I have an iPhone (I got a really *sweet* deal) - and right now; I'm using it as a jailbroken web-surfing wi-fi iPod touch. I have not AT&T activated it (YET) because I am still encumbered with 6 months left on my Verizon contract. When my Verizon Parole Board meets, I'm SO fucking OUT of that prison.
When I got the iPhone - I regarded it as a neat toy, and I was really happy to be able to get one for free. But now that I've used it for a couple of weeks, I really want to dump my crappy razr, and use the iPhone as a phone - and be able to connect anywhere, not just at wi-fi access points.
I don't think it's likely that there's a large number of people out there who feel the same way: You really need to see, touch, and use an iPhone for a while to see how brilliantly superior it is to any other cellphone/pda. (and actually - a lot of my excitement comes from "hacked" features, not the features Apple "allows" you to have out of the box). But it truly is an awesome machine.
Yeah, GPS would be nice - but, maybe in version 2.
Show me stats comparing the healthcare industries in Japan and the US, and you'll get some ideas of WHY those figures are so different.
The reason isn't Nasty Evul Commie Bastard Unions.
The reason is Nasty Evul Spiraling Out Of Control At Several Times The Rate Of Inflation Health Care And Health Insurance Costs Backed By A Monopolistic Industry Propped Up By Corrupt Politicians (like Tom DeLay, and, apparently, Hillary Clinton).
If the pensions and health insurance were too expensive, THEN THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE COMMITTED to paying them. They expect me to keep my commitment when I say I'm going to make my car payments. I expect them to keep their commitment when they say they're going to pay their workers "X". Everyone should.
The fact that unions muscled them into "bad" deals is sad. I'm boo-hooing as I watch the CEO loading his five hundred million dollar bonus into the back of his Escalade.
Seriously. They did this to themselves - the shareholders who allowed and encouraged the idiot executives who caved, and made bad deals with the Unions, and then handed themselves obnoxiously huge compensation packages.
The whole concept of how corporate governance works in this nation (and most others) is seriously flawed, and has been in the process falling on its face like a wino, in slow-motion, for the past two decades, and will continue to do so, probably for another two decades, before a more successful, probably more open and democratic model is adopted.
. . . I dunno, shitheads like Jim Cramer confirm that our entire economic system is based on fraud (http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/did-jim-cramer-cross-the-line/) and he's got a TV show. Not sure I'm willing to make comparisons about moral compasses between logic-bombs and guys who walk into shopping malls with shotguns - when the real nasty motherfuckers who destroy American Families by the THOUSANDS are the guys in immaculate pressed suits reading the Op Ed column of the Wall Street Journal before dialing up their broker in the morning. The REAL monsters, who cheer with glee; "burn, baby, burn!" as a brushfire takes out power lines in California, so they can get a higher percentage deal in brokering electricity.
Talk about fucked-up moral compasses.
If those assholes didn't exist, I'd bet the shopping-mall shotgunners, and disgruntled IT workers would be a lot less likely to be doing what they're doing.
Fuck. ZX-80 assembler, in hex, was no problem for me, when I was 13. I'm still struggling to get comfortable with C, C++, and Java.
Right now, I just finished a Data Structures class - taught in Java, and I understood all the stuff about queues, linked lists, hashtables, in fact, it's all old-hat to me. Inheritance? Interfaces? Blows my tiny freaking mind. *shrug* -
Same time, I took an Architecture class, which was digital circuits, binary, hex, logic, Finite State Machines - basically a review of all the stuff I taught myself when I was 13.
I *know* I'm not cut out to be a hard-core programmer. I also know that when I get a CS degree, and add that to the 14 years of experience working in the field in various capacities, I'm still going to be more valuable to my employer than I am today. Not everyone involved in Software Development is a coder. I'm comfortable with that. But in a lot of environments, you really *DO* need a degree for the credibility to move your career forward. Whether you actually write code or not. You need to be able to communicate with the coders.
Well, what you've really done here, is you've summed-up nicely how people "compare" things of value (on various criteria) - and how cost of production has crept in, as a criteria.
