Actually, I can talk to more than three different people at the same time. Physically, that is.

If they give me an amp, it becomes quite scalable. ;)

Money is money. If you're buying what I'm selling, I'm ok with you using a feather and ink or sms if need be. Specifically in these times.

What you just said is amazing. Wow.

Right.

I work for an American company and my work territory consists of Scandinavia, the Benelux and France while my boss is in the UK.

My wife is from Israel, and my son and my ex also live in Israel. Apart from that I have friends all over the world, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Israel, Russia, the US and Austria.

Could you explain to me how knowing what methods of communication are used in those countries is not relevant?

And, more to the point, what rock have you been living under in the last 15 years?

You realize that was just a long winded way of saying never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Not true. Any neuro-scientist or evolutionary biologist will disprove that statement in a heartbeat. We are not necessarily wired to be evil. You should read "Wij zijn ons Brein" by Dick Swaab, or "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

There are numerous examples of Altruism being an evolutionary stable strategy, and hence altruism and empathy are wired into us since the dawn of time.

There are some humans who tend to suffer from neurological damage, hormonal imbalance or other issues that cause them to act overly egotistically. Some of those do disproportionate amounts of damage to others, and we have a confirmation bias that blows that out of proportion.

To further demolish your argument yourself, I suggest you read "Risk: The politics and science of Fear" by Dan Gardner. The man is all about cognitive biases. ;)

I felt by your answer you were a Swede. And lo and behold, you are. Jag kan, som någorlunda Svennefierad Holländare, hålla med om vad du säger. ;)

Actually, it does not really matter if an argument contains swear-words or not. I dislike it when people attack any given statement by pointing at form rather than content.

I don't as much mind the gentleman's swearing in the original post, I dislike the complete lack of nuance in depicting those that don't agree with him.

But then that's typically American, isn't it, form over content?

As much as I am a left winger who doesn't believe that Corporations are People, to name an example, your notion of what Big Oil does is a bit skewed.

Both Shell and Statoil (the latter being the Norwegian Government's oil company) are doing tons of research into other forms of energy than just oil. Statoil is using a part of its profits to make the statement by the Norwegian government to be 100% CO2 neutral as a country by 2020 come true.

What I think is horrible in this discussion is that both "sides" of the discussion take very black and white populist stances. Corporations don't *only* do evil, and scientists are not *always* do gooders. But the opposite is also not always true.

So where is the nuance? All I see is a lot of screaming and finger pointing and not a lot of constructive discourse.

Funnily enough I saw a story once about an oil company and a conservative think tank sponsoring research by a professor into climate change. I think it was mentioned on the Daily Show, but I don't remember the professor or University involved.

You would, as Jon Stewart pointed out, expect a certain outcome if you adhere to the money dictates research philosophy. What's funny is that this research report showed that climate change is real, and on top of it, it is influenced by us.

So the Money argument isn't waterproof.

I worry because I live in the Netherlands.

This means, for example, that I was born 7.5 meters below sea level, in a province that consists of land that used to be the bottom of a sea until we built a system of walls and pumps to make land.

85% of the Netherlands currently lies below sea level when there's a high tide. The intricate system of walls, bridges, canals, pumping stations and ground water level monitors are managing the water quite well right now, but if sea levels rise, the pressure exerted on those walls or dykes is going to increase exponentially.

There are some government plans to convert a strip of four kilometers of the North Sea into land so we can create an additional buffer of dykes, walls and hydraulic doors to manage that, but at the end of the day, if water levels keep rising, the cost-benefit analysis will show it might not make sense to sustain the country currently known as the Netherlands.

So whether climate change is man-made or due to increased solar activity, cosmic radiation, a natural cycle or whatever reason you can come up with, it is a tangible concern for me as a citizen of a coastal area.

I am quite sure the good people of Bangkok and Bangladesh agree with this point of view. As do the Venetians, to name a few.

But... Apple's stuff is not manufactured locally!

I believe in spanking too. Sometimes I am a naughty boy, and my wife dresses up in heels and spanks me while speaking with a German accen..... Oh.... Wait.... ;)

First of all, as others have commented, most of the civilized world doesn't consider whipping your children an appropriate disciplinary action. So his "Fuck you, asshole" in reply to the gentleman's defense of the whipping is completely justified. Saying that my asshole dad whipped me does indeed not make it OK for some asshole dad to whip someone else, and I can understand this is an emotional topic.

