Catchy rhetoric, but ignorant of the facts. Britain has a population of around 60 million. On the 15th of February around a million of us were not only against the war
Well, in 1938 61% if the British public opposed war with Nazi Germany too. When it comes to the important stuff, the mob is usually wrong. Which is why we have a representative rather than direct democracy. How many of those protestors showed up because they believed the nonsense that a million Iraqi children would be killed, the Moslem countries would rise up against us etc, etc? You know, all that stuff that didn't happen?
The complaints about googlewashing are nothing to do with democracy - they're about how one special-interest group got it's propaganda outvoted by another special-interest group.
Why they hell can't we just let these people get on with it? If they want to form a Conservative Muslim government, based upon their ideals as Muslims, why they hell shouldn't they?
They can, and they do, for example Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. These countries were left in peace by the West. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabian citizens based in Afghanistan whacked us while their own governments did nothing. Therein lies the problem.
The terrorists wouldn't be there in the first place if the policies of the western world were sane. We created terrorism our self through racism, religious oppression and the support of dictatorship in developing countries during the cold war.
Yes, if only we didn't let women go to school, forced men to grow their beards a certain length to show respect to "the prophet", stoned people to death for "blasphemy" or sex outside of marriage, etc, etc just like the damn Taliban, the terrorists would leave us alone.
They hate us because we respect individual freedoms, including the right of individuals to speak criticism of their government without fear of the secret police dragging them out of their beds in the middle of the night.
SQL has not changed for a long time. Any DB admin/programmer worth his/her salary should be writing code as vendor-neutral as possible.
That is a red herring. A skilled developer on a known platform codes to take greatest advantage of that platform. After all Oracle, DB2 and the like are expensive, and if they can offer advantage you should take it. I don't know if you've ever worked on a very common class of database application, the bill-of-materials (BOM), but Oracle provides a SQL syntax (start with connect by prior) that makes it very simple and very fast. Another very common example is the pivot query - Oracle's syntax can make it O(n), the completely portable way is O(n^2). Oracle has had row level locking from the start, and to exploit that meant coding in a way that would not work on Sybase (on Sybase, readers block writers and writers block readers).
Cross-platform products like those from GNU make extensive use of macros and #defines to actually substitute in platform-specific code at compile time. The idea that a single piece of code should be written to run unmodified on any platform only applies to the most trivial projects.
Agreed. OTOH, you should ask yourself in how many places you really need nothing less than the state of the art. Probably less than the 50% of the total.
What about something 10 years behind the state of the art? I don't know exactly when they were introduced, but I can say that the developers I work with take things like subselects and stored procedures for granted. Those may have been "state of the art" once, but now they are the ultra-conservative choice (where choice exists). By the time MySQL gets them, more and more things will be taken for granted, and the advanced features will have moved on.
on PostgreSQL and MySQL.why should the market forces that apply to MS not apply to Oracle? Build those yachts while the sun shines, Larry!
At a conservative estimate, MySQL is 25 years behind the state of the art. No, I'm not even kidding or trolling, it's a fact - compare the state of relational databases in the late 70s to where MySQL is now. According to the press release, MySQL last week got features like relational integrity, row level locking, transactions and caching that products like Oracle and DB2 have had, quite literally, for decades. MySQL still does not have subqueries, stored procedures, or procedural constraints. And neither Oracle nor DB2 are standing still, they are continually adding new features. Larry has no need to lose any sleep over MySQL.
AMD is a big player in the CPU market, but there are a lot of companies doing memory chips, isn't there?
Interestingly, Intel used to have most of its business in memory, but had to make an abrupt switch to processors when it were undercut by memory producers in Japan. Andy Grove writes about this in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.
I think its great that Microsoft is doing this and its what Sun should have done at the start, but it doesn't mean a thing. C# (on top of CLR) is still only available on one platform and the underlying virtual machine is still proprietary.
