I have a half-dozen FreeBSD boxes that work great as servers, network management tools, etc.
However, I'd rather spend my free time doing something fun than spend it fscking around with what passes for a GUI under any x86 Unix. Applications just work under Win2k and XP and I don't need to become an X/kde/gnome/qt guru to make it happen.
Granted, the business can say "sorry, we don't want to do business with you"
The legislation has to forbid asking you for it and forbid denying goods or services based on refusal to give it to them even if they ask.
It should ONLY be required for tax or social security identification purposes, and only if required by law. Otherwise it should remain private to the SS# holder.
This is pretty much common in *any* hotel. I stayed in a Radisson in Chicago in March and the ratecard for the phones charged some outrageous rate for long distance ($4-5 per minute), an equally ridiculous rate for the local calls ($1-2 per minute) and I think toll free calls over 10 minutes were charged a few bucks, too.
I can't remember the last time I stayed in a hotel that had "free" local calls. It might have been a Super 8 in Stumblefuck, Nebraska -- where are you going to call there?
I'm not a super world traveler (maybe 4-5 trips per year), but it seems that the biggest trend is the clampdown on toll-free calls. I'm sure the rationale is to (1) make a buck where they weren't before and (2) by charging, maybe limit the number of outbound trunks they need.
Cunnilingus Future success is often dependent on the success and happiness of one's personal life. If you can't do this right, don't expect a fulfilling personal life.
Chemistry Most people would call this "learning how to drink", but I think that's just a subset. Its important to learn what are the right combinations and quantities of booze and drugs to take, and more imporantly, how to function before, during, and after consumption. You won't accomplish much in life if you can't work with a hangover or don't know what or how much to take or not take to prevent one.
These are two of the biggest lessons I learned in college. I learned a bunch of other crap about politics, math, history and science, but its kind of hazy and not very applicable most of the time to my full-time job managing a computer network.
I'm frankly appalled at how sleazy business has gotten and how willing people are to lie, cheat and steal under the rubric of "corporate competitiveness".
We had a local bank get fined big money for selling information (like bank account numbers!) to a telemarketing company, who then charged people for stuff they never got. The bank then gets kickbacks -- I mean, stealing your money directly is illegal so they do it this way?
From the deliberate fraud of Enron to the strong-arm tactics of MS, I just wonder if corporations aren't just legally sanctioned protection rackets and theives anymore.
I'd expect TV coverage of armed US Marshalls seizing computers, records and correspondence along with top Verisign officials being led off in handcuffs as part of a larger RICO investigation.
Sure the internet came into being 30 years ago, but do the years from 1972-1990 even mean anything? A bunch of universities and defense contractors on 56k links, with a lot of nodes UUCP only?
The same is true of the "early days of TV" -- sure, it was *invented* and very narrowly used in the 30s and 40s, but for most people the early days of TV means the early-mid 50s when people generally starting buying and watching TV regularly.
The same is true of the internet -- I worked at a major University and we didn't get general internet access (IP connectivity of our computers) until probably '90. Dialup wasn't an option until '91 or '92, and generic consumer access not an option until 93-94, and even then it was limited and expensive.
The "modern" internet as a mass phenomenon (cheap home dialup, most server sites accessed via high speed dedicated connectivity) didn't really start until '94-95 and wasn't even a popular force until a couple of years later.
Counting 72-90 as "the early years" is legitimate only if you're talking about the six geeks who did something with it then.
Get somebody to have an informal conversation with PanIP's leader about the health benefits of leaving your company alone.
They should know that the benefits are many: continued orthapedic mobility, original dentition, full use of digits. It's a family plan, too -- his or her daughter or son retain the dignity and innocence they've always enjoyed. And it's an umbrella that can even extend to one's car, home and other prized personal possessions which are so often the victim of unplanned catastrophes like fires and explosions.
You would think that someone that would make a business out of patent enforcement would eventually run into someone who can play that game a lot better. Extortion and strong-arm tactics with lawyers is generally the gateway to extortion and strong-arm tactics with guys with funny accents and a bad sense of humor.
Using the community standard, does it give any commmunity the ability to find internet content objectionable regardless of geography?
Say a server hosted in LA has porn on it and my community in Minnesota finds it objectionable. The only way for us to get the data on the server is to connect up there -- the server's ISP doesn't have any connectivity in our community so the data isn't even "running through" us on its way to somewhere else.