We'd all like to see the soulless spreadsheet-jockeys who give us featureless plastic car interiors burned in effigy; we need to consider the alternative: A hand-crafted leather and rainforest-wood interior that 99% of us can't afford to buy.
Can you objectively compare these two things?
Sure! But there are apples-and-oranges comparisons, and then there are "theoretically-equivalent" comparisons; and the FACT of the matter is, WE CAN'T ALL OWN an original OMR pressing of The Dark Side of the Moon, and a Rosewood turntable to play it on. Hell, we can't all even own a digital copy (a player, and sufficient leisure-time to sit back, roll a doobie, and enjoy it!) - so what is the point in even comparing the two on esoteric audiophile qualities that 99% of us don't even have the ear to discern (let alone the high-dollar audiophile equipment)? The point? is to have a "nyah nyah, my recording and musical tastes are better than yours - " pissing contest. That's what.
Real and artificial (and "real-but-effectively-artificial") value criteria will always be imprinted upon goods and services by clever marketeers, and those criteria used to justify elevated market prices. It's the game we humans play.
Sometimes, (especially in the bizzaro-world that is Windows), you need a CLEAN system to test on. You need to be able to test an app on a pre-service pack + post-service pack upgrade process (yes, in the REAL world, consumer-software gets installed on unpatched systems, and has to survive a patching) - then when you find something broke, you need to be able to quickly reset to the pre-service pack configuration to re-test the next build.
Nothing else can really do this. Drive cloning equipment, I suppose. But that's pricey, and you can't really compete with "free VMWare Server" software.
Better still - in distributed development; you tell your developer - hey, I got this really bizarre thing going on down here, whasupwitdat - and she says: it runs fine on my system - it's a hell of a lot easier to zip up your VM environment, and copy it over the network to the remote development site, and have them run the identical configuration and reproduce your problem, than it is to ship an actual machine. . . or a person.
I would say that Virtualization is an ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE tool that should be in every QA/test person's tool box.
I agree: With the added stipulation that, in the case of a no-confidence result, both leading candidates should be banned from politics, and the party leadership on both sides should be ousted, and new leadership elected, prior to a new election cycle.
I voted for Bush in 2000 because and only because of Tipper Gore and Lieberman's stance on video games. Of course in my defense, not in my wildest dreams would I ever think Bush would pass something like the PATRIOT Act, get us embroiled in a war, and keep the budget in check instead of giving us a 9 trillion dollar deficit.
Then you weren't fucking paying attention.
Didn't you look at his record as Texas Gov? His father's record? His VP selection alone should have been a big fucking red flag.
(for the record; I didn't like Gore either. If he had a problem with our nation's energy policy and carbon footprint, then he had 8 years to do something about it as VP, and he didn't do jack.)
Both.net and COM/DCOM models have a different security layer allowing programs to have different privileges than the user. You can expose the configuration for this in "dcomcnfg.exe" -
"oh - computer security is SOOOO hard, those Russian hackers are soooo sneaky. Pay this extra fee, and we'll protect you from identity theft!"
It's just another variation on the protection racket.
Incidentally - it's what the Petroleum industry has been doing for the past 60+ years.
The fact that there *IS* competition, and it's virtually impossible to militarily CONTROL all the petroleum in the world, and they STILL get away with collusion and market manipulation on the key input to all economic activity (energy) by controlling choke-points in the system (transportation (via pipelines), trading (via petrodollars/exchanges), refining (via infrastructure ownership), regulation via political bribery) - tells me that when it no longer becomes viable to use petroleum as a tool of control (either because it will become too rare to be the main driver, or due to global warming) - that INFORMATION will become the next tool. (as if it isn't already). It doesn't require a monopoly, or even an obvious oligopoly. All it takes is an abdication of control and power by the masses, and a willingness to abuse that abdication, by those to whom it is entrusted.
