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Excellent catch, sir. But the Bloomberg article doesn't establish that the Concorde wasn't profitable prior to the announced retirement.

From the Vanity Fair article:

Lord Marshall characterizes the Concorde as having had a “reasonable operating-profit performance” from the mid-1980s right up until the July 2000 crash, except for brief dips into the red around the time of the 1987 stock-market plunge and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Of course, as has been said, Concorde never recouped its development costs. But the popular idea that it always ran in the red is a myth. High ticket sales and a loyal clientele accustomed to 3-hour transatlantic travel kept it alive until the crash, and a lot of other factors collided to throw the program into the red while the planes were grounded being refitted with kevlar. Air France, stinging from the accident, wanted out, and Airbus didn't see any real money in maintaining such a small fleet of aging planes.

Airbus approached both airlines and informed them that the Concordes were due for an expensive new round of systems improvements and equipment upgrades. (Bannister says the figure was $60 million per airline over the next two years, above and beyond already budgeted maintenance.) Lord Marshall, in an interview with the London Times in May, said that when Air France balked at the expense, Airbus informed British Airways that it wouldn’t support the Concorde beyond October of this year. “It would have made it much more difficult for Airbus if Air France and BA had presented a united front in supporting the continuation of scheduled services,” Lord Marshall told the Times. To me, he offered no such gripes, but said that any speculation over whether the Concorde can carry on flying commercially beyond the scheduled termination date is moot, because “the manufacturer has now stated, quite categorically, that they will not support the aircraft beyond the end of October. And without that support, I would have to say that I think it is inconceivable that anybody could operate the aircraft.”

So that's something like 1% ^ 3, minus some overlap -- what part of US or global society do you have to be to make use of this?

Sheiks and Saudi royalty, Russian oil barrons, Larry Ellison, anyone who owns an apartment in this building or this neighborhood, all of whom would rather not have to breathe the same air as the proles and riff-raff in so-called first class in a plane built for normal people.

Read it and weep (or make-believe you're gonna win the lottery some day).

The only important reason it failed is because it was incredibly impractical and expensive to operate. Yes it was a marvel and all that, but you couldn't make money off it.

My understanding is that Concorde's unprofitability was mostly myth. There were problems in the beginning because fear-mongering in the States left only JFK as a destination, but once things settled and the ticket prices were reset to ultra-high class, things settled out just fine.

Had the Concorde really not been profitable, it would have been terminated long before the crash over Paris. That's just how business works. The problem was simply that the planes were aging, no replacement models were being made, and the operators were left to scavenging parts from other Concordes. With the Paris disaster, they had more expenses reinforcing the fuel tanks to try and prevent the disaster from occurring again. These things ultimately tipped the scales to grounding the program.

But is there a demand for crossing the Atlantic in 3 hours? Is there demand to cross the Pacific in 5 or less? Hell yes. If they build it, people will pay the ticket price (and enjoy the view of the curvature of the Earth through the window).

This article - http://www.vanityfair.com/news... - by Michael Lewis, makes the case look like extreme over-reach by our corporate overlords.

Not to mention that the code that Aleynikov allegedly stole is worthless without a substantial investment in supporting code and trading infrastructure to take advantage of it, not that the higher-ups at a place like Goldman necessarily understand this.

The double-jeopardy bypass is also astoundingly corrupt. Not so astounding is the arrogance by which Goldman takes advantage of open-source while ignoring the rules around it.

What a piece of work.
http://www.vanityfair.com/styl...

Just as an aside - any nudes?

Yes.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news...

"After having their nation's wealth raided by a collapse of British banks I suspect that the public feels a bit like a pirate seeking a bit of revenge."

Whaaa? It's the other way around - a bunch of Brits lost their deposits when ICELANDIC banks failed. Now, I don't have much sympathy for them, they put their money offshore to try to earn more interest, and that has risks, but the bad decisions that led the Icelandic banks to fail were 100% home grown.

Excellent piece from Michael Lewis about it here: http://www.vanityfair.com/cult...

"How many times has this administration embraced a petition and moved forward with it?"

How many times has this administration helped make the U.S. government better for its citizens in any way?

