just by invoking the "for the children" meme, hell we've seen otherwise rational people on this very site willing to ignore any and all violations of privacy if it was "to stop teh pedos".
So I'm convinced we'll see more of our privacy wiped off the map and what is more the crowds will cheer when it happens because the feds will say the magic word. Hell we have at least 2 guys in prison right now for thoughtcrime by using the magic word, the guy who supposedly wrote the "pro pedo" book and a guy who was writing any disturbing thoughts he had in a diary by order of his therapist of all people, and in BOTH cases the ONLY thing they did was what I am doing right now and put their thoughts on a page, that's it, that's ALL they did.
Now if that doesn't scare the hell out of you while illustrating just how powerful a word they have on their side? Well I don't know what will, I know it scares the hell out of me.
You know why you hate TMRepo, which BTW you should be fucking ASHAMED of comparing a JOKE SITE to Stromfront you douchebag, but you know why you hate it? Because like all good jokes its FUNNY BECAUSE ITS TRUE.
I can answer ALL of your arguments with the top 20 TMRepos, you know why? Its the SAME FUCKING EXCUSES the FOSSies have been using for a fricking decade, that's why! How do you think TMRepo came to be? a guy got tired of hearing the same old FOSSie bullshit and decided to just start listing them and tada! TMRepo.
So go back to your circle of loon, go back to pretending that the OEMs haven't all walked away from your broken mess because they got tired of the broken shit which even ESR can't make work while claiming that android is Linux.
Know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and that is Linux in a nutshell which is why me and every other B&M retailer and OEM have run away screaming from your mess, why even Dell hides it on a back page and gives you multiple warning before they will even sell it to you and just FYI unlike the Windows versions NO SUPPORT because even they know that shit is gonna break. I mean for the love of God fricking God Windows 8, the most hated windows since MSBob, got more users by its second month than Linux has in its entire history, what more proof do you fucking need that your current bullshit direction ain't working?
BTW know why I can produce so many citations and all you can produce is insults? because just like TMRepo I've heard the same excuses from FOSSies for so damned long i know EXACTLY what to type into a search engine to cut through your lies, but you hang onto your bullshit but if you have the balls take the Hairyfeet challenge, I dare you, double dare you to film it and upload it, you'll find that even giving Linux just HALF the support cycle of Linux it WILL fail, know why? Because the "let the devs do it" driver horseshit is just that,total fucking horseshit and IT DOES NOT WORK, it will NEVER work, and THAT is why even the other free OSes refuse to use his fucked up driver model!
While this is true talking to a friend in the state police I frankly wouldn't be comfortable running a tor node or a freenet server as frankly the idea of it really hasn't been tested in a court of law and with the fucked up way many of the CP laws are written you could be looking at decades in PMITA prison if the courts rule against you, awful lot to risk just to be the test case.
The way it was explained to me was like this...If I hand you a safe and tell you to deliver it, even if you don't have the key, and you willingly deliver it without bothering to find out what is inside and the cops stop you and find the safe full of CP? They can bust YOU for transportation and facilitation, even though you didn't have access to it yourself. According to my friend at the crime lab nobody really knows if the same will apply to Tor and Freenet and the like simply because no court has laid down what does and doesn't apply and how vaguely a lot of these CP laws are written leaves some of the cops saying yes, some saying no, the courts are really gonna have to chime in to get the laws defined as to what and what doesn't count as transportation and facilitation.
So considering how truly insane the amount of time you can get for getting convicted of anything to do with CP I'd be seriously wary of touching this stuff until the courts stick their 2c in, i don't know about you but i don't have a couple of hundred thou to spend in lawyer fees to fight it, not to mention you can give up working while its going on as nobody wants a pervo working for them. Most of the guys here forget that the laws really haven't caught up with the tech and this is one of those grey areas where the courts haven't laid down a precedent and without one you are literally risking the rest of your life behind bars, that is a hell of a thing to risk just to support Tor or Freenet.
I'll get hate but screw it, the reason linux goes nowhere is the same reason you name the distro and it won't pass the "Hairyfeet Challenge" which is already tilted badly in Linux' favor, and that is Linus Torvalds gives more care about religious dogma than designing an OS that works and since the vast majority of the public are NOT what I call "FOSSies" and do not give a rat turd about GPL purity Linux goes nowhere. I mean for God's sake guys, there is several orders of magnitude more people willing to risk tens of thousands in fines and possible jail time to steal the other guy's product than take yours for free, doesn't that set off a lightbulb above your head?
