Well the President shouldn't know about these things. That's what his Secretaries of State are for.

The President is the Head of State. I put those capitals in for a reason. It is an almost religious position. A large part of the authority and legitimacy of the state is invested in the current head of state and their behaviour has to be of an appropriately high standard. This is difficult under an executive presidency like the US, but the principle still applies.

Of foremost concern here is the simple principle that there are certain things the president should not see or hear. Sometimes countries need to spy on others, or assassinate people, or steal, or whatever. But there is absolutely no reason why the President needs to be told about these things. The only time the President should hear about things like this is in the newspapers, shortly before he makes a pledge to hold the guilty responsible.

The President is not going to be able to uphold the law if all of the lawbreakers make him an accessory before or after the fact as a matter of routine.

This is to say nothing of the loss of legitimacy that comes with being involved this close to the coal-face of the uglier side of state operations. As bin Laden was being killed, the President should never have been allowed into a room where live images of people being shot and killed were displayed on screen. Without exaggeration: His aide-de-camp deserves to be court-martialed for allowing that. The damage to the image of the US President as a head of state will take decades to undo. Heads of State do not watch gunbattles on live feeds.

There is Politics, or PR-Politics as it is practised today. There is Government, and the business of running it. Then there is Diplomacy and grand and murkier business of deal with other countries.

And finally there is Statecraft, the art of running a country wisely. No PR-man, economist, scientist or other technocratic advisor can speak with any authority on this most essential of topics. It is nebulous, yet essential to all actions of the state. Systems ; political, economic, national, international, are made or unmade by the actions of senior officials and heads of state. It is essential that these actors have the gravity and respect necessary to inspire confidence in their actions. It is simply not possible to do this effectively if you have been repeatedly seen emerging from the latest political abattoir, covered from head to twitter feeds in fallout gore and scandal. Heads of State have to be above such things.

Not with major browsers like Firefox screaming blue murder at encrypted connections that haven't been officially by certification authorities. We can't have an encrypted web if browsers themselves are hostile towards it.

In most places where gambling is legal in the US, it is only legal with severe (usually localized) restrictions and an extreme amount of government oversight.

I don't think Antigua ever offered to compete on a genuinely level playing field with anyone. So trying to throw that idea out is pretty assinine.

It just demonstrates how clueless most of the anti-USA blogosphere is when it comes to this particular subject.

> The difficulty, of course, is that the US signed a treaty saying it would abide by this sort of ruling. So now what?

So what. This should be seen as an affront to national soverienty by pretty much every body rather than the anti-USA hate-gasm it's turned into.

If the shoe were on the other foot, everyone would be defending the country that dared to have it's own independent law.

Blatant hypocrisy all around.

Remember, this is the precedent you begged for.

I answered based on my current job title and that included a bit with a previous employer where I had to "dial in" from vacation adding another time zone to my grand total.

There's a lot of history between us and Plato. Their fads don't necessarily have any relationship to our fads.

The idea of vegetarianism as some sort of moral crusade probably at the very least requires a society rich enough to support such a vanity. For everyone else, it's eat what you can get your hands on as you don't have the luxury of being picky.

> life sentence means something between 10 and 30 years,

There is nothing "civilized" about this kind of doublespeak.

Nah, it's just something he remembered from some old computing magazine.

You said it. I would have to go way out of my way to spend $1500 on a new machine. That's true even for a laptop. Forget a desktop.

There's a reason that Apple has the lead in the over $1000 market. PCs haven't had to cost that much in a LONG time.

The fact that Linux is gratis largely doesn't matter anyways. People get a "free" copy of Windows with their PCs and are loathe to upgrade. People hold onto ancient XP machines because they seem to work well enough and people are afraid of change.

Free upgrades might not even matter for Windows users. That fear of change and fear of tech in general will keep them away.

> If you really felt that way you wouldn't bother with this at thread at all.

That EXACTLY the reason why I would bother with this thread at all. This is just another example of the mindless hype that the media tries to artificially create. The media are acting like an unofficial divison of Apple Corp rather tha proper journalists.

It's not "hatred", it's simple pragmatism.

The only positive value of Apple hardware is the fact that it is authorized to run MacOS. Beyond that, Apple hardware is inferior and more expensive. You get to spend more to get less.

I don't have to run "old" hardware with Linux. I can spend less, still get more box, and have cycles to spare for a VM or two.

If the freebie aspect of this current release of MacOS were actually relevant, I could run it on such a VM.

It cost the shareholders $472 million. The men and women mismanaging Knight Capital drew their paychecks and benefits as before and didn't lose a dime in remuneration.

The only lesson learned here was that no lesson was learned.

> Linux is just irrelevant to the desktop market.

So is MacOS really. This was true even when it was competing with MS-DOS of all things.

So any "helpful suggestions" will likely be total nonsense.

Computing history is littered with the corpses of companies that conformed to whatever "advice" you care to come up with.

No you can't. The hardware requirements of the newer versions of MacOS won't allow for it.

Every so often, those icky "specs" matter.

Plus you are contradicting that common bit of fanboy propaganda regarding "resale value".