The current Russian administration is incapable of controlling their crime. They are too corrupt, but are often referred to as a police state by the more dashing commentators. However, China has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. They achieve it through abuses of freedom and kangaroo courts (but not violence - there is only one province in China that has police who carry guns.)
My point is that the America of 2008 looks a lot more like China than the America of 1980. The fact that this doesn't alarm the supposed conservatives of this country is truly frightening.
I can't even scream this loudly enough if you were here in person. China is a communist dictatorship which I have no control over. Russia is a pseudo-democratic dictatorship that I have no control over. When my government is doing evil, I complain bitterly about it. What good does bitching about China or Iran do? Absolutely nothing! Which is the only thing these so called pundits and reporters do - bitch about things that we cannot control, while ignoring the fact that WE have a part to play in our own destiny.
Vile regimes? How about Saudi Arabia? How about Pakistan? How about our One China policy? You completely missed the point of my first post. America does not care if you're a vile regime, as long as you do what we tell you to do. That's why Saddam had our public support - we removed him from our Terrorist States list in the early 80s so we could sell him weapons. Weapons which he used to exterminate hundreds of thousands of people, which didn't bother us in the slightest. Like the slaughter of the people of East Timor, also in the hundreds of thousands, didn't even cause us to stop selling weapons to Indonesia.
You are paying attention to the smoke and the mirrors, and not the real issues. This is not a pissing contest. This is a matter of injustice, and what we can do about it. So, if saying that the US is as good as Russia helps you sleep at night, by all means, get back in front of the TV and tuck in. Celebrate your freedom by doing fuck all. Trust the government. Ignore the fact that the president today is asking the public to provide immunity to telcos to spy on the public. Ignore the blood in the streets in Baghdad. Ignore the cries of injustice in the inner city. Ignore the fact that we spend more money on the military than any other expenditure in our budget, and more than any other country by any measurement (per capita, GDP, whatever.)
The sad thing is, you are the perfect American citizen. Because you are listless, thoughtless, you follow orders, and you ask no questions. If this sounds familiar to communist ideals, perhaps that should be alarming?
You're totally off the mark. When historical facts are "crap" the propogandists have done an excellent job of ruining your brain.
I do not just think about Americans when I consider the effects of our foreign policy. As a rational humanist (one who thinks about others in addition to himself) I consider what effects the actions of my government will have on the livelihood of others. We have overturned and destroyed so many democratic movements since WWII the damage we have done to world society as a whole is probably incalculable. Even when we think we are doing something good, we often fail completely and achieve the opposite result. Just look at our War on Terror to "defend" freedom. We've lost more rights and taken away more rights in 8 years than have been lost in the past two hundred.
America, in the context of world cultural development, has not done bad job until the 1940s. Everything has been going straight to hell since then, especially in regards to our foreign policy. We are now so backwards that conservative pundits will complain about helping neighbors through mass transit funding and public education, and turn around to defend our actions to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, and then rebuild it. How is it acceptable to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unjust, unnecessary, and aggressive war, and not spend far less to try to further a just and equitable society here at home?
In regards to people coming here, that's only been the case because of our economic prosperity, and our freedom compared to the military dictatorships that we sometimes explicitly support and prop up against repressed populations. Others flock from areas still recovering from our economic experimentation (Mexico, and almost every country south of it in the Americas).
People from Denmark aren't coming here in droves. They're choosing us over Ecuador and El Salvador. Whoopdedoo! Just watch those numbers as our currency continues to tank.
Now, I know you want to label me, and say I always want to "blame America first." The list of our fuckups is insanely large, and we are constantly cleaning up our own mess, most of it caused by our refusal to recognize that we do not have the right or the insight necessary to meddle in the affairs of other sovereign nations. You'll probably agree with me that you can't make someone go to rehab, but somehow you also believe that you can force an entire culture to ditch their own and accept ours without putting up a fight.
These are not hard things to understand. Just ask yourself what actions you would take, seeing a Chinese tank rolling by your front door, and burying family members every month. Now look at the actions of the Iraqis. Suddenly, they look more rational than we do.
America does not have to be a superpower in order to be a democracy. In fact, forming a global empire is as far from a constitutional republic as a nation can get.
Let's ask your question in a different way: Is there any country with more disregard for basic human rights than the United States or our "coalition" on the War on Terror?
Which, coincidentally, we are winning for the terrorists?
If you're an American adult, there's a 1% chance you're currently in jail. If you're a black male between the ages of 20 and 34, there's an 11% chance you're currently in jail.
As the article notes, that's more prisoners per capita than Russia or China.
This has never been the Land of the Free. There's always exceptions. People have fought and died to free Native Americans, blacks, women, immigrants, all of whom live inside the United States. We haven't had true equality among our own citizens - and I mean, in a purely legal capacity - until the 70s. Even now, Native American reservations aren't truly sovereign, as they are supposed to be.