The U.S. government has been arranging that the rich get richer, allowing the violent to be more violent, and helping those who want to make money by killing people.

For example, the "Affordable Care Act" is, in my opinion, in the direction of other recent changes in government. Instead of 2 organizations between you and a health care provider, there now are 3 or 4. The ACA gathers money from those like myself who never get sick. See, for example, Oregon Health Care Cost Increases under the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA was announced and pretended to be in operation before the software was ready: How Obamacare's epic fail exposed our government's biggest tech problem. Whoever is at the top of the U.S. government was obviously completely incompetent. (Often a U.S. president merely pretends to be in charge, hiding what is actually happening, and who is arranging it.)

The ACA helped technology companies take advantage of state officials who are completely ignorant about technology development. For example, Oregon sues Oracle over failed Obamacare website.

Quoting: Oregon's suit, filed Friday in state court, alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, made falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages.

If you love the U.S. like I do, help deal with the immense problems and lack of good leadership.

"Various hedge funds and investment banks likely devote more resources to getting trade times down by a few milliseconds (including building a straighter fiber-optic cable between Chicago and NY) than the sum total value of all developer time devoted to to every open source project ever, since the dawn of software."

My understanding that most of the software used in these trading platforms is heavly borrowed fron Open Source. They're quite happy to use it, but not so happy to contribute it back to the community.

Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

'(At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)'

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates handed the reigns to Steve Ballmer in January 2000. Today, the company announced Ballmer will retire within 12 months, and Microsoft stock has surged on the news. That can't feel good if you're Ballmer. Under his 13-year leadership, Microsoft stock has fallen over 40%.

And this article gets it right

Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.

... and ..

“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”

Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.

No, really.

One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.

Not like all these others most worried about the cache loss and career once the assets are made public.

So the Vanityfair article can't be another marketing plot to exploit the unexpected spotlight. With a cover (big photo 9MB) perfectly coherent to denounce a "sex crime".

Nope. Go read this fine article.

It is quite a bit more complex.

Jesus Christ, were you guys paid to write this or are you just bored and stupid? Let's review:

City of London at Wikipedia

The local authority for the City, namely the City of London Corporation, is unique in the UK and has some unusual responsibilities for a local council, such as being the police authority. It is also unusual in having responsibilities and ownerships beyond its boundaries. The Corporation is headed by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, an office separate from (and much older than) the Mayor of London.

The City has a unique political status, a legacy of its uninterrupted integrity as a corporate city since the Anglo-Saxon period and its singular relationship with the Crown. Historically its system of government was not unusual, but it was not reformed by the Municipal Reform Act 1835 and little changed by later reforms.

It is administered by the City of London Corporation, headed by the Lord Mayor of London (not the same as the more recent Mayor of London), which is responsible for a number of functions and owns a number of locations beyond the City's boundaries. Unlike other English local authorities, the Corporation has two council bodies: the (now largely ceremonial) Court of Aldermen and the Court of Common Council. The Court of Aldermen represents the wards, with each ward (irrespective of size) returning one Alderman. The chief executive of the administrative side of the Corporation holds the ancient office of Town Clerk of London.

The City is a ceremonial county, although it has a Commission of Lieutenancy, headed by the Lord Mayor, instead of a Lord-Lieutenant, and it has two Sheriffs instead of a High Sheriff (see list of Sheriffs of London), quasi-judicial offices appointed by the Livery Companies, an ancient political system based on the representation and protection of trades. Senior members of the Livery Companies are known as Liverymen and form a special electorate called the Common Hall, which chooses the Lord Mayor, the Sheriffs and certain other officers.

The City has a unique electoral system. Most of its voters are representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City. Its ancient wards have very unequal numbers of voters. In elections, both the businesses based in the City and the residents of the City vote.

The principal justification for the non-resident vote is that about 330,000 non-residents constitute the day-time population and use most of its services, far outnumbering residents, who number around 7,000. Nevertheless, the system has long been controversial. The business vote was abolished in all other UK local council elections in 1969.

