I didn't elide anything, I addressed it directly. Private ownership directly leads to differential and competitive property development, which leads to more livable surface area via multiple stories, at different price levels. Not everyone needs to live directly on dirt--pretty much only farmers do.
Because when "no one" owns something, everyone owns it. Now THAT is a bludgeoning assertion. What you're trying to do is take existence and transform that into a universal right of use--which ironically is the worst form of the theft you decry. If you dig a well while I just sit there, you're using more atmosphere than I am. Does that give me more right to the well water in compensation? If you grow a crop and I do not, will I be given the bulk of the crop to compensate for your unequal use of sunlight, water, and dirt?
Do you see how this creates backward incentives? The harder you work to better yourself, the deeper you go into debt to me for your unequal consumption of group resources.
A business that is unprepared to be without one employee for one day is not a resilient business. Not all absences from the office are "intended" or provide any warning at all. Bosses who are uncomfortable with an employee being unreachable for one day should be encouraged to think "disaster preparedness" and consider it a dry run in a controlled situation.
I own an iBook G4, which I bought new in 2003. I also have an HP Compaq nc6220 laptop that was issued to me by my employer in 2006.
The iBook has travelled with me to Alaska, Palau, and on numerous shorter trips around the U.S. It's had a glass of white wine spilled on the keyboard. Its battery is almost totally dead, but other than that it still works great for Web, office, and web design work. The $1200 or so I spent on it is still providing value.
The HP has travelled with me pretty much between home and office, and a few short trips. Today the case is obviously more flexible than it was new, and when it flexes I get the infamous BSOD. As a result I can only use it on a flat table top. On top of that it has developed a nagging driver problem that makes sleep and lower-power modes problematic. It cost my employer around $2000 and is in the process of being replaced now.
When my iBook goes I will almost certainly get another Apple.
In industries that are heavily unionized, it is often impossible to negotiate your own contract for work, because employers will refuse to hire people outside the union. Why would an employer do that? Because if they do hire outside the union, their union workers will work slow, strike, or organize "corporate campaigns" (look them up) against them. You probably don't know about this stuff because only about 7% of the workforce is in a union these days. The entertainment industry is one of the few that is still heavily unionized.
I've heard it several times before and it's always seemed to have some obvious failings to me.
Logical If property rights are stipulated to not exist, then how can they be based on theft? The slogan "property rights are theft" has always struck me as as begging the question. If no one owns something, how can it be stealing to take it?
There was a time before property rights True, just as all life today has its roots in death. Nothing today has existed before exactly as it does now. In cultures and religions this common conundrum is the basis for origin myths. Why should property rights be held to a more perfectly static standard?
Land cannot be created Farmable land--true. Livable land--not true. Any time a building with more than one story is built, the livable "land" is increased. For example the Sears Tower has somewhere on the order of 50 times the livable surface that its footprint covers. That is clearly a benefit to everyone since it increases a needed resource, which is clearly reflected in the real estate value. The acres of land under the Sears Tower are many multiples less valuable by themselves than the aggregate of all the real estate values throughout the tower.
Property rights lead to violence and inequality Property rights are generally non-existent among animals, yet there is plenty of violence and inequality. In this case I think people mistake correlation for causation.
Property rights are unfair Fairness is at least as fantastic a human invention as property rights. In nature red in tooth and claw, nothing is owed to anyone. The best we can get is opportunity. A plant whose seed lands in fertile soil has only an opportunity to grow, be healthy, and reproduce--not a right. Within structured human societies, private ownership provides the best opportunity for an individual.
Orion was all about paying a big price to lift a big mass. But why would we need to lift a big mass? There is no shortage of mass or raw materials in the solar system. What we need to lift are expertise and technology. But we need to do small-scale R&D to develop both, and that is our mission now. That is where we are in our development.
We should think of the future of manned spaceflight more like manned von Neumann probes than building airlines or cruise ships. Those will come much later. Europe did not bring their raw materials and mass to the Americas. They brought only enough to get them there, and did the rest by applying their expertise and technology to the local raw materials. It was only much later that reliable, high-mass, high-speed transportation was possible between the continents.
