That's because rational people don't have to actually go through with it to see how toxic it is.

>. Re:Why shouldnt Barack Obama follow the Tea Party?

Because he has the IRS to do that for him?

We already tried that. There was one set of communication lines, and various companies had access to them, at rates set by the government. Somebody had to maintain the infrastructure of course, and their rates and profit margins were heavily regulated. The company managing the infrastructure was called Bell.

    Under that model, calls could cost a dollar per minute. We then tried a different model, and immediately rates went to 10 cents per minute. Later, we now have four different companies providing competing coverage, redundant towers covering the same area, and I pay $25 for unlimited calls and unlimited* data.

Your proposal makes perfect sense on a planet with no humans, only perfectly logical machines, or Vulcans. It's been tried here on earth many, many times in various ways and it always fails when there is actual human nature involved. Humans are greedy and lazy.

When the various wireless companies compete, meaning they each try to provide better service in a particular area (meaning putting towers in the same area), their greed offsets their laziness. In order to get my money they need to provide better service than the other three companies, and/or a better price. Without that, you end up with "we're the phone company, we don't care".

Again, what you suggest SOUNDS logical, and would probably work if it weren't for humans. It never works in this world though, unfortunately.

It sounds like you put together a nice system. Of course, you chose to spend more on your CPU fan alone than most of these ARM SOC systems cost. Different strokes for different folks.

    I had a garage sale P4 as my DVR for a couple of years. You could tell something was using too much CPU when the fans became as loud as the TV AMD the room got warm.

Wintel: Windows on Intel
You think Linux "panders to wintel".

More proof that aside from being 100% completely devoid of social skills, you also have zero technical knowledge. You're not a nerd, you're just a dweeb.

Interesting how one has to strain credulity in order to say anything particularly bad about "pure capitalism", but "pure socialism" leaves its failures in plain view. My view on this is that a capitalist society is a very dynamic one. It may as you assert tend to social stratefication, but you are ignore tremendous wealth transfers from rich to poor (such as employment, charity, costly displays of social status, etc) that act to alleviate this disparity.

Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!

I was merely disproving the original poster's assertion by providing a counterexample.

lots of printer apps for android now... you go to your manufacturer and in most cases they have an app that is compatible with most of the printers from the company.

There is a big difference. The pension and fund managers are the kingmakers. They have control over a vast amount of voting shares in companies. Their disinterest and short term greed translates into similarly endowed CEOs.

Another factor which I didn't mention is bailouts. A lot of these players, both fund managers and CEOs can rely on some degree of public funding to ease their bad decisions.

The underlying fault to this whole mess IMHO is Other Peoples' Money (OPM). When decisions are made by people who control OPM, this leads to a fundamental conflict of interest and a disengagement between the decision and the consequences of that decision.

How often does he print, and how often does he need to print? I make the distinction because many people who grew up with paper use "print" as "save". They print it so they'll have it in case they need it later. Some of these people can take to saving documents rather than printing everything and it might be good and useful as a training aid if printing were slightly less convenient. Other people actually need to print quite often, and some people print maybe twice per year. If dad prints twice per year, the Kinko's service that prints to the FedEx Kinko's around the corner might be good.

Some uber-nerds, or wannabe uber nerds, shout "get a real computer!". Well my wife has had several "real" computers, running various operating systems. Her favorite device, the one she uses all day every day, is her Chrome book. I see why. She can leave it laying around and whenever she picks it up it's instantly ready to do what she needs to do. She charges it maybe a couple of times per week. It has been completely reliable and simple - she never needs to ask her computer geek husband for help. It is IDEAL for certain people.

I say this as a guy who has personally owned a $10,000 network switch and whose name is in the kernel changelog - I know real computers. I have systems with sixteen hard drives each. Those monsters are well suited to their task, and the Chromebook is well suited to its task.

Plug the pi into the printer and then put it on a wireless network. You can print offline that way.

That said, I don't get the point of chromebooks. They're not any cheaper then the cheap laptops you can find these days. Go to newegg. Same price basically and you get a proper operating system.

Chrome is a stupid OS. I don't know why they don't just install android on them. There are lots of printer apps for android.

Not really. Mickey Mouse would be public domain. Think about that.

Besides, I've talked to a lot of these MPAA guys personally. They're completely fanatical.

Their attitude is "our contract says we can do this, so those are our rights and anyone that violates them is a criminal." - period.

You know those crazy ads where they compare piracy to automotive theft or bank robbery? The people driving this along felt those ads were too mellow. They wanted to go farther with it.

You have no idea. They are as closed minded and intolerant as a 15th century cardinal. You cross the line and they're going to say "burn them".

While I agree nearly all the effort goes into zero day... that is because everything becomes more nebulous after that point and they make the most money off of zero day releases. So that is why they do that. But if you think they don't care about their legacy licenses you are kidding yourself. In their view, that stuff is worth billions. Telling them a certain amount of it is going to go public domain is like telling someone that a certain amount of their bank account is going to vanish. They're totally unwilling to move on the issue. They are not going to compromise on anything.

The only way forward is to let the old fire brands die... literally from old age in most cases and be replaced by more realistic members.

That it is publicly funded and purports to solve the sort of problems that are associated with philanthropy (improve the human condition, promote the arts, etc).

By looking at how well it satisfies its purported goals, given the money spent.

You mention some reasonably good examples, though clearly from a very one-sided viewpoint.

Obama has chosen not to "work around" decisions of the courts and the Congress, but rather to simply declare new law. He then declared that he MUST write new law because the Congress "failed to" (chose not to) pass the law he wanted. I think that might be a completely new precedent, for a president to say "Congress decided not to approve my proposal to chanhe the law, so I must therefore proceed as if they did" (rather than faithfully executing the law). The implication is that it's illegitimate for Congress to do anything but rubber-stamp the president's proposals. That may be new in American history.

Examples include Congress (at his urging) passed a health insurance law with certain dates and deadlines in it. Obama then unilaterally changed the deadlines, and also unilaterally changed the qualifications for eligibility that Congress wrote into the law. More concerning, probably, are his statements about illegal immigrants. Congress voted down his proposal - so he implemented it anyway, claiming that it's the job of Congress to approve whatever he wants to do. That's new, isn't it, or do you know of any earlier examples of that doctrine?

PS - in the example of you quoting me, you could of course try to claim fair use of my writing, but that's not the situation you're talking about. If I understand you correctly, you are talking about if "your" words were copypasta from someone else, in doesn't which case adding my words wouldn't give me grounds to authorize infringing their copyright.