I post the link here every time the subject comes up, so I'm not going to this time, but you can easily find CLR and a C# compiler for FreeBSD (including source code) on Microsoft's web site. Maybe it compiles on OpenBSD and NetBSD too (I haven't tried). The only thing that stopping CLR from appearing on Solaris is that no-one's done it yet. And before anyone mentions Windows.Forms, I will point out that most server-side applications a) don't have a GUI or b) can generate a GUI in HTML easily.
to me, the sheer volume of april fools jokes today, the duplicates that happen every week, the spelling mistakes that happen in 4 of 5 posts PROVE to me that this site is one giant year-long april fools joke.
Yes, and they wonder why more people don't pay for subscriptions...
The thing with Michael Moore is, if Gore had won, he wouldn't have said a word. This sounds obvious, but it's actually a crucial point: it's not the democratic process that Michael Moore cares about, it's the fact that his side lost.
Oh, and Clinton bombed Sudan, destroying their major facility for pharmaceutical manufacture. Moore said not a word.
If I was a USA citizen I would have voted for Nadar, not because I thought he could win, but because the Democrat and the Republican
So, we have Democrat voters too dumb to read the instructions and use the voting cards correctly, and wannabe Nader voters who can't even spell the name of their candidate. No wonder the Republicans won.
... in order to be allowed to call yourself an Engineer you must be registerd with APEGGA, the professional engineering society. Currently, the only way to get in to APEGGA is to have an engineering degree from an accredited university program, of which there are 3 (or 4?) in Alberta.
I'm torn, actually. I did my Bachelor's in Mech Eng, so was a student then a graduate member of IMechE for a while. I had planned to be an engineer, but in the end I headed in a different direction (mechanical/production engineering is not a particularly good career path in Britain, low pay, low job security, and the public think "mechanical engineer" is the same as "auto mechanic"). The IMechE take your money and claim to represent the profession, but don't appear to do very much - only they hold the sword of Damocles over your head, and if you don't toe their line, you don't get to work in the field. Now, don't get me wrong, in a responsible job like engineering, you have to have standards of professional competence, but the professional associations reek of the "closed shop", and seem more interested in perpetuating their own existance than looking after the rank and file. YMMV, of course. I am still pondering whether to bother renewing my membership of the IAP.
My university awards BAs for all non-Masters degree courses, even science ones
Yes, but your university is also well known for automatically upgrading BAs to MAs in return for a small donation. Are you going to claim you "earned" that MA too? Or are you going to put in the 1-2 years of postgraduate study that everyone else with a Master's degree does? I automatically disregard all CVs with those MAs on.
you should isolate the programmer in his or her own room.
why not give each programmer a budget with which they can buy their own chair and desk?
This is just more "programmers are special and should get special privileges". Programmers are no different from any other skilled craftsmen or any other office workers.
I don't give a fig if this costs you more money; the potential benefits are huge. If you continue to view the world as a risk/value proposition then you'll continue to produce mediocre results.
Any sane business manager weighs up risks and rewards. The suggestions in this article aren't about productivity, they're about luxury. Work is work - many people forgot that in the 90's when an office was more like a kindergarten, and look where that got us - many of those people are unemployed now. It's time to grow up and start behaving like all the professionals in the world.
I only skimmed the article, but it looked like more self-indulgent "programmers are special" whining.
programmers usually do have a longer attention span and a greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population
Anyone who has a degree has a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population. There is nothing here that makes programmers special.
Writing code is an act of creativity. It isn't science and it isn't engineering, although programmers are happy to apply science and engineering to the creative process, when possible.
This is just nonsense. Why can't engineering - the design of a new product - be creative? Why can't science - the discovery of new knowledge - be creative?
The vast majority of programming in the world is not creative. It's a skilled craft, sure, but it's not about creativity - that is, making something exist that did not exist before. One database application, or web site, or GUI etc is really much like another. The details differ, but it is not pushing the envelope of the possible, like scientists and engineers do every day.
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Chicago University, formerly the chair of the psychology department, has studied hundreds of exceptional individuals, from IT entrepreneurs to Nobel Prize winners, researching creativity. He has written many books and papers on the subjects of flow and creativity
An entrepreneur has a wholly different perspective than a programmer. There may be some overlap between the two groups, but they aren't directly comparable. An entrepreneur will spend most of their time on tasks other than programming, for a start, such as raising funding, making sales, hiring employees, managing existing staff, scouting out the next office, a million other things. But the article is all about how programmers can only do one thing at a time.