Anyone who thinks the American military gives a shit about anyone's rights hasn't been paying attention. These are the same guys (currently, this is literal - half of the executive branch are old white men from the Reagan administration) who sold weapons to a sworn enemy during wartime in order to fund right-wing guerrillas who were busy raping and murdering everyone from indigenous people to other Americans daring to raise awareness about the genocide. (Read about Dianna Ortiz - she was a nun who was abducted, tortured, and gang-raped for twenty four hours at the direction of the CIA).
Hell, look at Palestine. We hem and haw about freedom, but if we don't like who you elect, we try to economically sabotage and militarily exterminate the new government. This has been consistent US policy since the 50s. (Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama...) America isn't much better than the British Empire was in the 1700s. We just have a much better PR department. By the way, who's suspending habeas corpus now? Oh, that's right...
In short, America does not give a fuck about freedom. We care that you do what you're told. That's why Saddam Hussein is underground and the King of Saudi Arabia is making out with our president in Texas.
Hopefully the terrorists never get advanced enough to build any kind of robots or technology that would allow them to deliver munitions from long distances, high altitude, or even space, indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of US civilians. I can't imagine what we'd do to retaliate, but we'd never resort to terrorism.
I'm just glad we're not terrorists! Go freedom! Go democracy (unless you vote Hamas)! Peace in the middle east! Long live the USA, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and... oh wait, Pakistan isn't doing what we told them anymore. Go Saudi Arabia, anyhow!
First, are you even sure you're doing the business to necessitate a POS system? Is there a problem with theft, being out of stock, or are you trying to sell things online? You may have a solution in search of a problem.
I highly recommend getting a turnkey system. $2500 may seem like a lot of money, but that's all it costs to get a complete solution from Dell or another provider for Quickbooks POS. It will work 99% of the time; it's compatible with QuickBooks, and it includes everything you need. Plus, with ODBC, you can easily tie in your inventory levels with an e-commerce solution.
Think about this: if the system only lasts for two years, you have spent a little more than $100 a month or $3.40 a day on probably the biggest expense (besides COGS, rent, utilities) in a retail environment. How much time and effort would it take to get a Linux solution to be usable, and how much are you paid per hour? Hopefully more than $3.40.
Or not. A girl always gets modded WAY up, sort of the Slashdot equivalent of a free drink. But you do make a good point.
In my experience with dating sites, about fifty percent of guys are looking for a one night stand, and fifty percent of girls are looking for compliments and self-image reinforcement, either until they get back with their emotionally abusive boyfriend or they run in terror from the horrific messages.
Personally, I have grown tired of the entire dating scene online. I'm hitting the gym until the girls start hitting on me.
I upgraded to 10.5.2 last week... not sure what went wrong. Machine rebooted, and after providing my user name and password, it would go blue (the color of my desktop) for about a second, and then kick me back to the login screen. I booted into safe mood, booted off the Leopard disk and repaired permissions, repaired disk, reset the password, and that didn't work.
Then I did a clean Leopard install, and imported the user settings from my Time Machine backup (so I wouldn't have to manually reinstall all of my programs). Same thing happened, so I was forced to repave my laptop and reinstall all of my applications.
I'm just putting this out there to silence all of the anti-microsoft folks. A few users get screwed when an OS is updated, that's always been the case.
Oh, I did try to put Ubuntu on there between Leopard installs. Everything installed without issue, except the wireless performance was dismal (as in three minutes to load Google, timing out on everything else), and I couldn't get the VESA drivers to recognize the laptop resolution, and I couldn't get the proprietary ATI drivers to work with Compiz. It's very, very, close though. (On a side note, the Leopard disk utility is incapable of partitioning once Linux has been installed, so I had to nuke the partitions with the ubuntu installer before Leopard would successfully partition without the error: Resource Busy.)
This is another case of a group or person demanding respect instead of earning it.
I think the only case in which you can legitimately complain about this sort of dogmatic bullshit is when people are actively trying to piss you off in a way that's unavoidable, and (thank god) the internet is entirely avoidable. If these same people were outraged by a billboard in Riyadh, or even in NYC, I could understand. That's a legitimate complaint, and it makes sense to compromise on public spaces. But when you choose to go out of your way to watch a video or play a video game that offends you, how could you possibly get any dumber? It's like poking yourself in the eye and complaining about the sting.
What's more amazing about our culture in general is that hundreds of thousands of people complain about a bare breast, and the outcry against maiming and killing hundreds of thousands is paltry in comparison. Similarly, these muslims seem to have no problem sentencing the victim of gangrape to prison for being "defiled," but cannot bear to look at a picture.
I've got an idea: how about we send all the religious Christian nutcases to Iraq (since they care so deeply about freedom) and just watch the fireworks. Maybe fundamentalism is a problem that could solve itself.
I took a trip to florida when I was a kid, and my parents bought me a baseball game for my GameBoy for the trip. I can't remember which one it was, but it was infuriating. I think I'd lost 15 games in a row in the last inning, and I just snapped in the hotel room near the state line, and punched the screen. Immediately I saw the crack and the impending Dark Water seep from within. I had to stash it for the rest of the trip because I was so embarrassed. And nothing says punishment like staring at an unusable Motocross Maniacs cartridge on a ten hour car trip...
