I have to weigh in here. I'm old enough, I've been privy to the details of a number of "encounters" that later went to court. I've had freinds, both male and female freinds involved.
First, let's ground ourselves in reality. In Africa, today, (semi)organized gangs of men prowl the villages searching out female victims. Not only are the victims used and abused violently, but they are often cut and mutilated intentionally in an attempt to sterilize and degrade them. If the women survive, so be it, if not, tough. Victims range in age from infants to very old women.
Compare common cases in the civilized world to the actions of those thugs in Africa. I could sit in judgement of those savages, and uniformly award the death sentence from now until hell freezes over.
Here, in America, statutory rape has been abused to the point, that if a boy and girl have been dating for months, and he celebrates his 18th birthday before she does, he can be charged with rape, no matter that she consents, or maybe even initiates an evening of sex. THAT is a case of being raped by the system.
There is a wide range of "rapes" in between the two extreme ends that I've just painted. And, anyone who believes that our court system is adequate for judging all of them has a few screws loose, IMHO.
Real violent, brutal rape is simply not punished severely enough. The man who can use his fists to pummel a resistant woman into submission, should NEVER walk the streets again. In fact, I can justify the death penalty for many of them.
On the other hand, having a casual relationship with someone met in a bar, only to be charged with "rape" later, because she has some "multiple personality disorder" is about as bogus as things can get. (I've been close to two cases like that.)
I don't have any numbers to offer, but at a rough guess, I would say that nearly 10% of "offenders" in this country never should have gone to trial. Prosecuting attorneys seldom care about "justice", it's all about numbers.
The laws regarding registered sex offenders do not go nearly far enough to differentiate between the classes of offenders. As already stated, the worst offenders shouldn't even see sunlight, but there they are, walking the streets. Others, if they really DID do anything wrong, should serve a year of probation and be forgotten - they are no threat to anyone.
Laws like the one in TFA don't do ANYTHING to see that justice is done. They only create beauracratic hoops for a captive audience to jump through. They create jobs for people who get off on minding other people's business. They contribute to an Owellian society, something we are moving toward just as quickly as possible.
Personally I can't see any justice in a law like this. Dangerous people belong in a dungeon or a coffin, and non-dangerous people need their rights restored.
The system doesn't work, and laws like these will only make the system worse.
"Plausible deniability" didn't work for me. Whey waterboarded me, beat me with a hose, and pulled my fingernails out. I finally gave in, told them the password was "B0gUS*p*w0RD". They came right back, and tortured me some more, til I gave them "Th3_R34L_p_w0RD".
Ditto. Who cares about anything that includes red and green, when you can't SEE red and green? Phhht. For the most part, I don't give a damn about colors. Give me a dark skin, with high contrast, and I'm happy!
I don't "need" a cell phone. If I could get one for cheap, I might have one, but I don't "need" it. So, I don't pay the price!!
If 50% of the people in America suddenly had their cell phone service turned off, citing cost as the reason, the carriers would slash rates overnight. They might even be competitive with European rates.
But, no, we Americans enjoy being led around by the ring in our noses.....
Here, we will find out if Canadians have more balls than us Americans who live south of the 49th parallel. Hopefully, the Canucks will tell them all to eat shit, and that will give the voters in the states a little motivation to get off THEIR dead asses to protest.
LOL - I made the error, caught it during proof reading, and decided to let it stand. And, you're the first to catch it! ~13 hours for an obvious mistake to go unchallenged on a geek forum? I guess geeks != math major college grads!
However - I don't think that you typed what you meant to say, either. How about.05% != 1/20th ? To say precisely what the GP was ATTEMPTING to say, I would need to remove the decimal point.
But, I'm confident that those who commonly use terms such as "20x quieter" aren't going to figure any of this out.
Look, asswipe. Your post made sense, right up to the point you tried to sound superior. You could have left off after you started me thinking. Unfortunately, your oversized ego and your tendency to run at the mouth just makes you look like an idiot.
Now, I'm really, really, really motivated to look at it again to see if maybe the foul mouthed egotistical bastard is right. Uh-huh. Moron.
