If something is wrong with a car and people die the carmaker gets sued. Toyota had some issues recently.

The problem with guns is not rational rural users it is primarily irrational urban users. I don't know (or even know of) anyone who has defended him/herself with a gun. I know friends of friends who have had gun-related accidents or who have committed suicide with guns. Statistically in Canada that is not surprising. Gun-related homicides are pretty much organized criminals killing each other, but lots of people have guns and they are a significant suicide option. Violent crime is pretty low because enforcement pretty much leaves burglary and such to the insurance company but takes home invasions and other violent crime seriously.

Gun ownership without training is completely insane. Why would anyone want this?

Blocklists are not a bad thing. I dealt with a number of them when I inherited an SMTP open relay 10 years ago or so. People tend to hate them because they rant at the (generally unpaid) people running the blocklist instead of taking steps to show they are mailing sanely. I configured my SMTP server and got the IP removed from all (and there are a lot of them) blocklists including a number with a reputation for being unreasonable. Politeness goes a lot further than ranting.

This guy may say what he's doing is normal and reasonable but it sounds as though he's blatantly spamming. If the guy does not want his stuff flagged as spam he should try sending e-mails with the same address people opted in for.

Hmm, the Apple 3, the Lisa (debatable), the Newton, initial iCloud release, near irrelevance before Jobs came back... I'm sure there are others. I expect them to be more frequent now that Steve Jobs is not around to flip out and shred poor designs and implementations. It is definitely not the first major Apple flameout.

I have an iphone and I like my iphone but I expect my next phone to be an android both because rooted linux should improve and because Apple will go downhill without Jobs (great designer, great QA, lousy manager; too bad mediocre managers are using his autobio to control freak for mediocrity).

I was able to earn enough in the summer to pay for college and beer (but not rent, lived at home, bought most of my own food, though) in the early '90s. Of course I'm in Quebec. Maybe you should try massive civil disobedience like students here (they protested school fee increases when they should have protested offshoring, but the government was aiming for the higher loans/higher fees cycle so the kids had a point).

Singapore tried to influence birth rates with some success, some failures. First they tried to lower it, and were successful, then they tried to raise it and were successful. They also tried to get educated and successful people to have more kids and poor uneducated people to have less and did not succeed.

Whether the overall birth rate was high or low the group with the most kids was "women who did not finish high school."

And the levies go to the artists of course. A whole 0% of them. Yup, the artists are totally taken care of.

Hmm, wikipedia has a lot to say on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques.

IIRC one of the leading proponents of alien involvement went to Egypt to get more evidence of his beliefs, found that he was completely wrong, and became an egyptologist. Once he'd gone to take a look he didn't have much sympathy with the whole "it's a mystery" viewpoint.

I had a physics teacher who said it was known that plumb lines were used because the deformation due to the weight of the pyramid was measurable at the top. A quick estimate suggests that the deflection would not be noticeable by several orders of magnitude.

Problem is when they gang up. Clinton changed the laws and then Bush the lesser pushed the changes to the limit of their ability to send the American economy to Asia and the Caymans for the benefit of a few rich donors.

There is always a massive media push to elect the most bought politician in the race, the one who will never go against his donors for the good of the people or the economy (NOT Bush Sr (trashed by media and his own party), Clinton, Bush jr, NOT McCain, Romney). Obama is bought, and way more bought than was hoped when he was elected, but much less than Romney or Bush jr. There is some hope, on any given issue, that Obama won't let the 0.1% sell off shared assets and grab deficit dollars for their benefit to be paid for by the rest of us.

Obama may sell out the electorate 80 or 90 percent of the time, but at least he digs in his heels on the odd occasion. Bush jr, Clinton, and Romney would/did sell out 100% of the time with a servile bow and an easy smile.

And other institutions that sway public opinion to allow politicians to do stupid and dishonest things and still get elected. Propaganda.

Uh, the guy is correct on all his points...

Statements like these permeate the outsourcing industry and encourage VPs to offshore. Then you interview the offshore employees and they don't know anything technical, can't produce reports/statuses, and can't use simple logic. There are good people in India, but nowhere near as many as the industry thinks there are and the good ones are not working for peanuts. The going rate for competent people is pretty close to US rates, the people work gets offshored to, who can't make those rates really can't do much.