Why couldn't the same rules then apply to physical-world things? Ie, why couldn't we find that when we get on a plane and fly to LA that there are clubs there we find objectionable? I mean, we have to fetch the data from the server just like we have to fetch the experience.
Allowing someone to object to something using their community's standards when the thing thing isn't in their community *except when they go get it* seems kind of hard to understand.
I read about the waitron pocket-scanner, too. Most of the waitrons I know wouldn't have been coerced, they would have done it for free drugs, which is how this was probably paid for. After the first couple of payments you'll either keep coming back or they'll use the past drug payments against you..
I shipped a DEC TZ88 DLT4000 drive to California. I didn't have the original packing material, so I wrapped the drive in bubblewrap. When I was done, the drive had about 6-8" of bubblewrap on all sides. The drive was then placed in a box with more wads of bubblewrap filling out the gaps so the drive wouldn't shift in the box. Much as I had shipped at least three other drives to the factory for repair without incident.
When I got to the location the drive was at the box was still in good shape. The drive was not -- the housing (.125" steel) was bent in at a corner by about.75". Needless to say it didn't work. I am baffled to this day how the drive housing managed to get so dinged without any visible damage to the package. The dent in the drive was not reproducable with a single swing of a large hammer, either.
The next DLT drive I shipped was wrapped with 12" of bubblewrap, leaving it a ballish shape about 3 feet in diameter, and progressively test dropped to six feet, packed and shimmed into a heavy carton and shipped out without any problems.
That was the point I was trying to make. Enterprise systems don't face breakneck upgrade schedules -- they usually have stable, same-platform migration paths.
Obsolence and market forces will eventually force forklift upgrades. Our upgrade path for the Hp3000 is driven by the software vendor's switch to a new application, which is probably driven by the HP3k's being EOL'd by HP.
Aren't most mission-critical business systems already taking this into account?
We're running an HP3000 running MPE here. Most of the applications running on it are running code nearly 30 years old. HP is phasing out the 3000, but I'm guessing that the platform will remain runnable for at least another 10 years (5 years of legacy support from HP, and 3rd party beyond that).
I agree with you the breakneck pace of change is kind of nutty, but I don't think the impact is as dire as you claim outside the PC arena.
Plus, some of the changes being made are more than cosmetic Mhz changes -- the increased processing power brings real new functionality. If you don't upgrade, your competitors might, leaving you behind in terms of performance and functionality.
Nuclear power plants are storing every fuel rod they've ever used on-site,
This is the important thing in my mind.
It's not like someone planned the Yucca storage site with the idea of making a lot of *new* nuclear waste to put there. The waste already exists and is stored in containment facilities much less secure than Yucca.
I'm not worried about signage that will last 100,000 years. I suspect that either we'll stick around long enough as a civilization to figure out what we can do to do either recycle the waste or to permanently eliminate it (throw at the sun, etc). Or we'll annihilate each other in some global calamity that will take 100K years to recover from.
I think Microsoft may have played into the States' hands.
Announce XP modular demo. You wouldn't announce it if you couldn't do it; announcing you can do it and willingness to back it up are all you have to do. The actual demo is little more than yet another Windows desktop minus a few icons. Judge would have been bored and is probably smart enough to take a screen shot, delete the icons and see for herself.
And then Microsoft yells "Fire!" If modular Windows is such a "bad" idea, wouldn't Microsoft already have x^y reasons why it wouldn't work? Why would they need to go back to Redmond for a couple of years and root around in the attic for rebuttal info?
Getting them to want so much time to prepare rebuttal is pretty much an admission that "we tried it and it didn't work" or "it won't work" is a load of bullshit because they DO know it will work.
MS had to either put up -- rebut the demo -- or shut up. Now they don't get to rebut and they have to quit talking about it.
(There was a great Law and Order where the prosecutor did this kind of thing. He couldn't bring up a particular piece of evidence, but he could allude to it. Alluding to it was all he had to do since the awareness of its existence was 90% of the damage).
It's not such a crazy idea. OK, I know it sounds redundant, but it may be a way around security problems inherent in built-in Windows file sharing as well as promote compatibility with other Samba servers on the same segment or for standardization purposes. Is there a licensing workaround in there somewhere as well?
Given the CygWin environment, it should be at least *possible* to port it.
..that I had to scroll down so far to find this comment. I've really *tried* to like a lot of scifi books, but I've found that many of them are really bad. Characters with all the development and depth of cardboard, too many deus ex machina situations and good versus bad settings with all the complexity of a 3rd grade cops-n-robbers game.