"No, it was because while the companies were entirely happy to contribute back changes to libraries they were using, they were not happy to open up their entire finished product, just because they used a GPL'd library along the way."
Apparently, VMWare is a little bit smarter than any of the decision makers you have worked for. VMWare manages to sell a proprietary product which is based on GPL'd code. How do they manage? Could it be, because they are literate?
It is a meaningless expression. It is a grammatically idiotic expression, which does NOT translate into mathematics.
You have left NOTHING as an exercise for the reader. Express yourself properly.
An educated person who wished to express the concept you wish to convey, might very well say "this machine produces a noise level.05% of ambient noise in a quiet room"
"the implementation today will be much faster because networks are much faster"
That is so easy for city boys and girls to say. What about those of us who live in Outback, Nowhere? Applications get more and more bloated, protocols seem to take on a life of their own, pages are often written badly with far to much content, and EVERYONE relies on either Flash or Java. The net result? My 1/2 MB connection oftentimes seems slower than the 56k I finally got rid of about 2 yrs ago.
It's wonderful that peope who live close to a university, like downtown Boston, can run all their apps over the web. But, what about the REST of the country?
About the time that we can get affordabe 5MB connections, the rest of you will have written yet more bloated software, and that will be inadequate!
All over the web, there are stories about the IE-killer, the Firefox-killer, and, yes, the Microsoft-killer.
Everytime I read these stories, I know that the author is a small-minded person, who is incapable of coping with the complexities of marketing, personal preference, and technical needs. Or, he is yet another drama llama, catering to small-minded readers.
Boys and girls, if you've read much of what I post, you will KNOW that I don't like Microsoft. In fact, I despise Bill Gates. But, there is nothing on the market that is going to kill Windows, or kill Microsoft. No matter HOW GOOD ChromeOS is, no matter HOW MUCH Linux improves, no matter how many new arrivals on the scene might be, there will still be a market for Windows.
I would LOVE to see Windows reduced to about 20% market share. But, killed off? It isn't happening, any more than Linux is going to be done away with.
Microsoft death spiral. What nonsense. What is most likely to happen is, Chrome will indeed eat into Microsoft's cash flow. But, there are living people with working minds over at Microsoft. They will adapt, and they will respond. I have no more idea than the next guy HOW Microsoft will respond, but they will pick up the pieces and go on. That huge, multi-billion dollar company isn't going to dry up and blow away in any of our lifetimes, just because Google has come out with the "NEXT BIG THING!"
CmdrTaco and anyone else posting these stories is just engaging in baseless FUD.
I asked for a mathematical equation, not for a circuitous rationalization for your poor grammar.
Had you stated, "1/20th the volume" your statement could be incorporated into any mathematical equation. 20 times quieter is meaningless marketing babble.
You failed math, how many times? You can't turn that statement into a mathematical equation. If you were able to do so, you would have stated it properly.
"just as !false == true, so does !guilty == innocent"
You presume that people are as logical as a programming language? Or, you presume that law is that logical?
Either way, you fail.
Do you, perhaps, live in your mother's basement? You should get out and stufy people more. You might even browse some lawbooks and legal cases. In real life, not only are there black and white, and shades of grey, but there are MILLIONS OF COLORS. Kinda like your monitor, I hope.
If juries could be handed just black and white facts, along with clearly stated, logical laws, few people would escape justice. But, that will only ever happen in dream worlds and Hollywood.
Yes. If I had mod points, parent and GP would BOTH get them.
A life that revolves around TV scheduling is an empty, shallow life, IMHO. People need to get out and DO STUFF. Basket weaving seems a silly pastime to me, but I would much rather do a little basket weaving with a grand daughter, than to waste those hours watching spongebob, or some other mindless "humor".
If a person has NOTHING better to do with their time, then they should get out and meet neighbors. Doing things with and for other people is a rewarding activity, in and of itself. The old widow around the corner might even remember you in her will, if you spend time with her.