So you're getting all excited about a statistical tie, when we're spending $6700 per head and they're spending $251? Not to mention the fact that they have an infant mortality rate that's lower...
Hmm... keep the blinders on. I guess you wouldn't know what to do without them.
One of the reasons it's been an American policy to keep Cuba under embargo is because they are a symbol of success without American support in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, I think, military planners were genuinely scared of the ideological impact of a successful Cuba, despite the fact that they were no more propped up from Russia than Japan was from the United States. Now, businesses, mostly in the aeronautical and arms industries prop up the failed foreign policies of the 60s through the 80s in order to continue making money hand over fist.
Now, oddly enough, Cuba is the only western civilization to have passed peak oil (Brazil could also be a candidate depending on your definition). When the Soviet Union collapsed, the cheap oil flowing into the country stopped almost overnight, and they were forced to transition from a car-based, petrochemical powered agriculture industry to human powered travel and (by necessity) organic, renewable farming. It's one of the reasons Cubans live far longer than Americans.
I think it's funny that the embargo has actually helped Cuba far more than being a part of our sphere of influence. Our decision to try to ostracize them for being independent has only made the advantages far more obvious, otherwise it would have been turned into another Puerto Rico, and they'd be facing far more challenges in the future as a result.
(if anyone uses this and makes a million, at least cut me in 10% for the idea)
I gather the last frontier for computers is image recognition. I'm not sure of the state of image processing, but if you could randomly color simple pictures (one flower, one pen, one cup (NO PUN INTENDED)) into about twenty different shades, and get about a hundred different photos, and just start rotating two or three a week in. So the user sees a small photo with radio boxes below:
The cup is ()red ()blue ()green ()purple ()orange ()yellow orange The flower petals are ()orange ()blue ()brown ()black The pen is ()grey ()black ()yellow
You could even start throwing in random names for the colors (silver, charcoal, etc.) using it in sentences, combine with shape guesses (the longer pens are what color? the biggest cup is what color?) Either that or use tiny bits of flash with motion. (the bouncing flower is what color? the flashing red object is what?)
I say a few thousand different sites armed with the same "screen green" paint and tens of thousands of different photos could throw up somewhat of a roadblock.
America isn't a legitimate state... exit polling suggests the last two elections were rigged. They have no right to exist, own property, have a military, etc. Because they are a bigoted evil colonial power.
America has repeatedly said it will take no options off the table. If you visit America, you will hear people on the radio talk about turning the middle east into a piece of glass, etc. And it's not actually to protect themselves against terrorism (though it wouldn't be okay if it were), they are continuing a hundred year old policy of establishing a military presence around oil resources. This places them in the same category as Rome or the British Empire.
Also, you're wrong about the civilian deaths. America has killed more foreign civilians than any other outside country in history, perhaps with the exception of Nazi Germany. They claim the numbers in Iraq are low this time, but statistics out of America are always lies. Even if they say what the Americans want them to, they will still lie about it. Notice how they don't officially "keep track" of civilian deaths. Hell if anyone knows the real figures.
If your state is not a legitimate member of the international community, it has no right to exist. We can't destroy every such nation for obvious reasons, but we can fuck with them however we feel we need to. Why? Why not?
Sincerely, Wen Jiabao Premier of the People's Republic of China
When air-strikes are predicted to kill less than 30 civilians, they are permitted without need for approval. When air-strikes are predicted to kill more, all you need is permission.
What kind of message does this send to the rest of the world? In essence, when it doubt, we kill civilians. When not in doubt, we kill civilians. How did we manage to find ourselves across the world, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, who have never lifted a finger against our nation?
This is a question no one seems to be asking, or rather, one government leaders are pretending not to hear.
What I love about American culture (I was born and raised in the southeast) is the inability to try and comprehend why otherwise reasonable people engage in ultra-violent activities en masse. Sure, there are some sociopaths, but when your average citizen starts to follow sociopaths, there's likely a reasonable explanation. I think it's more likely that they live in perpetual poverty and are subject to random acts of violence directly by US forces or those who are backed by the US, rather than they "hate freedom."
You think Hezbollah and Hamas are evil organizations, and I'll assume because they kill people and advocate violence towards their enemies. Is that any different from statements from the Pentagon? We threaten "the use of force" and they threaten "death to American infidels," but is there, in fact, any difference in those statements? We are far more dishonest than terrorist groups because we pretend that we don't kill people, when in fact, we're responsible for more civilian death than any terrorist group that has ever existed.
This was all perfectly realized recently on the news. I laughed out loud when I saw the video about Iranians "harassing" the US Navy. When you look at the video, you have five off-the-shelf speedboats versus multi-thousand ton US warships. I really can't believe the Pentagon are taking themselves seriously anymore.
And the fact that "communist fronts" are even on your radar is really a testament to how narrow political discussion in the US has become. When "bullcrap" is having a flier forced in your hands, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is perfectly acceptable, grotesque doesn't begin to describe how ugly we must look to the outside world.
