In other words, unlike Obama, Dubya got congressional approval for his war(s).
Dubya fed us a huge pile of lies for his favorite war, and completely dropped the ball on his less favorite one.
More importantly though Dubya didn't call either of his wars a "war", because that would be too messy. Just as we didn't say we "invaded" Iraq, we instead said that we "liberated" it. But ultimately Dubya gave lip service to the "war powers resolution" only because he knew that he had strong enough majorities in both chambers that he could have asked to invade Antarctica and they would have given that to him as well. Had there been enough people in either chamber to deny him anything, he would have done the same thing that we are seeing President Lawnchair doing.
And for that matter, if it had been McCain elected instead, we would probably already have boots on the ground, since the republicans in the house would not have opposed his request for anything related to the military.
What would brands use different domain names for if the extension is the brandname? Would it be for different geographic regions? different pages? different languages?
None of the above. The new gTLDs will be used mostly by spammers to get around the pesky registration work that they have to do currently for their domains. No longer will they have to find an unscrupulous registrar in a developing country to buy domains from for their spamvertised web site, now they can just buy their own gTLD for one lump sum and do all their own registration at no additional cost.
Big companies will buy gTLDs just to protect them, spammers will buy them to make our lives miserable. And before you say "I can just blacklist them", recognize that they will do this to register the spamvertised site, which is of course not the domain that the spam itself came from.
When you buy a gTLD, you also are granted all rights for registration within that domain, you essentially become your own little mini-ICANN. Now domains will be registered with essentially zero accountability, that can do whatever they like whenever they like and be accountable to nobody. And once a domain is sold in a new gTLD and becomes a registrar for com/net/org, that registrar will also be above accountability themselves.
At that point, it is game over, the spammers have won. There will be no way to shut down spamming or spamvertised domains. The spammers will be able to register new domains more quickly than we'll be able to detect them (blacklisting goes out the window at that point, too).
But the ICANN guys will have made some nice one-time profits, and that is what they are there for anyways. At least they are happy, and that is the important part.
Hello from the other side of the political seesaw.
What's the weather like up there? We've been stuck down here on the bottom for a long, long time now.
I find both Obama and GW to be too liberal
Could you be so kind as to give an example of someone who has (at any point in history) declared candidacy for the presidency who you would consider to not be "too liberal"?
And for that matter, being as the federal government has not in any meaningful way become more liberal in the past several decades, what is it that you want that you are not getting from your government? They have basically been getting out of everything but national defense, which has generally been a very popular thing for conservatives to fund.
I want very hard line conservatism (and you obviously don't)
I thought Reagan was the benchmark for hard line conservatism, no? Being as GWB was a resurrection of Reaganomics, I figured there wasn't much more hard line that the federal government could go (of course the tea party is working hard to find something further to the right). And being as Obama has yet to do anything that GWB would not have done, I don't see how this is not a conservative government in power currently.
If you think the two parties are the same, you must be another frigging teabagger.
No. Tea Party hacks believe that both parties are raging lunatic socialists. I'm a real liberal, who realizes that both parties are actually extremely conservative.
For that matter, most Tea Party hacks try to place some great distinction between the policies of President Obama and his immediate predecessor, while the liberals who haven't yet been chased out of this country realize they are interchangeable.
It was under them that support for NT was dropped, and once that happened, the architecture was dead: people were not going to prefer OSF/1 to HP/UX or AIX, let alone Solaris or Linux.
I never really understood why anyone wanted NT for the Alpha anyways. There was so little of anything useful that could be done with NT back in the day, in comparison to what you could do in *nix with an Alpha. HP/UX was great on the Alpha, although we eventually setup Linux on ours to make it easier to install binaries for new software.
In the end I just don't see the Alpha making sense for a Windows user, any more than I see Windows making sense as a serious computational environment - which is where the Alpha was best suited.
I never understood why so many teams' hometowns would go and destroy their own towns after their team won the championship. Perhaps with even greater irony, my alma mater won a championship (twice, actually) when I wan in undergraduate, and some of my fellow students went and trashed our town in celebration.
Really, if you're going to trash something, shouldn't you go to sack and loot your opponents town? Sure, it would have been a long trip from Vancouver to Boston (or the other way if the winner is to sack the loser's town), but it would seem to make more sense.
Hence, if it had been Boston fans in Vancouver, destroying Vancouver after winning the cup, it would have made more sense (though that is extremely relative here) than the citizens destroying their own town.
Indeed Compaq killed it more actively than did HP, but when HP bought Compaq they could have changed the direction of its demise if they so desired.