If a programmer's flow is interrupted it can take a large amount of time for her to regain the state, sometimes up to an hour.
This is just mystical hand-waving. I half expected the next paragraph to be about "using the force".
you should isolate the programmer in his or her own room.
why not give each programmer a budget with which they can buy their own chair and desk?
This is just more "programmers are special and should get special privileges". Programmers are no different from any other skilled craftsmen or any other office workers.
I don't give a fig if this costs you more money; the potential benefits are huge. If you continue to view the world as a risk/value proposition then you'll continue to produce mediocre results.
Any sane business manager weighs up risks and rewards. The suggestions in this article aren't about productivity, they're about luxury. Work is work - many people forgot that in the 90's when an office was more like a kindergarten, and look where that got us - many of those people are unemployed now. It's time to grow up and start behaving like all the professionals in the world.
By removing jobs from the US, they're hurting the economy. The only people that benefit from this are the rich owners who are more concerned with lining their own pockets rather than keeping our economy stable.
Bullshit. The real beneficiaries are the consumers who pay lower prices for products and services. That's why steel tarriffs are a problem: yes, they protect steel producers, but steel users cannot benefit from lower prices that are the result of competition, and of course, in almost every industry, there are far more buyers than sellers. That removes the incentive for producers to compete, raises prices across the board, and then, those protected domestic industries will find themselves unable to export, as the foreign industries are forced to find new markets to sell into, at their reduced prices. Protectionism always fails for this reason. Why do countries do it then? Because it works long enough for the next election, and the next generation of politicians will be blamed for the downturn anyway, because our political system does not encourage long-term thinking.
but there should be a clause that says that the burden must be absorbed by the corporation, and not passed onto the consumers.
You seem not to understand what a corporation is. It is not an alien entity with its own resources. It is an organization of individuals united to perform economic tasks, and the only money it has comes from the sale of goods and services. If "corporations" are forced to increase their outgoings but as you say, not increase their income, what does that mean? It means lower wages and fewer jobs. Exactly the result you were trying to avoid.
it's cheaper for US corporations to exploit workers overseas to produce our goods rather than pay US workers an honest wage.
Firstly, there is no such thing as exploitation, apart from slavery. People are paid what their work is worth. If they don't want to work, they can quit and someone else will take their jobs. Oh, you say, if they don't work they'll starve? Shame on those American corporations, offering people the ability to earn money and support themselves! And of course it works both ways - if your work is worth more than you're paid, you can quit and get a better job.
You see, Americans are paid an honest wage - and they find that being born in the US doesn't automatically mean they are more skilled and productive than those born in India.
I am always amused by people who say corporations should show more loyalty to their employees, because it's a two way street. When times were good, employees left established companies in a stampede to go to "dot com" jobs. Where was the loyalty there? If you want to deny corporations the right to fire, you must also deny employees with right to quit - and that's in no-one's interest.
The BBC saying that the coalition is taking "heavy losses for small gains" is not objective reporting. the US has lost 24 soldiers and has gained a large portion of Iraqi territory, and has killed at least 1000 Iraqi soldiers, (fox is reporting something like 35,000 dead Iraqis, but I don't buy that at all) but the 3ID estimates that it has killed 800 Iraqis at the cost of 1 American... how is that heavy losses for small gains??!!
Indeed - the other night, 4 days after the Coalition arrived at Basra, the BBC reported it "the long-running siege of Basra". 1) 4 days isn't long by any stretch of the imagination, there have been sieges that lasted for years 2) it isn't a siege, since the BBC themselves have shown footage of people coming and going. In fact, the only people who aren't allowed to move freely are the Iraqi army, who are offered the choice between surrender and fighting. Hardly a siege.
Question: are the BBC using inaccurate terms because they have an agenda, or because their commentators are simply incompetent? I'd say it was a combination of the two. For example, they're keen to report in Iraqi civilian casualities, but totally glossed over Iraqis using a hospital as a fortress and a school as an armoury.
I wouldn't mind their bias at all, but unlike CNN who are paid for by their sponsors and viewers, the BBC are supported by our taxes, and have a duty to be objective in cases where they do not represent the viewpoint of every taxpayer (i.e. all the time).
