This, not Wikileaks, is a great example of that. In fact, if Wikileaks supporters are smart they will support throwing this man under the bus because he specifically named people who terrorist groups would have motive to find and murder.
I'm not a big fan of Manning and believe he deserves time in Leavenworth. However, Manning doesn't have a thing on this guy in terms of putting people at risk. I'd rather see Manning walk with an honorable discharge and VA benefits than see this man not do at least 10 years.
The game is rated mature, which means that giving it to a minor is morally analogous to giving them an R-rated movie. As a conservative Christian, I find it more problematic that parents give their kids and teens mature games than the fact that a mature game has a mature option you have to actively seek out. Unlike the MPAA which only grudgingly explains to parents how they arrived at their decision, the ESRB bends over backwards to empower traditional families to really find out which games are appropriate for their kids and teens.
What I still can't get is why EA even bothered with gay male options. 90% of their demographic (heterosexuals) tend to find watching actual gay sex between men to be repulsive (lesbians are a different story). It's a toss up between normal heterosexual men and women who finds watching two dudes going at it more repulsive to actually watch.
I think speak for many ME fans at this point by saying that the space for the gay sex options would have been better spent adding more to the ending...
I'll grant you that all government can be dangerous, but if you look at the federal government as a whole, most of it behaves pretty decently. The CIA and DoD intelligence agencies have virtually no domestic jurisdiction. The military is regulated pretty heavily by the Posse Comitatus Act and prevented from being deployed domestically except in extreme cases of civil breakdown. Even most of the law enforcement agencies (most of them are actually outside DoJ) behave in a fairly hands off way.
The danger with the DoJ is that you brought enforcement on all levels short of the courts themselves into the hands of one department and leader. You have the FBI, our single biggest law enforcement agency, and the two stooges ATF and DEA. Then you have the US Marshals which used to be part of the federal judiciary since their purposes were entirely to support the judiciary (physical security, apprehending fugitives and escorting prisoners to and from the executive branch).
On top of that, you have all of the federal prosecutors and solicitors. So you have one department that provides a "one stop shop" of commanding positions relating to criminal and civil law. Since the FBI is now subordinate to the Attorney General, it can't investigate him. 30 years ago, the head of the FBI would have been able to investigate Eric Holder for Fast and Furious. Today, the FBI works for Holder! Or if you're an Obama lover, the FBI could have investigated Gonzalez for rendition and torture (oops, Obama's still doing those too). The point is, the main agency charged with investigating serious federal crimes outside of the individual inspectors general is now subordinate to a department run by lawyers.
I was talking to a relative who was a federal agent from the mid 70s through the mid 90s and saw the rise of the Department of Justice to the behemoth it is today (including the DoJ take over of the FBI from top down). His perspective comes from being a Treasury special agent and he said that the DoJ has been like this for a few decades now. It's just that ever since they began to rapidly expand, they've gotten a bigger mandate and set of resources to throw their weight around. In general, they've been a total rat's nest of corruption for several decades now in a way that makes most of the other departments look like paragons of virtue.
The fact is that if you look at some of the absolutely wicked shit that comes out of them in terms of things they want to do, it is stuff that leaves you thinking "do these people literally conspire daily against the constitution?" The DoD and CIA had their problems with rendition and torture, but the DoJ takes it to a level that goes well beyond anything that has come to light about what those two actually want to do (rather than are compelled by Congress or the President). The DoJ frequently writes briefs and memos that go the other way around, letting or justifying Congress or the President do wicked shit.
Prior to Sun being bought by Oracle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Java was the safer patent bet. However, now we are about a decade into the conversation and the "safer" platform is the one where there is a major patent battle while Microsoft has never once even bared its fangs at Mono. I think the difference comes down to this...