In 1980 the average CEO made about 42 times the amount of it's average (AVG) worker. Now it is about 300 times more.
Meanwhile, companies are moving jobs out of America and getting tax cuts to do it! American workers, the only non-unionized labor force in the modern western world, are non-coincidentally the only workers in the modern western world who are making less money, on average, than they were twenty years ago, due to inflation and taxes.
America's middle class is undoubtedly disappearing, but there are so many factors it's impossible to give exact reasons. However, I think the lack of corporate oversight, bloated war (not defense) spending, and fat, no-bid contracts, and a lack of strong unions are part of the reason. You basically have rich friends helping themselves get rich all over the top rungs of corporate America, and as everyone knows, trickle down economics is a figment of Karl Rove's imagination.
Alright. Bin Laden is a religious zealot, and unfortunately, also a well-funded, CIA trained terrorist. Now, by himself, he can't do that much damage. If you took him and plopped him in Brooklyn in 1992, he'd have a hell of a time recruiting local Muslims to his cause. Why? Because only angry joes follow zealots, and only if they have little other choice. Most angry joes are content to get a job at a local business, marry, have a few kids, and buy some ugly pants and move to Florida when they retire.
But, take his physical security away, and install a military base near his house you start to have problems. Maybe he doesn't like having a gun pointed at him if he goes the wrong way at a checkpoint. Maybe some local servicemen get drunk and rape one of his neighbors (not because soldiers are evil, but because all people are sometimes evil.) Maybe he sees the limos of his oppressive government ride in and out of the embassy of the USA, where people claim to love freedom, but have put up with the oppressive government for decades because they are "friendly." He sees the money changing hands - oil for weapons - and doesn't have any of his own. Now you really start to have problems - way, way, way before a "smart" bomb misses it's target and kills his entire family.
And what I love is that no one on any news network seems to get that Bin Laden's dream is absolutely coming true. He pulled off an unbelievable (some say impossible) terrorist act, killed thousands of people, and got the reaction he wanted. American flags flying over new American bases in the Middle East. Of course, he'll say he wants us out, but if we did leave, the only thing he could motivate the angry joes with is rhetoric, and they will look around and say, "There aren't any Americans here. Why aren't we complaining about our own government instead of some country across the world?" America is no longer that country across the world. We're the great Satan, and easily pigeonholed there because our military forces kill people all over the world, every hour of every day.
Thus the real reason no country who has remained uninvolved in the middle east has been attacked by whatever buzzword they're using for terrorists these days. Terrorists don't hate freedom, they hate colonial powers, and that has been the case since the dawn of time. We, as Americans, choose to remain a colonial power at our own peril.
And realize that if you want to have companies use your software, helping them save money is a damn good start. Helping them transition to Linux by making it compatible with a piece of business software that sells millions of copies per year is even better.
This story was about Linux and small businesses. Obviously, if you are writing software for the sake of writing software, you usually wouldn't consider the needs of small businesses. Code away at your own project; I know you don't owe me anything. But, if you ever decry the popularity of Windows for SMBs, re-read my previous posts.
I love macs -- really. But if I have a 16MB spreadsheet, whether in Numbers or OOo 2.3 or even Excel 2008, it's too cumbersome, even on my MBPro Dual 2 with 2 gigs of RAM. On that same machine, in Windows XP in Excel '03, the difference is night and day, from saving files to entering formulas to simply moving around on the spreadsheet.
Similarly, I'd love to use a "hip" solution like an online SQL ledger or some poorly implemented FileMaker Pro app, but I need to get work done. It takes me about 45 seconds in Quickbooks to start a new PO, fill it out, and fax it to my vendor though the fax server. In all my travels, from writing checks to automatically reconciling bank accounts to simply running reports, QuickBooks saves me the most time.
It has huge downfalls - unbelievably botched major upgrades (I wait six months till I switch), non-weighted inventory (sad, but true), and poor performance (though this has gotten much better since they finally moved from a flat file to a real database.)
However, at price points under tens of thousands of dollars, it's still the best option. It's the last piece of software that I couldn't easily replace. (Explorer -> FireFox, Outlook -> Thunderbird, Office -> OpenOffice). It's just frustrating that no one in the Linux community can admit that they are unwilling or unable to offer a truly competitive product. There's no straightforward, multi-user accounting app with anywhere near the functionality, period. And, all I'm saying is, if you want to be ruling the small business market, which is by far the largest piece of the pie in the US, you have to get serious about that side of the solution.
This is one reason now would be a good time to get the desktop side of things working properly. The suits say, "Is Linux really ready?" and you can hand them that press release, and reply, "Yes. All I'm trying to do is save you money."
Slashdot Mirror
The current Russian administration is incapable of controlling their crime. They are too corrupt, but are often referred to as a police state by the more dashing commentators. However, China has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. They achieve it through abuses of freedom and kangaroo courts (but not violence - there is only one province in China that has police who carry guns.)