Granted we are speaking of much higher orders of both when we're talking about living on the moon or Mars. But the realities of the development cycle still apply. In fact--screw the Europe analogy. We are more like early Asians, developing the first ocean-going dugout canoes as they explored Micronesia.
Wall Street analysts understand business but generally do not understand long-term technology trends. That is because they are not paid to. They are paid to make predictions with, at most a 1 to 2 year horizon. Most spend their time looking no more than 1 to 2 quarters ahead. Given a choice between a small gain now vs. a large potential gain later, they will take the short, small win every time.
The grandparent post has it right--Yahoo has a huge footprint, loyal customers, and a continuously decreasing cost-to-capability ratio. I would not bet against them. They may not overtake Google as #1, but there is no reason they cannot be very, very profitable as #2. It's not a race, it's business, and you don't have to be the biggest to be very successful.
They do not hand code individual article pages, just the templates for their CMS. If it's a good CMS it tracks the links within the site and prevents breakage during changes.
If a content Website has a large degree of depth and complexity, there's no excuse for hand coding the whole thing. There are plenty of free CMS's available that work pretty well.
I have. I talked to a lot of them when I was getting my geology degree in college. You're right that the climate is constantly changing. You're wrong if you think that implies that humans cannot change the climate.
You're also wrong if you think that recorded human history is the only record of past climate that we can reference. There are numerous natural records of past climate that go back much further into the past. And by the way, the best estimate for an average global surface temp is actually about 14 degrees C, not 0. I have no idea where the grandparent got that number. Maybe they mistook temp anamoly for absolute temp.
Finally, it may surprise you to learn that many researchers of past and current climate do in fact hold geology degrees.
No school teaches a biology class or unit called "Darwinism." No scientist identifies themselves as a "Darwinist." You cannot get a degree in Darwinism or publish a paper on Darwinism or read The Journal of Darwinism.
It is a language construction by those who seek to promote their own ideology, typically a fundamentalist religious ideology. They give it a religion-like name so that they can promote the same arguments against it that are promoted against religions. It's the mirror to the ID strategy, which gives the religious doctrine of creationism a veneer of scientific language so that it can be promoted with scientific-sounding arguments. In either case they seek to twist the language to obscure real differences.
You're right that a doctor does not need to be an expert in biological taxonomy to treat the flu. But where you are wrong is in thinking that these are unrelated fields of study. When in fact, both are based on the exact same theory--the modern theory of genetic evolution. This is one of its most powerful proofs actually: the same theory can help improve understanding of both speciation AND the treatment of disease.
As example, scientists once thought the planets moved in perfectly-circular orbits, but when observations showed that was not true, these same scientists refused to believe the data. It took several years (and the death of the stubborn scientists) for a new generation to propose ellipitical orbits. The refusal to accept new data is called "protecting your paradigm" aka your belief system, even in the face of facts that challenge it. How do you know that this is such a good example? Because the system worked--the correct theory DID win out, despite the human failings.
Any example of how scientists "had it wrong" at one point in history implicitly provides support for the power of science to get things right. By citing such examples you are attempting to illustrate the failings of science by appealing to more accurate scientific knowledge--a logical contradiction. If science fails so easily, how has it produced the successes that illustrates the failure?
The power of science is not that scientists are individually superior humans. They are obviously subject to the same failings as anyone else. The power of science is that the system of group organization compensates and corrects over time for the failings of the individuals. Thus today we know that orbits are elliptical.
taking drugs for enhancement is actually self-defeating, psychologically and philosophically. you can cut at the issue with two simple questions: how much of what you do is you? how much of it is the drug? There's a third cut in mental issues, which is how much of who you are is your mind, and how much is your body?
I'll give concrete example. I love to fly on airplanes, and I love to camp in the backcountry. Mentally, sitting here at my computer, I get a little surge of joy as I think about them.
