Doesn't matter. Having a good to decent SAT score enables one to get into a better college/university. As long as you don't spend more than 1 summer prepping for it, it's worth the time investment.
Russia, US and North Korea aren't very much different. Collateral damage from drone strikes? CIA tortures? NSA surveillance? If one wants to boycott a game, then one should boycott all of them. Otherwise, that'll be a double standard would it not? And one's morals and beliefs would be contradictory and hypocritical.
The statement that Russia, the US, and North Korea are morally equivalent says more about the person saying that than it does about any of those 3 countries.
I'm not sure it makes much sense to compare a country that has engaged in zero wars of aggression in the last 25 years with one that has invaded or bombed Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Serbia, Sudan and Bosnia. The death toll for the Iraq war alone may well have been over a million. Add another 300,000 - 500,000 child deaths from the Iraq sanctions in the 90s.
It's possible that the North Korean government has killed more North Koreans over that time period; I see estimates for the 1948-1987 period of 700,000 - 3,500,000 deaths. However even assuming that rate remained the same subsequently it is at most within the same order of magnitude as US caused deaths. I don't really see a great difference morally.
It's a strange argument to make anyway. We don't need to compare the US government to poorly understood North Korean atrocities to measure the awfulness of the atrocities it commits which are numerous and heinous.
North Korea punishes people for their ideas (do anything that the Glorious Leader doesn't like, and your entire family for a couple of generations will live in a prison camp). That is rather insidious, and these people can have 'natural' deaths in captivity.
North Korea also threatens to attack civilian populations indiscriminately (e.g. Seoul, Japan, etc) if they don't get their way. They even threaten nuclear war on an semi-annual basis.
On the other hand, the US strikes may kill civilians due to poor intelligence gathering or 'acceptable levels of collateral,' but they have not indiscriminately bombed (or even threatened to bomb) civilian populations. There is at least an attempt made to limit the amount of death dealt, even if it's not always successful. I'm not admitting that this is good, or that (e.g.) the US should have been in Iraq in the first place, but claiming that the US is on the level of North Korea is laughable.
The US 'threatens' nuclear war as well. There is no point in nuclear weapons if you don't threaten to use them.
>they have not indiscriminately bombed (or even threatened to bomb) civilian populations
That is pretty disingenuous. We both know that the US government counts any adult male in certain countries/regions as a militant rather than civilian. If you claim nobody is a civilian then of course you never kill civilians
Also, I would like to hear your defence of the Iraq sanctions. You can hardly claim that was accidental or poor intelligence or that it wasn't indiscriminate. Much like in North Korea those excess deaths can be (and were by the US government) attributed to natural causes.
> The US 'threatens' nuclear war as well. There is no point in nuclear weapons if you don't threaten to use them.
I challenge you to cite an incident where the US has openly said, "do this or we will launch nukes at [city full of civilians]."
> That is pretty disingenuous. We both know that the US government counts any adult male in certain countries/regions as a militant rather than civilian. If you claim nobody is a civilian then of course you never kill civilians
Your post is the one that comes across (to me at least) as being disingenuous. My claim was that the US is not indiscriminately bombing civilian populations. You somehow are trying to conflate this with me saying that the US is not killing any civilians at all, which I did not claim, nor do I believe.
This section of your post comes across like you're looking for a way to vent your anger about how the US counts "any adult male in certain countries/regions as a militant." In doing so, you are also discounting women and children as civilians by implicitly claiming that only male civilians are killed (and then 'covered up' by claiming that they must have been militants).
> Also, I would like to hear your defence of the Iraq sanctions
I'm unsure what you're talking about. The economic sanctions against Iraq post-Gulf War but prior to the invasion? If you claim deaths due to economic sanctions are the fault of the countries that are imposing sanctions, then technically most of the world was responsible. Carrying this line of reasoning further, you could blame the US for deaths in North Korea due to economic sanctions, no?
It's a good thing that John Legere places customer care/service as a high priority, but it seems like you didn't take the time to figure out the problem yourself.
Instead of "getting frustrated" and taking the issue to the CEO, you could have spent some time and effort to resolve it yourself.
Also, this post doesn't provide enough information about your issue and why you had a misunderstanding. If it did, then it would be more meaningful.