Even the ones I thought were really good (Martian Chronicles, Philip K. Dick shorts, the early Gibson books) weren't that good relative to "real" literature -- Dick's shorts are merely clever next to Raymond Carver or Richard Ford. Some of the early Gibson books often veer into the metaphysical masturbation I'd expect from an engineering student who just showed up at liberal arts classes instead of paying attention.
I think scifi books probably expend too much energy on the scifi aspect or fall back on it too much as a crutch to carry their narratives. Straight lit books don't have that to fall back on, so character development, complex morality and so on become more important and more interesting.
And not that there aren't shit lit books printed by the trainload, either, but I think the "scifi reader community" will read damn near anything and everything ("I just finished I.M. Tedious' 87 part Nebula series. I can't wait to read all 49 parts of the Galaxy series.") and the publishers need to keep the production line full. When you value quantity like that, well, quality comes in second.
The traditional lit community tends to prize editorial and critical acclaim a little more and books that are "bad" in this realm just don't get read in the volume that "bad" scifi does.
Re:Rendezvous sounds interesting... open standard
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Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 1
Killing Appletalk sounds great, reinventing it layered on top of IP sounds kind of iffy to me. One thing that kind of choked Appletalk, especially on fully loaded networks was all the broadcast traffic.
You can dress it up and call it "multicast", but it still goes to all the nodes it can unless you have L2 switches that are multicast aware, and most aren't.
I do like the idea of a functional, working browsing mechanism. Too bad MS's won't work with Apple's, although I do note they are both working on "broadly compatible" competing multicast DNS proposals.
I generated $100 of wealth, and the bank generated $300 of wealth with that. So, yes, there is more emphasis on the financial side because it does produce more wealth than a laborer.
No, no, no -- the bank never generated $300 worth of wealth. The bank at best enabled someone to labor more efficiently by acting as a central access point for capital by those who have it and those who want it.
If banking was great at producing wealth the soviets should have done well at central planning.
If you wanted to field the Taliban you could do it for $10k. But remember, we're talking about actually *winning* a war (ie, overthrow government) not just doing guerilla warfare tactics to outlast an occupying army. We want to actually defeat an existing (albeit bad) standing army and take over the government.
$40 billion would field a good light infantry, maybe with some mechanized support and some helicopters. I don't think you could win anything with just RPGs, assualt rifles and machine guns -- you will need some light armor and some choppers.
The bummer is transport to the fight -- moving 10K troops, arms, ammo and supplies to some third world country isn't cheap. Supply chain logistics is a mofo that even the private sector has problems with.
And then there's the re-usability factor -- we're going to do this in more than one country, aren't we? $40 billion is plenty to overthrow the people's republic of east treestump and the four drunks armed with AK-47s that constitute its army. It might be tough to fight in asia, africa and south america effectively, in a serial fashion on $40b.
Perhaps not all, but many do. They believe that if the "rich got richer" that means the "poor got poorer." When they wack off cliche lines like that they are implicitly saying that they believe in a finite amount of wealth.
Wealth is finite in terms of present value -- how much am I wealth do I have at some fixed point. Obviously this has to be a finite number -- nobody is worth infinity.
The statement that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is about the trends in wealth distribution towards fewer, wealthier people and more, poorer people. Attempting to dispute this by claiming that "liberals believe in a finite amount of wealth" is disengenious at best and just insulting at worst.
Of course, everyone has to WORK to create wealth
You're not possibly agreeing with the labor theory of value are you? This is what the previous poster was alluding to -- *labor* produces wealth. Someone who can loan you money to more efficiently utilize your labor (ie, buy a truck instead of walking to deliver your product).
Both are necessary, although there is far more emphasis and reward through finance-based wealth generation than labor-based generation, except in the motion picture and recording industries.
The only real cures are to overthrow the corrupt governments that keep these country's citizen's impoverished, [...]
LOL! Are you suggesting that Bill use $40 billion to fund a mercenary army to overthrow dicatorships? Now *that* would be amusing.
I'm not sure he'd get very far on that, the US military budget is $400 billion and we can't overthrow the iraqis. You could probably field a pretty good force for $40 billion, especially if he just focused on special forces kinds of activities. It'd be tough to raise and fight several wars for $40 billion.
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I have a half-dozen FreeBSD boxes that work great as servers, network management tools, etc.