How is spamming still profitable? Are there that many people out there that are into having sex with farm animals? Or believe their are pills that increase life span? Who the hell are these people?
The economics of spam work because of the huge imbalance between what a spammer pays, and the price of the products bing sold. One sale per million messages probably makes the whole undertaking feasible. I think it was PT Barnum who said no-one ever went bust underestimating the intelligence of the public.
Well actually... Mr. Cheney is making a million dollars a year in "deferred compensation" from Halliburton. Search his name and that phrase at Google News.
Would $1M a year cloud your judgement?
If it's deferred from previous work, nothing he does now can affect it, can it?
I would feel much better if the US made the commitment to not have any economic interest in Iraq. There should be no US based company getting contracts for oil. Same goes for cell phone standards. KEEP YOUR GREEDY LITTLE HANDS OFF OF IRAQ! We are going to war with Iraq for the freedom of the people, not the plunder. Right?
That's just silly. What do you propose, wrapping Iraq in an economic bubble so no foreign country can do business there? Let the French and the Russians resume their oil-for-arms deals? This war is going to cost the US at least $75B directly, on top of the economic damage done by the uncertainty and reduced trade - it would take decades to make that back. Hundreds of billions have been wiped off the stock markets. This war may be about many things, but to suggest it is about profit reveals a profound ignorance of economics.
Fact: After the ravages of the Saddam regime, Iraq is in desperate need of modernization. Fact: The Iraqis can't do it themselves. Now, I agree that there shouldn't be an artificial bias towards US companies, the bidding should be open to anyone who can provide the goods and services the Iraqis need at the best price.
Slashdot Mirror
Catchy rhetoric, but ignorant of the facts. Britain has a population of around 60 million. On the 15th of February around a million of us were not only against the war
Well, in 1938 61% if the British public opposed war with Nazi Germany too. When it comes to the important stuff, the mob is usually wrong. Which is why we have a representative rather than direct democracy. How many of those protestors showed up because they believed the nonsense that a million Iraqi children would be killed, the Moslem countries would rise up against us etc, etc? You know, all that stuff that didn't happen?
The complaints about googlewashing are nothing to do with democracy - they're about how one special-interest group got it's propaganda outvoted by another special-interest group.
Why they hell can't we just let these people get on with it? If they want to form a Conservative Muslim government, based upon their ideals as Muslims, why they hell shouldn't they?
They can, and they do, for example Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. These countries were left in peace by the West. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabian citizens based in Afghanistan whacked us while their own governments did nothing. Therein lies the problem.
The terrorists wouldn't be there in the first place if the policies of the western world were sane. We created terrorism our self through racism, religious oppression and the support of dictatorship in developing countries during the cold war.
Yes, if only we didn't let women go to school, forced men to grow their beards a certain length to show respect to "the prophet", stoned people to death for "blasphemy" or sex outside of marriage, etc, etc just like the damn Taliban, the terrorists would leave us alone.
They hate us because we respect individual freedoms, including the right of individuals to speak criticism of their government without fear of the secret police dragging them out of their beds in the middle of the night.
I use SaveThis which is run by an offshoot of CNN (IIRC).
SQL has not changed for a long time. Any DB admin/programmer worth his/her salary should be writing code as vendor-neutral as possible.
That is a red herring. A skilled developer on a known platform codes to take greatest advantage of that platform. After all Oracle, DB2 and the like are expensive, and if they can offer advantage you should take it. I don't know if you've ever worked on a very common class of database application, the bill-of-materials (BOM), but Oracle provides a SQL syntax (start with connect by prior) that makes it very simple and very fast. Another very common example is the pivot query - Oracle's syntax can make it O(n), the completely portable way is O(n^2). Oracle has had row level locking from the start, and to exploit that meant coding in a way that would not work on Sybase (on Sybase, readers block writers and writers block readers).
Cross-platform products like those from GNU make extensive use of macros and #defines to actually substitute in platform-specific code at compile time. The idea that a single piece of code should be written to run unmodified on any platform only applies to the most trivial projects.