Why not use the trace keyboard? I know Sense 5 on the HTC One comes with a trace keyboard option. It might take a bit of learning to get used to, but using trace keyboards seems to be a lot faster and more efficient than clicking on small physical keyboard buttons. Then again, they don't provide the tactile feedback that a physical keyboard does, so you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.
>> you can't really type with muscle memory and have to look at the screen when trace-typing.
I used to be a devout BlackBerry user, and could happily type out entire emails in meetings with my device under the table, send then, and be 100% confident that I had typed what I was planning on typing. Likewise I could type while walking, and only glance down to see what my incoming messages were. In many jobs, the ability to do that is essential to success. I can't come near that with any type of soft keyboard.
Having said all that, I don't use a BB any more - my 9900 died, and I bought a Nexus 4. I was looking at a Q10, but it was $300 more expensive than the Nexus, it still doesn't have anywhere near the number of apps, and I was no longer in a place in life where the key BB features - BBM and the ability to type long emails without looking - mattered any more.
My karma level has no relation to his behavior. And Spongle, if you really aren't new to HN, then you should know which types of comments are useful and informative and which ones are not.
Not a very good article. The author implies that there will be a mass migration of users to another service if Facebook remains stagnant in terms of carrying out acquisitions. But Facebook continues to improve and update the user experience, so there is little incentive for users to move to a would-be competitor. Not when they already have connections with family members, close friends, and many others. Facebook has very much become a part of many users daily lives like using the Internet, and users have already invested a lot into Facebook; it's like a sunk cost. FB may remain static (in the same niche market) if they don't carry out more acquisitions, but that's (may be) fine. They can't be "doomed" just because other companies are carrying out more acquisitions.
Why not drop a mention of the NSA/CIA's spying and hacking on other countries and American citizens? Seems that it's only news for the media when China does it. Bunch of hypocrites.
The NYT and other major US media are pretty regularly reporting on the ongoing revelations from the Snowden whistle-blowing. I believe HN has instituted a "no NSA spying" story policy in general due to political arguments rather than discussions of the technical aspects involved. I could be wrong though.
This is an empty, useless comment full of hot air, and using swear words does nothing to support the poor assumptions and reasoning that you made.
The "best" devices will never sell without marketing. And if RIM does move to Android, that signals that they gave up and tried to stave off their decline/death by exploiting the Android market. Not to mention that with the competition, RIM has even less of a chance.
I recommend thinking of a unique comment/argument that doesn't repeat what is already said. If you cannot think of one, then please don't post a useless comment that turns this into a Reddit thread.
Half of your comments on HN so far are meta comments about how bad other comments are. You will not have a good time of it if you continue down this path. Stay on topic.
I mainly browse HN to read good/stimulating discussions and submissions, to expand my knowledge, to see other users' reasoning, to develop and maintain a improvement/scientist attitude, and to try to maintain a good quality experience for other users. I'm not here to "have a good time" - if that's what you mean.
But I'm noticing a trend in decreasing submission and comment quality, and I don't know if other users realize that or if they are ignorant of it. HN is becoming more "average" everyday, and I feel that more and more readers are commenting with ignorance, unfounded assumptions, and generally bad arguments overall. In short, a lot of the comments are useless/inaccurate/invalid. I'm sure you notice it as well? How are we supposed to address this issue?
If it's frowned upon to post meta-comments (on HN or any forum or article), then I wish there was a service or feature (not restricted to HN) that allows people to submit/receive feedback and constructive criticism on their comments and diction.
You see many people using words such as "obviously", "only", "completely", but this category of words (degree/intensifier adverbs) is improper/inaccurate to use many times because of the unfounded/unsupported assumptions that they imply. It make me cringe every time I see that. It's an identifying feature of a bad comment, or one that could be better if more effective diction were used.
And improperly using those words puts a severe hole in the argument, but people still treat these types of comments the same way as valid ones when they shouldn't.
Update: I think HN may want to implement the scoring system used on Slashdot to evaluate posts/comments based on relevance, usefulness, information, or insight. This way, there will be no need to post meta-comments to attempt to correct negative behavior that results in the degradation of the community and the decreasing insight and relevance of posts.