But about a year ago I started having panic attacks on airplanes and when sleeping in the backcountry. They come on with seemingly no trigger and I have no idea how to stop them or why they happen. As far as I'm concerned--that is, in my conscious mind--they are alien, unexpected, and unwelcome. They are not part of "me", they are something nasty that happens to "me."
I felt the way you do about drugs and just suffered through a few attacks (if you've never had one--they suck, it's absolute terror and fight/flight for about 20 minutes). Finally I went to a doctor, who prescribed a very low dose of a lorazepam. I take one before I fly, or before I bed down in the tent at night. It works great.
You might consider it rationalization, but my perspective is that somehow my body has failed my mind, and the drug simply patches the problem. My view of myself, my desires and what I enjoy has not changed, it's just that something has gone slightly wrong in the wiring, and it needs a slight fix sometimes.
I intentionally drove my car to work. Did I commit automobile abuse? Maybe if you drove down the sidewalk instead of down the road. Drug abuse is the use of drugs outside of their intended/approved profiles. Driving your car to work while following all traffic laws is the exact analogy of taking prescription medication exactly according to the prescription--neither can be considered abuse.
If I take a prescribed pain pill, I'm using a drug. If I take the exact same drug for the exact same condition but I purchased it from an illegal source, it's drug abuse. This is only true if you are outside the care of a licensed physician and outside the profile of the drug. For instance if you are recovering from a broken back and have a prescription for Vicodin for the pain, it is not abuse even if your uncle in Mexico ships the Vicodin to you. However if you continue to purchase and use the Vicodin after your recovery is complete, you would be abusing it.
The point is that, generally speaking, we've allowed legislatures to define what is use and what is abuse, and that we attach moral judgments to those terms. There is no legitimate moral or rational justification for the dividing lines that are drawn, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to mindlessly follow the legislatures judgments on what constitutes use and what constitutes abuse. With a few famous exceptions, legislatures stay out of defining specific instances of drug abuse. Instead they empower regulatory agencies to approve drugs for certain profiles (for safety reasons), with penalties for violating the profiles. This is a subtle distinction I know, but it is there. Congress does not tell the nation how long a patient can may take Vicodin. But the FDA has only approved it for certain uses under the care of a licensed physician.
Obviously this does not cover the famous exceptions like LSD, heroin, pot, etc. But that's not what this story is about--the story is about the use of drugs outside their profiles or outside the care of a doctor. Ritalin is not approved as a stimulant or to increase concentration. It is approved only as a drug to control medically-based hyperactivity. Using it outside this profile does constitute "abuse" (as defined with respect to drugs not kids).
The most famous self-fulfilling prophecy in the United States is that our system is run by corruption and lobbyists, and that everyday citizens are cut out. The reason it is a self-fulfilling prophecy is because people lean on this meme as crutch every time they are confronted about why they don't try to change things. "Why bother? The system is rigged," they say, and then carry on doing the same thing they were.
But it's all a ruse. Citizens can easily impact their government, it's just that most don't take the time to bother. Voting is important but if you want to have an impact you have to work between the elections too. A member of the House of Representatives will receive hundreds of thousands of votes from citizens, but only a few thousand phone calls or visits between elections. If you can call them, or write to them, or get in to see them, you can have an impact. Especially if you can show that many voters feel the same way you do.
And if you don't want to go it alone, there are tens of thousands of chambers of commerce, associations, nonprofits, unions, advocacy groups, political action committees etc, ready and waiting for you to plug into and get involved. ExxonMobil has lobbyists, but so do the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club (and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and NORML, since we're on the subject).
There are numerous examples of citizen lobbying carrying the day. ANWR still has not been drilled for oil despite massive effort and spending by the oil lobby. And on the other side, citizen action has killed a number of immigration reform bills that were strongly supported by corporate lobbies. Were you part of either of those? What about the issues you care about most?
An alternative scenario -- those other people uploaded their contact lists, and your e-mail was in there. When you signed up, LinkedIn ran a global search for your address and then presented the results to you as potential contacts.