However, I'd rather spend my free time doing something fun than spend it fscking around with what passes for a GUI under any x86 Unix. Applications just work under Win2k and XP and I don't need to become an X/kde/gnome/qt guru to make it happen.
I think there's room for both.
Granted, the business can say "sorry, we don't want to do business with you"
The legislation has to forbid asking you for it and forbid denying goods or services based on refusal to give it to them even if they ask.
It should ONLY be required for tax or social security identification purposes, and only if required by law. Otherwise it should remain private to the SS# holder.
This is pretty much common in *any* hotel. I stayed in a Radisson in Chicago in March and the ratecard for the phones charged some outrageous rate for long distance ($4-5 per minute), an equally ridiculous rate for the local calls ($1-2 per minute) and I think toll free calls over 10 minutes were charged a few bucks, too.
I can't remember the last time I stayed in a hotel that had "free" local calls. It might have been a Super 8 in Stumblefuck, Nebraska -- where are you going to call there?
I'm not a super world traveler (maybe 4-5 trips per year), but it seems that the biggest trend is the clampdown on toll-free calls. I'm sure the rationale is to (1) make a buck where they weren't before and (2) by charging, maybe limit the number of outbound trunks they need.
- Cunnilingus Future success is often dependent on the success and happiness of one's personal life. If you can't do this right, don't expect a fulfilling personal life.
-
Chemistry Most people would call this "learning how to drink", but I think that's just a subset. Its important to learn what are the right combinations and quantities of booze and drugs to take, and more imporantly, how to function before, during, and after consumption. You won't accomplish much in life if you can't work with a hangover or don't know what or how much to take or not take to prevent one.
These are two of the biggest lessons I learned in college. I learned a bunch of other crap about politics, math, history and science, but its kind of hazy and not very applicable most of the time to my full-time job managing a computer network.I'm frankly appalled at how sleazy business has gotten and how willing people are to lie, cheat and steal under the rubric of "corporate competitiveness".
We had a local bank get fined big money for selling information (like bank account numbers!) to a telemarketing company, who then charged people for stuff they never got. The bank then gets kickbacks -- I mean, stealing your money directly is illegal so they do it this way?
From the deliberate fraud of Enron to the strong-arm tactics of MS, I just wonder if corporations aren't just legally sanctioned protection rackets and theives anymore.
What the hell else do you expect at this point?
I'd expect TV coverage of armed US Marshalls seizing computers, records and correspondence along with top Verisign officials being led off in handcuffs as part of a larger RICO investigation.
Sure the internet came into being 30 years ago, but do the years from 1972-1990 even mean anything? A bunch of universities and defense contractors on 56k links, with a lot of nodes UUCP only?
The same is true of the "early days of TV" -- sure, it was *invented* and very narrowly used in the 30s and 40s, but for most people the early days of TV means the early-mid 50s when people generally starting buying and watching TV regularly.
The same is true of the internet -- I worked at a major University and we didn't get general internet access (IP connectivity of our computers) until probably '90. Dialup wasn't an option until '91 or '92, and generic consumer access not an option until 93-94, and even then it was limited and expensive.
The "modern" internet as a mass phenomenon (cheap home dialup, most server sites accessed via high speed dedicated connectivity) didn't really start until '94-95 and wasn't even a popular force until a couple of years later.
Counting 72-90 as "the early years" is legitimate only if you're talking about the six geeks who did something with it then.
we could build a pipeline to transport hydrogen
Something tells me I'd rather live next to Yucca mountain than a hyrdrogen pipeline.
How about these three words? La Cosa Nostra.
Get somebody to have an informal conversation with PanIP's leader about the health benefits of leaving your company alone.
They should know that the benefits are many: continued orthapedic mobility, original dentition, full use of digits. It's a family plan, too -- his or her daughter or son retain the dignity and innocence they've always enjoyed. And it's an umbrella that can even extend to one's car, home and other prized personal possessions which are so often the victim of unplanned catastrophes like fires and explosions.
You would think that someone that would make a business out of patent enforcement would eventually run into someone who can play that game a lot better. Extortion and strong-arm tactics with lawyers is generally the gateway to extortion and strong-arm tactics with guys with funny accents and a bad sense of humor.
Using the community standard, does it give any commmunity the ability to find internet content objectionable regardless of geography?
Say a server hosted in LA has porn on it and my community in Minnesota finds it objectionable. The only way for us to get the data on the server is to connect up there -- the server's ISP doesn't have any connectivity in our community so the data isn't even "running through" us on its way to somewhere else.