No; the real problem with reverting to EELV's was political in the sense that at the time, there would have had to have been a winner or loser (Boeing or Lockheed) - and the climate; back in the 1980's when the Challenger disaster happened, as well as after Columbia; was not going to permit a monopoly to arise in that industry. (though one arose anyway - United Launch Alliance).
Man-Rating EELV's is TRIVIAL compared to the redesign work being done for Constellation - and in the end; the hard choices that are going to have to be made to hammer the contractors and subs out there as well.
Yes: it was also largely about JOBS. (killing shuttle-infrastructure jobs would have LOST the state of Florida; too many Electoral Votes for a state that is not really a swing-state, but might become so - yes; a bunch of poor little ignorant voters who are in DENIAL about the PORK upon which they dine.)
Yes: there was also a technical issue with EELV; even the Delta IV Heavy configuration isn't really big enough. AND, there does not exist the manufacturing capacity to produce EELV's of either variety at a fast enough rate to feed our commercial Spacelift industry, AND our NRO needs, AND our Manned spaceflight program AND, Science payloads, AND a Manned Moon/Mars program. Although - the current shuttle manufacturing facilities COULD be modified; (the Thiokol SRB's could just as easily be strapped to Delta/Atlas boosters, AND recovered - the external-tank mfrg is done in Louisiana - not even in Florida - and after Katrina, Louisiana is DEFINITELY a swing-state anyway - and that facility was retooled in the 1970's from other rocket manufacturing, it could just as easily be retooled again - and the employees furloughed; cut them a check and get it over with, jeez! send them to school during the retool or something.)
I dunno; look at Russia's record with the DESIGN - one successful Buran launch, one FAILURE (thank goodness it was unmanned) Polyus launch.
I would say that the problem with the Shuttle wasn't a US/Russia thing. (with the Success/Failure criteria being: no catastrophic loss of vehicle/crew).
The basic design is flawed from the getgo.
But there are other success/failure criteria to consider: $/lb.-to-orbit.
Personally; I have a really bad feeling about Constellation. I think that trying to recycle these components in the name of "saving jobs" is a terrible, terrible idea. I'm a big proponent of saving jobs - I really am. But to risk such a huge investment on such inherently flawed design seems STUPID.
When you look at the original purpose of the Shuttle - to reduce the COST of spaceflight, by using reusable components - the Program has been an absolute spectacular failure, from the first launch on. Every single launch has been a worse disaster in terms of incurred cost-per-pound-to-orbit. The costs continue to escalate, almost geometrically.
And I think that the problem is - we tried to solve what is essentially an accounting and political problem, using Engineering.
And we all know what happens when we let Accountants and Politicians try to solve Engineering problems. . .
I don't know if "competition" is the answer either - because competition means that there's some meaningful reward - and in an economic sense, there just isn't one, for space. Not one that's going to be exploitable in any one Venture Capitalist's lifetime. (It took 400 years before EUROPE, in general, got a return on Queen Isabella of Spain's "investment" in Columbus' expedition to the New World). Hand off an Engineering problem to Economists? (who are not even REAL scientists!)
At least we have guys like Burt Rutan who seem to be driven by things other than the almighty dollar (not to say that he does not care about money - but he also seems to regard personal glory as a worthwhile reward as well!). But we need a whole industry of guys like that. A whole generation. And right now; we don't seem to have that. Most people seem more concerned about their 401k's and their stock options than anything else. Most people seem to want to be completely retired by the time they're Burt Rutan's age.
It's sad; but I think the selfishness of our culture, and our generation, is absolutely going to be our legacy. It's a done-deal.
I told my kids: "Boner Pills is what we accomplished. Our predecessors landed on the Moon. Please do better."
I pay my delivery guy to deliver my packages, while obeying the posted speed limit, not running over children, and not doing donuts in my neighbor's front lawn, (no matter how satisfying it may be to see a UPS truck doing donuts in that *sshole's lawn).
I pay my policemen to protect me from criminals; and along the way, I want to make sure that the policemen don't break laws either. I have to obey the law when I do my job. They should obey the law too; no matter how inconvenient it is for them. I pay them to do a job - they should do it and stop whining about having to read miranda rights or not being allowed to torture suspects, etc.