("To my cats, I leave my fortune of $98.32. To my daughter, I leave my wardrobe. To my son, I leave the heap in the garage that hasn't run since 1963. And, oh yes, I remember that sweet young man who sat on the porch with me from time to time!")
"so my self-esteem is not predicated on how popular I perceive myself to be"
How commendable. I can relate to that. I could relate even more, if you were willing to sign your name, anonymous COWARD.
Meanwhile - I've downloaded the PDF containing the law being discussed everywhere. It is neither the abandonment of the elderly that Sarah Bigmouth Palin claims it to be, nor is it the end-all be-all cure for everything that ails us.
With 1018 pages, it's going to take some time to digest all of it, but so far, it looks like a reasoned attempt to save money - MY money, as much as anyone's money - while actually ensuring that just plain Po' Folk get treatment when they need it.
OF COURSE there are problems with it. But, it does attempt to address real problems with the existing system.
1. Lack of integrity among business executives 2. Lack of responsibility among the accountants 3. An overlap of authority, with executives ordering and/or intimidating accountants 4. Lack of oversight by government through it's regulatory agencies 5. Obvious burning greed among executives - even AFTER Enron burned to the ground, executives expected to get their "performance" bonuses. 6. A legal system that managed to find cretins low enough to represent said executives in their claims for bonuses. 7. Numerous statements made by executive elitests around the country, coming to the defense of said executives, especially their "right" to collect those bonuses.
It matters little who lied where, when, or how - Enron made it obvious that Corporate America's investment schemes were nothing more than shady deals made in secrecy, using fraudulently obtained investor's funds. Enron made it blindingly obvious that executives expect huge payoffs, with no responsibility. Elitism, taken to an extreme. "Oh, we went to good schools, and we know all the right people, we're ENTITLED to millions in bonuses, no matter WHAT happens to your stupid company!"
If we have failed to learn any lessons from the financial meltdown, we will be repeating the same mistakes soon.
Oh, let's not forget another failure. That of the general population of America. Idol worship. We tend to idolize anyone who is "successful". If some egotistical freak has millions of dollars, we tend to emulate him, in our choice of clothes, manner of speech, choice of cars, choice of diet. We worship the guy with lots of toys, and we want to be just like him - no matter that he has no moral character. Michael Jackson, anyone?
Something like that may be happening. Malaria has been out of control since the beginning of time, in Africa. AIDS took off like a wildfire recently (recent, in historical terms). The flu strains are adapting, and growing more virulent. Overcrowding has made it so EASY for biological agents to spread. Who knows which virus or germ is mutating right now, to strike us in the next 2 to 10 years?
I expect a major die off of the human species, sometime soon. The only real questions are, will we preserve our science and learning, and, how will the survivors be affected psychologically?
Be a hell of a thing if a major pandemic destroyed civilization.
But, but, but - if AL GORE says so, it's GOTTA be so!!
Actually, I agree with you. Gorey Al couldn't make enough political capital with the green weenie crap, so now he's shooting for some plain old filthy lucre capital. Screw him, and all of his green freinds. They are milking the ecology for all it's worth, at the expense of all the little people who don't know any better.
All their blather about global warming wasn't enough to change the auto industry, or buyer's preferences. Only now, when our economic experts have raped the economy dry are people really interested in conservation - mostly for selfish resons. ("Oh boy, the government will give me 4500 bucks to buy a new car, and the auto industry will give me another 4500. $9,000 bucks? I'm getting Grandpa's old Ford out of the barn, RIGHT NOW! Screw sentimental value, Grandpa was a fool anyway!")
Meme or not, you and everyone in the Western world needs to get used to the idea that a very small number of Golden Boys on Wall Street, in cahoots with a somewhat larger number of politicians, managed to STEAL billions of dollars from small investors and taxpayers.
There has been little secrecy regarding deregulation of the securities and exchanges over the last 16 to 20 years. The democrats played ball with Wall Street when Clinton was in, then Bush came along and got serious about deregulation. Wall Street knew all along that they were selling worthless paper to fools who were happy to buy that worthless paper on credit. The emperor had no clothes, but no one wanted to recognize that fact.