For Microsoft, C# is just a gateway drug to making Windows apps. Microsoft honestly doesn't give a rat's ass if you are building products with C# or any other aspect of the.NET on Linux platform because.NET is just a means to an end for them. Their goal isn't to make you a C# developer, it's to make you write code that works only on Windows. If you use C# to make a Linux app, you are no different to them than someone who makes a Linux app in C++. Compared to Oracle, it probably gives them a little skip in their step to think that Mono will never enable true Windows development because that dichotomy leans commercial development in their favor without them having to be rat bastards about anything.
The same is not true of Java. Java is a whole damn platform unto itself. When Oracle senses their grip is failing, they have to squeeze harder because the goal is to make "Java apps" not "Java apps for Oracle Solaris/Unbreakable Linux." Therefore they have a lot more incentive to control.
It's pointless to conjecture about how Microsoft would have dealt with Mono had Google used it for Android because Microsoft very well might have let them violate Microsoft's patents to their hearts' content as a way to isolate Oracle a little. If Windows Phone and Android used.NET, not Java, there would be no mobile Java platform worth mentioning. That works 10x better to Microsoft's advantage than the short term victory of hurting Google.
If you think nation states cannot trade, communicate freely and all of that without going to war or having ethnically "diverse" societies, you are sadly mistaken. The reason diversity is a problem is that without common, shared values and culture you have a limited shared social fabric for how to form a government, regulate public and private dealings and host of other things which bind society together.
Shared ethnicity is very important and ethnicity transcends race. It's possible for a black and white man to have the same ethnicity; it's possible to have two blacks and two whites each be of different ethnicities. What matters most is having the mostly ethnically homogenous society you can while not tying ethnicity to race. At least in America, we've done a good job of separating race and ethnicity. You frequently now see whites and blacks treat each other as fellow citizens while both being suspicious of illegal immigrants as they're not from the same larger group as we are.
It would be even easier to just recognize that importing large numbers of foreigners who don't share your country's values, and who have a history of having a minority who advocate making open war on your society, was a huge mistake for the Western nations. You could correct that by revoking visas in the hundreds of thousands and sending them back home. But no, you cannot do that. That would be "hateful" even though it would be an even greater violation of the human dignity of those people, to say nothing of your citizens, to subject them to a police state because you don't want to accept the fact that there is a constant, indefatigable minority who not only cannot integrate but are violently opposed to Western values. When I say "violently" I mean in the sense of willing to actually use real force, not the sort of pissant, isolated incidents associated with native conservative Christians and Jews once in a blue moon.
If the NSA isn't spying on American citizens, then why are they so steadfastly opposed to EFF, EPIC, etc. trying to obtain that information from them in court?
Replace that with:
"If the CIA isn't spying on American citizens, then why are they so steadfastly opposed to EFF, EPIC, etc. trying to obtain the identities of their officers and front organizations?"
"If federal law enforcement isn't running a side criminal organization for profit, they why are they steadfastly opposed to revealing who is in the witness protection program?"
Really, people. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the NSA wouldn't open up to the world under some notion of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" even if they're lilly white on domestic espionage. Maybe it's because... well... no arm of the military (which they are) in their right mind just says "hey world, come take a look at our full operational capabilities and see just how awesome and scary we are!"
Exxon, which is about half as profitable (~8% profit vs Apple's ~17% profit margin), puts out a 2.2% yield.
I'm not a big fan of big oil, but one of the things that really gets me about the hypocrisy is that when people ask what big oil does with all of that profit, the answer is "they pay out fat dividends to their tens of millions of shareholders." Exxon is practically cheap as hell compared to many of its small competitors; 5-10% yields from healthy companies are easy to find.
Is that given their federal track record, why would NYC give them something like this? Their prior performance at the federal level looks like the killing fields of Cambodia done on a bank statement. They're an institutional argument of why cost alone should never be a factor in awarding a contract; bang-for-the-buck instead because the feds have almost without fail gotten exactly what they've paid for from this company.