My point is that the America of 2008 looks a lot more like China than the America of 1980. The fact that this doesn't alarm the supposed conservatives of this country is truly frightening.
I can't even scream this loudly enough if you were here in person. China is a communist dictatorship which I have no control over. Russia is a pseudo-democratic dictatorship that I have no control over. When my government is doing evil, I complain bitterly about it. What good does bitching about China or Iran do? Absolutely nothing! Which is the only thing these so called pundits and reporters do - bitch about things that we cannot control, while ignoring the fact that WE have a part to play in our own destiny.
Vile regimes? How about Saudi Arabia? How about Pakistan? How about our One China policy? You completely missed the point of my first post. America does not care if you're a vile regime, as long as you do what we tell you to do. That's why Saddam had our public support - we removed him from our Terrorist States list in the early 80s so we could sell him weapons. Weapons which he used to exterminate hundreds of thousands of people, which didn't bother us in the slightest. Like the slaughter of the people of East Timor, also in the hundreds of thousands, didn't even cause us to stop selling weapons to Indonesia.
You are paying attention to the smoke and the mirrors, and not the real issues. This is not a pissing contest. This is a matter of injustice, and what we can do about it. So, if saying that the US is as good as Russia helps you sleep at night, by all means, get back in front of the TV and tuck in. Celebrate your freedom by doing fuck all. Trust the government. Ignore the fact that the president today is asking the public to provide immunity to telcos to spy on the public. Ignore the blood in the streets in Baghdad. Ignore the cries of injustice in the inner city. Ignore the fact that we spend more money on the military than any other expenditure in our budget, and more than any other country by any measurement (per capita, GDP, whatever.)
The sad thing is, you are the perfect American citizen. Because you are listless, thoughtless, you follow orders, and you ask no questions. If this sounds familiar to communist ideals, perhaps that should be alarming?
You're totally off the mark. When historical facts are "crap" the propogandists have done an excellent job of ruining your brain.
I do not just think about Americans when I consider the effects of our foreign policy. As a rational humanist (one who thinks about others in addition to himself) I consider what effects the actions of my government will have on the livelihood of others. We have overturned and destroyed so many democratic movements since WWII the damage we have done to world society as a whole is probably incalculable. Even when we think we are doing something good, we often fail completely and achieve the opposite result. Just look at our War on Terror to "defend" freedom. We've lost more rights and taken away more rights in 8 years than have been lost in the past two hundred.
America, in the context of world cultural development, has not done bad job until the 1940s. Everything has been going straight to hell since then, especially in regards to our foreign policy. We are now so backwards that conservative pundits will complain about helping neighbors through mass transit funding and public education, and turn around to defend our actions to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, and then rebuild it. How is it acceptable to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unjust, unnecessary, and aggressive war, and not spend far less to try to further a just and equitable society here at home?
In regards to people coming here, that's only been the case because of our economic prosperity, and our freedom compared to the military dictatorships that we sometimes explicitly support and prop up against repressed populations. Others flock from areas still recovering from our economic experimentation (Mexico, and almost every country south of it in the Americas).
People from Denmark aren't coming here in droves. They're choosing us over Ecuador and El Salvador. Whoopdedoo! Just watch those numbers as our currency continues to tank.
Now, I know you want to label me, and say I always want to "blame America first." The list of our fuckups is insanely large, and we are constantly cleaning up our own mess, most of it caused by our refusal to recognize that we do not have the right or the insight necessary to meddle in the affairs of other sovereign nations. You'll probably agree with me that you can't make someone go to rehab, but somehow you also believe that you can force an entire culture to ditch their own and accept ours without putting up a fight.
These are not hard things to understand. Just ask yourself what actions you would take, seeing a Chinese tank rolling by your front door, and burying family members every month. Now look at the actions of the Iraqis. Suddenly, they look more rational than we do.
America does not have to be a superpower in order to be a democracy. In fact, forming a global empire is as far from a constitutional republic as a nation can get.
Let's ask your question in a different way: Is there any country with more disregard for basic human rights than the United States or our "coalition" on the War on Terror?
Which, coincidentally, we are winning for the terrorists?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/02/28/prison.population.ap/index.html
If you're an American adult, there's a 1% chance you're currently in jail. If you're a black male between the ages of 20 and 34, there's an 11% chance you're currently in jail.
As the article notes, that's more prisoners per capita than Russia or China.
This has never been the Land of the Free. There's always exceptions. People have fought and died to free Native Americans, blacks, women, immigrants, all of whom live inside the United States. We haven't had true equality among our own citizens - and I mean, in a purely legal capacity - until the 70s. Even now, Native American reservations aren't truly sovereign, as they are supposed to be.
Anyone who thinks the American military gives a shit about anyone's rights hasn't been paying attention. These are the same guys (currently, this is literal - half of the executive branch are old white men from the Reagan administration) who sold weapons to a sworn enemy during wartime in order to fund right-wing guerrillas who were busy raping and murdering everyone from indigenous people to other Americans daring to raise awareness about the genocide. (Read about Dianna Ortiz - she was a nun who was abducted, tortured, and gang-raped for twenty four hours at the direction of the CIA).
