There is plenty of money at the top end. It's a bald-faced lie that this type of research is not affordable by governments.
There's one thing you can say about cold, callous bastards, they don't suck off the public teat. You'll never find one on welfare, they can pull their own weight.
That's ridiculous! How can you possibly say that they're pulling their own weight? They earn thousands of times what the average worker does. Surely they don't work thousands of times harder. It is these people exactly that bludge off society, hence their massive income without having to work for it. Their welfare might not be paid for directly by the state, but the state intervenes to make sure that they can continue to extract their magnificent profits from everyone else, while not actually doing anything productive. Sure, there are people on welfare that take a small proportion of the GDP, but by comparison, the top end of town take hundreds of times more.
if those companies weren't guaranteed profit in case of discovering something useful, they wouldn't do the research in the first place
Perhaps they wouldn't. If that were the case, I would say that would be a good thing. Corporations have no business owning patents to medical technology. Because of the nature of the product, it should be owned collectively. Therefore governments should invest in medical research, not corporations. This way it is even more clear that the benefits of the research should be shared by all, and not just be auctioned to the highest bidder.
Are you implying that once I paid for that cup of coffee with cash I have a moral obligation to do something else, give up my own inventions to the rest of the world because they 'allowed' me to pay for that cup of coffee?
This would only apply if your cup of coffee could heal the sick. Clearly this is not the case, so your comparison is quite childish. Do you understand the difference between medical technology that can ease suffering and cure disease, and your cup of coffee? Think about it.
It is your responsibility not to steal something, but to pay for a service or a product you receive, that's all.
You can't steal knowledge. And what of the lives that are being stolen because this technology is not shared?
people will always be dying, just because people are suffering and dying it does not mean that all of a sudden some inventor's life's work is up for grabs at your terms.
Oh the melodrama! Sure people are always dying. But some are dying unnecessarily. And if you look at my post, I said that people should be able to make a fair living off their research, which is a far cry from your claim that I'm trying to 'steal' it from them. Pirates! Everywhere! Pirates! HELP!
Profit is not the most important thing in the world, but it is much more important than many other things.
You mean like people's lives? You, too, need to have a good hard think about yourself. Perhaps a dash of curable disease that you can't afford treatment for would do you some good.
Can we all wake up from your holier than thou utopian ideals now?
Profit is incredibly important.
Maybe it's time you woke up from your capitalist holier than thou ideals? Profit only lubricates society when you allow cold, callous bastards who care of nothing else to control things. The simple fact is that profits are not required for medical research to occur. Governments can allocate as much money as they desire to medical research.
No, it's not. Inventor's don't have to share anything with the outside world.
And where did this inventor get their education from? And their materials? And their food?
It is the responsibility of inventors to share their ideas with all society. As others have pointed out, they have a right to make a fair living off these ideas. But there is a limit to how 'fair' you can get, and making billions of dollars in profits while others are suffering and dying is going way past that point.
Joelt, You need to have a good, long think about yourself. Profit is not the most important thing in the world.
For starters, most X11 setups still need to redraw a window when it's exposed -- even with a fast CPU, it's noticable
Oh please! You're one of those window wankers, aren't you? The ones that sit in OS-X all day with the aptly-named 'mail' app running, wildly wanking it from side to side, and also sometimes from top to bottom, salivating over the speed your wallpaper is being redrawn at. Oh! You can wank SO fast! Look at how fast it wanks!
Problem is that most people... don't give a toss. When I move an app, I reposition it once, and I'm happy. If something takes 0.1 seconds to redraw underneath something I've just moved a window over, then that's fine. Whatever. For people like you, you should check out EXA or compiz.
Yes, I know you're running a fancy new compositing manager and it looks just as slick as Aqua. I tried the latest code a couple weeks ago, and it was marginally stable, and completely unusable. Come back when it's the default install for all setups.
What did you try? Personally I don't believe you tried anything - you're just saying you did. I was running EXA drivers on a 1Ghz Powerbook ( a TiBook ) years ago. It was silky smooth, and I remember my friend who sold me the Powerbook looking at it in awe, asking how I got the video card to do transparency. Of course he had shown me a 'transparent' terminal of some sort, which used fake transparency - just used a pixmap from the desktop wallpaper.
I've also run compiz / beryl for a number of months. I haven't had any crashes in it since I first started, so I'm not sure why you think it's unstable or unusable. Perhaps user error?
And as for having a hardware accelerated compositing manager for all setups... since when did Apple ever offer that? Even for the hardware that they support ( and lets be honest here, they don't support a lot of hardware ), they only offer full acceleration on the latest hardware. You can't, for example, take my old G3 PowerMac with a Rage 3D and run Quartz Extreme on it, can you? But you can use X's EXA drivers... and I do. It also will run compiz. So really I don't know where the fuck you think you can score points on hardware support for compositing. You're well behind. The only place you score is in saying that all official systems ( ie a grand total of 2 video cards ) have accelerated compositing. Wow.
Quartz2D is now much faster than QuickDraw (and will become even faster when they flip the switch on Quartz2D Extreme). Not only is that impressive by itself, but I don't see those kind of performance improvements from X11.