CVs from offshored employees are pretty funny and almost universally fictional (based on 25 interviews over multiple projects). The guys we hire are pretty much as competent as the ones I deal with at IBM and Oracle, and the problem is the offshoring industry (with some help from the Indian educational system that is much more stratified than the US one).

I know people who do offshoring properly (they do 55% to 65% of work onshore, pay $15-20 an hour for offshore juniors, know people offshore and know the business culture there) and make it work, but they save 5-10% not the 60% the big outsourcers are aiming for.

And clients have to figure out that if you replace one person onshore with 5 people offshore who cannot, as a group, do the work of the one person they replaced, the client is NOT saving money. "But now you have FIVE people, you can do SHIFTS." Sigh... You can change the SLA from 2 hours to five days but you are not helping your business.

To prevent gun issues try welfare. Less people with nothing to lose, less people with no known address (everyone has a PO box at minimum). And there's no downside as welfare is direct economic stimulation, the money is spent instantly (not intelligently, necessarily, but fast, taxis to the liquor store or grocery bills, doesn't matter) on receipt.

Gun ownership is pretty much neutral toward crime, more random shootings, less bar fights/home invasions, but it increases accidental deaths. Training would be good. Teaching people (at least people who want them) guns aren't toys would be better; too bad it's impossible without the corresponding body count. Like for Zimmerman it's fun and power until the trigger pull, and then you're back to real life. And jail.

And any sort of self-defense with a gun gets massively played up by the NRA. You don't hear about it because it is rare. Accidents come up rarely, but frequently relative to the number of self-defense actions. You hear about them because they tend to be tragic (kids) and/or because gun control groups publicize them. And finding honest stats is a mess now, and more effort than I'm willing to make. The propaganda to truth ratio is low at both ends of the spectrum and they drown out the middle.

Gun ownership laws in Canada are applied way differently in the city, where guns stay locked or en route to/from the range, and outside where shotguns (for farmers) and rifles (for hunters) can be carried pretty freely. There generally aren't a lot of incidents in the rural areas, other than occasional drunk hunters shooting farmers, mostly in their own fields right next to the "no hunting" and "no trespassing" signs. This makes total sense to me. So many red state/blue state issues are just rural/urban divides with no comprehension on either side, though the propaganda (from politicians and media owners) doesn't help.

Or we could try the Chris Rock solution and make ammunition expensive. So if someone gets shot they had it coming... Like the dogbert solution: guns for everyone but ammunition only for me.

Companies will train cheap offshore people (our offshore teams get tons of training, but it doesn't help: if they were any good (even potentially good) they would be getting paid more elsewhere), and they are willing to train people for things that are not valuable to other companies.

Execs worry, correctly, that the people they train will leave if they get valuable skills without significant raises. People do leave and leverage their training but the solution is for all companies to train so that there is a larger skilled pool available, not to avoid training so they all have to poach a few candidates and/or hire cheap but incompetent people in large numbers (to assure failure is complete). Of course it is easier to do what everyone else is doing, fail, and blame the business environment (the business environment created by their campaign donations to give them money for failure).

US capitalism is slitting its wrists and buying politicians to keep up the blood transfusions.

If salespeople do not want to sell the phone it probably has less to do with quality than with the profit per unit than with the commission. If the provider has to give away Windows phones they won't pay a big commission to the salesperson who sells the plan. The "Windows phones are crap" comments can probably be translated as "my commission for selling Windows phones is crap." I don't see a reason to get a Windows phone as it stands, but I would not shop somewhere that refused to show or sell me an item they advertise. I'm not partial to places that push commission either as they are going to try to push high margin items and hide bargains.

Difference is most control freak bosses will tank all their projects. Jobs was able to control freak to success. Sigh, my clueless ex-PHB is reading his biography and taking the lesson that control freakiness is good (dude, stick to scapegoating and work on the neglect, it will be better for everyone, or duct-tape yourself to your chair). It's not good if everything fails when you touch it. You can (should?) get away with too much involvement if you are a genius in matching technology to consumers.
Jobs' legacy: millions of talentless managers having more impact on greater failures.