City_of_London_Corporation
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5501455&cid=47620723
A Tale of Two Londons

and finally, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit tag at TorrentFreak, because this crap has been going on for some time. Older stories:

June 28, 2013: UK Government Announces New Intellectual Property Crime Unit
October 8, 2013: Police Demand Summary Domain Takedown, Traffic Redirection
October 9, 2013: UK Police Orders Registrars to Suspend Domains of Major Torrent Sites
December 9, 2013:

I actually agree with this, but two things. Nearly 70 years have passed.

Two more things: Israel is free to pursue crimes and property lost before that. If only Palestinian lives had the same value as Jewish art stolen in the 30's.

And the theft of Palestinian land was hardly a one time event that happens almost a century ago; it's been a daily event as people who have lived there for hundreds of years are forced off their land to make way for new settlements.

The UN drew a line in the sand

The UN also stipulated that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return as a condition of Israeli statehood, a condition that Zionists have no intention of ever honoring.

Sorry, this is a bullshit argument. The administrators set out to create a site to assist in piracy, hence their name, hence their advertising that you can find TV shows, movies, etc on the site. It's not even a secret. You are either engaging in sophistry or are naive to claim they are a neutral "common carrier" status.

Since you are either playing dumb or otherwise, here it is, spelled out for you:

As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden's pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm's servers to launch the Swedes' BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. "I hacked a company's service provider and put up obscene messages," says Neij. "The company said work for us or we prosecute." Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, "Because I could!"

By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named "Peter"), the site had effectively outgrown its host. "We had no idea it would happen," says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. "It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker."

With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: "We don't want to reform copyright lawâ"we just don't want the state to enforce it."

Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about "how value is produced in the cultural sector." He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. "This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century," he says. "Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically."

Does that sound like a neutral ISP to you?

AC I cordially invite you to go fuck yourself. You seem to think "Samsung" is just one big company. Its not. There are many divisions of Samsung that are creating - and have created - cutting edge tech. Tech that is changing the face of the industry.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/06/apple-samsung-smartphone-patent-war.print - read it and weep.

Here.

OH! Here's a heap of examples!

Then there's the whole Rush Limbaugh tough on drug abusers except when blowhard radio personalities take so much non-prescribed oxycontin their ears quit working. Why hasn't he had himself locked up? (just Google, there's far too many references to link)

Then there's these.. Here too. Even some (former) Republicans agree.

Please stop misquoting Orwel, he was talking about war not about abusing prisoners.

"foreign democracies aren't as open as ours"

Of course how could any foreign democracy ever be as open as the US. Nothing in Europe or the rest of the world could *ever* touch the US in openness.

Hope you're feeling all snug and cozy under your blanket of US exceptionalism.

And of course you are completely missing the point, no surprise there. None of these foreign democracies ever legalized torture. In cases where the truth is revealed the foreign public reacts with well deserved disgust and outrage. The fact that so many in the US seem to be numbed to the violence conducted in its name is what's most disturbing.

"waterboarding is not torture"

The only Iraq war cheerleader with an ounce of honor actually checked this for himself. Christopher Hitchens changed his tune afterwards.

Your opinion in the matter is completely irrelevant, the procedure just like mock executions is of course well outside any civilized standard.

That you happily put yourself there speaks for itself, and makes my point in highlighting how far the US has fallen.

Fortunately some of this moral cravenness is offset by exceptional Americans like Snowden and Greenwald. Over the long run I am optimistic that the US will regain its misplaced moral compass.

These two crappy articles say you're right. I'm not convinced they knew what they were doing.

"It was intense going through it," said the 18-year-old high school student who played the waterboarding victim. He asked not to be named.

Given that he'd supposedly just been subjected to drowning torture, that he described it as 'intense' seems rather... odd. The people Hitchens went to, actually knew what they were doing.

Would they volunteer, say, for a blowtorch on the balls?

Well put. Idiotic students trivialising the matter just makes it seem they're pushing for a broader understanding of 'torture', rather than convincing anyone that waterboarding is torture.

Let's see: Jesse Ventura, a Navy SEAL, was waterboarded, and says it's definitely torture. Apparently the SEALs used to use waterboarding in their counter-interrogation training, but stopped as the inability of anyone to tolerate it was damaging morale. The linked article says the mean-time-to-failure was 14 seconds.

Hitchens was waterboarded, and said it's definitely torture.

