I live in a small town in the western US. I used to get four channels over the air on a good day with analog. Now, I get one. Not saying you're wrong, but I think people in more rural areas suffer more when the analog signal is cut.

To refute a point:

1. The guy took a copy of the source code that he created while employed by the plaintiffs, and was getting ready to release the source code.

This is what is alleged by the plaintiffs in the suit; it is not clear that this is what actually happened. What we know is that the guy quit his job and later began offering a product that is similar to the one he participated in creating at his job. It is not clear that he either took a copy of the source code, or that what he is planning to release is that source code.

FTA:

In simple terms, the suit alleges that Corey stole the code and violated agreements with INL. I have no idea if he stole the code or what he signed while at INL. He probably had the code, but again the idea is hardly novel. He could have started over with a next generation product on his own.

This won't beat the Android with the lowest sales, let alone the iPad.

Well, yes. I agree with you. But I was attempting to refute the GPP's assertion that the iPad is the 'looser' tablet.

I own an iPad, which I bought before Android tablets were really a thing. If I were to go out and buy a new tablet, it would likely be an Android (probably Galaxy, but I haven't researched them in a while). I prefer the openness and don't feel the need for the Apple walled garden. The point is, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I'm just using the data that were given to refute a claim that I don't believe they justify.

Do you not keep up with current events. the iPad is the looser tablet. Its market share has plummeted from 60% of sales last year to 32%

According to your link, iPad's sales of 32.4% of tablets last quarter represents sales of 1.8 times as many tablets as Samsung, which is the only other company that has double-digit sales. So Apple is outselling the next-best-selling tablet by almost 2 to 1, and the next one after that by more than 7 to 1. The tablet market is fragmenting, and I expect that we will continue to see strong competition from Android tablets, particularly from Samsung, but from these numbers, for now, iPad is still the tablet to beat.

Well, I guess one of the problems is that in a lot of states, schools are getting a decreasing share of tax dollars. The legislature of the State of Idaho is almost comically opposed to education, K-12 and higher, despite our constitution having included specific language requiring the state to fund public education. The school districts actually had to sue the state, in a case that went all the way to the state supreme court, to force the state to continue to pay for critical maintenance of school buildings (things like making sure the roof doesn't collapse).

I guess what I'm getting at is that if we don't want corporate funding of schools (and the corporate influence on curricula that inevitably comes with), then we should be adequately funding schools with tax dollars. Perhaps by diverting some money from prisons (which is where a lot of the education money has gone in Idaho).

I think you have a point. With all of the standardized testing and other requirements, we often hear teachers complaining that there isn't enough time in the school year to cover everything they're supposed to cover. Why would we pile on these propaganda "lessons" that seem to offer negative educational benefit, when we don't have enough time to teach the important lessons?

I guess my response would be to talk to my kids' teachers, find out if they intend on using this curriculum, keeping my kids out of school on those days when it is covered, and drafting a letter to the teacher, the principal, and the school board. I don't believe that blatant corporate propaganda has any place in education. My kids and I can stay home "sick" on the days when this happens.

Yeah, the poor guy. He dedicates considerable text to repeatedly pointing out his "Buddhism" and how enlightened he is. But over the course of the whole year-long experience, he never gives any indication of actually learning anything about either himself or the world around him. He tells an anecdote about getting into a physical fight with some road-rager, and he seems to completely miss the fact that the altercation was utterly pointless, and that his enlightened self should have been able to eventually figure that out.

He seems to spend all of this time trying to come up with justifications for attacking a guy for making a stupid comic featuring his "mom", without it ever occurring to him that this fight is completely pointless--that if he just ignores the thing, it will all go away, and nobody will care about it anymore.

He also bloviates profoundly about Sun Tzu and how his whole revenge-litigation personality is actually based on wise and ancient strategies of war, and how the lyrics to some songs are just like his life, man.

There's nothing wrong with being a lawyer, but if you're going to be an aggressively nasty, sleazy one, just own up to it. This ugly episode was not a poetic trial sent by ancient gods. It was just him being a jerk.

One thing I've never understood: how do the phaser beam know when to stop vaporizing? I mean, if I'm sitting in a desk chair and get vaporized by a phaser, then the chair usually remains there, completely unharmed and pristine. How does that work? Is it just super-sensitive to boundaries of conductivity? Shouldn't my clothes be left behind, too?

