The article you linked opened with Lindsay Lohan being court ordered visit a rehab.

Let me ask you this -
If she were ordered to visit a law school a couple times, do you think that would make her a lawyer? Of course not. So that means law schools don't work?

What if she were ordered to visit NASA? Would she become an astronaut? Probably not. I guess NASA doesn't work.

Ordering a person to visit a place doesn't cause them to change their lives.

Law school works - people who really want to be lawyers can go there, work hard, and become a lawyer. AA works the same - addicts who really want to be sober can go there, work hard, and become sober.

FYI wiki is not a source, it's some random person's posting on the internet, just like this is.

Anyway, many leaders in my city, the most respected members of the community, are former "habitual offenders" , drunks and crack addicts who had no respect for themselves, much less the respect of others. I myself used to live under tarp behind the Target store.

  Now people act like I'm doing great things, helping
those in need. They call me "a blessing". It is I who is blessed. I don't help others because I'm any kind of saint, far from it. I do what I do because a) it's fun and b) I've discovered that I can either help the homeless guy, or become the homeless guy. For some of us it's like that. So my choice is between having fun being helpful, or having hep C being homeless. It doesn't take a saint to figure out which sounds better.

What happened to me, and hundreds of my friends who have had the same experience? We followed the steps of AA, even the hard ones. Each of our case studies shows that doing the AA system changes lives in a radical, amazing way.

What the survey studies will show you is that telling someone to go to a meeting and hear about AA doesn't make them sober, anymore than telling someone to visit a law school makes them a lawyer. That's what was tested in all of the studies I've seen that concluded "AA doesn't work so well" - they looked at people who were told to go hear about AA. 30% of those people didn't even go into the meeting to find out about AA, they skipped it or sat on the front porch chatting because they had no interest in getting sober.

The reasonable conclusion is "telling someone to find out about AA doesn't work. Actually doing the AA program does work."

Since there are tens of thousands of groups that are all different, I can't say that anything in particular is true of every group, but the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" tells us what it's designed to be. The book is abundantly clear. Drinking can be replaced by service to others. As I write this, I'm caring for a severely autistic young man while his parents are in church, instead of getting drunk with my brother. Here with me is my beautiful wife, who wouldn't have married me if I were still living like I used to. It works for me.

True, AA isn't generally "warm and fuzzy". NA is more warm and fuzzy, more of a "support" group.

At many AA groups, they'll not do the "everything's okay" bullshit. They'll tell you it's NOT okay to get drunk and punch your wife, then take your kids for a ride at 110 MPH. Did that hurt your feelings? That's okay. I care enough about you that I'd rather save your life than have you like me.

* there are tens of thousands of AA groups, who have held millions of meetings. Anything I say about AA in general may not apply to a particular meeting.

Are you seriously saying that the federal budget increase of 24% from 2008 to 2011 was to keep up with INFLATION, which was 4%? Government growth is out of control and inflation is not any significant factor. There are no cuts there, not

The President proposes to spend $3.8 trillion in 2014, an increase of 10% over 2012. Inflation was 4%. Explain to me again how a 6% increase after inflation is a massive cut?

As an example for you, in the 1930s and 1940s, they built over 10,000 C-47s. Production stopped in 1946 and they are still being used today. Spread over 10,000 units, development cost is thousands per plane. If you build 100 planes, per-plane development cost is billions.

Another example is the B-52, a 1950s plane. They built enough that the US Air Force still uses them 60 years later.

For fighters, the F-100 was produced in enough quantity that it lasted around 30-40 years. That's a shit ton cheaper than spending billions every few years to build 50 of a particular design.

I understand the sentiment, for sure.
Unfortunately, building fewer would cost more.
Building more and SELLING them saves a ton of money, and they are doing that.

Imagine if Apple spent a hundred million dollars developing the iPad and then only built 100 of them Each iPad would cost a million dollars. If they built 1,000 the development cost is $1000 each. It's the same with new fighter jets. Building 50 or 100 of them is DUMB with nine zeroes because you've already paid most of the cost, the development cost. The smart thing is what we've done with some other planes - build enough to last 50 years so you don't have to spend another few hundred billion developing another fighter ten years from now.

Washington math:

Actual 2013 spending: $3 trillion
Desired 2014 spending: $3.5 trillion
Actual 2014 spending: $3.3 trillion

Bottom line, human math: $300 billion increase
Bottom line, Washington / Democrat math: $200 billion "cut"

GP is absolutely right in what they said.
You try to LOSE money in an expanding market. More on that later. The problem is, Microsoft isn't in an expanding market. Google an Apple are. Microsoft isn't really in that market, the mobile market.

In an expanding market, especially a market where critical mass is so important (think app stores), it's all about market share during the time when the market is doubling every year or so. Remember the search engine wars? There were seven major search engines. The largest was HotBot (Inktomi). Guess how much Hotbot, AltaVista, and Excite have made in the last five years? Google is making billions per quarter because they got controlling market share while the total market was tens of milllions. To get that critical market share during the growth phase, the right move is to spend as much as you can on to gain more market share. If you turned a profit, those profit dollars are dollars you should have spent on marketing, expanding production, or otherwise growing your market share.

But again, though his statement is true, it doesn't apply to Microsoft, unless they actually want to get into mobile. If they want to be a significant player in mobile, they should have spent another $400 million developing something that could compete. That would be a $400M "loss", in exchange for a shot to remain relevant in the consumer market.

Actually it hasn't tripled. 200-2003 WAS a bad time for them compared to earlier years, but there's no tripling of profit.
In that same ten years, Google's profit actually HAS increased 100X and Apple's up 586X over the same period.
So the the score is:
Microsoft 2.2
Google 100.0
Apple 586.0

I must, I must increase my going bust

Show me where in the Patriot act this is authorized.
The administration is using a clause from the act to pretend it's legal, but the clause they point to really doesn't authorize tracking American's phone calls and emails.

I know that because that's my field. That's what I've been doing all day, every day, for seventeen years. If you want to see for yourself, check any major CVE list. Flaws are handled daily, through a well known process, just like bags of garbage are dealt with every day by those professionals. You can watch the process on the lists and in the databases.

A few times per year, a dead body is found in a trash bag. So it's true that "every trash bag covered on the news has a dead body or something in it". It would be an epic fail of intelligence to deduce from that "most trash bags contain dead bodies". Software flaws are the same, and thinking that most are handled very poorly is the same failure to think as assuming that because newsworthy trash contains bodies, most trash contains bodies.

I've certainly noticed that when I am one of the first to post on a Slashdot story, it tends to set the tone for many comments to follow. This was perhaps most noticeable when I pointed out all the BS in a certain anti-patent propaganda story. Commenters did some critical thinking and mostly agreed the story was a load of BS. It's apparent from other similar stories that without someone setting the tone, Slashdot readers generally revel in anti-patent propaganda, expanding it beyond the already BS claims in TFA of the day.

So Microsoft, Adobe, et al have never issued any security updates, ever?
All of those updates you see every day don't magically appear from nowhere. They come from the standard process of reporting and handling issues that most people follow. Selfish attention whores report maybe 0.5% of the issues. The other 99.5% are reported and fixed with no drama.