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If you want to read the full article, you need a subscription to FORTUNE magazine. Specifically, you need to enter the mailing address where your subscription is delivered.

By the way, I have it on good authority that NYU's Bobst Library, at 70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012, subscribes to a whole bunch of periodicals.

No, you are just scrambling in denial:

"Climates change. 500 years ago, New York Harbor froze solid. 7,000 years ago, it was about twenty miles from the ocean."

was an obvious attempt to say that humans don't affect the climate, though you hedged your bets by first saying

"There is no "crisis". There are cyclic variations in climate, with or without human influence. Human activity may have some amplifing effect on those cycles, but not to the degree that you are hysterical about."

Human activity is pushing our equilibrium of the past 10,000 years past the tipping point. Get used to it, both in the bad news from reality-based people like me, and in the lethal atmosphere we're creating to survive in.

And then there's this http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/research_data/health_co nsequences/mortali.htm:

Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking

2 million Americans killed by tobacco since Bush took office.

C'mon the if the trend is to attack a threat pre-emptively, then why is nothing being done? Or would that be too much like being productive?

Wasn't there just an article about electronic devices not using lead by 2006? And yet this technology uses PbS, right? Did I miss something? Are they working on a non-lead version?

Costco is nowhere near going out of business, and in fact, is beating the pants off Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's warehouse club chain. Costco had a pretty decent holiday season, too.

As students of the federal budget know, the citizens of some states pay more in taxes than they get back from Uncle Sam in grants and benefits. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan commissioned frequent studies that showed how New York was getting the shaft. Arnold Schwarzenegger was stunned to learn upon taking office that for every dollar Californians send to Washington, they get back only 77 cents--an imbalance that topped $50 billion in 2003.
linkus jucius

There is a very interesting article in the last edition of Fortune. I think AMD got it right this time around.

My favorite quote :
AMD CFO Rivet explains
"As hard as we tried to win the hearts and minds of CIOs, with the desktop as our focus we were going to fail. They made their decisions with the server on down. When Intel had 100% of the x86 server market, it could charge whatever it wanted and use that money to beat us on desktops. We had to be in the profit haven".

Ruiz (CEO of AMD) calls the server-led approach "do or die" for AMD: "If we hadn't pulled this off I would have shut the door"

From the Fortune article:
AMD: Chipping Away at Intel
CEO Hector Ruiz came from humble roots to propel AMD into the big leagues.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles /0,15114,724543,00.html

You need to be a subscriber to read the whole article :(

Predictable, consistent disregard of world opinion coming from the very same crowd of turferclones that cheerlead for a radical preemptive invasion sold by war profiteers using lies about clear and present WMD as a chickenhawk substitute for pursuit and prosecution of the Wahabi attackers of the Pentagon all while forcing oilcon rulers onto other nations and running economies into the ground.

Such an extreme case of do as I say, not as I do.

It's, it's, O'Lielly diplomacy!

Bush sucks? Shut up shut up shut up! Hussein sucks! We will replace your government by force! Chávez sucks! We will attempt to replace your government via intrigue! Korea, er, let's cut to commercial.

At least the British keep it in the family.

FORTUNE 500 List
Each year, the FORTUNE 500 List is compiled based on the latest financial data reported to a government agency through January 31 of that year. The List consists of the 500 largest domestic, U.S.-incorporated companies as ranked by total operating revenues, determined on the basis of each company's latest fiscal year.

"I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype," Michael Powell, chairman, Federal Communications Commission, explained. "When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it's free - it's over. The world will change now inevitably."
Fortune Magazine, 16th February 2004

I don't see a 2/16/2004 edition of Fortune according to their archives but I did find an article on 2/9/2004 which I cannot see in its entirety (see here for more bitching about that topic).

Like the Dean Kamen water purfier? Lookes cheaper to me...

--
3 new Gmail invitations availiable

Also, the name he goes by is simply "Winter". The only reason he has the "John Smith" in his name is because too many things (like the DMV) break when presented with a single name.

He is also a fairly good tournament Scrabble player. Because the National Scrabble Association's database can't handle single names either, he's registered as "Winter ZXQKJ".

"We were paying $35/hour for talent that we could get for about $55/hour domestically."

I don't know where you are located exactly, but in Florida, the going contracting rate for most IT positions, such as J2EE programming, is between $30 and $35 per hour, not $55/hour. This is take home pay, not including the markup.