Very few modern scientific theories are invalidated totally by any one data point. For instance general relativity has known contradicting data points, but is still considered a viable and good theory because it describes, in a neat and internally consistent way, the vast majority of observed phenomena within its domain. Small inconsistencies often either reflect a needed refinement, or a limit on the level of precision achievable in the measurement or the prediction. Their occurrence tends to increase with the complexity of the system being studied.
Occassionally they point the way to "paradigm shifts," but that is pretty rare. I'd be very surprised if slight differences in sea level rise result in the wholesale abandonment of a very robust and deeply studied area of science.
The only digital cameras using Foveon right now are Sigma and Polaroid, which are substantially less expensive than the top bodies from the likes of Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Leica, etc.--all of which use Bayer arrays in front of single-depth, color-blind CCD or CMOS sensors.
So, even if one were to concede all your points, these aren't really 1920x1280x24 displays are they then. Because that 1920x1280 resolution has to get shortchanged for the dithering. So you can say that Apple lied about the resolution instead of the color if you like, but it's awful pedantic. 1920x1280 is a pixel dimension, not a resolution measurement, and dithering does not change it. These Apple monitors might indeed have lower resolution, but that would have to shown through direct measurement--resolution depends on more than just how many pixels there are. Kind of ironic to raise this issue and Foveon in the same post, actually.
The article says:
While application designers are free to do almost anything they like, they can't create background tasks: software either runs on the screen or it doesn't run at all. The Slashdot post says:
ZDNet UK claims Apple is leaving itself vulnerable to the competition and to a loss of lustre by blocking background tasks on the device. As many others in this thread have pointed out, these are factually inaccurate statements. The SDK allows background processes but the guidelines discourage them. I do not think pointing out inaccuracies qualifies me for fanboy status.
In truth, such stories are written equally about any other company and corporation, by people who don't really give a fuck about whether that company even lives or dies. This is not really true. Apple gets press way out of proportion to its size in the marketplace. The press write about things that drive sales and ratings, and stories about Apple seem to drive both. Again--this is pretty well known and I don't think it makes me a fanboy to point it out.
Briefly, if you will, the few people who do hate Apple, don't hate it for its perfection, they hate for the unrelenting annoyance that Apple's hype and Apple's fanboys can be. I hear this a lot, and I've always thought it's a pretty dumb set of criteria by which to judge a product. The color of the box would even make more sense to me--at least that is a property of the product itself. I mean--I see assholes using cell phones all the time, and yet I continue to own one and enjoy what it does for me.
Technically superior, but losing in the consumer marketplace to a cheaper standard that has better market penetration. While at the same time, video pros continue to use and rely on it (and will for many years).
It's all fine to object to the Bush administration, but I'm talking about individuals. You're an American--are you rude to foreigners if they approach you for help? How many of your friends and family are? The question is not about politics, although I appreciate your point of view on that. The issue is interpersonal friendliness. I know a lot of people I disagree with on politics and we get along very well. A person can think the Iraq invasion was a great idea, and yet be friendly and helpful to someone they meet on the street who does not speak English well. Again--I know some.
You don't know what was important until much later. In 1908 the first airplane had flown, but who saw the potential for what we have today? It was a curiosity to most people. Same goes for computers in 1958. What, today, will we look back at and see the seeds of greatness? I'd vote for nanotechnology, robotics, and genetics at a minimum.
What third-party things are prevented from interoperating with Apple products? Their OS is now a certified Unix and works natively with a huge variety of file formats both standard and proprietary. Their hardware ports are all standard and you can plug almost anything into them and have it work. Heck they even provide a utility to make it easy to dual-boot an Apple machine with Windows.
Apple has definitely had its problems with NIH syndrome, but I think a rational analysis shows that they are actually much better about that stuff now than they used to be.
I'm calling BS. I live in DC, where we have millions of foreign tourists come through every year. Store employees, transporation workers, even people on the street typically as friendly and helpful as they can be. While the U.S. may not have the most popular government right now, as a people we are well-known for our friendliness and openness.