Yes; terrorists *ARE* terrible. Nobody said they weren't. But sheesh - I think that RIGHTS and FREEDOM are too damn important, and you don't make exceptions and excuses, and frankly, there are more constructive ways of dealing with problems like these, than resorting to GESTAPO TACTICS like torture, racial profiling, and propaganda.
Unless your real goal is to loot the treasury for your war-profiteering supporters by running a fake war, and the only way you can sustain your regime is by appealing to ignorant angry rednecks with the same tired formula used by every tinpot fascist dictator from Caesar to Hitler.
Well, no; It's not DANDY if you're an American - because I am SICK TO DEATH of being taxed to pay for the defense of our CLIENT STATES.
Japan, South Korea, Israel - freaking pay for your own damn defense. I'm sick of it. Fight your own battles.
How many Japanese, South Korean, or Israeli troops helped us "liberate" Iraq?
(answer: effectively zero) - These countries are not really allies. They're fair-weather friends. Cut them loose, I say.
The only reason we FUND their defense is as a GROSS subsidy - to ensure they BUY our Death Products (TM).
Well, that's fine and dandy, if you're in the Death Products business.
Don't you wish that the Government would tax the hell out of your countrymen, to force other nations to buy stuff YOUR company makes? Wouldn't that be nice? Well, you can make it happen. All you gotta do is bribe the right politician.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey dumbass, "uptight" is one word.
You seem to make mistakes like that alot.
I will say right here:
I have an iPhone (I got a really *sweet* deal) - and right now; I'm using it as a jailbroken web-surfing wi-fi iPod touch. I have not AT&T activated it (YET) because I am still encumbered with 6 months left on my Verizon contract. When my Verizon Parole Board meets, I'm SO fucking OUT of that prison.
When I got the iPhone - I regarded it as a neat toy, and I was really happy to be able to get one for free. But now that I've used it for a couple of weeks, I really want to dump my crappy razr, and use the iPhone as a phone - and be able to connect anywhere, not just at wi-fi access points.
I don't think it's likely that there's a large number of people out there who feel the same way: You really need to see, touch, and use an iPhone for a while to see how brilliantly superior it is to any other cellphone/pda. (and actually - a lot of my excitement comes from "hacked" features, not the features Apple "allows" you to have out of the box). But it truly is an awesome machine.
Yeah, GPS would be nice - but, maybe in version 2.
Show me stats comparing the healthcare industries in Japan and the US, and you'll get some ideas of WHY those figures are so different.
The reason isn't Nasty Evul Commie Bastard Unions.
The reason is Nasty Evul Spiraling Out Of Control At Several Times The Rate Of Inflation Health Care And Health Insurance Costs Backed By A Monopolistic Industry Propped Up By Corrupt Politicians (like Tom DeLay, and, apparently, Hillary Clinton).
If the pensions and health insurance were too expensive, THEN THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE COMMITTED to paying them. They expect me to keep my commitment when I say I'm going to make my car payments. I expect them to keep their commitment when they say they're going to pay their workers "X". Everyone should.
The fact that unions muscled them into "bad" deals is sad.
I'm boo-hooing as I watch the CEO loading his five hundred million dollar bonus into the back of his Escalade.
Seriously. They did this to themselves - the shareholders who allowed and encouraged the idiot executives who caved, and made bad deals with the Unions, and then handed themselves obnoxiously huge compensation packages.
The whole concept of how corporate governance works in this nation (and most others) is seriously flawed, and has been in the process falling on its face like a wino, in slow-motion, for the past two decades, and will continue to do so, probably for another two decades, before a more successful, probably more open and democratic model is adopted.
I can only HALF agree with you there.
The front-end of the Corvette is bitchin.
The ass-end looks like ass.
Frankly, they've turned me into a Mustang fan.
VW demonstrated a test vehicle (based on Stanford's DARPA Challenge winner) two years ago.