Wysopal and others blame the difference on a lack of accountability of federal contract developers, who aren't held to security standards and are even paid extra to fix their bugs after creating them.
Ah yes, blame the contractors for everything. Ignore the fact that not that long ago, one of the highest ranking federal IT officers came out and basically confessed that most federal IT projects fail because most of the federal government doesn't even remotely handle requirements gathering properly. That's a nice way of saying they have a lot of money and don't know what they want to do with it, but damned if they're not going to blow it anyway before firmly figuring out what they need.
Google could have become the every man's corporate replacement for systems like Autonomy and Endeca. They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that. Instead, they never really went hard after the enterprise market where they could have not only revolutionized things, but have left themselves fairly independent as a whole business on advertising.
The sad part is that they probably could have beaten Autonomy like a rented mule because Autonomy's documentation is pretty bad and not easily accessible to people who aren't firmly on the Autonomy reservation.
And so, the NSA will have created a phone that the NSA itself could not use.
The NSA doesn't need or even want to spy on its own people. That's what the clearance process is for; to screen out 95%+ of the people who might be internal security threats. The remaining few percent are likely some form of high functioning sociopaths no one can catch until they slip up, and when they do slip up, it'll be the FBI's job to hunt them down as it is. Unlike the NSA, the FBI has legal authority to target American citizens suspected of criminal activity with far more invasive measures courtesy of the good ol' search warrant and related tools.
I'm 28 and haven't seen any sign that my fellow Millennials are any fundamentally better with computers than Generation X or the Boomers. In fact, I've found that my grandmother who is 82 and doesn't even have a computer has more common sense about how she would use one if she bothered to buy one. For example, when I told her of all of the people I knew who got viruses by not updating their OS when automatic updates have been available for at least 10 years, if not about 12-14 (Windows ME?) or by clicking on every link and file attachment they're sent, she asked how stupid could those kids be to be that lazy and trusting. You can make excuses for them like phishing, but the fact is that more often than not, it's just laziness or unwillingness to learn to do any better.
will China open the floodgates and put it out of business
Whenever I've had conversations with libertarians about how free trade would actually work in the real world where governments frequently aggressively protect corporate interests, they always stammer "buh buh the free market will prevail." Really? You mean American companies going up against Chinese state-owned companies or companies with tacit backing from the Chinese central government aren't going to face crushing problems competing against that level of cohesion between state and corporate power? Anyone remember what happen to the Australian mining executives who were imprisoned a while back for having the audacity to negotiate hardball style with their Chinese counterparts under the mistaken premise that it was a meeting of equals?
When this country was at its most economically free, we had high tariffs. That's an indisputable fact that no free trader can deny unless they want to argue that slavery was so heinous that it overshadows all of the economic freedom in all areas of employment, property ownership, business creation, etc. that was enjoyed in the late 18th century and most of the 19th century.
Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said
If the teaching-only position is an option for most of them, then that seems to be a reasonable compromise. The West simply doesn't have the money anymore to throw at professors who are neither prolific researchers nor teachers. There are plenty of students who work very hard for the university who could benefit from having their stipends increased by cannibalizing the salaries of "researchers" who don't really publish much of anything.
I think this quote might hint at who is really being targeted:
“The mood is bloody,” agreed Jake Lynch, Director of the university’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. “The union accurately reflects the frustration of many researchers.”
There are a lot of humanities, liberal arts and social sciences professors who claim to be "researchers" but aren't productive in any sense that the sciences or engineering disciplines would recognize. Based on the friends I had in the sciences and engineering, I can't believe that most of the professors overseeing the researcher graduate students aren't regarded as highly productive by their universities because they put in solid time and effort every year at the very least guiding the researchers doing the grunt work. Admittedly, that's an American experience, but I have a feeling that their College of Arts and Letters, not Science and Engineering, is what is starting to feel the bean counters' medusa-like gaze...