Most Americans are not powerful at all--they are regular folks who try their best. If you disagree with U.S. foreign policy, fine. So do many Americans. But it's not fair to extend that perception to individual Americans. The U.S. has a long-standing reputation as a great tourism destination--the recent tarnish is a reflection of international government policies, not personal nastiness.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see how this creates backward incentives? The harder you work to better yourself, the deeper you go into debt to me for your unequal consumption of group resources.
A business that is unprepared to be without one employee for one day is not a resilient business. Not all absences from the office are "intended" or provide any warning at all. Bosses who are uncomfortable with an employee being unreachable for one day should be encouraged to think "disaster preparedness" and consider it a dry run in a controlled situation.
I own an iBook G4, which I bought new in 2003. I also have an HP Compaq nc6220 laptop that was issued to me by my employer in 2006.
The iBook has travelled with me to Alaska, Palau, and on numerous shorter trips around the U.S. It's had a glass of white wine spilled on the keyboard. Its battery is almost totally dead, but other than that it still works great for Web, office, and web design work. The $1200 or so I spent on it is still providing value.
The HP has travelled with me pretty much between home and office, and a few short trips. Today the case is obviously more flexible than it was new, and when it flexes I get the infamous BSOD. As a result I can only use it on a flat table top. On top of that it has developed a nagging driver problem that makes sleep and lower-power modes problematic. It cost my employer around $2000 and is in the process of being replaced now.
When my iBook goes I will almost certainly get another Apple.
In industries that are heavily unionized, it is often impossible to negotiate your own contract for work, because employers will refuse to hire people outside the union. Why would an employer do that? Because if they do hire outside the union, their union workers will work slow, strike, or organize "corporate campaigns" (look them up) against them. You probably don't know about this stuff because only about 7% of the workforce is in a union these days. The entertainment industry is one of the few that is still heavily unionized.
I've heard it several times before and it's always seemed to have some obvious failings to me.
Logical
If property rights are stipulated to not exist, then how can they be based on theft? The slogan "property rights are theft" has always struck me as as begging the question. If no one owns something, how can it be stealing to take it?
There was a time before property rights
True, just as all life today has its roots in death. Nothing today has existed before exactly as it does now. In cultures and religions this common conundrum is the basis for origin myths. Why should property rights be held to a more perfectly static standard?
Land cannot be created
Farmable land--true. Livable land--not true. Any time a building with more than one story is built, the livable "land" is increased. For example the Sears Tower has somewhere on the order of 50 times the livable surface that its footprint covers. That is clearly a benefit to everyone since it increases a needed resource, which is clearly reflected in the real estate value. The acres of land under the Sears Tower are many multiples less valuable by themselves than the aggregate of all the real estate values throughout the tower.
Property rights lead to violence and inequality
Property rights are generally non-existent among animals, yet there is plenty of violence and inequality. In this case I think people mistake correlation for causation.
Property rights are unfair
Fairness is at least as fantastic a human invention as property rights. In nature red in tooth and claw, nothing is owed to anyone. The best we can get is opportunity. A plant whose seed lands in fertile soil has only an opportunity to grow, be healthy, and reproduce--not a right. Within structured human societies, private ownership provides the best opportunity for an individual.
Orion was all about paying a big price to lift a big mass. But why would we need to lift a big mass? There is no shortage of mass or raw materials in the solar system. What we need to lift are expertise and technology. But we need to do small-scale R&D to develop both, and that is our mission now. That is where we are in our development.
We should think of the future of manned spaceflight more like manned von Neumann probes than building airlines or cruise ships. Those will come much later. Europe did not bring their raw materials and mass to the Americas. They brought only enough to get them there, and did the rest by applying their expertise and technology to the local raw materials. It was only much later that reliable, high-mass, high-speed transportation was possible between the continents.
Granted we are speaking of much higher orders of both when we're talking about living on the moon or Mars. But the realities of the development cycle still apply. In fact--screw the Europe analogy. We are more like early Asians, developing the first ocean-going dugout canoes as they explored Micronesia.