Rather uniquely, Oliver North claims to have been waterboarded and says it's not torture. Personally I'd like him to spend a few seconds at the hands of the guys Hitchens went to. I suspect he'd change his mind rather quickly.

Sean Hannity volunteered to be waterboarded, but backed-out. He maintains it's not torture, and points to North.

Like the Healthcare and Finance reforms, this is a step in the right direction, but we should be doing much better (thanks, Republicans) The F-35 is already way over budget and it is predicted to cost 1.5 trillion over the planned lifetime, This is for a tool that barely works. The brilliance of the evil plan was spreading production to almost every state so each one will have a stake in the pork.
http://www.vanityfair.com/poli...

Are there risks with fracking?

Groundwater contamination, for one. Especially, flammable tap water. Perhaps you dismiss that as anecdotal, but it's not as if scientist have been given the access, data, and funding to run these claims to ground... that will take another ten or twenty years, by which point the perpetrators will have long since taken off with the profits while the general public gets stuck with whatever environmental catastrophes this created.

Don't get me wrong... I wish fracking was as safe and plentiful as proponents claim. And maybe it's worth some amount of contamination even if it isn't safe. I just wish these things could be determined objectively and scientifically in the best public interest instead of this same old sh*t where the powerful simultaneously exert influence over corporations, media, government, and public opinion to effect the fattest profit instead of the utilitarian good.

Some achievement tracking is justified and useful (and even necessary) for the project itself.

Apparently the system they use to assess students and teachers is based on "stacked ranking", an employee performance system that Gates introduced at Microsoft, and continued under Ballmer for a decade, but which Microsoft has more recently dropped utterly.

Importantly, this policy has already been introduced in over 30 states for teacher assessment, thanks to Gates' donation to the Obama administration, and the administration tying the adoption of the system to education grants. Teacher job satisfaction in the affected states has dropped from 62% to 39% in four years. With such a sharp drop in morale, and apparently high level of stress created by the program, you can imagine how actual teacher performance would have suffered.

Meanwhile... ...stacked ranking was being blamed for Microsoft's decline. "Microsoft's Lost Decade".

"Stacked ranking effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies." Or in the case of teachers, leads to them undermining each other rather than focus on doing the best for their own students.

And now Microsoft has completely eliminated the "stacked rank" policy. That's easy for a company to do, but how long do you think it will take to unwrap it from national and state education policies?

Sully may have been able to ditch successfully without it; but, William Langewiesche makes a strong case that the Airbus A320's fly-by-wire software was an important factor in the favorable outcome of the procedure. See http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/06/us_airways200906 and the expanded account in Langewiesche's excellent book, 'Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson.' I'm an instrument-rated private pilot who is in awe of both Captain Sullenberger and the Airbus engineering team.

"How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy." ref

They didn't, they could have been way ahead of the curve, when they joined the Tron consortium, but not totally owning it, they acted to supress it in the US while promoting the much inferior WinCE. A replay of the WinNT - OS/2 collaboration/war with IBM.

'Microsoft Teams Up with Japanese Group That Promotes Archrival Tron'

'Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would collaborate with a consortium that promotes an open operating system for consumer electronics called TRON'

'Microsoft Corp., which was the first U. S. supplier to lobby Washington about TRON'

'We don't want the Japanese to create a specification that would preclude competition,', former Deputy U. S. Trade Representative Michael B. Smith

Maybe they should start by requiring the military to demonstrate how everything it spends is in the 'National Interest'.

I think you'd lose a lot of pork.

The military has been doing that for years. These days, the primary skill needed by general officers is planning equipment and staff reductions while keeping some ability to fight. It's quite eye-opening to watch the talks by senior military staff that make their way to YouTube, and see e.g. an admiral talking about how the Navy plans to lose a carrier battle group - not in war, but to congress.

It's true that congress holds the purse strings for the military, but when over 60% of non-discretionary spending goes towards military spending, they're not going to suffer like paying down the national debt or stabilizing SS/Medicare. Their biggest problem are the spending cuts via sequester, but congress can always allocate emergency funds for anything they want and already have for some military spending.

