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STFU, bi-atch.

it was as if Steve Ballmer would quit Microsoft to compete with Gates

Something similar to this did happen....in 1993, Microsoft's Vice President of Digital Media, Rob Glaser, left Microsoft to found RealNetworks. You can read more about Rob here.

And what ever happened to Felix the Cat? Come on!

So-called reality shows are a huge success for the television networks. The reason?

They cost jack shit to produce.

Didn't reality TV shows become popular around the time the Writers Guild of America was threatening to strike around 2001? These shows don't need writers, so I kind of assumed it was a way of undermining the leverage of the Writers Guild's influence by propagating these kind of shows. Both Survivor and the US version of Big Brother started in 2000. The networks were probably aware a problem was brewing and planning ahead.

Is the US at war now ? No.

Some people would disagree with you.

I think if you "overpromise" in order to gain business advantages worth billions of dollars, that counts as "cheated and lied". In fact, it might count as "fraud".

Ok, here from TIMETime magazine

blackwater

look into what blackwater inc really does, and what they offer.

Actually, Kerry did promise to kill terrorists. I bet that made the anti-war pacifists proud!

From time.com: "but it put Edwards on the defensive, forcing him to promise that John Kerry would hunt down and kill terrorists before they could hurt America. (Would that it were that simple.)"

Yeah, I wonder how many copies of Time was sold.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0 ,16641,1101040920,00.html

Great article on Sam Walton and the business strategies and tacticts that put Walmart where it is today.
Builders & Titans: Sam Walton

...short of shooting a homosexual immigrant with an assault rifle.

If only I had moderation points :( Mod up this guy, he's right on target.

The phrase you highlighted bothers me too... hope it's coming from a misinterpretation from the reporter (which according to my experience, happens a lot). It just doesn't make any sense... and I'm working on AIDS, I should know :)

Education goes a long way in preventing AIDS, just look at Northern America numbers vs Africa... of course, the problem of poverty is interwined with lack of education...

China is a special case... being communist, with the tendency to leak only the information it wants, it can cause certain problems. Some think that the epidemic is well underway back there, see : http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,1 3673,501031215-557111,00.html... Chances are that we're only seing the tip of the iceberg.

However, yet another survey group wrapped up their conclusion that Iraq never had WMDs before the war, and doesn't now. They were all destroyed in 1991. What other source can I quote for you? David Kay? Hans Blix? There were no weapons. Even Bush conceded the point. Give it up

Bush's rationale in the campaign speech was that Saddam Hussein had the capability of buying and manufacturing WMDs. Well so does Canada, and any country that has money. Heck, evern Bill Gates has the "capability." That reasoning is completely stupid.

Yeah the Sarin gas was confirmed, but it was a very small quantity. If the rebels knew that it had Sarin in it, wouldn't they lob it into the green zone, instead of letting it detonate on a roadside? You can't prove they knew it had sarin in it, and all signs point to it being an old shell from the Iran-Iraq war.

Of course Saddam Huessin was a bad man, but doesn't give carte blanche to us to do whatever it takes. Iran HATES the man, but refused to help remove him, because they correctly guessed our intentions. If we carried it out properly, then I wouldn't be complaining. Instead, the US cancelled the elections that were on schedule because pro-Iranians would win. Come on, now the US is blocking democracy in Iraq? Donating to specific Iraqi candidates who are pro-US? Screw that. The US is undermining the entire idea of democracy, the Bush administration never wanted to free the Iraqis, they just wanted military bases in Iraq to launch new attacks on their neighbors. Kuwait was getting small and lonely.

I wish I didn't expect that, but I do because the world does. The U.S. and the world pretty much ignore the existence of such regimes except where paying attention actually furthers the U.S.'s or the respective nations' immediate aims. Have you ever heard of Sudan? Fifty thousand people died in the past year from the assault of the Sudanese-government-supported Janjaweed, yet Bush hasn't even mentioned it. Over one million people are now refugees fleeing the slaughter, yet still Bush's administration ignores it. There's dozens of other examples like this around the world.
Here's a Time Magazine article, The Tragedy of Sudan. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101041004/story.h tml

Brutalities far worse, more wanton, and more extensive than any that occurred under Saddam have been largely ignored.

Not if the Bush Administration had it their way.
I don't think this is liberation.

Because the US, UK and Australia were the only ones taking part in the invasion. We were talking about the invasion not the occupation.

