>I bought my first firearm 15 years ago solely because it was a right I considered as important as voting and free speech, and I wanted to exercise that right. (Yes, I know this is mostly an American sentiment.)
The idea behind that right had to do with the ability of the people to overthrow an oppressive government, not with the ability to have guns per se, e.g as a gun collector or to protect your house from burglars.
And, as we know, the utility of guns against an oppresive government today is zero.
>In the legal sense, the third party doctrine is as inherent to the 4th amendment as anything can be--it's the Supreme Court's binding interpretation of the contours of the phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Or, to put it better:
>the Supreme Court's binding interpretation of the contours of the phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy", in which the Supreme Court bended over to big goverment and took the most BS route of interpretation it could.
>The singular man acting as CEO did all this, and more! He is smarter than everyone else ever.
Doesn't matter is he was the smartest or not, all those happened under HIS watch. The same holds true for every other CEO.
And, as a CEO, he did "success" 4 times at 3 different companies: at Apple 1977, at NeXT (which he sold to Apple for a nice sum and their OS is still going strong), at Pixar and at Apple 1997-2010.
>Or he just used smart and predatory business practices
Predatory? As if Apple was MS in the nineties with 98% PC share and a de-facto monopoly?
You don't get to use "predatory" when you're at 2% of the PC market, near bankrupt and with competitors asking you to close the company and give back the stock money.
Not even when you are at 10% of the market for that matter. With 2-3 established competitors in each segment you compete, only the quality of your offerings can be your leverage.
As for "smart", yes, "he just used smart", as you condescendingly put it. If only the competitors "just used smart" themselves...
>and somehow was the only major player to realize eyecandy will win over configuration for everyone that wants just a "tv" into the internet
What won for OS X, iOS was "eye candy"? You don't get this UX thing at all, do you?
If it was mere "eye candy" that mattered, we would be rocking Enlightenment 16 themes designed by Kai Krause on our Alienware laptops...
The problem with racism is not that it targets people of color. It's that it targets them in order to treat them bad. The KKK wouldn't be any better if they targeted people blindly. So, I take offense with your behavior here: being rude to everybody and anybody is just as bad as being racist in a tweet.
The arguments put forth in the parent comments seem perfectly valid. The sample is in the region of statistical noise, and as such gives very little information about the matter.
Also, I believe that Twitter as a sampling space is flawed. E.g places like Mississippi and Alabama might have far more rampant racism than California, but be underrepresented in the category of "people with tweeter accounts" because of poverty rates.
Is this supposed to mean that the Chinese are too tame and subservient?
They already had a huge communist revolution -- and two more revolutions in the last 120 years (the Boxer and the Hsin-hai Revolution). Even the last 2-3 decades, they had massive strikes and struggles, and the Tien-An Men square thing.
>There is no place for humor or overly subjective terms like "evil" in a software license or other legal document, and the problem with Douglas Crockford's license is that he fails to understand that.
No, the problem is that the other guys WANT to use Douglas Crockford's code.
It's they who are needy and demanding, not Douglas, who doesn't have to "understand" anything.
People that "stopped reading" after some point, but still went on to rant about an article, rarely provide any useful insight.
Case in point.
Oh, and "those two things" are not unrelated. His argument is that Firefox never drove UI innovation, and almost all the good things we now take for granted were copied from other browsers (Opera and Chrome). Left to itself, Firefox had (and would continue to have) a subpar UI.
Your point is that being a late adopter of UI goodness doesn't preclude you having a good UI. But "good UI" is relative. If you are a late adopter your UI is always worse than the competition.
>Human translators are so expensive today that they are only used in situations where the translation has to be correct -- diplomacy, courtrooms, books, etc.
Professional translators and trained interpreters yes.
But thousands of people work solely (or assume the role periodically) as interpreters and translators for many more situations, mainly revolving around business.
Now, signing a business deal will still involve translator and a trained lawyer, but those other everyday cases, including showing a western partner around the Chinese offices, could switch to machine translation.
>How am I supposed to know which is best? Do I need a degree in Keynesian economics or can I just listen to a few talking heads on the local news?
You're not supposed to vote for what is "best".
You are supposed to vote for what you WANT to happen.
It could be the worst thing for the country but very good for you. That's OK too, if a tad selfish.
Now, if you don't know what you want or what is good for you, you still get to decide. Anything major that will be legislated, like taxes, WILL affect you. So, what would you do if you don't know which option is the best? What you do in every similar situation in life:
a) User your direct knowledge.
b) Use your experience.
c) Try to learn for other people that know that stuff.
d) Discuss it with others in general.
e) Read up on the issue.
d) When everything fails, just your gut.
You'll have to suffer any consequences anyway.
And it's not like you can just have people with "degrees" and experts to make your opinion, or have the only right to vote on an issue.
1) For one, because those people also have biases, personal interests and hidden agendas. And even the non outright lying ones can be partisan, deluded, dogmatic, ideological or simply idiots with rich dads that bought them a good education.
2) Second, YOU'LL suffer from the consequences of any law, so it's YOUR decision to make, not theirs.
Sure, raw benchmark speed doesn't matter for code dealing with external latency sources (databases and similar IO bound cases), but it's very nice for CPU intensive code. TL;DR: V8 and Dart are blazingly fast.
Now, maybe Dart doesn't have much future in the browser space without being adopted by the major vendors, but, wouldn't it be nice if Dart could got some adoption like Go did in the scripting/server area. It would make a nice and modern dynamic language to balance something like Go that plays at the statically typed side.
Of course, getting someone like Lars Bak to make a screaming fast Ruby or Python VM would be even better. He could improve on one of the next-gen implementations of those languages, like Rubinious or PyPy.
Maybe there's hope a crowd-funding project to pay the man? Because, as it seems, volunteer effort can only get you that far.
What's disgusting is that the abuse continues to this very day.
First they were decimated, then they were forced into "reformation camps" to break their spirit, and then casino licenses and the like were thrown to them as a bone (and to corrupt and silence the more tempted or gullible with the easy money).
The government and various interested parties even try to take some of their supposedly "sovereign" reservation lands from them and/or poison them to get profitable minerals such as Uranium.
>Revenue also increased from the previous year, coming in at $35 billion. However, analysts expected much more for the quarter, estimating EPS of $10.35, and revenue of $37.2 billion.
So,let me get this straight:
1) Apple consistently gains more revenue and profit, and even beating it's own estimations.
2) The only ones who get it wrong are BS "analysts", with their over the top estimations.
As a crude example:
Apple earned say 10B in 2011,
prdicts it will earn 15B in 2012
and ends up earning 17B.
Now, just because some idiot analysts expected earnings of 25B, Apple is somehow "failing"?
All the while, with Google and Facebook that make money with far less diversification, far less revenue, and far less profit than Apple being overvalued as hell?
Well, Hitler was inspired by the american concentration camps for native americans to build his own concentration camps for Jews:
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” (“Adolph Hitler” by John Toland, p 202)
Plus, there were two to three times more native americans that were killed by European invaders in the US region, than Jews that died in the holocaust.
So, the US already has HAD a holocaust problem in the past.
(One would call dropping two bombs to 250,000 civilians and evaporating them, a holocaust itself, by the very definition of the term)
The idea behind that right had to do with the ability of the people to overthrow an oppressive government, not with the ability to have guns per se, e.g as a gun collector or to protect your house from burglars.
And, as we know, the utility of guns against an oppresive government today is zero.