Regarding the military demonstrate that they need something in 'national interest' to get funding is ludicrous. Just look at the F-35 Lightning II. That plane's construction has roots in almost every state (read section 7 Political Engineering). That's why you're not going to get rid of that pork so easily --even the Pentagon doesn't want F-35 features that the House is trying to force spending on.

Nobody here is arguing that they are doing billions in business. The issue is that they should be doing many billions in business more than they are. In the words often attributed to Senator Dirksen "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

This is an industry in which incumbent multibillion giants fall, events that many Slashdot saw or experienced first hand. Fundamentals are fundamentals and any company the starts to consistently make the same mistakes that the previous multibillion dollar companies made is likely to have a repeat of the same consequences.

Microsoft treats it's customers (e.g. Windows 8.1 Start Button instead of Menu), manufacturing partners (8.0/8.1 & the Surface), professional advocates (ending Technet) and it's own employees (stacked ranking) with contempt. When your busy pissing off the very people that you need to stay in business you lose their good will. When you lose their good will they start to make fundamental decisions to go with competitors products. The market reflects these changes everywhere from the rise of alternative office suites to failure of Windows phone to the largest consecutive set of multibillion dollar losses the PC market has ever seen.

The giants can and will fall, nobody is entitled to an empire. Unless Microsoft stops treating the very people it needs as the enemy and starts listening to what people keep telling them that they want they will continue to lose their empire. Start by reading this excellent piece from Vanity Fair on Microsoft's Stacked ranking system for their employees.

If you've read the Vanity Fair articles you know that the problem is not the IT, it's the senior management at Goldman that patches together spaghetti code and STEALS OPEN SOURCE CODE by slicing off the headers from the code they stole.

Would it be so hard to link the article. If even two people read your post, it saves time to provide a link. It's silly to write something you don't expect to be read, especially when you seem to want us to read the unlinked article, which says:

At Sergeâ(TM)s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.

I am sure the quality of their IT staff will vastly improve as a result of their recent strategy to underpay them and then aggressively press for federal crime charges if they decide to leave.

Is that it limits information sharing.

The biggest problem that the internet caused is that it destroyed culture. Worldwide.

Everyone has this common generic culture now.

This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995.

People wear the same clothes as they do in 1995. Style hasn't advanced like it did from the 50's to the 70's. Or from the 70's to the 90's.

People listen to the same kinds of music.

They use the same grammar and language from 20 years ago.

And so on.

It's a pretty well documented phenomenon, and a great Vanity Fair article from a couple years ago describes this perfectly: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

The whole idea of information being free and shared by everyone is actually destructive to society, since that means information becomes devalued when culture becomes democratic. It devalues professional tastemakers, causing populist sensibilities to take hold, which is the exact cause of cultural stagnation. Democratic sensibilities are always obvious, and can never advance the state-of-the-art that professional tastemakers can.

So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on. It is perfectly fine to limit these items, to make sure there ARE "have-nots". People don't HAVE to have every single goddam song in their library.

We really do need to limit the spread of information, through costs, DRM, or other means, to cause society to advance. Right now the world is frozen in 1995, because information is too open.

Seriously, it is perfectly fine to not know things or to have things. Your life is going to be just fine. But the democratic population wants everything.

Limit them.

Why is this modded -1? I'ts actually a pretty interesting argument, and one I had not heard before. Moderators, using your points as means for censorship makes YOU the bad guy.

Is that it limits information sharing.

The biggest problem that the internet caused is that it destroyed culture. Worldwide.

Everyone has this common generic culture now.

This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995.

People wear the same clothes as they do in 1995. Style hasn't advanced like it did from the 50's to the 70's. Or from the 70's to the 90's.

People listen to the same kinds of music.

They use the same grammar and language from 20 years ago.

And so on.

It's a pretty well documented phenomenon, and a great Vanity Fair article from a couple years ago describes this perfectly: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

The whole idea of information being free and shared by everyone is actually destructive to society, since that means information becomes devalued when culture becomes democratic. It devalues professional tastemakers, causing populist sensibilities to take hold, which is the exact cause of cultural stagnation. Democratic sensibilities are always obvious, and can never advance the state-of-the-art that professional tastemakers can.

So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on. It is perfectly fine to limit these items, to make sure there ARE "have-nots". People don't HAVE to have every single goddam song in their library.