The simple fact of the matter is that NOBODY uses Torvalds fucked up "Let the devs do it" driver model, not even the other free as in freedom OSes like BSD and Solaris and the reason why is it DOES NOT WORK, hell you can use basic math to show why it'll never work, ready? You have MAYBE 400 guys working with Torvalds and qualified to write and debug low level systems drivers, following so far? Now add in the fact that there is probably a good 10,000 new devices coming out per quarter MINIMUM and a good 100,000+ drivers that are ALREADY in the tree....see the problem yet? if you mainlined those devs on Bolivian Marching Powder so they NEVER slept and ONLY worked on drivers you'd have each driver getting around 20 minutes worth of time every 3 years or so, which is why you end up with drivers like these that were half assed and piss poor to begin with, only having half the hardware functional, and are poorly supported on top of that.
But what do we get when we point this out, and what I'm sure to hear here? We don't need no steekin ABI and then you expect, with a straight face and without a trace of irony, for Joe and jane Average to do forum hunts, google for fixes, and be able to tweak piles of CLI crapola because thanks to Torvalds fucked up way of dealing with drivers, which worked in 93 when you had a couple of hundred drivers but just can't scale to the number we have today, leaves even Eric Raymond unable to get a printer to work over the network, a feature that the other guy has been doing since WinXP in 01 trivially. In fact the ONLY response you can show from the kernel devs is a RELIGIOUS argument, in fact the dev even wrote "and I hope we break none free drivers often!" which if that doesn't show you its about the GPL religion over having a functional OS then I don't know what will.
At the end of the day you have to be either the most arrogant prick on the planet or fucking deluded to look and see that EVERY SINGLE OTHER OS does it one way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, fuck even OS/2 and your "dear leader" goes for the exact opposite approach, one that NOBODY other than him uses, and then to believe he is actually right and they are wrong, that he is fucking smarter than ALL those OS devs put together? I'm sorry but that is bullshit and ironically the community knows it too even if they won't say it out loud. after all what does everybody on the forums tell you to buy from graphics? Nvidia a NON FREE DRIVER because what do you know, the driver actually WORKS. sadly Nvidia is the only company it seems willing to blow that much money supporting Linux, the rest aren't gonna pay an entire dev team to fix what Torvalds and Co. break and Joe and jane sure as fuck ain't gonna put with updates shitting all over drivers and forum hunts for fixes.
Uhhh...the creation of Libre Office came about because Oracle was being their usual dickish selves, I doubt you are gonna see that same attitude anywhere in the Apache foundation so that isn't the problem. The problem is that Apache is more of a BSD license and Libre is GPL, no point in starting up THAT old flamewar so lets just say they agree to disagree and move on.
Now that said I think we should all give the Libre Office team another year and a half before we even start judging their work, because frankly Sun left that code in pretty damned bad shape and when you are talking about a project THAT size? Well its gonna take a good while just to clean out the cruft and straighten out the messes. Considering the short amount of time they have had it its already getting better, its just a shame the LO guys can share improvements with the Apache guys but due to license incompatibilities I just don't see that happening.
Its not gonna help as they have blown too big of a bubble and built entire industries on Wall Street around the bubble. Oh and those that are right wing may not want to watch that video as guess what started the bubble? Ronald Reagan with the 401K and 403B. Basically this "supercharged" the stock market with billions of new dollars flowing in, the market exploded in growth...then the jobs all got sent overseas, people stopped putting money into 401Ks and 403Bs because they didn't have it or it wasn't offered (the "temp job generation") and so the government rather than let the bubble burst started putting fed printed money straight into the market. at the end of the day it WILL burst and when it does it'll make the great depression look like a flash crash.
As for the cost to clean up Fukushima? Can we PLEASE stop blaming nuclear power for what is in reality a case of corporate and government malfeasance please? It was SUPPOSED to have been shut down years ago, it wasn't, it was SUPPOSED to have been well maintained, it wasn't, what you have is the government and the corp in bed together and running a plant WAY past its prime and not taking good care of it so no shit when something nasty came along it was fucked.
If you want us to get off fossil fuels there is really only ONE choice and that is nuclear, none of the renewables are capable of even scaling up to what we are using now, much less allowing for growth, so unless you are gonna just get rid of a large chunk of the population (which sadly I've met some greenies that would be more than happy to "final solution" the problem if it would "save mother earth") then we really have no choice, we MUST build new plants. If we reprocess and use the new designs frankly the risk of another Fukushima is extremely low and if we truly are gonna switch to all electric vehicles than all that power has to come from somewhere folks, and until we can get a HELL of a lot better with renewables there isn't much of a choice, its nuclear or keep on burning.
