Call us back, after you acquire a few more orbits on this rock... ;-)

The "people" who own Obama, own the media.

...so what you're basically saying is to just f*ck all of the applications that ultimately depend on the OS that's the "bedrock" of everything.

You're kind of attitude is why a CAB gets put in place to begin with. ANY change should be done only after consideration to it's impact. Trashing production because you can't be bothered to examine things or let someone else examine things is why these beaurocracies gets created.

Obama is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.

Hillary is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect she would.

Kerry is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.

Microsoft seems to have taken the other track now. They are still bringing the Windows experience to the tablet, but they've revamped the windows experience to be the kind that works well on touchscreens, some say to the detriment of the mouse and keyboard crowd.

What's annoying is the perception that salad is the only kind of food that qualifies as healthy.

At McDonalds, this is probably an accurate perception, and only if you skip (or go very light on) the dressing. Even their yoghurt is questionable.

Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw Tablet Computer prototypes come up every couple of years. Sometimes they would even make it to market, where they hit with a resounding thud thanks to their horrible clunky OS choices, lack of applications, and hardware limitations. Apple tinkered with the iPad for years before finally releasing it, waiting until the infrastructure grew up to make the device practical. They actually worked on the iPad before the iPhone.

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:

• Wifi networking.
• Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
• Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
• A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
• Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way in the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips.

Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".

I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.

A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.

Right this way sir... here's some bread, we hope you enjoy the circus.

This study defines "rich people" as those making around $146000/year.

If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.

I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.

Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.

I recommend antibiotics.

The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.

This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.

This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.

Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.

Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.

Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.

...a collapsed ring system?

> Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization

Except the NRA really isn't a "gun rights" organization. It's original charter was to encourage the development of marksmanship skills. Basically, they wanted to make sure that people could effectively use the kinds of weapons one might find in the Army or Marines.

You can't really do that if you can't own a rifle.

That whole "well regulated militia" thing can't happen if people at large aren't ever allowed to practice.