We really do need to limit the spread of information, through costs, DRM, or other means, to cause society to advance. Right now the world is frozen in 1995, because information is too open.

Seriously, it is perfectly fine to not know things or to have things. Your life is going to be just fine. But the democratic population wants everything.

Limit them.

But, what's worse is that the spending hasn't been on anything which benefited the average citizen, it's mostly on things that benefit the rich.

Bush did pass the drug benefit bill when he was running for re-election, which of course was also a big payout for the drug companies. While I was looking that up, I checked to see who sponsored the bill, and it was the Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was implicated in a Turkish bribe by an FBI whistleblower who was subsequently fired. Hastert later retired and went on to earn $35k per month as a lobbyist for Turkey.

Words fail me.

To give the devil his due, there are certain things that Nixon/Kissinger did right. You mentioned one of them. Others are détente and SALT I. But those are no reason to loose sight of the corrupt, murderous, and possibly outright treasonous things that they also did. History is full of such contradictions.

Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970, advocated for (near) universal health care, and even negotiated with Anwar Sadat for King Tut to travel from Egypt to the U.S.. The guy's demons ultimately got the best of him, but it's whack that the guy behind the Southern Strategy that led the Republicans into the crazy they're in today would now be considered too liberal (even socialist!) for his own party.

Apple are doing far worse things for computing than Microsoft ever did.

These two companies and the deleterious effects they may or may not have had on computing cannot even begin to be compared.

I've never had a virus on my iPhone and I have access to very useful apps that help me learn foreign languages, log my exercise, and construct data schema, among a host of other things. These apps, where they were not free of charge, are ones I paid for and for which developers were compensated.

Furthermore, Apple's approach to most competitors is to leave them be or, in the case where Apple sees significant market advantage, to purchase them and promote the use of the acquired assets and technology Apple's technological infrastructure.

This is a far cry from the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" philosophy adopted by Microsoft. The decade-upon-decade of vulnerability to viruses and malware as a result of poor OS architecture from Windows 95 through Windows XP looks nothing like the well-considered architectural choices Apple made for OS X security. (I'm not claiming of invulnerability, just reasonable separation of userland and system-level executables.)

This list could go on and on before I even got to the point where Microsoft became a convicted monopolist whose systematic refusal to adopt Internet standards stifled innovation for over a decade.

Microsoft's Windows is a derivative product that used to be incredibly unsecure. For nearly two decades, Microsoft bludgeoned innovative companies to death and manipulated hardware manufacturers in order to maintain market dominance and, as far as I'm concerned, I still don't trust Microsoft very much despite their considerably weakened position.

tl;dr: Even considering Apple's restrictive developer licenses, unfavorable marketplace terms, and their ongoing patent litigation, Apple's negative effects on computing are trivial compared to Microsoft's lamentable corporate history.

Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.

1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.

A blind trust and offshore account are two entirely different things.

A blind trust is designed to prevent you from being exposed to charges of insider trading by buying or selling stock in companies you have insider knowledge about. You can do that without having to hide it overseas in countries where the US tax man does not know how much is in there or what interest is being paid on it.

"Why aren't the US and Europe exerting more diplomatic pressure on these tax havens...?"

Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

Why would the people who created the tax laws that allow the sheltering in the first place exert any pressure?

Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

I'm NO friend of Mitt Romney - to put it mildly. But let's not blame him for something that's not his doing.

1) Because Romney was running for president, US law REQUIRES he put his money in a blind trust.

2) Also under US law the trustee has a "fiduciary duty" to do his reasonable best to protect and grow Romney's money for him. That includes seeing to it that is not taxed substantially more than the law requires. If he can save, say, 40% of the trust's earnings from being taxed away by using a LEGAL tax haven in Bermuda, and trustees of such trusts are expected to know that, he is REQUIRED BY LAW to do so.

So let's not have cheap shots against politicians and financial managers who are only doing what the law REQUIRES them to do.

There are plenty of things politicians have done that we can LEGITIMATELY go after them about - which have zapped us to the tune of trillions of dollars - at $3,175.40 from EACH citizen for EACH trillion. Let's not the dilute the discussion, and give them something to use to discredit their critics, by flaming them over drops in the bucket that AREN'T THEIR FAULT.