Hell you don't even have to do that as /. has built in filters that let you block any stories you don't want, this is how I keep from seeing the majority of Linux articles, just check the boxes, add a few keywords (in my case words like Redhat and Ubuntu, in this guys case words like Microsoft, Sharepoint,etc) and voila! No more crap you don't care about.
Now if there was only a way to filter out AC posts while not blocking registered users that were downmodded by groupthink I'd say this place was perfect, can't always get what you want though.
Not really as i have found in the shop there is ALWAYS a minority that will like ANYTHING, hell I've met users that hung on to the last possible second to Windows ME because they really liked it and I have a handful that will be on Vista right up to support ending in 2017, no matter how funky or off or just plain terrible something is you'll find somebody that loves that shit, see Troll 2 being a cult hit as an example.
That said i have to throw a flag, bullshit on the field, when it comes to Chrome OS becoming the "dominant" OS, total crock of shit. Maybe if you live in Asia where ultra high speed and free WiFi is as common as dirt but it will NEVER become anything more than a niche everywhere else because like all thin clients once you lose Internet it becomes a giant worthless brick. Hell even Torvalds who bought the crazy expensive ChromeBook (Pixel I think its called?) is talking about putting Linux on it as the limitations of a thin client is starting to become grating, after using a rich OS most folks aren't gonna be willing to put up with the limitations of a thin client and all the spying and sharing data with the feds certainly isn't gonna give folks a warm fuzzy when it comes to Google products.
Sadly you wanna see what the future is go to your average phone store, its walled gardens controlled by the carriers that never get updates and which you are forced to toss yearly as the carriers refuse to support anything but the latest and greatest and even those get piss poor support at best. Frankly it bums me out as we were getting all this incredible hardware for cheap...then here comes the smartphones and its back to the 90s, horrible data caps, proprietary everything, locked down hardware, most of these phones have more in common with game consoles than they do PCs.
Exactly, Gnome simply went the Windows 8 "Hey lets flip off our users and tell them to 'deal with it' because we don't give a fuck what they want" route and are now paying the price for that....and?
Its something any little shop guy could have told you, you give the people what they want or they go somewhere else. The gnome devs thought they had a captive audience, thought they could say "deal with it" and nobody would do anything about it, and instead the userbase evaporated...uh huh? I mean who couldn't have predicted flipping off your users would get them to abandon you? That the application devs would likewise go where the users are, so that you end up with the chart on TFA where the whole thing just nosedives.
I hope this serves as a lesson down the line, you can't force the customer to take shit if they have choices. Doesn't matter who you are, Gnome, Ubuntu, MSFT, you can't just throw a shitburger down in front of the customer if they can just go across the street and get a real burger, it just doesn't work. I hear that the gnome guys are trying to backpedal but its probably too late as once folks move away its DAMN hard to get them to move back so probably the best they can hope for now is to get that line to level off and stop the bleeding, but its gonna take years to bring that line back up if ever. For an example just look at how many abandoned Ubuntu for Mint, never to look back.
I'm sorry but copyrights as designed by the founding fathers was a GOOD thing, it allowed the little guy to make enough to live on while keeping the large cartels from just snatching everything that wasn't nailed down. what we have now is the exact opposite, a system which favors those very same cartels and screws the little guy, just look at the "standard record contract" which is just a damned joke its pathetic to see how badly things have been tilted towards the cartels.
So what we need is NOT to abolish it but reform it, starting with putting copyright terms back to the original 25 years so that the cartels can't lock down our history behind paywalls, remove the ability to sell your copyrights, if the cartels want to lease the rights that is fine but what has happened is the record contracts now force the artist to give away their songs just to be heard so the ability to take someone's copyrights away should be removed, and once the copyright term is up the formerly copyrighted work shall be put in a large repository on the web free for all to use to enjoy and create more art.
If we were to do this frankly copyrights wouldn't be something everybody bitched about anymore, why you'd have all the great music of the first 80 years of the twentieth century to use in new projects, the artists wouldn't be forced to sign everything away, and the cartels wouldn't have our entire recorded history locked behind paywalls, it would be great.
Sadly our system is so corrupted and ruined by big money that I truly believe that only a total collapse will bring about any chance for change so until then I say until We, The People get a seat at the negotiating table you should treat copyright laws as what they are, laws bought with bribes and therefor null and void. Does ANYBODY believe the people would have voted for 150+ year copyrights? Or that copyrights would last nearly a century after the creator of the work has died? Of course not but the people didn't get a say, the cartels, especially Disney, just broke out their checkbook and bribed their way into having the laws changed. This is why they should be ignored, as unjust laws that came to be through illegal acts are crimes and should be treated as such.