Agreed. OTOH, you should ask yourself in how many places you really need nothing less than the state of the art. Probably less than the 50% of the total.
What about something 10 years behind the state of the art? I don't know exactly when they were introduced, but I can say that the developers I work with take things like subselects and stored procedures for granted. Those may have been "state of the art" once, but now they are the ultra-conservative choice (where choice exists). By the time MySQL gets them, more and more things will be taken for granted, and the advanced features will have moved on.
on PostgreSQL and MySQL.why should the market forces that apply to MS not apply to Oracle? Build those yachts while the sun shines, Larry!
At a conservative estimate, MySQL is 25 years behind the state of the art. No, I'm not even kidding or trolling, it's a fact - compare the state of relational databases in the late 70s to where MySQL is now. According to the press release, MySQL last week got features like relational integrity, row level locking, transactions and caching that products like Oracle and DB2 have had, quite literally, for decades. MySQL still does not have subqueries, stored procedures, or procedural constraints. And neither Oracle nor DB2 are standing still, they are continually adding new features. Larry has no need to lose any sleep over MySQL.
AMD is a big player in the CPU market, but there are a lot of companies doing memory chips, isn't there?
Interestingly, Intel used to have most of its business in memory, but had to make an abrupt switch to processors when it were undercut by memory producers in Japan. Andy Grove writes about this in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.
I think its great that Microsoft is doing this and its what Sun should have done at the start, but it doesn't mean a thing. C# (on top of CLR) is still only available on one platform and the underlying virtual machine is still proprietary.
I post the link here every time the subject comes up, so I'm not going to this time, but you can easily find CLR and a C# compiler for FreeBSD (including source code) on Microsoft's web site. Maybe it compiles on OpenBSD and NetBSD too (I haven't tried). The only thing that stopping CLR from appearing on Solaris is that no-one's done it yet. And before anyone mentions Windows.Forms, I will point out that most server-side applications a) don't have a GUI or b) can generate a GUI in HTML easily.
to me, the sheer volume of april fools jokes today, the duplicates that happen every week, the spelling mistakes that happen in 4 of 5 posts PROVE to me that this site is one giant year-long april fools joke.
Yes, and they wonder why more people don't pay for subscriptions...
All your base are NOT belong to us!
he knew that the same day of the shooting that America dropped the most bombs on the Balkans(Sudan?)
The Balkans are in Europe, Sudan is in Africa. But thanks for playing.
Stupid White Men (the awful truth)
The thing with Michael Moore is, if Gore had won, he wouldn't have said a word. This sounds obvious, but it's actually a crucial point: it's not the democratic process that Michael Moore cares about, it's the fact that his side lost.
Oh, and Clinton bombed Sudan, destroying their major facility for pharmaceutical manufacture. Moore said not a word.
If I was a USA citizen I would have voted for Nadar, not because I thought he could win, but because the Democrat and the Republican
So, we have Democrat voters too dumb to read the instructions and use the voting cards correctly, and wannabe Nader voters who can't even spell the name of their candidate. No wonder the Republicans won.
which part of the camel do they use to trace those GPS signals?
The parts that the French and the Russians sold 'em, I'd expect.
... in order to be allowed to call yourself an Engineer you must be registerd with APEGGA, the professional engineering society. Currently, the only way to get in to APEGGA is to have an engineering degree from an accredited university program, of which there are 3 (or 4?) in Alberta.
I'm torn, actually. I did my Bachelor's in Mech Eng, so was a student then a graduate member of IMechE for a while. I had planned to be an engineer, but in the end I headed in a different direction (mechanical/production engineering is not a particularly good career path in Britain, low pay, low job security, and the public think "mechanical engineer" is the same as "auto mechanic"). The IMechE take your money and claim to represent the profession, but don't appear to do very much - only they hold the sword of Damocles over your head, and if you don't toe their line, you don't get to work in the field. Now, don't get me wrong, in a responsible job like engineering, you have to have standards of professional competence, but the professional associations reek of the "closed shop", and seem more interested in perpetuating their own existance than looking after the rank and file. YMMV, of course. I am still pondering whether to bother renewing my membership of the IAP.