Wall Street analysts understand business but generally do not understand long-term technology trends. That is because they are not paid to. They are paid to make predictions with, at most a 1 to 2 year horizon. Most spend their time looking no more than 1 to 2 quarters ahead. Given a choice between a small gain now vs. a large potential gain later, they will take the short, small win every time.
The grandparent post has it right--Yahoo has a huge footprint, loyal customers, and a continuously decreasing cost-to-capability ratio. I would not bet against them. They may not overtake Google as #1, but there is no reason they cannot be very, very profitable as #2. It's not a race, it's business, and you don't have to be the biggest to be very successful.
They do not hand code individual article pages, just the templates for their CMS. If it's a good CMS it tracks the links within the site and prevents breakage during changes.
If a content Website has a large degree of depth and complexity, there's no excuse for hand coding the whole thing. There are plenty of free CMS's available that work pretty well.
And they are discovered, not created.
I don't think they should be patentable either, but I'm not in charge.
I have. I talked to a lot of them when I was getting my geology degree in college. You're right that the climate is constantly changing. You're wrong if you think that implies that humans cannot change the climate.
You're also wrong if you think that recorded human history is the only record of past climate that we can reference. There are numerous natural records of past climate that go back much further into the past. And by the way, the best estimate for an average global surface temp is actually about 14 degrees C, not 0. I have no idea where the grandparent got that number. Maybe they mistook temp anamoly for absolute temp.
Finally, it may surprise you to learn that many researchers of past and current climate do in fact hold geology degrees.
No school teaches a biology class or unit called "Darwinism." No scientist identifies themselves as a "Darwinist." You cannot get a degree in Darwinism or publish a paper on Darwinism or read The Journal of Darwinism.
It is a language construction by those who seek to promote their own ideology, typically a fundamentalist religious ideology. They give it a religion-like name so that they can promote the same arguments against it that are promoted against religions. It's the mirror to the ID strategy, which gives the religious doctrine of creationism a veneer of scientific language so that it can be promoted with scientific-sounding arguments. In either case they seek to twist the language to obscure real differences.
You're right that a doctor does not need to be an expert in biological taxonomy to treat the flu. But where you are wrong is in thinking that these are unrelated fields of study. When in fact, both are based on the exact same theory--the modern theory of genetic evolution. This is one of its most powerful proofs actually: the same theory can help improve understanding of both speciation AND the treatment of disease.
Any example of how scientists "had it wrong" at one point in history implicitly provides support for the power of science to get things right. By citing such examples you are attempting to illustrate the failings of science by appealing to more accurate scientific knowledge--a logical contradiction. If science fails so easily, how has it produced the successes that illustrates the failure?
The power of science is not that scientists are individually superior humans. They are obviously subject to the same failings as anyone else. The power of science is that the system of group organization compensates and corrects over time for the failings of the individuals. Thus today we know that orbits are elliptical.
I'll give concrete example. I love to fly on airplanes, and I love to camp in the backcountry. Mentally, sitting here at my computer, I get a little surge of joy as I think about them.
But about a year ago I started having panic attacks on airplanes and when sleeping in the backcountry. They come on with seemingly no trigger and I have no idea how to stop them or why they happen. As far as I'm concerned--that is, in my conscious mind--they are alien, unexpected, and unwelcome. They are not part of "me", they are something nasty that happens to "me."
I felt the way you do about drugs and just suffered through a few attacks (if you've never had one--they suck, it's absolute terror and fight/flight for about 20 minutes). Finally I went to a doctor, who prescribed a very low dose of a lorazepam. I take one before I fly, or before I bed down in the tent at night. It works great.
You might consider it rationalization, but my perspective is that somehow my body has failed my mind, and the drug simply patches the problem. My view of myself, my desires and what I enjoy has not changed, it's just that something has gone slightly wrong in the wiring, and it needs a slight fix sometimes.