Why couldn't the same rules then apply to physical-world things? Ie, why couldn't we find that when we get on a plane and fly to LA that there are clubs there we find objectionable? I mean, we have to fetch the data from the server just like we have to fetch the experience.
Allowing someone to object to something using their community's standards when the thing thing isn't in their community *except when they go get it* seems kind of hard to understand.
I read about the waitron pocket-scanner, too. Most of the waitrons I know wouldn't have been coerced, they would have done it for free drugs, which is how this was probably paid for. After the first couple of payments you'll either keep coming back or they'll use the past drug payments against you..
...isn't that ironic?
I shipped a DEC TZ88 DLT4000 drive to California. I didn't have the original packing material, so I wrapped the drive in bubblewrap. When I was done, the drive had about 6-8" of bubblewrap on all sides. The drive was then placed in a box with more wads of bubblewrap filling out the gaps so the drive wouldn't shift in the box. Much as I had shipped at least three other drives to the factory for repair without incident.
.75". Needless to say it didn't work. I am baffled to this day how the drive housing managed to get so dinged without any visible damage to the package. The dent in the drive was not reproducable with a single swing of a large hammer, either.
When I got to the location the drive was at the box was still in good shape. The drive was not -- the housing (.125" steel) was bent in at a corner by about
The next DLT drive I shipped was wrapped with 12" of bubblewrap, leaving it a ballish shape about 3 feet in diameter, and progressively test dropped to six feet, packed and shimmed into a heavy carton and shipped out without any problems.
Upgrading after 30 years is breakneck?
That was the point I was trying to make. Enterprise systems don't face breakneck upgrade schedules -- they usually have stable, same-platform migration paths.
Obsolence and market forces will eventually force forklift upgrades. Our upgrade path for the Hp3000 is driven by the software vendor's switch to a new application, which is probably driven by the HP3k's being EOL'd by HP.
Aren't most mission-critical business systems already taking this into account?
We're running an HP3000 running MPE here. Most of the applications running on it are running code nearly 30 years old. HP is phasing out the 3000, but I'm guessing that the platform will remain runnable for at least another 10 years (5 years of legacy support from HP, and 3rd party beyond that).
I agree with you the breakneck pace of change is kind of nutty, but I don't think the impact is as dire as you claim outside the PC arena.
Plus, some of the changes being made are more than cosmetic Mhz changes -- the increased processing power brings real new functionality. If you don't upgrade, your competitors might, leaving you behind in terms of performance and functionality.
Nuclear power plants are storing every fuel rod they've ever used on-site,
This is the important thing in my mind.
It's not like someone planned the Yucca storage site with the idea of making a lot of *new* nuclear waste to put there. The waste already exists and is stored in containment facilities much less secure than Yucca.
I'm not worried about signage that will last 100,000 years. I suspect that either we'll stick around long enough as a civilization to figure out what we can do to do either recycle the waste or to permanently eliminate it (throw at the sun, etc). Or we'll annihilate each other in some global calamity that will take 100K years to recover from.
I think Microsoft may have played into the States' hands.
Announce XP modular demo. You wouldn't announce it if you couldn't do it; announcing you can do it and willingness to back it up are all you have to do. The actual demo is little more than yet another Windows desktop minus a few icons. Judge would have been bored and is probably smart enough to take a screen shot, delete the icons and see for herself.
And then Microsoft yells "Fire!" If modular Windows is such a "bad" idea, wouldn't Microsoft already have x^y reasons why it wouldn't work? Why would they need to go back to Redmond for a couple of years and root around in the attic for rebuttal info?
Getting them to want so much time to prepare rebuttal is pretty much an admission that "we tried it and it didn't work" or "it won't work" is a load of bullshit because they DO know it will work.
MS had to either put up -- rebut the demo -- or shut up. Now they don't get to rebut and they have to quit talking about it.
(There was a great Law and Order where the prosecutor did this kind of thing. He couldn't bring up a particular piece of evidence, but he could allude to it. Alluding to it was all he had to do since the awareness of its existence was 90% of the damage).
Heh, that wasn't the definition of the IBM enterprise.
It's not such a crazy idea. OK, I know it sounds redundant, but it may be a way around security problems inherent in built-in Windows file sharing as well as promote compatibility with other Samba servers on the same segment or for standardization purposes. Is there a licensing workaround in there somewhere as well?
Given the CygWin environment, it should be at least *possible* to port it.