More on topic, I suspect that the outsourcing trend is overblown. Quite frankly, I believe there is no longer a need for so many programmers. There is off-the-shelf software available for just about any business niche you can think of. For example, there is software for the commercial fishing industry. There is software for the aquaculture (fish farming) industry, including software that simulates various pond management scenarios and analyses the effects on yields. Software exists for the manufactured housing industry and the prefabricated concrete industry.

From what I see, companies want to hire people that know how to use all of this software to improve their business. They want managers and consultants, business experts, not programmers. This is why IBM bought PricewaterhouseCoopers back in 2002. As this Fortune article explains, (Subscription required) clients want IBM to use its business/tech experts to solve thorny business issues, improve their operations, or even to run entire divisions such as customer service or finance/accounting.

"There is enough software out there," companies seem to be saying, " now help make it help me."

don't have your house wired with fiber optics yet? Too few computers? There Is Help!

NPR did a good story on it in December. If you don't like using ears, Fortune covered it too.

Paying offshore workers much less than American workers would make for the same job isn't necessarily exploitation. The "low" salaries really depend on perspective. For example, a call center worker in India makes more money than a doctor does.

so many people think that art is just about how things 'LOOK',
but true art arises where form and function are integral --

-- design is not veneer - steve jobs interview in fortune magazine --

Fortune Magazine: What has always distinguished the products of the
companies you've led is the design aesthetic. Is your obsession with design
an inborn instinct or what?

Steve Jobs: We don't have good language to talk about this kind of thing.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer.
It's interior decorating.
It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.
But to me, nothing could be
further from the meaning of design.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up
expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or the shape of the shell.
The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer
in which each element plays together.

On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it
is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time.

That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an
enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do
a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest
thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.

This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy
and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good
at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for
them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely
like it.

After a lot of hand-wringing and head scratching we concluded that the reason they are stealing is because they feel that at $6 an hour, the company is stealing from them.

Time to revisit this Fortune Magazine article again.

Synopsis: Costco suffers much less stock shrinkage than Walmart because it pays its employees well and treats them nicely.

I hate this unfortunately pervasive attitude. The point of a company/CEO/board is not, and should not be to make as much money as quick as possible, at any cost to anyone. Morality ought to be a consideration in business decisions. Why do so many people seem to think that companies should be faceless money-grubbing automatons? That makes me vomit in my own mouth.

There is a place for responsible companies, ones that treat employees, consumers, the environment, etc with respect. There are various lists that suggest this idea of responsible business isn't totally foreign.

What if you, as a CEO, could make more money by shipping programming jobs to India, should you? What if you could make more by using child labor in Burma? How about if you could make more by dealing with an apartheid supporting regime in South Africa, or a dictatorial regime in the Sudan, or North Korea, or Iraq? How about if you could make more money by overstating earnings reports? What if your motthoople widget would cost a little less if you buy from company A rather than company B, only company A tests it by anally raping baby seals?

Not only is moral behavior a good thing to do, just because; it actually can be good in terms of reputation, public image, and employee karma. If you prefer the Gordon Gecko style of business, so be it... But don't cloak that in the bullshit of 'responsibility to the stockholders.'

-Ted

using fossilized hydrocarbon is certainly not the only way to create plastic. Here are some examples:

Plantic Technologies will roll out a cornstarch-based bioplastic wired article
Bioplastic Fantastic
Toyota sees green in 'bioplastics' for cars

As a previous post mentioned, network. When you are networking, market what you have done and what you are capable of relentlessly.

Did you watch The Apprentice? Market yourself like Trump. You didn't write a program, you wroted the best #$&^ing program ever. You solved the hardest problem in the history of mankind. Show enthusiasm. Make them believe everything you touch turns to gold.

Oh, also forgot to add that Fortune compiles a yearly list of best companies to work for. It looks like they require you to pay to access the articles (like anyone will pony up 5 bucks just to read a single article having no idea about its quality), but get a newsstand copy, check one out at the library, or if you're a student, visit your Careers office.

Fortune also explains why a given company is the best to work for, so writing down a list of things you'd like to see in your potential employer would be helpful for the future.

"I'll have to be a global warming agnostic. I've seen credible viewpoints that indicate that in the next decades we will either be swimming like "Water World" or freezing in a new ice age."