As the Fact Sheet we have provided shows, when students receive more than 12 detentions, they have to pay $140 to attend a “behavior class.” And if they receive more detentions, they have to take two discipline classes, costing a whopping $280.
A $140 fine for 12 detentions? Really? Why is the student not simply suspended after 5 detentions in one year and expelled after 7-8 detentions?
Other great civilizations have done this and it always leads to ruin. The more you debase your currency, the less valuable the actual coins and other forms of currency become, the worse the devaluation gets. The only sane thing here to do is begin discussing plans to fundamentally bolster the foundation of the US dollar, not find ways to make producing it cheaper.
It's not like they're doing the common man any favors. Inflation hits the poor first and hits them hardest. It's a backdoor flat tax.
All Apple had to do to quash their critics is have two licenses: free and premium. Free lets you do whatever you want, provided you only sell it through Apple's store. Premium, which happens to cost $500 or something, lets you take it wherever you want AND entitles you to some sort of limited publicity if you make it on the Apple store.
People are surprised that when you take marginally skilled, semi-officious private sector workers and give them civil service protection behavior that was an instant firable offense becomes something you have to endure with a smile...
You're in favor of putting kids in ready access of tens of thousands of pedophiles since:
1) We know that predators seek places where their prey goes. 2) There have been thousands of cases in the last few years of public school teachers in the US going to jail for having sex with minors. 3) Whatever the cops can find is usually only the tip of the iceberg.
So clearly, since you support ripping kids out of the loving arms of their parents and putting them in public schools, you MUST be in favor of putting them at risk for actual molestation by a pedophile.
This is actually forgivable compared to how the Saudi public is using their internet freedom: tens of thousands have joined a Facebook page calling for a journalist to be executed for dissing Mohammed. At least this is a post-revolution law aimed at trying to restore civil order. Whether done right or not, at least the purpose is justifiable (which means hopefully there can be good faith negotiation on how to make it work).
Consider the fact that there are no mass market ARM-based desktop PCs. It's not like Dell is offering a low-end dual CPU ARM offering and Microsoft is doing their best Montgomery Burns impression at the suggestion that it be given a full desktop. Personally, I am not sure I'd want a Windows 7-like UI on a tablet (not sure I'd want Metro either, but that's beside the point).
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This, not Wikileaks, is a great example of that. In fact, if Wikileaks supporters are smart they will support throwing this man under the bus because he specifically named people who terrorist groups would have motive to find and murder.
I'm not a big fan of Manning and believe he deserves time in Leavenworth. However, Manning doesn't have a thing on this guy in terms of putting people at risk. I'd rather see Manning walk with an honorable discharge and VA benefits than see this man not do at least 10 years.
The game is rated mature, which means that giving it to a minor is morally analogous to giving them an R-rated movie. As a conservative Christian, I find it more problematic that parents give their kids and teens mature games than the fact that a mature game has a mature option you have to actively seek out. Unlike the MPAA which only grudgingly explains to parents how they arrived at their decision, the ESRB bends over backwards to empower traditional families to really find out which games are appropriate for their kids and teens.
What I still can't get is why EA even bothered with gay male options. 90% of their demographic (heterosexuals) tend to find watching actual gay sex between men to be repulsive (lesbians are a different story). It's a toss up between normal heterosexual men and women who finds watching two dudes going at it more repulsive to actually watch.
I think speak for many ME fans at this point by saying that the space for the gay sex options would have been better spent adding more to the ending...
I'll grant you that all government can be dangerous, but if you look at the federal government as a whole, most of it behaves pretty decently. The CIA and DoD intelligence agencies have virtually no domestic jurisdiction. The military is regulated pretty heavily by the Posse Comitatus Act and prevented from being deployed domestically except in extreme cases of civil breakdown. Even most of the law enforcement agencies (most of them are actually outside DoJ) behave in a fairly hands off way.