GM == old_and_busted.
. . . I dunno, shitheads like Jim Cramer confirm that our entire economic system is based on fraud (http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/did-jim-cramer-cross-the-line/) and he's got a TV show. Not sure I'm willing to make comparisons about moral compasses between logic-bombs and guys who walk into shopping malls with shotguns - when the real nasty motherfuckers who destroy American Families by the THOUSANDS are the guys in immaculate pressed suits reading the Op Ed column of the Wall Street Journal before dialing up their broker in the morning. The REAL monsters, who cheer with glee; "burn, baby, burn!" as a brushfire takes out power lines in California, so they can get a higher percentage deal in brokering electricity.
Talk about fucked-up moral compasses.
If those assholes didn't exist, I'd bet the shopping-mall shotgunners, and disgruntled IT workers would be a lot less likely to be doing what they're doing.
Fuck.
ZX-80 assembler, in hex, was no problem for me, when I was 13.
I'm still struggling to get comfortable with C, C++, and Java.
Right now, I just finished a Data Structures class - taught in Java, and I understood all the stuff about queues, linked lists, hashtables, in fact, it's all old-hat to me. Inheritance? Interfaces? Blows my tiny freaking mind. *shrug* -
Same time, I took an Architecture class, which was digital circuits, binary, hex, logic, Finite State Machines - basically a review of all the stuff I taught myself when I was 13.
I *know* I'm not cut out to be a hard-core programmer. I also know that when I get a CS degree, and add that to the 14 years of experience working in the field in various capacities, I'm still going to be more valuable to my employer than I am today. Not everyone involved in Software Development is a coder. I'm comfortable with that. But in a lot of environments, you really *DO* need a degree for the credibility to move your career forward. Whether you actually write code or not. You need to be able to communicate with the coders.
I only have one response to that.
The Internet is for porn.
Well, what you've really done here, is you've summed-up nicely how people "compare" things of value (on various criteria) - and how cost of production has crept in, as a criteria.
We'd all like to see the soulless spreadsheet-jockeys who give us featureless plastic car interiors burned in effigy; we need to consider the alternative: A hand-crafted leather and rainforest-wood interior that 99% of us can't afford to buy.
Can you objectively compare these two things?
Sure! But there are apples-and-oranges comparisons, and then there are "theoretically-equivalent" comparisons; and the FACT of the matter is, WE CAN'T ALL OWN an original OMR pressing of The Dark Side of the Moon, and a Rosewood turntable to play it on. Hell, we can't all even own a digital copy (a player, and sufficient leisure-time to sit back, roll a doobie, and enjoy it!) - so what is the point in even comparing the two on esoteric audiophile qualities that 99% of us don't even have the ear to discern (let alone the high-dollar audiophile equipment)? The point? is to have a "nyah nyah, my recording and musical tastes are better than yours - " pissing contest. That's what.
Real and artificial (and "real-but-effectively-artificial") value criteria will always be imprinted upon goods and services by clever marketeers, and those criteria used to justify elevated market prices. It's the game we humans play.
Sometimes, (especially in the bizzaro-world that is Windows), you need a CLEAN system to test on. You need to be able to test an app on a pre-service pack + post-service pack upgrade process (yes, in the REAL world, consumer-software gets installed on unpatched systems, and has to survive a patching) - then when you find something broke, you need to be able to quickly reset to the pre-service pack configuration to re-test the next build.
Nothing else can really do this. Drive cloning equipment, I suppose. But that's pricey, and you can't really compete with "free VMWare Server" software.
Better still - in distributed development; you tell your developer - hey, I got this really bizarre thing going on down here, whasupwitdat - and she says: it runs fine on my system - it's a hell of a lot easier to zip up your VM environment, and copy it over the network to the remote development site, and have them run the identical configuration and reproduce your problem, than it is to ship an actual machine. . . or a person.
I would say that Virtualization is an ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE tool that should be in every QA/test person's tool box.
What do you think; is it time to cut off the record industry?
Time?
More like 10 (or 20) years too late. . .