The problem is that everyone associates Global Warming with warm weather. The truth is that Global Warming will alter the weather paterns of the earth and make some places colder. For example. The Gulf Stream has shut down 4 or 5 times during the past 20,000 years. The shutting down of the gulf stream is associated with a warmer global temperature. Scientists feel that the current global warming will shut down the gulf stream. Europe relies on the gulf stream to keep it's temperature somewhat moderate. Even though the global temerature is a few degrees higher. The global temperature will not make the up the difference for the lack of warm water and air from the gulf stream in the European region. The result is that Europe will be very cold and countries like England will become a tundra.

The Pentagon has already begun considering the consequences of global warming on future politics and thus warfare.

For the most part, I recommend each person do their due diligence because you learn more doing the research.

However, I'll give you one interesting piece I ran into when I was searching for someone who believed, as I do, that the trade deficit was deterorating America's wealth at a rapid rate. I never suspected it would be one of the richest men in the world sounding the alarm since most economists and large corporations were preaching free trade too much to confess the graveness of the trade deficit.

America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (pdf)
America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (html)
America's Growing Trade Deficit Is Selling the Nation Out From Under Us (Warren Buffet) (html, Fortune Article, paid subscription required)

Federal Express CEO Fred Smith made a huge investment in FAX over a private satellite network called Zapmail. The idea being they could do better than next day delivery by getting documents there in the next few hours.

Unfortunately for them high-speed FAX machines using dial-up phone lines became cheap and common and ZapMail was abandoned in a year.

"I'm still not convinced on global warming so how can I condemn another man who also isn't convinced."

Ok. That shows you're as ignorant as Bush. The difference is that you don't have to make decisions that can change the world, so you're excused to be ignorant. Even though Bush is dumb, he has specialists to help. And all these specialists, including those from Pentagon, are warning him about this. And he doesn't care. I strongly suggest you read this this

I love how you just say he lied to a whole nation in order to get support for the war. What did he say or even insinuate that was a lie?

You must been brain-washed if you din't notice the lies. He tried to picture Saddam as a threat to the US. But Saddam, althought being a son-of-a-bitch crazy loon, was harmless to the world at that point. His army was almost dismanteled, specially if compared to what it was some years ago. He didn't have any missile able to reach the continental US. He didn't have any WMD (in fact I am surprised the US didn't plant any WMD in Iraq, to be found). He was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda. And all reports Bush received indicated all this. But he tried to supress and change these reports and fabricate others, that would incriminate Saddam.

I suggest you read this excelent explanation, this and this. Please tell me what you think after reading these links.

I guess he's done with hoarding.

IBM's founder spent time in prison for his string arm dealings in the cash register business

Thirty NCR executives were found guilty in that decision, which was subsequently overturned. See this Fortune article for an overview. As far as I can tell, T.J. Watson never served a day.

Oh, and while T.J. arguably founded the modern IBM, the company had existed for years before T.J. got there as the "Computer Tabulating Recording Company". CTR was itself a derivative of Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896.

Why yes. Which is why the UK is in the process of rolling out Chip and PIN (the trial was last summer). Over the next 18 months, every credit card - and probably most debit cards - in the UK will be replaced, along with upgrades to near enough every ATM and PoS device.

The major enforcement of this is the shifting of liability from the card schemes (MC, VISA and AMEX mostly) to anyone that doesn't comply. By 2006, finding anyone relying on magstripe will be less easy than currently finding someone relying on paper carbons.

IIRC, the verification takes place on the card. The ATM passes the PIN entered to the card, which simply responds pass|fail. No keys pass between reader and card, and the real PIN is held on-card with a sensible level of encryption.

It's a far cry from the Fresno Drop of 1958.

OT: Given that:

1. this is a UK story
2. /. has UK-members a-plenty
3. every UK credit card company has written to all cardholders about it in the last few months
4. it's been well covered in /.-friendly publications like ElReg

I'm fairly gobsmacked that we're re-inventing the wheel here.

When it comes to science questions, such as whether or not global warming is happening and whether or not we are contributing to it and whether or not the icecaps are melting into the ocean at an alarming rate, well, the scientists are correct, and the administration is wrong.

Interestingly, I read an article in Fortune not to long ago that says that the Pentagon is studying the possibility that the climate in the Atlantic could suddenly change, causing temperatures in the U.S. and Europe to drop and creating a national security issue as third-world governments collapse and declare wars on each other due turmoil caused by famine.
So already, parts of the administration are considering global climate change to be too real to be ignored.

Why don't you tell the scientists CNN refers to here about your peculiar "urban legend". Or find out exactly what Fortune Magazine actually said about this.

Got any references to back your odd claims?

Your tinfoil hat looks a lot like a dunce cap.