And I know signatures are automatically offtopic, but I agree with yours - Obama is indeed just another Bush presidency. Which leaves one to wonder why people who so euthusiastically supported Bush are so eagerly doing everything they can to derail Obama.
I doubt any company will be found to have failed from unionization alone.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what was claimed in the post I replied to. Your answer regarding GM is reasonable, stating that there were many factors involved in driving General Motors into bankruptcy, as GM was committed to many costs that they were unable to meet.
However certain slashdot conservatives - and at least one slashdot troll - are out to portray unions as being guilty of single-handedly taking prosperous companies and driving them into bankruptcy after establishing themselves in an non-union environment. While many people like to state that to be the case, nobody has yet come up with an example of it happening as such.
If I was vague, I apologize. I am not questioning the notoriously sound Icelandic records. I am questioning facebook's claim instead. Did they actually verify that the Icelandic accounts they claim to have actually all correspond to real living people, on a 1:1 basis? It isn't exactly hard to establish more than one account on facebook, or to give less-than-truthful information to them as to where you are.
People are speculating at the body being eaten by creatures of the sea, but I don't recall hearing if he was buried at sea in a coffin or not. That would change the search parameters fairly significantly.
Of course, both of those times are trumped by time spent charging the damned things, but that is a different problem.
My solution to that is never to charge batteries for kids' outside toys. Let them push the fuckers, it's good exercise.
Now I am certainly not a big believer in the power wheels as being great toys anyways; I obviously survived my childhood just fine without one. And I would be perfectly content to not buy any for any future children of my own.
However, if you own one, you know that they are utterly worthless without charged batteries. They aren't any fun to push - even parents can tell you that. If you want to give them something that is people-powered, get them a cozy coupe or a radio flyer instead; giving them a battery-operated toy and refusing to charge the batteries is rather cruel.
No, the blu-ray doesn't need more buttons than a DVD; it needs the same number of buttons. But that number is still more than the number of buttons on a Wii remote. And the Sony PS3 controller is awkward (to be kind) for playing a blu-ray movie. Sure, people who play PS* games all the time find it second nature, but for someone who just wants to watch a movie, a dedicated blu-ray (or DVD) remote works much better.
Anyone whose tried to tell a senior citizen "hold down trigger R2, then press triangle" can confirm that. Hell, just finding triangle in the dark on an all-black controller is no easy task.
Science is great for business. What do you think the world's most powerful computation clusters are doing? They aren't doing financial transactions, I'll tell you that. The largest computation clusters are doing scientific calculations. There is a lot of money to be made in that realm - hardware sales, configuration, support, upgrades, etc. Hell it is one of the core focuses of IBM since they sold off their PC & laptop division to Lenovo, and they seem to be doing quite well with it.
The idiots who killed off Alpha at HP also killed off a nontrivial amount of revenue. Revenue that IBM, Apple, and Dell were happy to compete for. If you look at the top500 list, you see that Alpha was present there even after HP killed it off.
Money spent to keep things the same is money well spent.
They didn't even do that with Alpha. They could have just made bigger systems with the same CPU and kept it going with essentially zero R&D work, as the processor scaled beautifully in multi-CPU applications. I can tell you that from personal experience as I used to use an AlphaServer with four 667MHz CPUs and 8 GB of RAM, it could beat the pants off of our 32 CPU Intel P4 cluster with each of those CPUs running at 2GHz.
Sony sold the PS3 with the promise for a superior blueray player
But how many people buy a PS3 to play blu-ray? You can get a very capable blu-ray player for half the cost if blu-ray is all you want. And the blu-ray only device is much easier to use for playing blu-ray than a PS3 with a regular sony PS3 controller.
and they won the war agains toshiba for this next gen format
It is open to debate whether or not the PS3 had any impact on the blu-ray/hd-dvd battle...
The claim that 2/3rds of the Icelandic population is on facebook, based on the number of facebook accounts listed in Iceland? That seems sketchy to me. I would be hesitant to accept every one of those accounts as actually belonging to a real person, actually living in Iceland. Back when I used ICQ, I used to say I was in Uzbekistan, but I don't think the ICQ guys were silly enough to count me as an Uzbek citizen.
If Oracle wants to countersue HP for dropping the Alpha, I'd be happy to testify on their behalf. The idiots at HP killed off one of the best architectures for scientific computations ever.
The Wii shipped without DVD playing capability (yes you can hack it to do it), and that didn't seem to slow down sales to any appreciable amount. Besides, look at the remote for your blu-ray player (any blu-ray player you have; you probably have more than one by now) at your home. Compare the number of buttons on that remote to the number of buttons on the Wiimote or the buttons show on the remote for the Wii U. People are already mocking the Wii U remote for being too big; do you really want them to an another 40 buttons to it?