Now we can look at that too: South Korea, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and the Netherlands are the countries with more than 1000 troops in Iraq. Public opinion in the first three is overwhelmingly against, and in the Netherlands it was against before the war and I doubt that has changed since even though I have no current numbers. I don't know about Ukraine but I think I read once that they had similar numbers to Poland. Ukraine wants to reduce its contingent by 250 and Poland wants to cut it in half.

For non-US citizens. As a US citizen, I am not worried about this

*cough*Padilla*cough*

Ok, I have you now dumb ass. Of the 95% Muslim population of Iraq, about 2/3 are Shia; they were oppressed by the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath Party that ruled Iraq. SOURCE. That is the end of that stupid argument.

What are you smoking? Let's assume 2/3 of the Shiites are for something that makes 2/3 x 2/3 = 4/9 less than half of the whole population. IIRC more than 2/3 of the US population was white is it ok to ignore Blacks, Hispanics and Asians?

No I think most want a stable Iraq and America out in that order, as fast as possible.

Well that's what we're doing dumb ass!!!

You should read the stuff Cheney's and Rumsfeld's think tank "Project for a New American Century" is writing since 1999. Iraq will be the new permanent Army base in the Mideast.

Sounds good to me. Problem with polling on the street is that these street people are the same people looting abandoned US vehicles, hanging charred bodies from a bridge, throwing rocks at US troops. There is no accurate polling data on poverty in Iraq. It wasn't done. Saddam had no need for figures on the number of homeless people in Iraq, because he didn't care. The polling aught to be done through the mail, and I'm not even sure if they have a stable postal system yet.

You produced some less useful statistics so I don't see how you can complain about more representative ones. You could also see hanging bodies as a political statement it most likely means "We don't like you".

It was a wise thinker who once said "Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent". If you're expecting world peace to occur all on it's own, you're an idiot.

I don't think it will occur anytime soon. People like Bush will see to that.

I think you hated George Bush to begin with, he "stole" your election, imposed stricter drug laws, instated religious initiatives, and a few other convtroversial measures. I don't think these points you bring up are anything but propoganda used to try and sway public opinion, made by the democrats. Oh god, Reagan won the cold war by building nuclear weapons, and now George Bush is going to try and fix violence in the middle east? Oh god. We have to stop them

Bush didn't steal the election, Harris did and the US press took 7 months to notice that the UK press less than a week. I don't take drugs, I don't smoke, I don't even drink but Bush should know better than anyone else that you should give drug addicts a second chance. Heck they could even become president someday. Reagon wasn't as stupid as Bush is, was never that unpopular in the rest of the world and even he saw that the Star Wars project was stupid. And I really don't see how Bush will stop violence in the Middle East. The whole administration has ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for months and a solution there will be the centerpiece for the whole region. If/When Iraq becomes democratic it won't suddenly change the Iraqi opinion on Israel. Only if the Palestinians accept a solution the rest of the region will follow over time.

The Iraq war is a war to liberate the people. But

You mean this guy?

It's quite a cultural phenomenon: Cover of Time Magazine

And when I said "cultural", I meant degenerate.

I find this cover more disturbingly familiar...
this last weeks cover.

Even Time mag. knows we are more wide open than any nation, having declared itself at war, has any reason to be. [time may or may not be money but Time wants your money to read past cover stories]

Jeez, how hard is it to do some fact checking before posting things like that?

Haider was never PM of Austria, his party was a member of the ruling coalition though in 2000, and he is governor of the state of Carinthia. Read wikipedia entry to get some details.

Haider is an avowed anti-EU politician. In 2000 some EU member countries did impose limited diplomatic sanction on Austria. In this case this meant cancelling of visits, recall of ambassadors, etc, and had zero direct economic consequence. I.e this was a gesture of disapproval, and yes any country is entitled to do that, this is was diplomacy is all about. Israel did exactly the same BTW.

FYI Haider is a neo-Nazi revisionist. For once you'd like Europeans to do something when people like Haider get too close to actually governing a country. You remember the last time the European did nothing?

Nice double standards you've got there.

Clearly you didn't see September 20th cover of Time Magazine.

This reminds me of the brilliant disposable phone business idea. Hire some fugitives of the law to be your top company officers, preferably some people known for having started a fake online casino and having run away with the money of their investors. Covertly buy $200 Nokia phones. Remove their plastic shell and their logo. Surround them in cardboard. Call them prototypes. Tell investors you're going to sell those phones for below $30 and watch the diligent hard-hitting investigative "journalists" hype your wonderful innovative product to no end.