Look at the events that brought down Wall Street in 1929, then look again at our recent crisis. Really look at them, then come back to explain any substantial differences.
If, and I emphasize IF, we really have reached the bottom, and we are on our way up again, then we have been far more lucky than we deserve. There were blatantly obvious signs of how much trouble we were in, as far back as the Enron scandal. A decent economist with a real education should have seen what was happening as much as 5 years before the Enron scandal broke.
Fools and crooks. To hold Goldman Sachs out as being better than the rest of Wall Street is to admit that they were fools, if lesser fools than their buddies sitting in offices all around them.
Don't be sick or the "meme". Instead, get sick of, and get outraged at our economics "experts" who dug the hole that we are in today. The meme is here, and it will be around for quite awhile. The only question is, are we going to learn from it, or will we do this again in 20 to 50 years?
Go on, call a spade a spade. Bigtime thieves and fools put the screws to all us little fools. And we are still damned fools, for allowing the bastards to have their bonuses. Plain English defines a bonus as something earned for superior performance. There is no one on Wall Street who has earned a bonus in recent history.
Hmmm. I'll give you that. A buddy bought a used CNC, sold for parts. He got everything put back together, minus one head. Fired it up, and Windows was borked. He thought that he would just format and install Linux, but when he went searching for software he quickly became discouraged. Seems there is little to no support to run the thing under Linux, and he has zero experience trying to compile and install anything. Had he called me, I might have have made it run, but he was in a hurry, found an installation CD somewhere, and got it running under Windows. There are niches in which the ONLY support is Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to weigh in here. I'm old enough, I've been privy to the details of a number of "encounters" that later went to court. I've had freinds, both male and female freinds involved.
First, let's ground ourselves in reality. In Africa, today, (semi)organized gangs of men prowl the villages searching out female victims. Not only are the victims used and abused violently, but they are often cut and mutilated intentionally in an attempt to sterilize and degrade them. If the women survive, so be it, if not, tough. Victims range in age from infants to very old women.
Compare common cases in the civilized world to the actions of those thugs in Africa. I could sit in judgement of those savages, and uniformly award the death sentence from now until hell freezes over.
Here, in America, statutory rape has been abused to the point, that if a boy and girl have been dating for months, and he celebrates his 18th birthday before she does, he can be charged with rape, no matter that she consents, or maybe even initiates an evening of sex. THAT is a case of being raped by the system.
There is a wide range of "rapes" in between the two extreme ends that I've just painted. And, anyone who believes that our court system is adequate for judging all of them has a few screws loose, IMHO.
Real violent, brutal rape is simply not punished severely enough. The man who can use his fists to pummel a resistant woman into submission, should NEVER walk the streets again. In fact, I can justify the death penalty for many of them.
On the other hand, having a casual relationship with someone met in a bar, only to be charged with "rape" later, because she has some "multiple personality disorder" is about as bogus as things can get. (I've been close to two cases like that.)
I don't have any numbers to offer, but at a rough guess, I would say that nearly 10% of "offenders" in this country never should have gone to trial. Prosecuting attorneys seldom care about "justice", it's all about numbers.
The laws regarding registered sex offenders do not go nearly far enough to differentiate between the classes of offenders. As already stated, the worst offenders shouldn't even see sunlight, but there they are, walking the streets. Others, if they really DID do anything wrong, should serve a year of probation and be forgotten - they are no threat to anyone.
Laws like the one in TFA don't do ANYTHING to see that justice is done. They only create beauracratic hoops for a captive audience to jump through. They create jobs for people who get off on minding other people's business. They contribute to an Owellian society, something we are moving toward just as quickly as possible.
Personally I can't see any justice in a law like this. Dangerous people belong in a dungeon or a coffin, and non-dangerous people need their rights restored.
The system doesn't work, and laws like these will only make the system worse.