The danger with the DoJ is that you brought enforcement on all levels short of the courts themselves into the hands of one department and leader. You have the FBI, our single biggest law enforcement agency, and the two stooges ATF and DEA. Then you have the US Marshals which used to be part of the federal judiciary since their purposes were entirely to support the judiciary (physical security, apprehending fugitives and escorting prisoners to and from the executive branch).
On top of that, you have all of the federal prosecutors and solicitors. So you have one department that provides a "one stop shop" of commanding positions relating to criminal and civil law. Since the FBI is now subordinate to the Attorney General, it can't investigate him. 30 years ago, the head of the FBI would have been able to investigate Eric Holder for Fast and Furious. Today, the FBI works for Holder! Or if you're an Obama lover, the FBI could have investigated Gonzalez for rendition and torture (oops, Obama's still doing those too). The point is, the main agency charged with investigating serious federal crimes outside of the individual inspectors general is now subordinate to a department run by lawyers.
I was talking to a relative who was a federal agent from the mid 70s through the mid 90s and saw the rise of the Department of Justice to the behemoth it is today (including the DoJ take over of the FBI from top down). His perspective comes from being a Treasury special agent and he said that the DoJ has been like this for a few decades now. It's just that ever since they began to rapidly expand, they've gotten a bigger mandate and set of resources to throw their weight around. In general, they've been a total rat's nest of corruption for several decades now in a way that makes most of the other departments look like paragons of virtue.
The fact is that if you look at some of the absolutely wicked shit that comes out of them in terms of things they want to do, it is stuff that leaves you thinking "do these people literally conspire daily against the constitution?" The DoD and CIA had their problems with rendition and torture, but the DoJ takes it to a level that goes well beyond anything that has come to light about what those two actually want to do (rather than are compelled by Congress or the President). The DoJ frequently writes briefs and memos that go the other way around, letting or justifying Congress or the President do wicked shit.
Prior to Sun being bought by Oracle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Java was the safer patent bet. However, now we are about a decade into the conversation and the "safer" platform is the one where there is a major patent battle while Microsoft has never once even bared its fangs at Mono. I think the difference comes down to this...
For Microsoft, C# is just a gateway drug to making Windows apps. Microsoft honestly doesn't give a rat's ass if you are building products with C# or any other aspect of the .NET on Linux platform because .NET is just a means to an end for them. Their goal isn't to make you a C# developer, it's to make you write code that works only on Windows. If you use C# to make a Linux app, you are no different to them than someone who makes a Linux app in C++. Compared to Oracle, it probably gives them a little skip in their step to think that Mono will never enable true Windows development because that dichotomy leans commercial development in their favor without them having to be rat bastards about anything.
The same is not true of Java. Java is a whole damn platform unto itself. When Oracle senses their grip is failing, they have to squeeze harder because the goal is to make "Java apps" not "Java apps for Oracle Solaris/Unbreakable Linux." Therefore they have a lot more incentive to control.
It's pointless to conjecture about how Microsoft would have dealt with Mono had Google used it for Android because Microsoft very well might have let them violate Microsoft's patents to their hearts' content as a way to isolate Oracle a little. If Windows Phone and Android used .NET, not Java, there would be no mobile Java platform worth mentioning. That works 10x better to Microsoft's advantage than the short term victory of hurting Google.
If you think nation states cannot trade, communicate freely and all of that without going to war or having ethnically "diverse" societies, you are sadly mistaken. The reason diversity is a problem is that without common, shared values and culture you have a limited shared social fabric for how to form a government, regulate public and private dealings and host of other things which bind society together.
Shared ethnicity is very important and ethnicity transcends race. It's possible for a black and white man to have the same ethnicity; it's possible to have two blacks and two whites each be of different ethnicities. What matters most is having the mostly ethnically homogenous society you can while not tying ethnicity to race. At least in America, we've done a good job of separating race and ethnicity. You frequently now see whites and blacks treat each other as fellow citizens while both being suspicious of illegal immigrants as they're not from the same larger group as we are.