I agree:
With the added stipulation that, in the case of a no-confidence result, both leading candidates should be banned from politics, and the party leadership on both sides should be ousted, and new leadership elected, prior to a new election cycle.
I voted for Bush in 2000 because and only because of Tipper Gore and Lieberman's stance on video games.
Of course in my defense, not in my wildest dreams would I ever think Bush would pass something like the PATRIOT Act, get us embroiled in a war, and keep the budget in check instead of giving us a 9 trillion dollar deficit.
Then you weren't fucking paying attention.
Didn't you look at his record as Texas Gov?
His father's record?
His VP selection alone should have been a big fucking red flag.
(for the record; I didn't like Gore either. If he had a problem with our nation's energy policy and carbon footprint, then he had 8 years to do something about it as VP, and he didn't do jack.)
Both .net and COM/DCOM models have a different security layer allowing programs to have different privileges than the user. You can expose the configuration for this in "dcomcnfg.exe" -
Artificial Muscle Inc. got it from:
http://www.sri.com/esd/automation/actuators.html
Yes;
Windows handles the fragmented memory just fine. Very slowly. But just fine.
It is also what the financial industry is doing.
"oh - computer security is SOOOO hard, those Russian hackers are soooo sneaky. Pay this extra fee, and we'll protect you from identity theft!"
It's just another variation on the protection racket.
Incidentally - it's what the Petroleum industry has been doing for the past 60+ years.
The fact that there *IS* competition, and it's virtually impossible to militarily CONTROL all the petroleum in the world, and they STILL get away with collusion and market manipulation on the key input to all economic activity (energy) by controlling choke-points in the system (transportation (via pipelines), trading (via petrodollars/exchanges), refining (via infrastructure ownership), regulation via political bribery) - tells me that when it no longer becomes viable to use petroleum as a tool of control (either because it will become too rare to be the main driver, or due to global warming) - that INFORMATION will become the next tool. (as if it isn't already). It doesn't require a monopoly, or even an obvious oligopoly. All it takes is an abdication of control and power by the masses, and a willingness to abuse that abdication, by those to whom it is entrusted.
As long as there are cocks, there will be "who's got the biggest - " races.
No; the real problem with reverting to EELV's was political in the sense that at the time, there would have had to have been a winner or loser (Boeing or Lockheed) - and the climate; back in the 1980's when the Challenger disaster happened, as well as after Columbia; was not going to permit a monopoly to arise in that industry. (though one arose anyway - United Launch Alliance).
Man-Rating EELV's is TRIVIAL compared to the redesign work being done for Constellation - and in the end; the hard choices that are going to have to be made to hammer the contractors and subs out there as well.
Yes: it was also largely about JOBS. (killing shuttle-infrastructure jobs would have LOST the state of Florida; too many Electoral Votes for a state that is not really a swing-state, but might become so - yes; a bunch of poor little ignorant voters who are in DENIAL about the PORK upon which they dine.)
Yes: there was also a technical issue with EELV; even the Delta IV Heavy configuration isn't really big enough. AND, there does not exist the manufacturing capacity to produce EELV's of either variety at a fast enough rate to feed our commercial Spacelift industry, AND our NRO needs, AND our Manned spaceflight program AND, Science payloads, AND a Manned Moon/Mars program. Although - the current shuttle manufacturing facilities COULD be modified; (the Thiokol SRB's could just as easily be strapped to Delta/Atlas boosters, AND recovered - the external-tank mfrg is done in Louisiana - not even in Florida - and after Katrina, Louisiana is DEFINITELY a swing-state anyway - and that facility was retooled in the 1970's from other rocket manufacturing, it could just as easily be retooled again - and the employees furloughed; cut them a check and get it over with, jeez! send them to school during the retool or something.)
I dunno; look at Russia's record with the DESIGN - one successful Buran launch, one FAILURE (thank goodness it was unmanned) Polyus launch.
I would say that the problem with the Shuttle wasn't a US/Russia thing. (with the Success/Failure criteria being: no catastrophic loss of vehicle/crew).
