At that location they are so far above us in speed. It's sad when the middle of nowhere in a useless state has access about eight times faster than us for about a tenth of the cost. I wish Seattle would catch-up so the shithole of South Carolina.

Gee, it sure sounds to me like it's Seattle that's the shithole!

Based on this list [wikipedia.org], it looks like merger activity between US banks dramatically slowed since Obama took office, after going through the roof during the Bush years.

I counted 48 mergers during the Clinton years versus 39 during Bush.

Well, shit, when an industry is consolidating of course there are going to be a bunch of mergers (of small companies into medium companies) at the beginning, then a moderate amount of mergers (of medium companies into big companies), then just a few mergers (of big companies into gigantic, dangerous ones).

So yeah, we should fully expect Clinton mergers > Bush (II) mergers > Obama mergers, just because by the time Obama got in office there were hardly any companies left to merge!

Almost never the case?!?

Jesus Johnson, put your iPhone down and look around sometime.

There are cameras everywhere. Parks schools streets, stores, neighborhoods. Outside your own home, there is scarcely any place in a city you can avoid surveillance.

i have no problem with opposing monsanto, the corporation with dubious goals that should be opposed

I want labels on GMO crops because I'm opposed to use of the "terminator gene" and Monsanto's contractual prohibition of seed-saving. I want to be able to buy corn and know it's wasn't grown by a farmer in cahoots with Monsanto, and GMO labeling is a very good proxy to inform me about that.

Perhaps because all the modern devices are meant to work with your fingers and not with a stylus?

You've got the cause and effect backwards: devices are designed not to use a stylus because their makers had no desire to support handwriting recognition, not the other way around.

Because Steve Jobs fucked everything up by refusing to support it on the original iPhone, and Google followed suit.

If Palm -- or Microsoft, for that matter -- had been the breakthrough smartphone innovator, we'd have had handwriting recognition all along.

The neighborhood in that area isn't like that -- the neighborhood itself is probably about a 50%/45%/5% black/white/other mix. If there were only one school that all the kids went to, it would be thoroughly integrated.

They are committed when it impacts large contracts.

Seen stuff in the news lately regarding the push for open document standards on the web? Governments are now specifying published government documents can not be propriety formatted. This forced Microsoft to support open formats or lose large contracts because Microsoft Office is not meeting specifications of the document requirements.

Compatibility with internet standards has forced open standards onto Microsoft for a long time from TCP/IP over NetBios, to NTP, Remember when Microsoft had Windows for Workgroups? The Internet put them at risk of a end run past them. They had to adapt or die.

There are numerous other examples where Microsoft does not own the standard in use where their solution was forced to the back to die.

If you think you can get an average 13-year old ready for college-level CS in one year, without sacrificing the rest of their usual middle school and high school education, you're severely deluded.

Absolute bullshit.

First of all, they're not trying to teach "average" 13-year-olds; they're trying to teach 13-year-olds who've applied to a special magnet school because they want to be software engineers (and presumably have at least some aptitude for it). That's a very different demographic.

Second, I coasted through my college intro to programming class (and the data structures / object-oriented programming class after that) on what I had taught myself back in middle school and high school. Anyone who can't do at least as well with a year (or less) of actual, dedicated instruction is completely unsuited to the field.

AMD chips run all three latest-gen gaming consoles...

What, you mean with the trolling ACs spouting bullshit? Slashdot has always been that way.

More importantly, I'm right and you're wrong. Go use your reading comprehension skills to RTFS[ummary], specifically the sentence that says "Students in GALA will follow a six year sequence of computer courses starting in middle school that will culminate in AP Computer Science Principles."

Now fuck off.

It shows it's possible. No-one was expecting the early versions would magically appear fully-formed and ready for market... I mean, apart from you, it seems ;)

Wow! With your half-thought-out idea you have overturned their entire field of research! Amazing! It's simply staggering that no-one thought of this before! Quick! To the rooftops!

Or, just maybe, they know more than you. I know, it's a concept you have difficulty accepting.

Just as many are gobsmacked by those who assume they know all there is to know about the issues surrounding global warming, and then use their stilted, malformed knowledge of the subject to condemn those who take a more rational, rigorous approach as being hoaxers or charlatans or whatever other pejorative springs limply to mind...

Ozone was a different problem, which has been largely alleviated by international action.

You really should brush up on your knowledge before proudly telling everyone just how little you know.

And practically impossible to re-start, as the majority of coal was created because tree-eating bacteria hadn't yet evolved. Clearly they have now, and so the cycle is not just unbalanced, but completely broken. It might be possible to create coal from peat bogs and the like, but that's nowhere near as easy or widespread as forests, clearly.