Obviously this does not cover the famous exceptions like LSD, heroin, pot, etc. But that's not what this story is about--the story is about the use of drugs outside their profiles or outside the care of a doctor. Ritalin is not approved as a stimulant or to increase concentration. It is approved only as a drug to control medically-based hyperactivity. Using it outside this profile does constitute "abuse" (as defined with respect to drugs not kids).
The most famous self-fulfilling prophecy in the United States is that our system is run by corruption and lobbyists, and that everyday citizens are cut out. The reason it is a self-fulfilling prophecy is because people lean on this meme as crutch every time they are confronted about why they don't try to change things. "Why bother? The system is rigged," they say, and then carry on doing the same thing they were.
But it's all a ruse. Citizens can easily impact their government, it's just that most don't take the time to bother. Voting is important but if you want to have an impact you have to work between the elections too. A member of the House of Representatives will receive hundreds of thousands of votes from citizens, but only a few thousand phone calls or visits between elections. If you can call them, or write to them, or get in to see them, you can have an impact. Especially if you can show that many voters feel the same way you do.
And if you don't want to go it alone, there are tens of thousands of chambers of commerce, associations, nonprofits, unions, advocacy groups, political action committees etc, ready and waiting for you to plug into and get involved. ExxonMobil has lobbyists, but so do the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club (and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and NORML, since we're on the subject).
There are numerous examples of citizen lobbying carrying the day. ANWR still has not been drilled for oil despite massive effort and spending by the oil lobby. And on the other side, citizen action has killed a number of immigration reform bills that were strongly supported by corporate lobbies. Were you part of either of those? What about the issues you care about most?
An alternative scenario -- those other people uploaded their contact lists, and your e-mail was in there. When you signed up, LinkedIn ran a global search for your address and then presented the results to you as potential contacts.
Very few modern scientific theories are invalidated totally by any one data point. For instance general relativity has known contradicting data points, but is still considered a viable and good theory because it describes, in a neat and internally consistent way, the vast majority of observed phenomena within its domain. Small inconsistencies often either reflect a needed refinement, or a limit on the level of precision achievable in the measurement or the prediction. Their occurrence tends to increase with the complexity of the system being studied.
Occassionally they point the way to "paradigm shifts," but that is pretty rare. I'd be very surprised if slight differences in sea level rise result in the wholesale abandonment of a very robust and deeply studied area of science.
Aptonym
Technically superior, but losing in the consumer marketplace to a cheaper standard that has better market penetration. While at the same time, video pros continue to use and rely on it (and will for many years).
It's all fine to object to the Bush administration, but I'm talking about individuals. You're an American--are you rude to foreigners if they approach you for help? How many of your friends and family are? The question is not about politics, although I appreciate your point of view on that. The issue is interpersonal friendliness. I know a lot of people I disagree with on politics and we get along very well. A person can think the Iraq invasion was a great idea, and yet be friendly and helpful to someone they meet on the street who does not speak English well. Again--I know some.
You don't know what was important until much later. In 1908 the first airplane had flown, but who saw the potential for what we have today? It was a curiosity to most people. Same goes for computers in 1958. What, today, will we look back at and see the seeds of greatness? I'd vote for nanotechnology, robotics, and genetics at a minimum.
What third-party things are prevented from interoperating with Apple products? Their OS is now a certified Unix and works natively with a huge variety of file formats both standard and proprietary. Their hardware ports are all standard and you can plug almost anything into them and have it work. Heck they even provide a utility to make it easy to dual-boot an Apple machine with Windows.
Apple has definitely had its problems with NIH syndrome, but I think a rational analysis shows that they are actually much better about that stuff now than they used to be.
I'm calling BS. I live in DC, where we have millions of foreign tourists come through every year. Store employees, transporation workers, even people on the street typically as friendly and helpful as they can be. While the U.S. may not have the most popular government right now, as a people we are well-known for our friendliness and openness.
Most Americans are not powerful at all--they are regular folks who try their best. If you disagree with U.S. foreign policy, fine. So do many Americans. But it's not fair to extend that perception to individual Americans. The U.S. has a long-standing reputation as a great tourism destination--the recent tarnish is a reflection of international government policies, not personal nastiness.