"Why aren't the US and Europe exerting more diplomatic pressure on these tax havens...?"

Because where else would US politicians offshore their income? http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

Paul Allen spotted it in 1980:

I had run into Steve [Ballmer] a few times at Harvard, where he and Bill were close. The first time we met face-to-face, I thought, This guy looks like an operative for the N.K.V.D.

Forget McAfee. I want a movie about Henry Nicholas of Broadcom. Henry was living large: drugs, prostitutes, secret sex lair being built under his house while his family lived in it.. It's as though he was living his life just to make a crazy movie about it.

McAfee? I don't want to watch a movie about some some guy that is obsessed with taking drugs rectally.

Probably the last time that happens though.

That's because Symbian is being discontinued. There will be no more new phones coming out with Symbian. All existing Symbian phones are scheduled to have only one or two more updates before EOL.

Nokia has deprecated Symbian. Nokia won't be making any more Symbian phones due to the exclusive nature of their relationship with Microsoft, even though the number of Symbian users converted to Windows Phone were essentially zero - as any but a fool would have expected. The deal essentially eliminated all of Nokia's considerable Symbian profits and revenues, replacing them with not a darned thing. But Symbian is open source, and those things have a way of springing back from the dead. Long after BSD was written off it lives on in OS X and iOS. If carriers want a third ecosystem Symbian with an installed base of still over 300 million is a good bet for it - far better than BB10 or Windows Phone. Symbian needs an open app store ecosystem, and a facelift, a few handset OEM sponsors, a community build that will go onto extant phones for the transition. But that's easier to do than selling 300 million Symbian users Windows Phone when they bought it because it was "not Microsoft".

Nokia got their half-billion Symbian units sold from a bygone era when smartphone sales were much lower. It took them a long time of huge market share to lift that bar so high, it wasn't even until last year that both iOS and Android combined could reach it and just this year that both did - due to the huge growth of the smartphone market.

It's late and the thread is old so you're likely the only one left reading this. I'll gift you with some historical juice: Counting coup on Nokia was one of the boxes Bill Gates left unchecked when he retired. He had Nokia envy for a decade. Besting Nokia was an undone task he had to let go to get away. Steve Ballmer, gifted with the CEO slot on the top of a tech and financial bubble, and then cursed with maintaining dividends and share price while the largest stockholder divests felt he didn't have a fair shot at success. Pressed on all sides and ridiculed in every corner Ballmer needed a win like wrecking Nokia to restore his self esteem. So he cheated. One day maybe the tale of how he cheated by subverting the Nokia Board and especially the Chairman in the critical CEO selection moment will be laid bare in some court somewhere. Or not. The connection should be well protected. But that's what happened. Wrecking Nokia by putting a puppet in, destroying the economy of Finland by deliberately bankrupting their biggest taxpayer, impoverishing the many retirees whose retirements rely on Nokia investments is just an intended consequence, a byblow, of Steve Ballmer proving to himself that he can do something even the legendary strategist he subconsciously knows is superior to him - Bill Gates - couldn't do. Steve Ballmer needed a win at any cost, and he got it.

Bill Gates really could have done it, and more gracefully, but it was out of phase with his retirement plan.

I could maybe propose some hypotheticals about how SteveB cheated. You see, as a multibillionaire CEO of what was then the world's largest technology company he travelled in rarified circles and rubbed elbows with movers and shakers. He could suggest, for example, that if some banks invested in a company dedicated to suing users and publishers of the cancerous Linux, they might make good their losses with favorable future tips. He could suggest to US bankers and financiers that they contact Nokia chairman Jorma

Nah, it's all just relevence. Everyone still talks plenty of shit about Microsoft and Apple.

It's just that, nobody much cared if Apple was evil back when they were bankrupt. And people care less about Microsoft now that they've stagnated for a decade.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer

You're really full of shit and hate.

Gates' ambition was to become a great engineer and programmer, and he could easily see that he is a failure

He's a failure because his direct programming efforts led to a successful company that he parlayed into the dominant computer company for about 20 years?