It would be even easier to just recognize that importing large numbers of foreigners who don't share your country's values, and who have a history of having a minority who advocate making open war on your society, was a huge mistake for the Western nations. You could correct that by revoking visas in the hundreds of thousands and sending them back home. But no, you cannot do that. That would be "hateful" even though it would be an even greater violation of the human dignity of those people, to say nothing of your citizens, to subject them to a police state because you don't want to accept the fact that there is a constant, indefatigable minority who not only cannot integrate but are violently opposed to Western values. When I say "violently" I mean in the sense of willing to actually use real force, not the sort of pissant, isolated incidents associated with native conservative Christians and Jews once in a blue moon.
Replace that with:
"If the CIA isn't spying on American citizens, then why are they so steadfastly opposed to EFF, EPIC, etc. trying to obtain the identities of their officers and front organizations?"
"If federal law enforcement isn't running a side criminal organization for profit, they why are they steadfastly opposed to revealing who is in the witness protection program?"
Really, people. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the NSA wouldn't open up to the world under some notion of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" even if they're lilly white on domestic espionage. Maybe it's because... well... no arm of the military (which they are) in their right mind just says "hey world, come take a look at our full operational capabilities and see just how awesome and scary we are!"
If you disconnect someone who is factually innocent, give them a right to sue for defamation where intent is irrelevant.
It's still only about a 0.5% return.
Exxon, which is about half as profitable (~8% profit vs Apple's ~17% profit margin), puts out a 2.2% yield.
I'm not a big fan of big oil, but one of the things that really gets me about the hypocrisy is that when people ask what big oil does with all of that profit, the answer is "they pay out fat dividends to their tens of millions of shareholders." Exxon is practically cheap as hell compared to many of its small competitors; 5-10% yields from healthy companies are easy to find.
Is that given their federal track record, why would NYC give them something like this? Their prior performance at the federal level looks like the killing fields of Cambodia done on a bank statement. They're an institutional argument of why cost alone should never be a factor in awarding a contract; bang-for-the-buck instead because the feds have almost without fail gotten exactly what they've paid for from this company.
Ah yes, blame the contractors for everything. Ignore the fact that not that long ago, one of the highest ranking federal IT officers came out and basically confessed that most federal IT projects fail because most of the federal government doesn't even remotely handle requirements gathering properly. That's a nice way of saying they have a lot of money and don't know what they want to do with it, but damned if they're not going to blow it anyway before firmly figuring out what they need.
Google could have become the every man's corporate replacement for systems like Autonomy and Endeca. They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that. Instead, they never really went hard after the enterprise market where they could have not only revolutionized things, but have left themselves fairly independent as a whole business on advertising.
The sad part is that they probably could have beaten Autonomy like a rented mule because Autonomy's documentation is pretty bad and not easily accessible to people who aren't firmly on the Autonomy reservation.
In the eyes of evil people, even the most innocent actions can be twisted into something nefarious or vile.
The NSA doesn't need or even want to spy on its own people. That's what the clearance process is for; to screen out 95%+ of the people who might be internal security threats. The remaining few percent are likely some form of high functioning sociopaths no one can catch until they slip up, and when they do slip up, it'll be the FBI's job to hunt them down as it is. Unlike the NSA, the FBI has legal authority to target American citizens suspected of criminal activity with far more invasive measures courtesy of the good ol' search warrant and related tools.
I'm 28 and haven't seen any sign that my fellow Millennials are any fundamentally better with computers than Generation X or the Boomers. In fact, I've found that my grandmother who is 82 and doesn't even have a computer has more common sense about how she would use one if she bothered to buy one. For example, when I told her of all of the people I knew who got viruses by not updating their OS when automatic updates have been available for at least 10 years, if not about 12-14 (Windows ME?) or by clicking on every link and file attachment they're sent, she asked how stupid could those kids be to be that lazy and trusting. You can make excuses for them like phishing, but the fact is that more often than not, it's just laziness or unwillingness to learn to do any better.
