I blame all parents for everything.
Teaching your children the difference between right and wrong only takes a little bit of time and attention.
Plus, you have to know the difference yourself, first.
I don't know if the parents in this case were busy making a living or smoking crack, but they fell down on the job.
But I can't even imagine what it would be like to have your kid be a sociopath. It would feel like dying, I think.
There's actually quite a bit of public outrage over the NSA revelations, but the people who benefit from this spying are spending a lot of money to suppress the story in the media and to astroturf social networks to make it seem like all the reasonable people are perfectly OK with their own government spying on them.
If you think I'm wrong, start paying closer attention when the story about NSA spying comes up on websites and blogs. Read the comments about how you should "Stop being such a drama queen about it, because privacy is so 20th century" and notice the similarity in the form of these comments.
I'm not saying they're made by the same people or even by an organized campaign (not necessarily anyway), but I'm saying that a lot of the "opinion makers" are worried, and that's the real story here. They're worried enough to either decide just to not talk about it too much or save their own bacon by coming out in favor of NSA overreach. It goes something like this: "Yes, mistakes were made, but the issues are being addressed" or, "There's overreach, but at least we're safe" or "The people who have exposed this overreach are a bunch of attention whores" or, "Get over it, princess. Privacy is a thing of the past because you use Google". Don't ask me to explain the rationale of that last one. I guess somehow, if you decide to have a private transaction with a private party and you give them your name and phone number, I guess it means that it's OK to do a pen register on your phone or put your contacts list into some database of some private contractor working for the government (and working for other private companies).
People see what happens if you rock this boat too hard. People are tacitly aware of what can happen if a little birdy drops a word in someone's ear about you. There are names in the news of people that nobody really wants to mention too much, like Aaron Schwarz and that Rolling Stone journalist with the car accident or even just Glenn Greenwald's partner getting hassled in a UK airport. For 9 hours. Nobody needs that. Ain't nobody got time to fight a faceless contractor who works for a company without customers and without accountability who works for the Federal Government. Hell, I don't even have time to fight with my phone company, and I'm gonna take on who knows who?
If your credit rating goes bad, you could lose your job. If the FBI start talking to your neighbors, you could lose your apartment. If you're so much as questioned, it could change the way people look at you. In an environment where jobs are scarce and things uncertain, it's not hard to put enough fear into people that they'll just decide to keep their heads down and pay attention to their fantasy football league instead of expressing their outrage that now our government treats us all like the enemy.
I have seen cases where tax rates go over 100%.
I'd love to see a citation for this.
I'm not challenging you, or doubting you, but I'd like to read some of the details.
I suspect that the "incompatibility" comes from how little of the corporation's actual income has to be considered "income". From the US to Greece to Finland, you find that even the rates that would be considered confiscatory are almost always accompanied by givebacks, subsidies, and special exemptions.
But Apple's been using fictional countries to run it's money through for some time. Maybe they'll decide to move their headquarters there now.
Clearly, the Irish have not figured out who's the boss.
We have been giving to the Chinese charity for far too long. It's time we stopped. We really don't need them. They need us. If they want us, they should pay for us. Not the other way around.
That applies to more than just China. Unfortunately it has not sunken in to the people negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will just force us to accelerate the horrible policies that have gutted the American middle class and caused at least three economic catastrophes since the 1970s.
They should just define specifically what the limits of the service is instead of writing in nebulous language about servers that could mean anything a lawyer wants them to mean.
That right there is the whole thing in a nutshell.
On the other hand, I'm a little bit sympathetic to "make the thing first, then work out the details" because if I had to hammer out every detail, every contingency of the things I do before I do them, I'd never get anything done.
However, when you get the size of Google and have that much of a bigfoot-effect from everything you do, there is a fairly substantial responsibility to define parameters. Because other people depend on you.
How hard do you think it is to build a stereo?
And how long are Chinese stereo-builders going to be willing to work for 25 cents an hour and all the rice you can eat?
The world would be so much better if purity was something obtainable, or even desirable.
The best we can hope for is that if a guy jumps in between me and the guy who wants to kill me is more interested in blocking the other guy than harming me.
We love attention-seekers, and shouldn't be surprised when public people are attention-seekers. I just hope they seek attention for screwing up the gears of the people who are outright hostile to us. Deal with Greenwald after he's done what he can to thwart the ones who are out to do us harm, because as much as I dislike certain aspects of his act, I don't see him trying to hurt me. I cannot say the same for the ones with whom he's chosen to do battle.
Your free tuition doesn't cost them jack shit.
That's not exactly true, but I understand with your point.
But, the price is the price and a tuition waiver and research assistant's salary is better than minimum wage. I've been there, both when I was getting my PhD and when my wife got hers. You're not going to be living in the clover, but you won't starve to death.
(free tuition and maybe a tiny stipend that doesn't even add up to minimum wage).
To that grad student from out of state, free tuition and a tiny stipend adds up to a lot more than minimum wage. Let's see...out-of-state grad school tuition at umich is $39,818.
Yep, if you're getting a tuition waiver and are paid as a research assistant, even if you're a resident of Michigan, you're way ahead of minimum wage. A research assistant takes home about $ 1300-1600/mo., so the Michigan resident who pays $19,792 is clearing...a lot more than minimum wage.
I don't need this kind of convenience. In fact, I don't even want this kind of convenience. Maybe I'm just a lot smarter than other people, but I have actually figured out how to choose which groceries to buy all on my own.
How bad does it have to get before people realize that no corporation is offering convenience because it loves us? How many times does someone have to run to use that "10% off" coupon for the box of cereal that is 15% smaller before they figure it out?
No, no corporate generosity for me, thanks.
The first free country that offers secure webmail to the world will quickly become the most beloved country on earth.
They should charge enough to make it profitable, of course and then let anybody on earth sign up.
Let's say, for example, that - I don't know - Finland maybe, rolled out a secure webmail system. Unlike a private corporation, what's the US gov't going to do, threaten to invade Finland over too much freedom?
but Valve's page just mentions free and doesn't say what kind of "free" that is.
It's the kind of "free" that's more free than Windows or Mac OS or iOS.
Sometimes, that's enough for now, you know?
They stayed with the old connector for ages. They replaced it because it was getting too big.
I wasn't aware the old connectors were growing.
News flash 2 : people often hold stock for longer than a year. Except they are Gordon Gecko.
Did you know that the average share of stock in the Market is held for 22 seconds?
We are not a loved organization, but we are a respected one. -- John Fisher