For the amount of money a new major space initiative is going to cost, we need more than a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks and a thousand research publications which is all we're likely to get from the alleged Mars project.

NASA has already worked on a Space Power Satellite project, it estimates the costs for a 250MW demo for $10 B and discusses a 10,000 gigawatt system capable of replacing all other earth energy sources.

Throwing in a moon mining and processing facility and a space crew shack and either a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun might add tens or hundreds of billions to the cost but would make building the powersat system capable of rendering oil a non-issue a believable investment for the private sector.

We can get cost numbers down by buying

If the major oil companies want to continue selling energy, they can pay for the space power satellite systems which will make it possible to stop buying oil out of the Middle East.

As in the days of the railroads in the American West, a government/private sector initiative is needed to make a new place for industry and habitation and research available to the rest of us.

The best news about this is that the space infrastructure we need to build will make a trip to Mars a lot cheaper and safer and probably happen sooner than in the original Bush "plan". Fueling a Mars probe is a lot cheaper if one can simply order propellant shipped from a Moon facility to L-5.

For more discussion of this and other initiatives proposed to get America's brainpower working for the profit of everyone instead of sitting wasted and idle as current outsourcing promises to do, click here. The links on which this post and my further discussion are based can be found there.

Pirates of the Net

When such a large change occurs then there are going to be consequences ... which probably wont be good for human beings. What kind of consequences ? OK here is an article describing fears based on a possible slowing / shutdown of the Gulf Stream and perhaps even of the whole conveyor, and here is the article that probably inspired it, and finally here is the Pentagon take on the real world dire consequences.

By the way, I think this change is so large that there is no way it can be stopped. It is just plain too late.

Enjoy.

From Fortune's review:

Dell Unveils Its iPod Kryptonite

Bizarro was an imperfect clone of Superman yet still pulled off the occasional superhero feat. So it is with the Dell DJ.

By Peter Lewis

The evil scientist Lex Luthor used his duplicator ray to try to clone Superman, but something went terribly wrong. The result was Bizarro, a good-natured but ugly and backward version of the Man of Steel. Bizarro was the antithesis of cool; his home planet, Htrae, was square.

When Bizarro had good news to announce, he would say, "This am terrible!"

Which leads us into a discussion of Dell's new Bizarro version of Apple's iPod, called the Dell Digital Jukebox Music Player, or Dell DJ for short. Coming from the square world of Dell instead of the hip world of Apple, it's bigger, heavier, and clunkier than Apple's sleek, suave, elegant iPod, which arrived on the scene two years ago and quickly became the most popular portable digital music player on our home planet, Earth. Even worse, the Musicmatch-backed Dell Music Store is the clumsy, Bizarro counterpart to Apple's brilliant iTunes Music Store.

[...]

Bizarro, the pathetic wretch, was driven mad by constant comparisons with the handsome, smart, and sexy Superman he was meant to emulate. So too must the DJ suffer from inevitable comparisons with the iPod, with its two-year headstart. If the iPod did not exist, the DJ might even lay claim to the title of Best Portable Music Player Since the Sony Walkman.

But the iPod does exist, and so do Apple iTunes and the Apple iTunes Music Store, and thus the Dell DJ is doomed to be merely the second-best player on the market.

Fortune Magazine agrees. It named paperless voting the worst technology of 2003. Runner up was a skin-implantable RFID chip from Applied Digital Solutions.

Of the two, Enron and the future SCO, only SCO is an organization that is publicly using lies and deception as its primary business model. Anyone still at SCO should know this and should be avoided like the plague by any employer in the industry. At the end of the day, you've got to stand for something; working for someone you know is unethical is just as bad as actively participating.

Enron and AA aren't in the same category. Enron masterminded a huge deception with the complicity of a lot of people, including their auditors and investment bankers. Fortune did a great story awhile back, but it's not available on the web for free.

At the same time, Enron was a massive company that employed many, many people who had no clue what was going on. They were people who went to work every day and did a job that they thought was valuable. This included a number of acquired start-ups that were trying to build new technologies and business models. Unless someone was working in Enron's finance department or in some of their shady energy trading operations, it shouldn't matter. (And yes, I realize that there were many who deliberately avoided the truth because they were making a lot of money.)

If you have friends defending themselves based on the behavior of Fastow and Ken Lay, then your friends need to come up with a new answer. It should be a very simple, direct answer -- I was one of thousands of employees at Enron and I wasn't privy to any of the financial decisions. And that's the end of the story.