Time magazine obviously havent seen it either.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0 ,16641,1101040920,00.html/

Either that, or the cover designer has a fetish, and it's starting to show.

Time magazine obviously havent seen it either.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0 ,16641,1101040920,00.html/

doh!

I'll go kill myself quitly in a corner now.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0 ,16641,1101040920,00.html

Wow. He's famous now. ;)

I plan on clipping a printout of the original inspiration, along with the cover of this week's issue of Time Magazine and put it up on my door...

It should be enough to scare the crap out of anyone.

Hilarious prediction of Ken's Future

Yes, I'm with you that we need another heavy lifter, a return of something similar to Saturn would do lot of good.

There comes a time in every important Jobs project, usually when the thing appears to be finished, that he sends it back to the drawing board and asks that it be completely redone. Some people say this trait is pathological, a sign of his control-freak perfectionism or his inability to let go. "It's happened on every Pixar movie," Jobs confesses. It's also what he did when Ive presented him with a plastic model of what was to be the new iMac. It looked like the old iMac on a no-carb diet, a leaner iMac in the Zone. "There was nothing wrong with it," recalls Jobs. "It was fine. Really, it was fine." He hated it.

Rather than give his O.K., he went home from work early that day and summoned Ive, the amiable genius who also designed the original iMac, the other-worldly iPod music player, the lightweight but heavy-duty titanium PowerBook and the ice-cube-inspired Cube desktop, to name but a few of his greatest hits. As they walked through the quarter-acre vegetable garden and apricot grove of Jobs' wife Laurene, Jobs sketched out the Platonic ideal for the new machine. "Each element has to be true to itself," Jobs told Ive. "Why have a flat display if you're going to glom all this stuff on its back? Why stand a computer on its side when it really wants to be horizontal and on the ground? Let each element be what it is, be true to itself." Instead of looking like the old iMac, the thing should look more like the flowers in the garden. Jobs said, "It should look like a sunflower."

Back in 1990 I caught a photo exhibit by Igor Kostin in Baltimore, MD. He was the first photographer in the area after the accident and toured it afterwords, taking many pictures which are still very disturbing to remember.

Not to diminish the power of this story, but I'm still intrigued by the caption for the first photo on page 9

I just read this and here is the paragraph for those interested :

"The accident released about as much radiation as one atmospheric nuclear test," Jackson notes. "Think of Chernobyl, which exuded hundreds of thousands of square meters of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Think of all the hundreds of atmospheric tests, and think about the next breath you inhale. How many bits of Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, and Nagasaki you are inhaling each time you breathe in."

I think it speaks for itself...

P.S.: Is it ok to copy a paragraph from a copyrighted article if I reference it?

Anyone up for recording this and making it available?

Back in 1990 I caught a photo exhibit by Igor Kostin in Baltimore, MD. He was the first photographer in the area after the accident and toured it afterwords, taking many pictures which are still very disturbing to remember.

It's remarkable how optimistic he is on nuclear power, even with his concerns of safety above finanancial or even political concerns.

Anyone up for recording this and making it available?

Back in 1990 I caught a photo exhibit by Igor Kostin in Baltimore, MD. He was the first photographer in the area after the accident and toured it afterwords, taking many pictures which are still very disturbing to remember.

It's remarkable how optimistic he is on nuclear power, even with his concerns of safety above finanancial or even political concerns.

Let's get YOUR facts straight. Bill Clinton was on trial for a sexual harrassment charge. The charge was he gave good paying jobs to women who gave him sex and ignored the women who didn't. Monica Lewinski came up as a case in point. Clinton's lie about his relationship with Lewinski obstructed proving the key point - he was a typical jerk boss who promoted women he fucked and dissed women who rejected him.

Clinton then compounds his perjury by talking to his secretary about her upcoming Grand Jury testimony. He was specifically ordered not to speak to any of the witnesses who had yet to testify and yet he did. That's another obstruction of justice charge.

Bill Clinton deserved his impeachment and should have been removed from office. The fact that he wasn't removed left him in a position to sell pardons to people like Marc Rich and the Hasidic Jews knowing nobody would do anything about it. The Marc Rich pardon was true chutzpah - to wit:

Some are calling the inquiries a field day for die-hard Clinton-haters. But most see this as a source of bipartisan outrage. Republicans and Democrats alike were dumbstruck by the Rich pardon. The federal prosecutors who indicted Rich are especially livid, particularly because, by definition, Rich appears to be ineligible for a pardon: He never took responsibility for his actions or served any sentence.