My son lives with his mother in Israel while I am far away. We try to maintain a good contact. However, if I ever find out that my ex or her current boyfriend would structurally whip Daniel with a belt, I'll be on the first plane to Israel to end their lives. I am not kidding, it is something I will gladly do jail time for in an unsavory country. Mind you, by structurally I mean more than once. If I found out it happened once I'd just fly there to punch their lights out and claim custody of my child. I am a reasonable man.

Secondly, the video is about a 200 pound dude whipping a girl. My mother always taught me that I shouldn't hit women. I don't think it's a man's job to hit a woman. We have quite the different physique, and quite frankly I don't give a shit who beat who for what reason... You just don't hit women. Period.

To all the people that claim "children behaved far better when I was a kid" I can call bullshit. Records of a 15th century monk's writings find him complaining about "today's youth" who refuse to dress properly, are lazy, stupid and ill-mannered. It is a property of mankind to become the sort of "it was all better before" grumpy old bastard, and yet I see we have the longest life expectancy ever, and people seem on the whole to become more and more domesticated.

So no, I really don't think the "Fuck you, asshole" gentleman needs more discipline. I think his reaction is honest and balanced.

Actually, the law disagrees where I'm from. Over here, you are an adult at 18, but the law does state that until 21 you should be able to count on support from your parents. From 16 you can drive a 50 cc motor cycle, drink beer and have consensual sex with your peers (certain limitations apply to the last point), but driving, joining armies, voting, complete sexual self-determination and the ability to smoke weed, drink hard liquor and such all come at 18.

That would be the legal aspect. From a neurological perspective, the Rotterdam professor of Neurology Dick Swaab has been claiming for years that a human brain doesn't reach a stable state until it's 23 or 24 years old. The way the brain physically fires and the way hormones affect a person's mindset is enough reason to collectively say that all persons below 23 are of diminished mental capacity or at the very least show a diminished sense of good judgment.

Car Insurance companies will definitely back that claim up, if you look at the way a person's car insurance premium is calculated, by the way. So saying that this judge is whipping an adult is just plain wrong from both a legal and scientific perspective, and I find it morally objectionable.

This is a kid who got whipped viciously with a leather belt for downloading some songs from internet. The man in the video doesn't seem to whip his daughter in an orderly fashion that suggests the administration of a measured disciplinary whipping, the man in the video beats his daughter in a completely emotionally over the top manner that suggests a somewhat vicious nature.

From my perspective, this man is not fit to be a judge or parent, for that matter. On top of that, I am relatively sure my mother would strike him exactly once, across the face, for behaving in this way. After that he'd have to sit through a full hour lecture with a lot of finger-wagging and stern staring during which he'd feel strangely compelled to listen real damn well lest he get one of those measured smacks across the face again.

By the way, my mother struck me twice in my whole upbringing. It was deserved in both cases, and done in such a way that I will never forget them. I dearly love the woman. She is wise, kind and on the whole, just.

Eh,

I don't get that. Now you're glorifying things without looking at past failures and current successes.

Firstly, HP's NetServer products, for those that remember, were a complete failure when compared to Compaq's ProLiant Servers, and after the merge we rightfully went with that line of servers. If you then look at the current C-class blade product line and the attached Flexfabric stuff, you'll have to agree that it is, in your words, exquisitely engineered stuff.

You're going on about a printer, but if you then look at what a printer used to cost versus what you buy now for a couple of dollars, yes, the ink is expensive in comparison, but that's only because the device doesn't cost you anything anymore. The same can be said for lasers. In the 80's, the average private person couldn't afford a laser printer for the home, whereas now I can buy color laser for the same price a consumer inkjet with no frills cost me in 1993.

Now HP's line of ProCurve Switches were hot shit back in the day, but they never went anywhere commercially. So we had very well-engineered network infrastructure for sale that never went anywhere for the longest time. Same goes for Storage devices (Marathon, anyone?).

Having said all that, the market and economy of scale have changed. For all players in the market. You don't solder together a PC in your garage anymore. You move millions of products all over the globe at a breakneck pace and with 4 hr response on breakdowns, sometimes even 6 hr to fix contracts.

With those constraints in mind, I don't think HP is doing that badly.

I just spent sixteen years of my life at HP, and I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement.

Carly Fucking Fiorina. Makes Mark Hurd look good.