Hell, look at Palestine. We hem and haw about freedom, but if we don't like who you elect, we try to economically sabotage and militarily exterminate the new government. This has been consistent US policy since the 50s. (Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama...) America isn't much better than the British Empire was in the 1700s. We just have a much better PR department. By the way, who's suspending habeas corpus now? Oh, that's right...
In short, America does not give a fuck about freedom. We care that you do what you're told. That's why Saddam Hussein is underground and the King of Saudi Arabia is making out with our president in Texas.
Hopefully the terrorists never get advanced enough to build any kind of robots or technology that would allow them to deliver munitions from long distances, high altitude, or even space, indiscriminately killing hundreds of thousands of US civilians. I can't imagine what we'd do to retaliate, but we'd never resort to terrorism.
I'm just glad we're not terrorists! Go freedom! Go democracy (unless you vote Hamas)! Peace in the middle east! Long live the USA, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and... oh wait, Pakistan isn't doing what we told them anymore. Go Saudi Arabia, anyhow!
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
First, are you even sure you're doing the business to necessitate a POS system? Is there a problem with theft, being out of stock, or are you trying to sell things online? You may have a solution in search of a problem.
I highly recommend getting a turnkey system. $2500 may seem like a lot of money, but that's all it costs to get a complete solution from Dell or another provider for Quickbooks POS. It will work 99% of the time; it's compatible with QuickBooks, and it includes everything you need. Plus, with ODBC, you can easily tie in your inventory levels with an e-commerce solution.
Think about this: if the system only lasts for two years, you have spent a little more than $100 a month or $3.40 a day on probably the biggest expense (besides COGS, rent, utilities) in a retail environment. How much time and effort would it take to get a Linux solution to be usable, and how much are you paid per hour? Hopefully more than $3.40.
Or not. A girl always gets modded WAY up, sort of the Slashdot equivalent of a free drink. But you do make a good point.
In my experience with dating sites, about fifty percent of guys are looking for a one night stand, and fifty percent of girls are looking for compliments and self-image reinforcement, either until they get back with their emotionally abusive boyfriend or they run in terror from the horrific messages.
Personally, I have grown tired of the entire dating scene online. I'm hitting the gym until the girls start hitting on me.
I upgraded to 10.5.2 last week... not sure what went wrong. Machine rebooted, and after providing my user name and password, it would go blue (the color of my desktop) for about a second, and then kick me back to the login screen. I booted into safe mood, booted off the Leopard disk and repaired permissions, repaired disk, reset the password, and that didn't work.
Then I did a clean Leopard install, and imported the user settings from my Time Machine backup (so I wouldn't have to manually reinstall all of my programs). Same thing happened, so I was forced to repave my laptop and reinstall all of my applications.
I'm just putting this out there to silence all of the anti-microsoft folks. A few users get screwed when an OS is updated, that's always been the case.
Oh, I did try to put Ubuntu on there between Leopard installs. Everything installed without issue, except the wireless performance was dismal (as in three minutes to load Google, timing out on everything else), and I couldn't get the VESA drivers to recognize the laptop resolution, and I couldn't get the proprietary ATI drivers to work with Compiz. It's very, very, close though. (On a side note, the Leopard disk utility is incapable of partitioning once Linux has been installed, so I had to nuke the partitions with the ubuntu installer before Leopard would successfully partition without the error: Resource Busy.)
This is another case of a group or person demanding respect instead of earning it.
I think the only case in which you can legitimately complain about this sort of dogmatic bullshit is when people are actively trying to piss you off in a way that's unavoidable, and (thank god) the internet is entirely avoidable. If these same people were outraged by a billboard in Riyadh, or even in NYC, I could understand. That's a legitimate complaint, and it makes sense to compromise on public spaces. But when you choose to go out of your way to watch a video or play a video game that offends you, how could you possibly get any dumber? It's like poking yourself in the eye and complaining about the sting.
What's more amazing about our culture in general is that hundreds of thousands of people complain about a bare breast, and the outcry against maiming and killing hundreds of thousands is paltry in comparison. Similarly, these muslims seem to have no problem sentencing the victim of gangrape to prison for being "defiled," but cannot bear to look at a picture.
I've got an idea: how about we send all the religious Christian nutcases to Iraq (since they care so deeply about freedom) and just watch the fireworks. Maybe fundamentalism is a problem that could solve itself.
I took a trip to florida when I was a kid, and my parents bought me a baseball game for my GameBoy for the trip. I can't remember which one it was, but it was infuriating. I think I'd lost 15 games in a row in the last inning, and I just snapped in the hotel room near the state line, and punched the screen. Immediately I saw the crack and the impending Dark Water seep from within. I had to stash it for the rest of the trip because I was so embarrassed. And nothing says punishment like staring at an unusable Motocross Maniacs cartridge on a ten hour car trip...