If someone persists and wants to go down the Enron road and you have to be more aggressive, then tell them you'll be happy to answer whatever questions they've got if they can tell you what their CEO worked on before lunch today and what their CFO discussed with their investment bankers the last time they talked.

At the end of the day, this shouldn't be an issue based on paranoid fantasies like, "Ex-SCO employees might plant code." It's a simple matter of the employee's ethics -- and an employee who is willing to cross the line, legally or morally, is a time-bomb. Sooner or later, he or she is going to screw you or your customer, because life is full of little temptations and opportunities to do the right or wrong thing.

Exactly. Interesting since the PowerMac G5 has been named product of the year in many medias around the world.

Aren't Toms Hardware very pro-Intel anyway? Rembember some rumor about that.

Fortune called the US $20 bill a product of the year. I think this is kinda silly, especially considering in Canada we've had unique money for several years now. Our money is more advanced, including a no-two-bills-the-same idea (which can be seen when held under UV light). Our $10 and $5 bills are like this. Sure, it may be an american magazine, but i still think that the note is not very special.

This article does a good job of conveying WalMart's reach. Microsoft rules the desktop, but WalMart rules retail.

A list of the Fortune 1000 can be found here, but I don't know if it's up to date. Fortune Magazine publishes the list in the spring of each year. If you're a subscriber, you can look at it here.

Yeah -- I'd buy a Dual 2Ghz-G5 with 8 Gigs of ram and a half terrabyte of disc if I was making 100 million off stock sales. Hell -- I calculate that price tag to be only a mere $8475 (without displays -- which would add another $2000 per display).

Mr. Joy is missing the point. No one is saying that Mac hardware/software is crap. It's just waay out of the spending range for mere mortals... which is perhaps the biggest reason why Linux is such a "cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon" -- we don't all have $10,000 to blow on a pretty desktop.

Don't get me wrong -- I think Bill Joy has fully earned his money -- he made some great career and life decisions, now he's enjoying the rewards.. more power to him!

From my weblog:

An article titled "IT Doesn't Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr published in May 2003 issue of venerable Harvard Business Review, announcing the elevation of IT into a mature infrastructure, in the same league as rail-road, electricity and hence incapable of providing any strategic advantage, seems to have generated good amount of controlversy. Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick wrote in his column Stupid-Journal Alert: Why HBR's View of Tech Is Dangerous: "One of the article's most glaring flaws is its complete disregard for the centrality of software." Pete Delisi wrote in SOUND OFF column of CIO magazine: "What I believe he misses is that IT is not only a transport technology, as are all the other technologies he compares it to. IT is also a "processing" technology capable of doing more than carrying electronic signals or goods, which basically arrive at their destination without major value being added by the technology in the transport process."

The HBR article defines IT (Information Technology -- if you are still wondering) as the technologies used for processing, storing, and transporting information in digital form. But still uses specific embodiments of IT such as number of hosts connected to the Internet as an indicator of IT's overall maturation. Conclusions drawn from state of a specific IT segment cannot be applied to the the whole of IT. I agree that the Internet itself may be in a fairly advanced stage of development. But then, the Internet, however important, is just a segment of IT and cannot be equated with IT. IT is much broader and has seen evolution of many such segments: Transaction Processing, Personal Computing, Desk Top Publishing, Multi-Media and so on. The Internet is only one among many manifestations of IT.

In my opinion, this is the biggest flaw of the HBR article -- It takes a fairly narrow view of IT. It may be okay to compare the Internet with Railroad but it is not fair to compare IT with Railroad. Comparison with the general category of Trasnportation would be more appropriate. Maturing of Railroad did not preclude aviation based transport or even the network of highways for the ground transportation!

From my weblog:

An article titled "IT Doesn't Matter" by Nicholas G. Carr published in May 2003 issue of venerable Harvard Business Review, announcing the elevation of IT into a mature infrastructure, in the same league as rail-road, electricity and hence incapable of providing any strategic advantage, seems to have generated good amount of controlversy. Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick wrote in his column Stupid-Journal Alert: Why HBR's View of Tech Is Dangerous: "One of the article's most glaring flaws is its complete disregard for the centrality of software." Pete Delisi wrote in SOUND OFF column of CIO magazine: "What I believe he misses is that IT is not only a transport technology, as are all the other technologies he compares it to. IT is also a "processing" technology capable of doing more than carrying electronic signals or goods, which basically arrive at their destination without major value being added by the technology in the transport process."

