It's a nonsensical argument, pay it no mind. The fact is that everyone in China pirates all their software, so forcing everyone to upgrade will only result in a spike in piracy numbers, which will make the guys (allegedly) trying to reduce piracy in China look bad. Looking bad (aka "losing face") is a big deal in most Asian cultures. That's really all that's driving this announcement.

In reality, EOLing XP will make no practical difference in China any time soon. The Chinese love XP. I've sent refurbished laptops with clean installs of Win7 to friends in China, and the first call I get after they get it is "how do I install XP?" Anyone who thinks those people are going to give two shits whether MS continues to support XP or not is nuts.

I agree in principle that it's best for the company to hire promising individuals and train them. In fact, my company does this. The majority of our employees start out as interns, and the ones that work out get hired full time (I was one of those). The thing is, not everyone works out.

Some of them just never seem to get it. Generally it's because their problem solving processes are just too convoluted, and it leaves them unable to organize things intelligibly. We're big on mentoring, and give plenty of second chances, but at some point you have to just cut your loses.

Well, you're wrong. It does work that way. As proof, I offer every single protestant denomination that has ever existed. Especially the Church of England.

I'm pretty sure that imposing significant restraint on a person is the entire point of seatbelts.

I don't think it's the actual driving that's important here. I think it's the ability to go where we want to go without having to rely on someone else to get us there that people actually care about. Autonomous cars satisfy that need just fine in the majority of cases.

Here, we agree. I'd be perfectly fine with a self-driving car as long as it had a manual mode. I don't have a great deal of confidence in a self-driving car's ability to properly navigate the bumpy dirt road to my mom's house, for example. But, I only make that drive a few times a year. For the other 99.9% of the driving I do, it would be awesome.

How is this an ineffective boycott? The man has issued a public apology before the proposed boycott even had a chance to progress past the suggestion phase. That seems pretty damned effective to me!

So, what you're saying is that the First Amendment protects the rights of hateful bigots to spew their filth in public, but it does not protect my right to call them out on their bullshit? I think you don't fully understand the concept of Freedom of Speech.

Actually, several studies in Europe have found that the vast majority of heroin addicts lose interest in the drug and quit using on their own within a decade.

Nonsense. Someone's name is on the letter you were sent demanding licensing fees. That person can be found and "convinced" to give you the information necessary to find any other people that might be involved. The shell company game only defends against legal methods of discovery. It will not protect you from someone who is willing to use torture, rape, and arson to find you.

Wow! Epic reading comprehension failure, there.

I said nothing at all about preschool. I was addressing your false equivalence of kindergarten with daycare. That should be obvious enough if you bother actually reading what I wrote.

If you really want my post to be about preschool, then feel free to replace all instances of "kindergarten" with "preschool" and all the claims I made will remain just as true.

Well, yes... except for the fact that there is actual instruction in kindergarten, and the kids actually learn stuff, unlike any daycare I've ever seen. Oh, and the fact that every study I've ever seen that has looked into the issue has found a significant correlation between kindergarten attendance and long-term academic success; again, unlike daycare.

So, really, once you look at the actual facts, it seems more appropriate to consider kindergarten to be school rather than daycare. Because it is.

Having worked in construction with a few genuine craftsmen, I can assure you they would do both. But, as a general rule, the better the craftsman the higher the percentage of vitriol would be levelled at the tools, because a good craftsman knows what could be accomplished with better ones.

No, fascism = capitalism + nationalism. Maybe it's time for you to step away from the Glenn Beck and pick up a fucking dictionary.

This is true. A boss needs workers. Workers don't necessarily need a boss.

"Properly processed" is the key. When film scanners reached 1k resolution (aka 1080p) the operators started to notice visual artifacts, which turned out to be the grain of the film. By the time 2k scanners came out, post-scan processing was an absolute necessity to get video of acceptable quality.

At least, that's the story I was told by the engineers when I worked in customer service repair on the Spirit DataCine. So much for my old TV/Film professor's assertions (a mere 7 years earlier) that digital would never equal the resolution of film.

The problem with the fourth amendment argument is that the internet is effectively a public place. The NSA doesn't need a warrant to packet sniff the internet for the same reason a cop doesn't need a warrant to listen in on your conversation while you're waiting in line at Starbucks.

It would certainly be nice if the fourth applied here, but it's not an argument that that's likely to ever prevail in court.