My university awards BAs for all non-Masters degree courses, even science ones
Yes, but your university is also well known for automatically upgrading BAs to MAs in return for a small donation. Are you going to claim you "earned" that MA too? Or are you going to put in the 1-2 years of postgraduate study that everyone else with a Master's degree does? I automatically disregard all CVs with those MAs on.
I still think all the geeks should collect in one state and make their own laws.
Sounds like you'd be interested in the Free State Project. They've thought about what you propose in some depth.
That last bit should be:
you should isolate the programmer in his or her own room.
why not give each programmer a budget with which they can buy their own chair and desk?
This is just more "programmers are special and should get special privileges". Programmers are no different from any other skilled craftsmen or any other office workers.
I don't give a fig if this costs you more money; the potential benefits are huge. If you continue to view the world as a risk/value proposition then you'll continue to produce mediocre results.
Any sane business manager weighs up risks and rewards. The suggestions in this article aren't about productivity, they're about luxury. Work is work - many people forgot that in the 90's when an office was more like a kindergarten, and look where that got us - many of those people are unemployed now. It's time to grow up and start behaving like all the professionals in the world.
I only skimmed the article, but it looked like more self-indulgent "programmers are special" whining.
programmers usually do have a longer attention span and a greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population
Anyone who has a degree has a longer attention span and greater ability to concentrate than the majority of the population. There is nothing here that makes programmers special.
Writing code is an act of creativity. It isn't science and it isn't engineering, although programmers are happy to apply science and engineering to the creative process, when possible.
This is just nonsense. Why can't engineering - the design of a new product - be creative? Why can't science - the discovery of new knowledge - be creative?
The vast majority of programming in the world is not creative. It's a skilled craft, sure, but it's not about creativity - that is, making something exist that did not exist before. One database application, or web site, or GUI etc is really much like another. The details differ, but it is not pushing the envelope of the possible, like scientists and engineers do every day.
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Chicago University, formerly the chair of the psychology department, has studied hundreds of exceptional individuals, from IT entrepreneurs to Nobel Prize winners, researching creativity. He has written many books and papers on the subjects of flow and creativity
An entrepreneur has a wholly different perspective than a programmer. There may be some overlap between the two groups, but they aren't directly comparable. An entrepreneur will spend most of their time on tasks other than programming, for a start, such as raising funding, making sales, hiring employees, managing existing staff, scouting out the next office, a million other things. But the article is all about how programmers can only do one thing at a time.
If a programmer's flow is interrupted it can take a large amount of time for her to regain the state, sometimes up to an hour.
This is just mystical hand-waving. I half expected the next paragraph to be about "using the force".
you should isolate the programmer in his or her own room.
why not give each programmer a budget with which they can buy their own chair and desk?
This is just more "programmers are special and should get special privileges". Programmers are no different from any other skilled craftsmen or any other office workers.
I don't give a fig if this costs you more money; the potential benefits are huge. If you continue to view the world as a risk/value proposition then you'll continue to produce mediocre results.
Any sane business manager weighs up risks and rewards. The suggestions in this article aren't about productivity, they're about luxury. Work is work - many people forgot that in the 90's when an office was more like a kindergarten, and look where that got us - many of those people are unemployed now. It's time to grow up and start behaving like all the professionals in the world.
By removing jobs from the US, they're hurting the economy. The only people that benefit from this are the rich owners who are more concerned with lining their own pockets rather than keeping our economy stable.
Bullshit. The real beneficiaries are the consumers who pay lower prices for products and services. That's why steel tarriffs are a problem: yes, they protect steel producers, but steel users cannot benefit from lower prices that are the result of competition, and of course, in almost every industry, there are far more buyers than sellers. That removes the incentive for producers to compete, raises prices across the board, and then, those protected domestic industries will find themselves unable to export, as the foreign industries are forced to find new markets to sell into, at their reduced prices. Protectionism always fails for this reason. Why do countries do it then? Because it works long enough for the next election, and the next generation of politicians will be blamed for the downturn anyway, because our political system does not encourage long-term thinking.
but there should be a clause that says that the burden must be absorbed by the corporation, and not passed onto the consumers.
