Interesting to see this brought up again by Businessweek but this is far from news – Nestlé and PepsiCo were featured in the 2009 documentary Tapped, which came to many of the same conclusions, and brought up other potential health issues with bottled water, such as the use Bisphenol-A (BPA) in bottle plastics.
Signup seems to be broken? I've tried a few 'random' (keyboard-mashing) usernames to no avail. As guptaneil pointed out, some immediate form feedback on username availability would be very helpful as well.
Perhaps they meant that foreign (specifically Chinese) competition has done much better globally than those companies currently holding most of the US market.
The idea that we should create a ban on private primary and secondary-ed institutions to fix the public system is incomprehensible to me. Should we force people with enough time and effort to devote to quit homeschooling, too? How about those who can afford private tutors? How far do you plan to take this to eliminate any economic advantage? Inciting conflict and anti-governmental feelings is a great way to inspire creative workarounds by the upper class, not creative solutions to a broken shitpile of an educational system. Ask yourself: would you really be inclined to fix something that someone else broke because you were forced to by the government?
The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?
What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.
The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.
I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, and b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them free computers. Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, especially when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?
I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.
*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.
You should move the survey response bars into a more neutral organization, otherwise it places "respectful" and "team player" in a context where they appear to be lacking compared to your other traits. Also, I believe you mean 'persistent' in your scrolling text bit at the top.
You're criticizing The Atlantic (which happens to be a print publication as well, not just online) for an article stating that Bitcoin won't become an everyday currency, but saying "it doesn't have to fit [that] role." The article never said it did have to fit that role. The journalism is perfectly fine here, quit being defensive and make an actual argument.
That 30% price change in a year was an anomaly, and it was in 1980, during a severe global recession. Bitcoin, meanwhile, just gained value approximately eightfold over several weeks ago, and it's relatively unusual that it isn't highly volatile, especially lately.
I kind of wonder if that's because a lot of updates are rolled out poorly to older devices. On my previous two phones, I've ended up running CyanogenMod or another third-party ROM, even at the same base Android version at the stock OTA updates, because many times even the RC versions run better than what's getting pushed by the carrier. Verizon customer here though, so I don't know if other networks are better about that. I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if that effect (wanting a new phone over an update) is intentional.
"Larry Page publicly stated at Google’s I/O conference this year that he wants to start his own country."
You know it's serious journalism when they take something that was already overblown by the actual media and rehash it. Also, when he says, "if I can speculate further," and proceeds to talk about "steal[ing] the content that greases their ad machines," as well as "their quasi-religious effort to more quickly bring about technological singularity," ending in an unclever and sarcastic comment.
This is an inflammatory piece of junk with an alarming lack of facts (and abundance of pathos appeals and weasel words) to back up any of the claims. Political criticism is fine, but this is just blasphemy pretending to be news.
Nearly ordered myself a test before discovering this mess on the day the FDA sent their letter. I would really hope they'd provide some sort of compensation to those who're being screwed...doubtful that'll happen though.