The HBR article defines IT (Information Technology -- if you are still wondering) as the technologies used for processing, storing, and transporting information in digital form. But still uses specific embodiments of IT such as number of hosts connected to the Internet as an indicator of IT's overall maturation. Conclusions drawn from state of a specific IT segment cannot be applied to the the whole of IT. I agree that the Internet itself may be in a fairly advanced stage of development. But then, the Internet, however important, is just a segment of IT and cannot be equated with IT. IT is much broader and has seen evolution of many such segments: Transaction Processing, Personal Computing, Desk Top Publishing, Multi-Media and so on. The Internet is only one among many manifestations of IT.

In my opinion, this is the biggest flaw of the HBR article -- It takes a fairly narrow view of IT. It may be okay to compare the Internet with Railroad but it is not fair to compare IT with Railroad. Comparison with the general category of Trasnportation would be more appropriate. Maturing of Railroad did not preclude aviation based transport or even the network of highways for the ground transportation!

On the way out they pick up a MAG Innovision 17-inch CRT monitor for a hundred bucks, hop in the Chevy Malibu rental, and floor it back to the Burkes'.

Business people are well aware of the dangers of lock-in and looking for alternatives. Witness the recent adoptions of linux for the desktop (government of Munich), the moves by Asian governments (Japan, Korea, China) to create a non-proprietary OS, the moves of industry groups to adopt open standards (CELF in Japan, the embedded market in general).

The tendency here is to view Microsoft as all-powerful. However, as revealed by the recent Fortune opinion piece summarized here, Microsoft cannot come up with new products that genuinely win people over. Business people have revolted over the forced upgrade terms they put through a year ago. People are walking away from their forced lock-in at all levels. If anything, this move will just speed up the process.

If these fuggers ever actually did real time in a real prison, we'd see a lot less of this sort of crap in the future.

If these are the kind of people that the GPL has opposed to it, they're just saying that stuff because they're drowning in it themselves.

One thing that is interesting to note here is the fact that the massive state budget gaps come not from poor management, but from reduced consumer spending.

But they are all related. Consumer spending is down because people are out of work. People are out of work because the economy is bad. The economy is especially bad in California because of the asinine anti-business legislation that is driving businesses out of the state.

The message? Sales taxes are a bad idea.

The message I get is that you shouldn't increase state spending by 30% in three years during a period of unsustainable growth in tax revenue.

And I happen to think that sales taxes are the most fair methods of taxation because they let the individual choose how much taxes they are going to pay.

One idea I like is the circulation fee system.

I hate that idea. Coerced spending- ugh.

>This whole situation seems like a gross abuse of a recall system that relies on honesty and virtuous politicians.

"Must...control...laughter..."

"HAHAHAHAHAHA! Hahahahahaha! Ha. Ha. Oh boy, that's a good one."

Neither California's recall system nor any other democratic institution in the United States has ever relied on "honesty and virtuous politicians." Our system of checks and balances assumes that if one branch of the government gets out of line, the other two can check it. If the Republic had depended on "honesty and virtuous politicians" to run government, it would have collapsed sometime shortly after George Washington left office.

The California recall provisions are perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional, and were followed to the letter. If Gray Davis were not such a manifestly incompetent and corrupt weasel, it would have been impossible to gather the 1 million+ signatures the recall provision did. The poster evidently believes that California voters should have let their state's economy be completely destroyed rather than avail themselves of the perfectly legal recall mechanism available to remove Gray Davis from power.

Recalls are far less of a threat to the Republic than unelected judiciaries legislating from the bench, or regulatoruy agencies that issue dictates to the American public that were never passed by Congress or signed by the President. Those are the mechanisms that have most eroded representative democracy, not recall provisions.

True, but did you read the rest of that page? MS has $4.3B in cash . . . AND $41.9 B in short term investments, which are basically cash equivalent. That's a total of $46.2 B it has available.

In contrast, while IBM has $4.2 B in cash, it only has $1.4 B in short term investments.

BTW, despite being seen as the biggest and baddest company in the world, Microsoft is actually much smaller than IBM alone.

True. There are actually many companies that have more revenue than MS. You've probably heard of the Fortune 500. That list is based on revenue. And MS isn't even in the top 20. (I don't know it's exact ranking because the damn list isn't on the site). There are companies that dwarf IBM in revenue. For example, Exxon Mobil has $63 B in revenue. Wal-Mart has $57 B.

But look at the net income (aka Profit). While Exxon's $7B in income is huge, MS's $2.8 B is higher than Wal-Mart's or IBM's.