The basic design is flawed from the getgo.
But there are other success/failure criteria to consider: $/lb.-to-orbit.
Personally; I have a really bad feeling about Constellation.
I think that trying to recycle these components in the name of "saving jobs" is a terrible, terrible idea. I'm a big proponent of saving jobs - I really am. But to risk such a huge investment on such inherently flawed design seems STUPID.
When you look at the original purpose of the Shuttle - to reduce the COST of spaceflight, by using reusable components - the Program has been an absolute spectacular failure, from the first launch on. Every single launch has been a worse disaster in terms of incurred cost-per-pound-to-orbit. The costs continue to escalate, almost geometrically.
And I think that the problem is - we tried to solve what is essentially an accounting and political problem, using Engineering.
And we all know what happens when we let Accountants and Politicians try to solve Engineering problems. . .
I don't know if "competition" is the answer either - because competition means that there's some meaningful reward - and in an economic sense, there just isn't one, for space. Not one that's going to be exploitable in any one Venture Capitalist's lifetime. (It took 400 years before EUROPE, in general, got a return on Queen Isabella of Spain's "investment" in Columbus' expedition to the New World). Hand off an Engineering problem to Economists? (who are not even REAL scientists!)
At least we have guys like Burt Rutan who seem to be driven by things other than the almighty dollar (not to say that he does not care about money - but he also seems to regard personal glory as a worthwhile reward as well!). But we need a whole industry of guys like that. A whole generation. And right now; we don't seem to have that. Most people seem more concerned about their 401k's and their stock options than anything else. Most people seem to want to be completely retired by the time they're Burt Rutan's age.
It's sad; but I think the selfishness of our culture, and our generation, is absolutely going to be our legacy. It's a done-deal.
I told my kids: "Boner Pills is what we accomplished. Our predecessors landed on the Moon. Please do better."
Most insightful post of 2007. Seriously.
I pay my delivery guy to deliver my packages, while obeying the posted speed limit, not running over children, and not doing donuts in my neighbor's front lawn, (no matter how satisfying it may be to see a UPS truck doing donuts in that *sshole's lawn).
I pay my policemen to protect me from criminals; and along the way, I want to make sure that the policemen don't break laws either. I have to obey the law when I do my job. They should obey the law too; no matter how inconvenient it is for them. I pay them to do a job - they should do it and stop whining about having to read miranda rights or not being allowed to torture suspects, etc.
Yes; terrorists *ARE* terrible. Nobody said they weren't. But sheesh - I think that RIGHTS and FREEDOM are too damn important, and you don't make exceptions and excuses, and frankly, there are more constructive ways of dealing with problems like these, than resorting to GESTAPO TACTICS like torture, racial profiling, and propaganda.
Unless your real goal is to loot the treasury for your war-profiteering supporters by running a fake war, and the only way you can sustain your regime is by appealing to ignorant angry rednecks with the same tired formula used by every tinpot fascist dictator from Caesar to Hitler.
I don't see what the problem is.
If I can process PERSONAL email and phone calls while I'm at the office, I can be an agent for my employer outside of my normal work hours.
As long as boundries and expectations are healthy, and clear - I don't see the problem with this.
Well, no;
It's not DANDY if you're an American - because I am SICK TO DEATH of being taxed to pay for the defense of our CLIENT STATES.
Japan, South Korea, Israel - freaking pay for your own damn defense. I'm sick of it. Fight your own battles.
How many Japanese, South Korean, or Israeli troops helped us "liberate" Iraq?
(answer: effectively zero) - These countries are not really allies. They're fair-weather friends. Cut them loose, I say.
The only reason we FUND their defense is as a GROSS subsidy - to ensure they BUY our Death Products (TM).
Well, that's fine and dandy, if you're in the Death Products business.
Don't you wish that the Government would tax the hell out of your countrymen, to force other nations to buy stuff YOUR company makes? Wouldn't that be nice? Well, you can make it happen. All you gotta do is bribe the right politician.