So you're getting all excited about a statistical tie, when we're spending $6700 per head and they're spending $251? Not to mention the fact that they have an infant mortality rate that's lower...
Hmm... keep the blinders on. I guess you wouldn't know what to do without them.
One of the reasons it's been an American policy to keep Cuba under embargo is because they are a symbol of success without American support in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, I think, military planners were genuinely scared of the ideological impact of a successful Cuba, despite the fact that they were no more propped up from Russia than Japan was from the United States. Now, businesses, mostly in the aeronautical and arms industries prop up the failed foreign policies of the 60s through the 80s in order to continue making money hand over fist.
Now, oddly enough, Cuba is the only western civilization to have passed peak oil (Brazil could also be a candidate depending on your definition). When the Soviet Union collapsed, the cheap oil flowing into the country stopped almost overnight, and they were forced to transition from a car-based, petrochemical powered agriculture industry to human powered travel and (by necessity) organic, renewable farming. It's one of the reasons Cubans live far longer than Americans.
I think it's funny that the embargo has actually helped Cuba far more than being a part of our sphere of influence. Our decision to try to ostracize them for being independent has only made the advantages far more obvious, otherwise it would have been turned into another Puerto Rico, and they'd be facing far more challenges in the future as a result.
Free with purchase of any Packard Bell PC. Finest machines ever made.
(if anyone uses this and makes a million, at least cut me in 10% for the idea)
I gather the last frontier for computers is image recognition. I'm not sure of the state of image processing, but if you could randomly color simple pictures (one flower, one pen, one cup (NO PUN INTENDED)) into about twenty different shades, and get about a hundred different photos, and just start rotating two or three a week in. So the user sees a small photo with radio boxes below:
The cup is ()red ()blue ()green ()purple ()orange ()yellow orange
The flower petals are ()orange ()blue ()brown ()black
The pen is ()grey ()black ()yellow
You could even start throwing in random names for the colors (silver, charcoal, etc.) using it in sentences, combine with shape guesses (the longer pens are what color? the biggest cup is what color?) Either that or use tiny bits of flash with motion. (the bouncing flower is what color? the flashing red object is what?)
I say a few thousand different sites armed with the same "screen green" paint and tens of thousands of different photos could throw up somewhat of a roadblock.
What say ye?
Don't find it odd!
America isn't a legitimate state... exit polling suggests the last two elections were rigged. They have no right to exist, own property, have a military, etc. Because they are a bigoted evil colonial power.
America has repeatedly said it will take no options off the table. If you visit America, you will hear people on the radio talk about turning the middle east into a piece of glass, etc. And it's not actually to protect themselves against terrorism (though it wouldn't be okay if it were), they are continuing a hundred year old policy of establishing a military presence around oil resources. This places them in the same category as Rome or the British Empire.
Also, you're wrong about the civilian deaths. America has killed more foreign civilians than any other outside country in history, perhaps with the exception of Nazi Germany. They claim the numbers in Iraq are low this time, but statistics out of America are always lies. Even if they say what the Americans want them to, they will still lie about it. Notice how they don't officially "keep track" of civilian deaths. Hell if anyone knows the real figures.
If your state is not a legitimate member of the international community, it has no right to exist. We can't destroy every such nation for obvious reasons, but we can fuck with them however we feel we need to. Why? Why not?
Sincerely,
Wen Jiabao
Premier of the People's Republic of China
When air-strikes are predicted to kill less than 30 civilians, they are permitted without need for approval. When air-strikes are predicted to kill more, all you need is permission.
What kind of message does this send to the rest of the world? In essence, when it doubt, we kill civilians. When not in doubt, we kill civilians. How did we manage to find ourselves across the world, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, who have never lifted a finger against our nation?
This is a question no one seems to be asking, or rather, one government leaders are pretending not to hear.
What I love about American culture (I was born and raised in the southeast) is the inability to try and comprehend why otherwise reasonable people engage in ultra-violent activities en masse. Sure, there are some sociopaths, but when your average citizen starts to follow sociopaths, there's likely a reasonable explanation. I think it's more likely that they live in perpetual poverty and are subject to random acts of violence directly by US forces or those who are backed by the US, rather than they "hate freedom."
You think Hezbollah and Hamas are evil organizations, and I'll assume because they kill people and advocate violence towards their enemies. Is that any different from statements from the Pentagon? We threaten "the use of force" and they threaten "death to American infidels," but is there, in fact, any difference in those statements? We are far more dishonest than terrorist groups because we pretend that we don't kill people, when in fact, we're responsible for more civilian death than any terrorist group that has ever existed.
This was all perfectly realized recently on the news. I laughed out loud when I saw the video about Iranians "harassing" the US Navy. When you look at the video, you have five off-the-shelf speedboats versus multi-thousand ton US warships. I really can't believe the Pentagon are taking themselves seriously anymore.
And the fact that "communist fronts" are even on your radar is really a testament to how narrow political discussion in the US has become. When "bullcrap" is having a flier forced in your hands, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is perfectly acceptable, grotesque doesn't begin to describe how ugly we must look to the outside world.