"Plausible deniability" didn't work for me. Whey waterboarded me, beat me with a hose, and pulled my fingernails out. I finally gave in, told them the password was "B0gUS*p*w0RD". They came right back, and tortured me some more, til I gave them "Th3_R34L_p_w0RD".
It just ain't fair, I tell you!
Ditto. Who cares about anything that includes red and green, when you can't SEE red and green? Phhht. For the most part, I don't give a damn about colors. Give me a dark skin, with high contrast, and I'm happy!
There's a kitten on every lap?
That damned kitten clawed my balls, you insensitive clod!
Yes, that ^
I don't "need" a cell phone. If I could get one for cheap, I might have one, but I don't "need" it. So, I don't pay the price!!
If 50% of the people in America suddenly had their cell phone service turned off, citing cost as the reason, the carriers would slash rates overnight. They might even be competitive with European rates.
But, no, we Americans enjoy being led around by the ring in our noses.....
Here, we will find out if Canadians have more balls than us Americans who live south of the 49th parallel. Hopefully, the Canucks will tell them all to eat shit, and that will give the voters in the states a little motivation to get off THEIR dead asses to protest.
LOL - I made the error, caught it during proof reading, and decided to let it stand. And, you're the first to catch it! ~13 hours for an obvious mistake to go unchallenged on a geek forum? I guess geeks != math major college grads!
However - I don't think that you typed what you meant to say, either. How about .05% != 1/20th ? To say precisely what the GP was ATTEMPTING to say, I would need to remove the decimal point.
But, I'm confident that those who commonly use terms such as "20x quieter" aren't going to figure any of this out.
I take it that you do not consider CHAOS to be a standard?
"fantastically full of shit."
Look, asswipe. Your post made sense, right up to the point you tried to sound superior. You could have left off after you started me thinking. Unfortunately, your oversized ego and your tendency to run at the mouth just makes you look like an idiot.
Now, I'm really, really, really motivated to look at it again to see if maybe the foul mouthed egotistical bastard is right. Uh-huh. Moron.
"No, it was because while the companies were entirely happy to contribute back changes to libraries they were using, they were not happy to open up their entire finished product, just because they used a GPL'd library along the way."
I believe that to be a bit of FUD. http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/workstation65.html
Apparently, VMWare is a little bit smarter than any of the decision makers you have worked for. VMWare manages to sell a proprietary product which is based on GPL'd code. How do they manage? Could it be, because they are literate?
"something times less than"
"20 times quieter" means "20 times less than"
It is a meaningless expression. It is a grammatically idiotic expression, which does NOT translate into mathematics.
You have left NOTHING as an exercise for the reader. Express yourself properly.
An educated person who wished to express the concept you wish to convey, might very well say "this machine produces a noise level .05% of ambient noise in a quiet room"
"because OS development is not their core competence"
Nor is it MS's core competence. MS core competence involves marketing and FUD. Just so you know. ;-)
"the implementation today will be much faster because networks are much faster"
That is so easy for city boys and girls to say. What about those of us who live in Outback, Nowhere? Applications get more and more bloated, protocols seem to take on a life of their own, pages are often written badly with far to much content, and EVERYONE relies on either Flash or Java. The net result? My 1/2 MB connection oftentimes seems slower than the 56k I finally got rid of about 2 yrs ago.
It's wonderful that peope who live close to a university, like downtown Boston, can run all their apps over the web. But, what about the REST of the country?
About the time that we can get affordabe 5MB connections, the rest of you will have written yet more bloated software, and that will be inadequate!
All over the web, there are stories about the IE-killer, the Firefox-killer, and, yes, the Microsoft-killer.
Everytime I read these stories, I know that the author is a small-minded person, who is incapable of coping with the complexities of marketing, personal preference, and technical needs. Or, he is yet another drama llama, catering to small-minded readers.
Boys and girls, if you've read much of what I post, you will KNOW that I don't like Microsoft. In fact, I despise Bill Gates. But, there is nothing on the market that is going to kill Windows, or kill Microsoft. No matter HOW GOOD ChromeOS is, no matter HOW MUCH Linux improves, no matter how many new arrivals on the scene might be, there will still be a market for Windows.