And you can't honestly tell me that the PS3 controller is a great blu-ray remote. If you think it is a good remote then hand it to a senior citizen and ask them to start a movie.
While originally when I bought a Wii and found it couldn't play DVDs, I was disappointed, this time I agree. We don't need the Wii U to play DVD or blu-ray. The old ideal of an all-in-one media center device for the home just didn't happen, and doesn't need to.
Ah yes, lets not let the kids figure stuff out for themselves.
Do you realize the age and size of kids who are appropriate for power wheels? They generally can't understand complicated instructions like "put it in reverse" (assuming it has reverse and you know where the switch is - the answers to both vary widely across models even from the same manufacturer). On top of that they generally don't have the strength to climb out/off of vehicle and turn it around if they drove into an immovable object and don't have reverse.
So in other words, in many cases "let the kids figure stuff out for themselves" just doesn't apply to power wheels and the kind of problems kids run into on their own while driving them. By the time they are old enough to figure it out, they are too large to use it, or they are already using faster moving forms of transportation like bicycles, roller skates, or shoes with laces.
Hence I'm going to wager you have never seen a kid drive one and run into these problems, or you would understand why this would be useful. Parents who have had kids rid these things can tell you they spend almost as much time walking after them to turn them around (or pull them off the grass) as they spend actually watching junior drive it. Of course, both of those times are trumped by time spent charging the damned things, but that is a different problem.
Some time ago someone pointed out to me that powerwheels toys would be dramatically more fun for the parents if they could be remote-controlled like giant R/C cars. As it is right now, when junior is out riding his mini-whatever-vehicle, he inevitably will get it stuck and not know how to put it in reverse. If the parents had a remote control for it that could override junior's input, they could throw it in reverse, drive it out, and bring junior back to the top of the driveway, without having to get off the front step.
Win, win, win.
Although putting a camera and a machine gun on it is pretty clever, too.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, unlike Obama, Dubya got congressional approval for his war(s).
Dubya fed us a huge pile of lies for his favorite war, and completely dropped the ball on his less favorite one.
More importantly though Dubya didn't call either of his wars a "war", because that would be too messy. Just as we didn't say we "invaded" Iraq, we instead said that we "liberated" it. But ultimately Dubya gave lip service to the "war powers resolution" only because he knew that he had strong enough majorities in both chambers that he could have asked to invade Antarctica and they would have given that to him as well. Had there been enough people in either chamber to deny him anything, he would have done the same thing that we are seeing President Lawnchair doing.
And for that matter, if it had been McCain elected instead, we would probably already have boots on the ground, since the republicans in the house would not have opposed his request for anything related to the military.
This doesn't seem in any way different than what the previous guy would have said in the same situation.
What would brands use different domain names for if the extension is the brandname? Would it be for different geographic regions? different pages? different languages?
None of the above. The new gTLDs will be used mostly by spammers to get around the pesky registration work that they have to do currently for their domains. No longer will they have to find an unscrupulous registrar in a developing country to buy domains from for their spamvertised web site, now they can just buy their own gTLD for one lump sum and do all their own registration at no additional cost.
Big companies will buy gTLDs just to protect them, spammers will buy them to make our lives miserable. And before you say "I can just blacklist them", recognize that they will do this to register the spamvertised site, which is of course not the domain that the spam itself came from.
... the portable version?
When you buy a gTLD, you also are granted all rights for registration within that domain, you essentially become your own little mini-ICANN. Now domains will be registered with essentially zero accountability, that can do whatever they like whenever they like and be accountable to nobody. And once a domain is sold in a new gTLD and becomes a registrar for com/net/org, that registrar will also be above accountability themselves.
At that point, it is game over, the spammers have won. There will be no way to shut down spamming or spamvertised domains. The spammers will be able to register new domains more quickly than we'll be able to detect them (blacklisting goes out the window at that point, too).
But the ICANN guys will have made some nice one-time profits, and that is what they are there for anyways. At least they are happy, and that is the important part.
Hello from the other side of the political seesaw.
What's the weather like up there? We've been stuck down here on the bottom for a long, long time now.
I find both Obama and GW to be too liberal
Could you be so kind as to give an example of someone who has (at any point in history) declared candidacy for the presidency who you would consider to not be "too liberal"?