The congressional panels were called to investigate the path to Rich's pardon -- which, as various documents seem to indicate, did not follow usual channels. In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. pardon attorney Roger Adams says when the White House sent over Rich's name for pardon consideration -- only a few hours before the President was due to leave office -- there was never any mention of Rich being a fugitive. There is also suspicion that donations made to Clinton campaigns and to the Clinton presidential library by Rich's ex-wife, Denise, could be a quid pro quo for the pardon.

Look at the silly monkey. Look at the silly monkey.

Oh wait. I almost didn't notice. You didn't answer what I asked - because you can't.

Conservatives have almost always voted racist. Liberals usually vote for fairness and equality. Oops, you better try another funny technique to change history. Maybe like a time machine.

Better hope no one reads the news. Even "the Holy Saint Reagan" was a known racist.

Sure both parties have plenty of crackpots, lunatics, and jackasses. It's the U.S. government, after all. The difference with Republicans is that, with them, it's party policy. At least until Karl Rove got too chicken to keep it up, and started convincing people like you to try these incredibly funny attempts to whitewash it...

Take a little friendly advice. The less you people talk about racism and politics, the better off you are.

Hey, moron!

Refute anything I said, or fuck right the hell off.

First of all, where did I say such a conspiracy requires "hundreds or even thousands" of people? What I described requires almost NO people - a few higher ups in the FBI and the CIA, and a lot compartmentalization in the lower ranks?

You don't think the FBI covered up fore-knowledge of the events? Read anything about Sibel Edmonds. Read Coleen Rowly's memo to the FBI director here

It's the brainless "remote airplane" conspiracy theories that postulate hundreds of passengers "disappearing" that require a lot of people to be quieted. My explanation requires none of that. All of it was done by a few Mossad assets and a handful of criminals employed by the CIA. The actual attack and other related activities were carried out by the Al Qaeda patsies who knew nothing (which, based on the article, seems to be their chronic condition.)

You want to see how far the Pentagon would go to fake an attack on the US? Google for the "Northwoods documents". Most of the sites carrying them are rightwing loony sites but the documents themselves are genuine.

You want to see how far Israel will go to put intelligence agents in the United States? Read this

You're just another ignorant "citizen" who gets his news from Fox and thinks he's "well-informed".

By the Grace of God, Praise and Glory be to him, Muslims were able to defeat and force them out of Somalia, as they expelled them before, from Aden. This blockade and this tightening doesn't hurt us much. We expect to be rewarded by God, Praise and Glory to him.

Published in Time Magazine, I recieved this issue today. Where has our originality gone?

You could have just linked to the Time story, it's very extensive.

Yes, Republican State Funerals (which Falwell would not get anyway, since he's never held political office) are so very much worse than Democratic political rallies disguised as memorial services.

"...internally the new iPod is a ground-up reconstruction, and its really compelling applications -- the ones that very well might get the goat of anyone unable or unwilling to upgrade -- are still secret. All that Apple is saying is that there's more to this than what's being publicized."

AFAIK they started public manifestation after the government cracked down on them. See http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/fa lungong.html#issues
In early 1999 the Chinese government launched a renewed effort against various spiritual movements. In response the Falun Gong held asilent, non-violent, mass protest. Over 10,000 people participated. The illegal protest occured outside the Communist Party headquartersin Beijing on April 25, 1999. 21 The government was frightened both by the size of theprotest and by the lack of fore- knowledge of Chinese intelligence. The government points to the size of the protest as an indication of ahigh level of the movements. Li Hongzhi and other Falun Gong members continue to claim that the demonstrations have always beenspontaneous. They argue that the lack of heirarchy and the loose nature of member networks prevent any such organization.

