borism

their products and services can. but the people who made them and their ideas usually don't disappear without a trace. so if you see a service that was quickly shutdown by parent company after acquisition, you have to realize it wasn't about product but team or intellectual property (or just keeping them off competitors' hands)

Besides, even OP states that affirmative action was only "in part" responsible for funding success.

maybe he means Flight Management Computers? those don't have direct control over avionics anyway, AFAIK.

I mean, even the static scan of paper maps with dynamically resizable labels will often times do better than what we have on screens right now.

well that's the thing - very few if any digital maps allow you to do simple things like this.

possibilities of digital cartography are much greater than paper one for sure, it's just that very few of them have materialized and gained widespread use yet.

I mean, ability to pinch zoom into satellite photo of my neighborhood is awesome and such, but I'd change it any day for beautiful (and correct!) offline cartography like Times Atlas.

Startupping is a creative process in which all levels of company should participate, good ideas might very well have come from below ranks.

He mentions he didn't get founder's stock though, so that kinda answers your question.

How long do you think will they be able to sell their printer ink (has to be their highest margin business) if they don't compete in tablet space?

edit: so yeah, turns out they're actually spinning off tablets together with PC division as low margin businesses. Doesn't mean that whoever ends up with it (Samsung?) will have to do both.

Not this article though. It proposes pretty clear solutions, and no, they don't involve money or anything political you talk about. In fact quite opposite, it talks that both right and left in Finland agree that all kids should get the same quality of education. Did you read it anyway?

So devaluing that space as long as they can thanks to their other businesses might just as well be the only viable tablet strategy for HP while it reinvents itself.

Is the only topic permissable here these days another software patent debacle or something?

But think about it logically. Earthquake is a quick release of kinetic energy of a tectonic plate in one relatively small location. But the whole plate moves! So yes, earthquakes happening on the same plate's boundary can very well be correlated, IMHO (not pretending to be a geology expert or anything, but the topic is fascinating).

Virginia is not in any way connected to Pacific Ring of Fire though.

Much like the Skype-SilverLake plan.

37signals sure has some good lawyers!

Mess is like adjustable rate mortgage.

You might be able to pay down the former, but you may go underwater if the latter goes way above what you imagined in your worst case scenarios.

isn't this the only thing that matters? After all we're talking about President Obama, not Senator Obama (which is a totally different topic)

Left/Right spectrum - absolutely. That's why modern spectrum is 2-dimensional, and I totally for expanding it into 3rd and further dimensions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Other_multi-...

That doesn't mean that we can't more or less precisely place one or the other political force onto it.

This is not "real" science of course, more kind of art, but if we conform to the rules of the game ("liberal democracy" it is called), then I think by polling large enough pool of political scientists/commentators/pundits/whatever-you-wanna-call-them we can arrive at pretty good consensus of where to place one party or the other at each moment in time, wouldn't you agree?

now to your questions:

1. What are the ideas of "real" members of the Left that Obama and the other Democrats are failing to represent?

the link to the article by J.K.Galbraith I gave above perfectly answers it, I think:

Whether your prime interest is housing, health care, peace, justice, jobs or climate change, if you are an activist in America you have known for a long time that this President is not your friend.

2. Since Obama and the Democrats clearly are in opposition to the American Right, what are those ideas that they (the DEMs) are fighting for in opposition to the Right?

Well, I'm actually not even so sure anymore that Obama is in clear opposition to "American Right" whatever that may be. I don't recall any issue during his presidency where he has stood his ground and haven't bowed to pressure from GOP, do you? Guantanamo, Afganistan, Healthcare, Bush Tax Cuts extensions and now Debt Ceiling deal. Not one of those went by unmodified by Tea Partiers, even when Democrats had supermajority.

So I clearly side with commentators who called Obama centrist right from inauguration. I mean, who even calls Obama leftist besides Tea Partiers?

[1] Up to half the people alive in 1930, to use Kovács' insensitive phraseology, were mentally retarded? Really? That might help explain the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

this, again, is not my personal opinion, but what I've read from political scientists.

you or me can indeed not consider Bush a conservative, but in any objective terms as studied by political science he is, and in the same vein Obama and the majority of Democrats are considered centrists, not leftists (or commies, as GOP would like to paint them).

Here's an article that is shaping my opinion on the matter from very respected "progressive" James K. Galbraith:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/151949/how_obama_is_neutrali...

P.S. if you disagree, I'd appreciate explanation about what exactly.

Now here in Estonia and I venture a guess in pretty much all of liberal democratic countries (and most notably USA) right-wing IS actually associated if not equal with extreme right-wing, since there actually is no left-wing.

So when Obama or our centrist parties are labelled "communist" by teabaggers and such, you actually begin to understand that something is terribly out of balance with democratic systems of ours.

23andMe makes a very good job of notifying you about this per disease they have markers for.