Could you just skip the 'likely what happened here' conjecture and take a look at TFA? If you read the article or the audit report, you'll learn that the contractors did not start this fiasco (the DOC CIRT group did), did not provide the temporary infrastructure (the census bureau did), did not recommend the destruction of the hardware (they advised the EDA to reimage the handful of computers that were infected), and ultimately advised the CIO of EDA that they could not provide the guarantee that no malware could possibly exist anywhere on the EDA network.

The contractor made a lot of money for this work, but the real problem seems to be naive management at EDA who panicked and brought the contractors in in the first place and then persisted in paying the contractors to search for malware infections that the contractors had already told them weren't there. I'm no great fan of indiscriminately replacing government workers with contractors, but I don't think the contractors are the villains in this particular story.

Really? Did they ruin Postman by missing the point? What would you say the point of The Postman was? I've always kind of thought it was about the guy putting on the outfit to stay warm, and then growing in to the role on account of how people treated him. Plus a whole lot of stuff about government-created supersoldiers.

The book was good, the movie was bad, but how do you think they could have fixed it?

Okay, so that's a nice, broad, political view of the situation. I appreciate that. Maybe this crackdown is related. It's also true that sometimes, other countries take a harder line on laws they haven't before, in order to exert diplomatic pressure. Maybe it's bullshit to you that China is now enforcing their laws.

In the meantime, take your GPS into Tunisia and let me know how that goes. I won't visit you in Tunisian prison.

US companies expect retaliation for trade disagreements. The mechanics of those consequences will vary. Those multinationals have planned for the consequences, and we shouldn't cry for them. The loss that Coke realizes in all of this is more than you or I will make in years, but less than they make in a day. To them, it's just the cost of doing business.

If you do a lot of travelling, you will find that GPS laws are different everywhere. Many countries won't even allow you to bring one across the border. Defense against enemies obtaining high quality maps is usually the reasoning. Sometimes, you can bribe a customs guy to let you bring it in. But you shouldn't be flaunting GPS when you're visiting a place like that. I think China should be more free, but I can't get too upset when they enforce their existing laws against visitors who break them, even when the laws are out of date or seem silly.

Nonsense. Survival of the fittest is still occurring, it's just that the fitness criteria have changed. As you say, "babies that would have died lived on" -- but mostly that happens for those parents who have either the money or the health insurance (and the medical facilities) to deal with what would previously have been an "unfit" baby. Natural selection continues through societal means: the costs of birthing and raising viable children are inversely proportional to the health of the baby; children with difficulties are more expensive to raise.

There is still selection pressure, but in developed countries it's coming more from societal sources than from environmental sources. And the societal pressure isn't so worried about things like good eyesight or height, or those sort of physiological characteristics; it's about access to health care (whether that comes from parents with money or states with social safety nets).

And I would argue that even though humans are in charge of the programs and policies that affect these new fitness criteria, they are still fitness criteria because they are being applied to populations, rather than to individuals (except in very special and statistically insignificant cases). So, survival of the fittest is still alive and well, and being implemented inadvertently by human policy.

For one thing, even with a sit-down desk, you shouldn't be sitting in front of it for nine hours. What I do is I set a countdown timer for an hour or so. When it rings, I get up and walk around the floor, hit the bathroom, fill up my water bottle, maybe step outside for a few minutes and experience sunlight. But you really have to train yourself to do it, and stick to getting up when it goes off. I find that it improves my work, because it forces me to step away from immediate problems and think about things in a larger context while I'm taking my little walk. I get back to my desk eager (usually) to continue work, and energized from getting my blood flowing. If your employer is so concerned about OSHA, then they should know that OSHA recommends frequent rest breaks for employees who sit at computer desks all day.

To me, one of the most important things about a standing desk is that you need to pay attention to the ergonomics of the floor and your footwear. My building has concrete floors with low-pile carpet. If I stood all day at a desk on this surface, my feet would kill by the end of the day. You potentially need a floor mat that provides more support than a solid floor. Think of the kinds of surfaces that workers on manufacturing lines stand on all day. You also want some kind of low platform or stool (preferably two of different heights, or one that you can flip onto a different side to change its height) that you can use to put one foot up on for periods, adjust your stance and weight distribution. Finally, you'll want to pay attention to the shoes that you wear, to make sure that you're getting the support that your feet need for you to be standing on them all day. There's a reason they call beat cops 'flat-foor'.

So. Sorry for the text wall. But those are some considerations.