On his ambitions: "His parents subscribed to Fortune, and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine's special annual issue and asked me, "What do you think it's like to run a Fortune 500 company?" I said I had no idea. And Bill said, "Maybe we'll have our own company someday." He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur."

His greatest engineering achievement was a BASIC interpreter

He had to write it for an extremely limited platform in assembly, the kind of optimization that Woz gets accolades for on his early work for Apple. Gates, along with his two partners, was also the first to do it for the Altair. He recognized the opportunity and succeeded first. By the time IBM came knocking, he was already the head of a successful company.

And calling Gates dumb just proves your ignorance and hate: "When Bill got the news that he'd been accepted at Harvard University, he wasn't surprised; he'd been riding high since scoring near the top in the Putnam Competition, where he'd tested his math skills against college undergraduates around the country."

The article goes on to point out that he was humbled at Harvard with regards to math, but calling him "the dumbest person in Harvard" is just hateful assertion on your part.

Stack Ranking as entertainment.

If people think that a career in Microsoft is a prize, then they are in for a surprise.

"I see Microsoft as technology's answer to Sears," said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. "In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it's just a barren wasteland. And that's Microsoft."

Emulating "The Real World" and a "Reality TV" meme that peaked 5 years ago is indicative that Ballmer's Microsoft is still woefully clueless - on top of being bloated, cruel, ignorant and narcissistic.

It doesn't matter how well he can dodge chairs; he just has to aim for a team where everybody else is worse at it because Microsoft operates is the type of nightmare employer which operates forced ranking. Also, being with the stupidest people is probably your best chance of getting someone intelligent to teach you something since only the suicidal would teach someone in their own team. Ideally you are looking for a team of stupid people with a recently changed, decent, intelligent manager.

Having said that, the best thing about winning this would be the pleasure of being able to say "no thanks"

Not true. Only after Bill Gates and Paul Allen already had a company with serious profits, did Bill invite Steve in.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/05/paul-allen-201105

Or do they have different shaped corners than the Samsung models?

Regardless, there many be some people who choose to suspend buying Samsung or other South Korean products now that the country has announced that they'll be doing "research" whaling. (Of course they should be told why business is going elsewhere) Calling it research whaling exploits a loophole to engage in a banned practice.

I don't suppose political researchers use harpoons? They can end up traveling to places like the Cayman Islands though.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

The way this guy makes and shuffles money is much stranger than Bill

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

But that company's lawyers can and do reproduce, to the detriment of all humanity:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110330/04055413695/monsanto-sued-organic-farmers-who-dont-want-to-be-accused-patent-infringement.shtml

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/26/eveningnews/main4048288.shtml

It's amusing to watch "serious thinkers" labor under the seemingly self-imposed restriction that basically says "all important things come down to money.". Apparently , this is the only way to taken seriously in America today- do a "we' re all economically interdependent " jig ala Thomas Friedman -who turns out is wrong-o on, like, a regular basis:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/friedmans-follies

Look, one thing that unites us at least as much as money is porn. Porn porn porn. The porn the Navy seals found in bin Laden's son hard drive. It's non-trivial. The world view that women are fundamentally non-sexual or worse, a kind of livestock to be owned, collected, traded and bred, is not going to survive the Great Porn Onslaught coming from developed nations. You can't be exposed to image after image of two chicks fucking each other with gigantic purple gel dildos while one guy fucks one up the ass and the other administers a deep-throated, lipstick-perfect blowjob to a tanned and muscled Mr. 10 inches and continue to see the sight of a woman's bare ankle, or hair or uncovered mouth as a dangerously provocative sight.

And then there's the flood of pages questioning religion through everything from mockery to lists of holy book contradictions and ridiculous assertions to sane and sober dismemberment of core religious tenets .

As far as China goes, knowledge of what the West had started with TV and now is spreading into the areas of the intellectual, political and associational freedoms people in western nations enjoy. These are the things that change nations by changing people's perceptions, one person at a time, sitting alone in front of their computer, reading something forbidden, exhilarated at the ideas being encountered and idealizing what life might be like to live in a country where men and women were able to speak so freely.

Or whacking off to dirty Tumblr-after-dark pictures.

http://tumblr-afterdark.tumblr.com/

There ya go.