You seem not to understand what a corporation is. It is not an alien entity with its own resources. It is an organization of individuals united to perform economic tasks, and the only money it has comes from the sale of goods and services. If "corporations" are forced to increase their outgoings but as you say, not increase their income, what does that mean? It means lower wages and fewer jobs. Exactly the result you were trying to avoid.
it's cheaper for US corporations to exploit workers overseas to produce our goods rather than pay US workers an honest wage.
Firstly, there is no such thing as exploitation, apart from slavery. People are paid what their work is worth. If they don't want to work, they can quit and someone else will take their jobs. Oh, you say, if they don't work they'll starve? Shame on those American corporations, offering people the ability to earn money and support themselves! And of course it works both ways - if your work is worth more than you're paid, you can quit and get a better job.
You see, Americans are paid an honest wage - and they find that being born in the US doesn't automatically mean they are more skilled and productive than those born in India.
I am always amused by people who say corporations should show more loyalty to their employees, because it's a two way street. When times were good, employees left established companies in a stampede to go to "dot com" jobs. Where was the loyalty there? If you want to deny corporations the right to fire, you must also deny employees with right to quit - and that's in no-one's interest.
The BBC saying that the coalition is taking "heavy losses for small gains" is not objective reporting.
the US has lost 24 soldiers and has gained a large portion of Iraqi territory, and has killed at least 1000 Iraqi soldiers, (fox is reporting something like 35,000 dead Iraqis, but I don't buy that at all) but the 3ID estimates that it has killed 800 Iraqis at the cost of 1 American... how is that heavy losses for small gains??!!
Indeed - the other night, 4 days after the Coalition arrived at Basra, the BBC reported it "the long-running siege of Basra". 1) 4 days isn't long by any stretch of the imagination, there have been sieges that lasted for years 2) it isn't a siege, since the BBC themselves have shown footage of people coming and going. In fact, the only people who aren't allowed to move freely are the Iraqi army, who are offered the choice between surrender and fighting. Hardly a siege.
Question: are the BBC using inaccurate terms because they have an agenda, or because their commentators are simply incompetent? I'd say it was a combination of the two. For example, they're keen to report in Iraqi civilian casualities, but totally glossed over Iraqis using a hospital as a fortress and a school as an armoury.
I wouldn't mind their bias at all, but unlike CNN who are paid for by their sponsors and viewers, the BBC are supported by our taxes, and have a duty to be objective in cases where they do not represent the viewpoint of every taxpayer (i.e. all the time).
How is spamming still profitable? Are there that many people out there that are into having sex with farm animals? Or believe their are pills that increase life span? Who the hell are these people?
The economics of spam work because of the huge imbalance between what a spammer pays, and the price of the products bing sold. One sale per million messages probably makes the whole undertaking feasible. I think it was PT Barnum who said no-one ever went bust underestimating the intelligence of the public.
Well actually... Mr. Cheney is making a million dollars a year in "deferred compensation" from Halliburton. Search his name and that phrase at Google News.
Would $1M a year cloud your judgement?
If it's deferred from previous work, nothing he does now can affect it, can it?
Hmm ... decentralized opponents striking from the shadows against quarreling allies. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
I don't know if this is a "Lord of the Rings" reference or a "War on Saddam" reference.
I would feel much better if the US made the commitment to not have any economic interest in Iraq. There should be no US based company getting contracts for oil. Same goes for cell phone standards. KEEP YOUR GREEDY LITTLE HANDS OFF OF IRAQ! We are going to war with Iraq for the freedom of the people, not the plunder. Right?
That's just silly. What do you propose, wrapping Iraq in an economic bubble so no foreign country can do business there? Let the French and the Russians resume their oil-for-arms deals? This war is going to cost the US at least $75B directly, on top of the economic damage done by the uncertainty and reduced trade - it would take decades to make that back. Hundreds of billions have been wiped off the stock markets. This war may be about many things, but to suggest it is about profit reveals a profound ignorance of economics.
Fact: After the ravages of the Saddam regime, Iraq is in desperate need of modernization. Fact: The Iraqis can't do it themselves. Now, I agree that there shouldn't be an artificial bias towards US companies, the bidding should be open to anyone who can provide the goods and services the Iraqis need at the best price.