I would LOVE to see Windows reduced to about 20% market share. But, killed off? It isn't happening, any more than Linux is going to be done away with.
Microsoft death spiral. What nonsense. What is most likely to happen is, Chrome will indeed eat into Microsoft's cash flow. But, there are living people with working minds over at Microsoft. They will adapt, and they will respond. I have no more idea than the next guy HOW Microsoft will respond, but they will pick up the pieces and go on. That huge, multi-billion dollar company isn't going to dry up and blow away in any of our lifetimes, just because Google has come out with the "NEXT BIG THING!"
CmdrTaco and anyone else posting these stories is just engaging in baseless FUD.
I asked for a mathematical equation, not for a circuitous rationalization for your poor grammar.
Had you stated, "1/20th the volume" your statement could be incorporated into any mathematical equation. 20 times quieter is meaningless marketing babble.
"a minimum of 20 times quieter than talking"
You failed math, how many times? You can't turn that statement into a mathematical equation. If you were able to do so, you would have stated it properly.
"just as !false == true, so does !guilty == innocent"
You presume that people are as logical as a programming language? Or, you presume that law is that logical?
Either way, you fail.
Do you, perhaps, live in your mother's basement? You should get out and stufy people more. You might even browse some lawbooks and legal cases. In real life, not only are there black and white, and shades of grey, but there are MILLIONS OF COLORS. Kinda like your monitor, I hope.
If juries could be handed just black and white facts, along with clearly stated, logical laws, few people would escape justice. But, that will only ever happen in dream worlds and Hollywood.
Yes. If I had mod points, parent and GP would BOTH get them.
A life that revolves around TV scheduling is an empty, shallow life, IMHO. People need to get out and DO STUFF. Basket weaving seems a silly pastime to me, but I would much rather do a little basket weaving with a grand daughter, than to waste those hours watching spongebob, or some other mindless "humor".
If a person has NOTHING better to do with their time, then they should get out and meet neighbors. Doing things with and for other people is a rewarding activity, in and of itself. The old widow around the corner might even remember you in her will, if you spend time with her.
("To my cats, I leave my fortune of $98.32. To my daughter, I leave my wardrobe. To my son, I leave the heap in the garage that hasn't run since 1963. And, oh yes, I remember that sweet young man who sat on the porch with me from time to time!")
"so my self-esteem is not predicated on how popular I perceive myself to be"
How commendable. I can relate to that. I could relate even more, if you were willing to sign your name, anonymous COWARD.
Meanwhile - I've downloaded the PDF containing the law being discussed everywhere. It is neither the abandonment of the elderly that Sarah Bigmouth Palin claims it to be, nor is it the end-all be-all cure for everything that ails us.
With 1018 pages, it's going to take some time to digest all of it, but so far, it looks like a reasoned attempt to save money - MY money, as much as anyone's money - while actually ensuring that just plain Po' Folk get treatment when they need it.
OF COURSE there are problems with it. But, it does attempt to address real problems with the existing system.
Now, take your bigoted ass down the road, BOY!
Well, let's start with the basics. Did you plug the goddamned printer in YOU MORON?!?!?!
(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! What idiots - I intended to shout!)
Enron made several things obvious.
1. Lack of integrity among business executives
2. Lack of responsibility among the accountants
3. An overlap of authority, with executives ordering and/or intimidating accountants
4. Lack of oversight by government through it's regulatory agencies
5. Obvious burning greed among executives - even AFTER Enron burned to the ground, executives expected to get their "performance" bonuses.
6. A legal system that managed to find cretins low enough to represent said executives in their claims for bonuses.
7. Numerous statements made by executive elitests around the country, coming to the defense of said executives, especially their "right" to collect those bonuses.
It matters little who lied where, when, or how - Enron made it obvious that Corporate America's investment schemes were nothing more than shady deals made in secrecy, using fraudulently obtained investor's funds. Enron made it blindingly obvious that executives expect huge payoffs, with no responsibility. Elitism, taken to an extreme. "Oh, we went to good schools, and we know all the right people, we're ENTITLED to millions in bonuses, no matter WHAT happens to your stupid company!"