And for that matter, being as the federal government has not in any meaningful way become more liberal in the past several decades, what is it that you want that you are not getting from your government? They have basically been getting out of everything but national defense, which has generally been a very popular thing for conservatives to fund.
I want very hard line conservatism (and you obviously don't)
I thought Reagan was the benchmark for hard line conservatism, no? Being as GWB was a resurrection of Reaganomics, I figured there wasn't much more hard line that the federal government could go (of course the tea party is working hard to find something further to the right). And being as Obama has yet to do anything that GWB would not have done, I don't see how this is not a conservative government in power currently.
If you think the two parties are the same, you must be another frigging teabagger.
No. Tea Party hacks believe that both parties are raging lunatic socialists. I'm a real liberal, who realizes that both parties are actually extremely conservative.
For that matter, most Tea Party hacks try to place some great distinction between the policies of President Obama and his immediate predecessor, while the liberals who haven't yet been chased out of this country realize they are interchangeable.
I'm seeing a banner ad on the top of the page encouraging me to blame Obama for high gas prices. Certainly, that is only coincidental, right?
Microsoft is a not-insignificant sponsor of the republocrat party, and must be rewarded as such.
It was under them that support for NT was dropped, and once that happened, the architecture was dead: people were not going to prefer OSF/1 to HP/UX or AIX, let alone Solaris or Linux.
I never really understood why anyone wanted NT for the Alpha anyways. There was so little of anything useful that could be done with NT back in the day, in comparison to what you could do in *nix with an Alpha. HP/UX was great on the Alpha, although we eventually setup Linux on ours to make it easier to install binaries for new software.
In the end I just don't see the Alpha making sense for a Windows user, any more than I see Windows making sense as a serious computational environment - which is where the Alpha was best suited.
I never understood why so many teams' hometowns would go and destroy their own towns after their team won the championship. Perhaps with even greater irony, my alma mater won a championship (twice, actually) when I wan in undergraduate, and some of my fellow students went and trashed our town in celebration.
Really, if you're going to trash something, shouldn't you go to sack and loot your opponents town? Sure, it would have been a long trip from Vancouver to Boston (or the other way if the winner is to sack the loser's town), but it would seem to make more sense.
Hence, if it had been Boston fans in Vancouver, destroying Vancouver after winning the cup, it would have made more sense (though that is extremely relative here) than the citizens destroying their own town.
Indeed Compaq killed it more actively than did HP, but when HP bought Compaq they could have changed the direction of its demise if they so desired.
And I know signatures are automatically offtopic, but I agree with yours - Obama is indeed just another Bush presidency. Which leaves one to wonder why people who so euthusiastically supported Bush are so eagerly doing everything they can to derail Obama.
I think that tag renders inconsistently some times... or most of the time under some situations.
I doubt any company will be found to have failed from unionization alone.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what was claimed in the post I replied to. Your answer regarding GM is reasonable, stating that there were many factors involved in driving General Motors into bankruptcy, as GM was committed to many costs that they were unable to meet.
However certain slashdot conservatives - and at least one slashdot troll - are out to portray unions as being guilty of single-handedly taking prosperous companies and driving them into bankruptcy after establishing themselves in an non-union environment. While many people like to state that to be the case, nobody has yet come up with an example of it happening as such.
If I was vague, I apologize. I am not questioning the notoriously sound Icelandic records. I am questioning facebook's claim instead. Did they actually verify that the Icelandic accounts they claim to have actually all correspond to real living people, on a 1:1 basis? It isn't exactly hard to establish more than one account on facebook, or to give less-than-truthful information to them as to where you are.
People are speculating at the body being eaten by creatures of the sea, but I don't recall hearing if he was buried at sea in a coffin or not. That would change the search parameters fairly significantly.
Of course, both of those times are trumped by time spent charging the damned things, but that is a different problem.
My solution to that is never to charge batteries for kids' outside toys. Let them push the fuckers, it's good exercise.
Now I am certainly not a big believer in the power wheels as being great toys anyways; I obviously survived my childhood just fine without one. And I would be perfectly content to not buy any for any future children of my own.
However, if you own one, you know that they are utterly worthless without charged batteries. They aren't any fun to push - even parents can tell you that. If you want to give them something that is people-powered, get them a cozy coupe or a radio flyer instead; giving them a battery-operated toy and refusing to charge the batteries is rather cruel.
No, the blu-ray doesn't need more buttons than a DVD; it needs the same number of buttons. But that number is still more than the number of buttons on a Wii remote. And the Sony PS3 controller is awkward (to be kind) for playing a blu-ray movie. Sure, people who play PS* games all the time find it second nature, but for someone who just wants to watch a movie, a dedicated blu-ray (or DVD) remote works much better.