In the following months, practitioners were harassed while performing their group exercises throughout China. Falun Gong members were told that their phones were being monitored and that their retirement pensions would be terminated. Police broke into practitioners' homes and confiscated Falun Gong materials. Some followers have been arrested and have disappeared. The movement claims that many of its incarcerated members have died while imprisoned. Thousands of members have continued to demonstrate peacefully in about 30 Chinese cities.
Also http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/bth/falun.htm:
For over three years now, the Falun Gong (the Practice of the Wheel of the Dharma) movement has been in the forefront of the international news. After its large scale demonstration for freedom of practice at the residential area of the Chinese Communist Party elite at Zhongnanhai (Beijing) on 25 April 1999, an increasingly severe crackdown has followed, with more severe legal measures specifically introduced to deal with this phenomenon. This crackdown includes the exertion of considerable pressure on Western media in China not to pay too much attention to the suppression of the Falun Gong and Western authorities to prevent overly visible Falun Gong protest during state visits of Chinese leaders (this would influence coverage at home, as they would have to cut references to the Falun Gong out of all reports). It also includes removing Falun Gong adherents without trial to psychiatric institutions, pressurizing them through their jobs and personal networks, unannounced searches of private homes, hotels and any places where Falun Gong followers might be staying, and so forth. People arrested are be put under severe pressure and are maltreated (to the extent that even force-feeding during hungerstrikes takes place very clumsily with obvious results), which has already frequently led to permanent physical & psychological damage, deaths and suicides. Essentially, all means are considered legitimate in dealing with the movement.

The communist regime perceives of the Falun Gong movement as an "incident" and as a subspecies of the traditional category of "crooked teachings" (xiejiao, the Chinese pejorative pendant to the Western labels "cult" - Northern American - and "sect" - Western European). As someone working on new religious groups in recent Chinese history, I see the movement as an important religious phenomenon in its own right, arising out of the specific urban circumstances of post-1949 China, but responding to social, ethical and emotional needs that are quite traditional. The way in which the communist Chinese state has misunderstood this movement, and is labelling and persecuting it bears strong resemblances to the way in which the imperial Chinese state saw similar phenomena in the past.
and http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/magazine/0,975

here.

In 1999 a german Doctor gained the confidence of the regime. Getting behind the 70ies-kitschy facade, he came back to report on the oppression and poverty.

Google will find you lots of interviews about his experiences.

Canadians don't actually think all Americans are evil. We do, however, think that a small number of them are evil, and they tend to have an immense amount of political sway in the country. But Canadians aren't alone in this view.
Personally, I think Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and the whole lot of them, are terrible people. But I have family in the US and I certainly don't think they're evil... well maybe my aunt...

'If there were no Apple, it would be necessary for Microsoft to create one.'

Heh heh heh

Since I am old enough to experience and remember this I refute his assertion that business was the prime user at the PCs inception. PCs were the tools for education mainly (along w/Apple IIs).

No, that is flat wrong; and I'm also old enough to remember.

Yes, PCs were used in education, but not "mainly" -- and certainly not more than in business. The education market was back then much as it is now, underfunded and certainly not large enough to support Apple, IBM, Commodore, Osbourne and the others who fought in the first PC wars.

And the reason is this: the first "killer app" VisiCalc changed the personal computer from hobbyist's plaything to business tool in 1979. Initally, this saved the Apple because every business wanted to run VisiCalc and the Apple II was the only platform it ran on. This caused IBM to release the IBM PC in 1981 which quickly because the PC of choice for business because 1) a version of VisiCalc was written for it and 2) the name carried weight -- many businesses knew IBM from their mainframe business.

In 1982, Time magazine named the computer "man of the year." Read the article for yourself. Here are some pertient quotes:

There are now more than 100,000 computers in U.S. schools

and

In 1980 some two dozen firms sold 724,000 personal computers for $1.8 billion. The following year 20 more companies joined the stampede, including giant IBM, and sales doubled to 1.4 million units at just under $3 billion. When the final figures are in for 1982, according to Dataquest, a California research firm, more than 100 companies will probably have sold 2.8 million units for $4.9 billion.

So, 100,000 units total installed base in education vs. almost 5 million computers units sold in three years.

Was education important? Yes. But was it "mainly" where you found personal computers? Absolutely not.

You can grow a headless (or brainless) body in a vat. They've already grown headless mice:

Time Magazine Summary on Headless Mice.

As well, I suppose, it might be easier just to transplant out all your organs. Do arm transplants, skin transplants, organ transplants, and build a new body around the old brain.

Key areas of research I'd want is:

• Artificial Intelligence (All these technologies will come online almost simultaneously if we developed artificial consciousness / intelligence)
• Cryonics. The ability to freeze and unfreeze people at will be useful in expanding out beyond our solar system.
• Environmental sciences. We need to be able to live with the planet in a sustainable manner. We might wipe ourselves by killing the planet before we develop technologies to prevent it from happening ;).

Steve Jobs on the Microsoft Monopoly

MikroBitti, Suomen Kuvalehti, Dr Dobb's Journal, Software Development, Embedded Systems Programming, C/C++ Users Journal, National Geographic and Time