If we have failed to learn any lessons from the financial meltdown, we will be repeating the same mistakes soon.
Oh, let's not forget another failure. That of the general population of America. Idol worship. We tend to idolize anyone who is "successful". If some egotistical freak has millions of dollars, we tend to emulate him, in our choice of clothes, manner of speech, choice of cars, choice of diet. We worship the guy with lots of toys, and we want to be just like him - no matter that he has no moral character. Michael Jackson, anyone?
Systemic failure, from top to bottom.
Something like that may be happening. Malaria has been out of control since the beginning of time, in Africa. AIDS took off like a wildfire recently (recent, in historical terms). The flu strains are adapting, and growing more virulent. Overcrowding has made it so EASY for biological agents to spread. Who knows which virus or germ is mutating right now, to strike us in the next 2 to 10 years?
I expect a major die off of the human species, sometime soon. The only real questions are, will we preserve our science and learning, and, how will the survivors be affected psychologically?
Be a hell of a thing if a major pandemic destroyed civilization.
But, but, but - if AL GORE says so, it's GOTTA be so!!
Actually, I agree with you. Gorey Al couldn't make enough political capital with the green weenie crap, so now he's shooting for some plain old filthy lucre capital. Screw him, and all of his green freinds. They are milking the ecology for all it's worth, at the expense of all the little people who don't know any better.
All their blather about global warming wasn't enough to change the auto industry, or buyer's preferences. Only now, when our economic experts have raped the economy dry are people really interested in conservation - mostly for selfish resons. ("Oh boy, the government will give me 4500 bucks to buy a new car, and the auto industry will give me another 4500. $9,000 bucks? I'm getting Grandpa's old Ford out of the barn, RIGHT NOW! Screw sentimental value, Grandpa was a fool anyway!")
Meme or not, you and everyone in the Western world needs to get used to the idea that a very small number of Golden Boys on Wall Street, in cahoots with a somewhat larger number of politicians, managed to STEAL billions of dollars from small investors and taxpayers.
There has been little secrecy regarding deregulation of the securities and exchanges over the last 16 to 20 years. The democrats played ball with Wall Street when Clinton was in, then Bush came along and got serious about deregulation. Wall Street knew all along that they were selling worthless paper to fools who were happy to buy that worthless paper on credit. The emperor had no clothes, but no one wanted to recognize that fact.
Look at the events that brought down Wall Street in 1929, then look again at our recent crisis. Really look at them, then come back to explain any substantial differences.
If, and I emphasize IF, we really have reached the bottom, and we are on our way up again, then we have been far more lucky than we deserve. There were blatantly obvious signs of how much trouble we were in, as far back as the Enron scandal. A decent economist with a real education should have seen what was happening as much as 5 years before the Enron scandal broke.
Fools and crooks. To hold Goldman Sachs out as being better than the rest of Wall Street is to admit that they were fools, if lesser fools than their buddies sitting in offices all around them.
Don't be sick or the "meme". Instead, get sick of, and get outraged at our economics "experts" who dug the hole that we are in today. The meme is here, and it will be around for quite awhile. The only question is, are we going to learn from it, or will we do this again in 20 to 50 years?
Go on, call a spade a spade. Bigtime thieves and fools put the screws to all us little fools. And we are still damned fools, for allowing the bastards to have their bonuses. Plain English defines a bonus as something earned for superior performance. There is no one on Wall Street who has earned a bonus in recent history.
Hmmm. I'll give you that. A buddy bought a used CNC, sold for parts. He got everything put back together, minus one head. Fired it up, and Windows was borked. He thought that he would just format and install Linux, but when he went searching for software he quickly became discouraged. Seems there is little to no support to run the thing under Linux, and he has zero experience trying to compile and install anything. Had he called me, I might have have made it run, but he was in a hurry, found an installation CD somewhere, and got it running under Windows. There are niches in which the ONLY support is Windows.