In 1980 the average CEO made about 42 times the amount of it's average (AVG) worker. Now it is about 300 times more.
Meanwhile, companies are moving jobs out of America and getting tax cuts to do it! American workers, the only non-unionized labor force in the modern western world, are non-coincidentally the only workers in the modern western world who are making less money, on average, than they were twenty years ago, due to inflation and taxes.
America's middle class is undoubtedly disappearing, but there are so many factors it's impossible to give exact reasons. However, I think the lack of corporate oversight, bloated war (not defense) spending, and fat, no-bid contracts, and a lack of strong unions are part of the reason. You basically have rich friends helping themselves get rich all over the top rungs of corporate America, and as everyone knows, trickle down economics is a figment of Karl Rove's imagination.
Alright. Bin Laden is a religious zealot, and unfortunately, also a well-funded, CIA trained terrorist. Now, by himself, he can't do that much damage. If you took him and plopped him in Brooklyn in 1992, he'd have a hell of a time recruiting local Muslims to his cause. Why? Because only angry joes follow zealots, and only if they have little other choice. Most angry joes are content to get a job at a local business, marry, have a few kids, and buy some ugly pants and move to Florida when they retire.
But, take his physical security away, and install a military base near his house you start to have problems. Maybe he doesn't like having a gun pointed at him if he goes the wrong way at a checkpoint. Maybe some local servicemen get drunk and rape one of his neighbors (not because soldiers are evil, but because all people are sometimes evil.) Maybe he sees the limos of his oppressive government ride in and out of the embassy of the USA, where people claim to love freedom, but have put up with the oppressive government for decades because they are "friendly." He sees the money changing hands - oil for weapons - and doesn't have any of his own. Now you really start to have problems - way, way, way before a "smart" bomb misses it's target and kills his entire family.
And what I love is that no one on any news network seems to get that Bin Laden's dream is absolutely coming true. He pulled off an unbelievable (some say impossible) terrorist act, killed thousands of people, and got the reaction he wanted. American flags flying over new American bases in the Middle East. Of course, he'll say he wants us out, but if we did leave, the only thing he could motivate the angry joes with is rhetoric, and they will look around and say, "There aren't any Americans here. Why aren't we complaining about our own government instead of some country across the world?" America is no longer that country across the world. We're the great Satan, and easily pigeonholed there because our military forces kill people all over the world, every hour of every day.
Thus the real reason no country who has remained uninvolved in the middle east has been attacked by whatever buzzword they're using for terrorists these days. Terrorists don't hate freedom, they hate colonial powers, and that has been the case since the dawn of time. We, as Americans, choose to remain a colonial power at our own peril.
And realize that if you want to have companies use your software, helping them save money is a damn good start. Helping them transition to Linux by making it compatible with a piece of business software that sells millions of copies per year is even better.
This story was about Linux and small businesses. Obviously, if you are writing software for the sake of writing software, you usually wouldn't consider the needs of small businesses. Code away at your own project; I know you don't owe me anything. But, if you ever decry the popularity of Windows for SMBs, re-read my previous posts.
I love macs -- really. But if I have a 16MB spreadsheet, whether in Numbers or OOo 2.3 or even Excel 2008, it's too cumbersome, even on my MBPro Dual 2 with 2 gigs of RAM. On that same machine, in Windows XP in Excel '03, the difference is night and day, from saving files to entering formulas to simply moving around on the spreadsheet.
Similarly, I'd love to use a "hip" solution like an online SQL ledger or some poorly implemented FileMaker Pro app, but I need to get work done. It takes me about 45 seconds in Quickbooks to start a new PO, fill it out, and fax it to my vendor though the fax server. In all my travels, from writing checks to automatically reconciling bank accounts to simply running reports, QuickBooks saves me the most time.
It has huge downfalls - unbelievably botched major upgrades (I wait six months till I switch), non-weighted inventory (sad, but true), and poor performance (though this has gotten much better since they finally moved from a flat file to a real database.)
However, at price points under tens of thousands of dollars, it's still the best option. It's the last piece of software that I couldn't easily replace. (Explorer -> FireFox, Outlook -> Thunderbird, Office -> OpenOffice). It's just frustrating that no one in the Linux community can admit that they are unwilling or unable to offer a truly competitive product. There's no straightforward, multi-user accounting app with anywhere near the functionality, period. And, all I'm saying is, if you want to be ruling the small business market, which is by far the largest piece of the pie in the US, you have to get serious about that side of the solution.
This is one reason now would be a good time to get the desktop side of things working properly. The suits say, "Is Linux really ready?" and you can hand them that press release, and reply, "Yes. All I'm trying to do is save you money."
Yes, why would we want to:
1. Update Quickbooks to fix (sometimes show-stopping) bugs automatically.
2. Download financial information to reconcile our accounts instead of doing it by hand.
3. Download tax forms.
4. Send and receive e-mail.
5. Automatically update payroll information.
Really. If you're weren't trolling, you either need a nap or you're retarded.