..that I had to scroll down so far to find this comment. I've really *tried* to like a lot of scifi books, but I've found that many of them are really bad. Characters with all the development and depth of cardboard, too many deus ex machina situations and good versus bad settings with all the complexity of a 3rd grade cops-n-robbers game.
Even the ones I thought were really good (Martian Chronicles, Philip K. Dick shorts, the early Gibson books) weren't that good relative to "real" literature -- Dick's shorts are merely clever next to Raymond Carver or Richard Ford. Some of the early Gibson books often veer into the metaphysical masturbation I'd expect from an engineering student who just showed up at liberal arts classes instead of paying attention.
I think scifi books probably expend too much energy on the scifi aspect or fall back on it too much as a crutch to carry their narratives. Straight lit books don't have that to fall back on, so character development, complex morality and so on become more important and more interesting.
And not that there aren't shit lit books printed by the trainload, either, but I think the "scifi reader community" will read damn near anything and everything ("I just finished I.M. Tedious' 87 part Nebula series. I can't wait to read all 49 parts of the Galaxy series.") and the publishers need to keep the production line full. When you value quantity like that, well, quality comes in second.
The traditional lit community tends to prize editorial and critical acclaim a little more and books that are "bad" in this realm just don't get read in the volume that "bad" scifi does.
Killing Appletalk sounds great, reinventing it layered on top of IP sounds kind of iffy to me. One thing that kind of choked Appletalk, especially on fully loaded networks was all the broadcast traffic.
You can dress it up and call it "multicast", but it still goes to all the nodes it can unless you have L2 switches that are multicast aware, and most aren't.
I do like the idea of a functional, working browsing mechanism. Too bad MS's won't work with Apple's, although I do note they are both working on "broadly compatible" competing multicast DNS proposals.
I generated $100 of wealth, and the bank generated $300 of wealth with that. So, yes, there is more emphasis on the financial side because it does produce more wealth than a laborer.
No, no, no -- the bank never generated $300 worth of wealth. The bank at best enabled someone to labor more efficiently by acting as a central access point for capital by those who have it and those who want it.
If banking was great at producing wealth the soviets should have done well at central planning.
If you wanted to field the Taliban you could do it for $10k. But remember, we're talking about actually *winning* a war (ie, overthrow government) not just doing guerilla warfare tactics to outlast an occupying army. We want to actually defeat an existing (albeit bad) standing army and take over the government.
$40 billion would field a good light infantry, maybe with some mechanized support and some helicopters. I don't think you could win anything with just RPGs, assualt rifles and machine guns -- you will need some light armor and some choppers.
The bummer is transport to the fight -- moving 10K troops, arms, ammo and supplies to some third world country isn't cheap. Supply chain logistics is a mofo that even the private sector has problems with.
And then there's the re-usability factor -- we're going to do this in more than one country, aren't we? $40 billion is plenty to overthrow the people's republic of east treestump and the four drunks armed with AK-47s that constitute its army. It might be tough to fight in asia, africa and south america effectively, in a serial fashion on $40b.
Perhaps not all, but many do. They believe that if the "rich got richer" that means the "poor got poorer." When they wack off cliche lines like that they are implicitly saying that they believe in a finite amount of wealth.
Wealth is finite in terms of present value -- how much am I wealth do I have at some fixed point. Obviously this has to be a finite number -- nobody is worth infinity.
The statement that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is about the trends in wealth distribution towards fewer, wealthier people and more, poorer people. Attempting to dispute this by claiming that "liberals believe in a finite amount of wealth" is disengenious at best and just insulting at worst.
Of course, everyone has to WORK to create wealth
You're not possibly agreeing with the labor theory of value are you? This is what the previous poster was alluding to -- *labor* produces wealth. Someone who can loan you money to more efficiently utilize your labor (ie, buy a truck instead of walking to deliver your product).
Both are necessary, although there is far more emphasis and reward through finance-based wealth generation than labor-based generation, except in the motion picture and recording industries.
The only real cures are to overthrow the corrupt governments that keep these country's citizen's impoverished, [...]
LOL! Are you suggesting that Bill use $40 billion to fund a mercenary army to overthrow dicatorships? Now *that* would be amusing.
I'm not sure he'd get very far on that, the US military budget is $400 billion and we can't overthrow the iraqis. You could probably field a pretty good force for $40 billion, especially if he just focused on special forces kinds of activities. It'd be tough to raise and fight several wars for $40 billion.