Whenever I've had conversations with libertarians about how free trade would actually work in the real world where governments frequently aggressively protect corporate interests, they always stammer "buh buh the free market will prevail." Really? You mean American companies going up against Chinese state-owned companies or companies with tacit backing from the Chinese central government aren't going to face crushing problems competing against that level of cohesion between state and corporate power? Anyone remember what happen to the Australian mining executives who were imprisoned a while back for having the audacity to negotiate hardball style with their Chinese counterparts under the mistaken premise that it was a meeting of equals?
When this country was at its most economically free, we had high tariffs. That's an indisputable fact that no free trader can deny unless they want to argue that slavery was so heinous that it overshadows all of the economic freedom in all areas of employment, property ownership, business creation, etc. that was enjoyed in the late 18th century and most of the 19th century.
If the teaching-only position is an option for most of them, then that seems to be a reasonable compromise. The West simply doesn't have the money anymore to throw at professors who are neither prolific researchers nor teachers. There are plenty of students who work very hard for the university who could benefit from having their stipends increased by cannibalizing the salaries of "researchers" who don't really publish much of anything.
I think this quote might hint at who is really being targeted:
There are a lot of humanities, liberal arts and social sciences professors who claim to be "researchers" but aren't productive in any sense that the sciences or engineering disciplines would recognize. Based on the friends I had in the sciences and engineering, I can't believe that most of the professors overseeing the researcher graduate students aren't regarded as highly productive by their universities because they put in solid time and effort every year at the very least guiding the researchers doing the grunt work. Admittedly, that's an American experience, but I have a feeling that their College of Arts and Letters, not Science and Engineering, is what is starting to feel the bean counters' medusa-like gaze...
A $140 fine for 12 detentions? Really? Why is the student not simply suspended after 5 detentions in one year and expelled after 7-8 detentions?
Other great civilizations have done this and it always leads to ruin. The more you debase your currency, the less valuable the actual coins and other forms of currency become, the worse the devaluation gets. The only sane thing here to do is begin discussing plans to fundamentally bolster the foundation of the US dollar, not find ways to make producing it cheaper.
It's not like they're doing the common man any favors. Inflation hits the poor first and hits them hardest. It's a backdoor flat tax.
All Apple had to do to quash their critics is have two licenses: free and premium. Free lets you do whatever you want, provided you only sell it through Apple's store. Premium, which happens to cost $500 or something, lets you take it wherever you want AND entitles you to some sort of limited publicity if you make it on the Apple store.
People are surprised that when you take marginally skilled, semi-officious private sector workers and give them civil service protection behavior that was an instant firable offense becomes something you have to endure with a smile...
You're in favor of putting kids in ready access of tens of thousands of pedophiles since:
1) We know that predators seek places where their prey goes.
2) There have been thousands of cases in the last few years of public school teachers in the US going to jail for having sex with minors.
3) Whatever the cops can find is usually only the tip of the iceberg.
So clearly, since you support ripping kids out of the loving arms of their parents and putting them in public schools, you MUST be in favor of putting them at risk for actual molestation by a pedophile.
This is actually forgivable compared to how the Saudi public is using their internet freedom: tens of thousands have joined a Facebook page calling for a journalist to be executed for dissing Mohammed. At least this is a post-revolution law aimed at trying to restore civil order. Whether done right or not, at least the purpose is justifiable (which means hopefully there can be good faith negotiation on how to make it work).
Consider the fact that there are no mass market ARM-based desktop PCs. It's not like Dell is offering a low-end dual CPU ARM offering and Microsoft is doing their best Montgomery Burns impression at the suggestion that it be given a full desktop. Personally, I am not sure I'd want a Windows 7-like UI on a tablet (not sure I'd want Metro either, but that's beside the point).