Anyone whose tried to tell a senior citizen "hold down trigger R2, then press triangle" can confirm that. Hell, just finding triangle in the dark on an all-black controller is no easy task.
Science isn't good for business
Bullshit.
Science is great for business. What do you think the world's most powerful computation clusters are doing? They aren't doing financial transactions, I'll tell you that. The largest computation clusters are doing scientific calculations. There is a lot of money to be made in that realm - hardware sales, configuration, support, upgrades, etc. Hell it is one of the core focuses of IBM since they sold off their PC & laptop division to Lenovo, and they seem to be doing quite well with it.
The idiots who killed off Alpha at HP also killed off a nontrivial amount of revenue. Revenue that IBM, Apple, and Dell were happy to compete for. If you look at the top500 list, you see that Alpha was present there even after HP killed it off.
Money spent to keep things the same is money well spent.
They didn't even do that with Alpha. They could have just made bigger systems with the same CPU and kept it going with essentially zero R&D work, as the processor scaled beautifully in multi-CPU applications. I can tell you that from personal experience as I used to use an AlphaServer with four 667MHz CPUs and 8 GB of RAM, it could beat the pants off of our 32 CPU Intel P4 cluster with each of those CPUs running at 2GHz.
Sony sold the PS3 with the promise for a superior blueray player
But how many people buy a PS3 to play blu-ray? You can get a very capable blu-ray player for half the cost if blu-ray is all you want. And the blu-ray only device is much easier to use for playing blu-ray than a PS3 with a regular sony PS3 controller.
and they won the war agains toshiba for this next gen format
It is open to debate whether or not the PS3 had any impact on the blu-ray/hd-dvd battle...
The claim that 2/3rds of the Icelandic population is on facebook, based on the number of facebook accounts listed in Iceland? That seems sketchy to me. I would be hesitant to accept every one of those accounts as actually belonging to a real person, actually living in Iceland. Back when I used ICQ, I used to say I was in Uzbekistan, but I don't think the ICQ guys were silly enough to count me as an Uzbek citizen.
If Oracle wants to countersue HP for dropping the Alpha, I'd be happy to testify on their behalf. The idiots at HP killed off one of the best architectures for scientific computations ever.
The Wii shipped without DVD playing capability (yes you can hack it to do it), and that didn't seem to slow down sales to any appreciable amount. Besides, look at the remote for your blu-ray player (any blu-ray player you have; you probably have more than one by now) at your home. Compare the number of buttons on that remote to the number of buttons on the Wiimote or the buttons show on the remote for the Wii U. People are already mocking the Wii U remote for being too big; do you really want them to an another 40 buttons to it?
And you can't honestly tell me that the PS3 controller is a great blu-ray remote. If you think it is a good remote then hand it to a senior citizen and ask them to start a movie.
While originally when I bought a Wii and found it couldn't play DVDs, I was disappointed, this time I agree. We don't need the Wii U to play DVD or blu-ray. The old ideal of an all-in-one media center device for the home just didn't happen, and doesn't need to.
Ah yes, lets not let the kids figure stuff out for themselves.
Do you realize the age and size of kids who are appropriate for power wheels? They generally can't understand complicated instructions like "put it in reverse" (assuming it has reverse and you know where the switch is - the answers to both vary widely across models even from the same manufacturer). On top of that they generally don't have the strength to climb out/off of vehicle and turn it around if they drove into an immovable object and don't have reverse.
So in other words, in many cases "let the kids figure stuff out for themselves" just doesn't apply to power wheels and the kind of problems kids run into on their own while driving them. By the time they are old enough to figure it out, they are too large to use it, or they are already using faster moving forms of transportation like bicycles, roller skates, or shoes with laces.
Hence I'm going to wager you have never seen a kid drive one and run into these problems, or you would understand why this would be useful. Parents who have had kids rid these things can tell you they spend almost as much time walking after them to turn them around (or pull them off the grass) as they spend actually watching junior drive it. Of course, both of those times are trumped by time spent charging the damned things, but that is a different problem.
Some time ago someone pointed out to me that powerwheels toys would be dramatically more fun for the parents if they could be remote-controlled like giant R/C cars. As it is right now, when junior is out riding his mini-whatever-vehicle, he inevitably will get it stuck and not know how to put it in reverse. If the parents had a remote control for it that could override junior's input, they could throw it in reverse, drive it out, and bring junior back to the top of the driveway, without having to get off the front step.
Win, win, win.
Although putting a camera and a machine gun on it is pretty clever, too.