What the fuck is Quartz2D, what the fuck is QuickDraw, which part is impressive, and how does this relate to X? If you haven't seen any performance improvements in X recently, it's because you haven't been using X, you've been window-wanking in OS-X. Wank me another window there, boy.
I was running Gentoo on a similar system - a 350Mhz G3. It worked so well I used it as my email / web / imap / database / file server for 18 months or something. Then the damned thing started having troubles detecting the hard disk when starting up. It would just throw the disk heads around, making a horrible sound, until you stopped it. But take the disk out and put it in other computer, and it was fine - could read all stuff off, etc. I would have to sit at the thing and hit the reset button for hours sometimes until it would detect the disk. After 6 months of such crap, I've finally given up and moved everything to the next slowest system around - an Athlon 1800XP.
But back the the G3...
Other than the above, it really was a descent computer. It ran E17 fine. It was a little slow to start Firefox, but leave it running, and it was fine. It was a trusty old beast... until I couldn't trust it's HD controller that is. It certainly looked the part too - nice green space-age look. It showed up many a newer server in the looks department.
I've already maintained that there is more at work in evolution than purely DNA. An animal ( or plant ) is more than it's genetic makeup. For example it's mind and chemical states are direct descendants of it's parents - in particular it's mother - the process is one of continuous emergence. This process allows much more than DNA to be passed on. Of course locating the exact mechanisms by which this occurs is not easy - especially for armchair specialists such as myself ( programmer ) - but this by no means detracts from the theory.
What's more, consider the 98% or so 'junk' DNA that scientists are so eager to sweep under the carpet. What if each individual were a genetic experiment, and the results were stored in 'junk' DNA, which could then guide the gene activation in future generations? Or the current individual?
The Darwinian revelation was quite an important one, granted, but it is far from complete.
We are at a total loss to understand how this policy has developed, who is behind it and why there is such haste in enacting it into law -- with little if any public debate.
I can probably help you out there. It's called corruption. Howard's Liberals are 2nd only to Dubya's Republicans at this game. The problem is that the Liberals are much better at covering their tracks. It's a very rare occasion, eg AWB ( Australian Weapons-For-Oil scandal ), that they get caught out.
The point was that you can hardly expect things to go forward thanks to a coup. I realise that Thaksin was more than a little corrupt. The same could be said of leaders of more prominent nations. I also hope Thailand will see elections 'soon', but I'm highly suspicious that the source of the problems have been addressed.
First of all, the State creates laws which give some companies preferential treatment over ideas or the way a person can use their hands and mind to create something. We call these useless laws "copyright," "patent" or "trademark." The State is the only way to enforce these laws which govern how you think and use your body, it is impossible to cover these restrictions without force or the threat of force.
I'm right there with you so far:)
Copyright, patents, trademarks can all be used to keep other people out of a given market long enough for a company to grow to a size that makes it hard to defeat. This is not what happens in a relatively free market (I'll say most deregulated).
Actually, this is precisely what happens under capitalism. The so-called free market is a myth... a fairy-tale that capitalists tell us, including tales of great competition and freedom. In reality, competition never ever even approaches the lofty freedom we are told about, and any competition that does exist is transitory. A idealistic market, with lots of competitors all striving to produce a better product gives way to a smaller and smaller number of corporations, who become less competitive and more co-operative. Smaller players are bought out or driven out, and the large players ( if there are more than 1 left ), divide the market up amongst themselves and form a cartel. They use ALL the dirty tricks in the book, including copyright law, patents, etc, to keep the market to themselves. This is not a revelation. It's simply what we see around us every day. Fanciful theory on free-market economics and competition has no place in our reality.
Microsoft is not a monopoly, it is just able to use the preferential treatment of the law better than their competitors.
I think you'll find that anti-trust law defines Microsoft as a monopoly. This, again, is no revelation. Anti-trust law was introduced to attempt to hide one of the contradictions between capitalist theory and reality. On the one hand, as you point out, the state allows corporations to use intellectual 'property' as a barrier to entry ( where it most certainly should not be allowed ). But without antitrust law, nothing stops one corporation from rising to the top, at the expense of every other competitor, and of course society. Therefore, to keep a lid on anti-capitalist sentiment and attempt to maintain the myths of capitalist 'competition', the state steps in a attempts to prevent absolute monopolies. It's a contradiction in their policy, for sure.
The State wants these fines to pad their own accounts
There are easier ways to pad your accounts. This is a semi-serious attempt to maintain some competition. It's not working that well, but being in contradiction with the rest of their free-market policies, you have to expect some problems.
This is basically a legal form of asking for bribes, and Microsoft will be happy to comply.
Again, there are other, easier ways to do this. Keep in mind that the people actually pursuing this are themselves talking of downsizing the state and 'freeing' the market. They have other reasons for pursuing Microsoft and other monopolists.
Microsoft is being forced to hand over "secrets" but those are past secrets -- not future ones, right? They'll just make new secrets, or obfuscate the old ones in new ways so that anything they share isn't useful in the long run (everything changes every 18months right?).
Of course, that the way Microsoft will choose to see it. But a decision against them here sets a precedent, and if Microsoft get cute and create new 'secrets', the case against them will be a lot easier to make the 2nd time around. They will also likely get slapped with larger fines next time.
This is the guy who rose to power due to a military coup. Who's saying he's not more corrupt that the ones they booted out? His comments seem to suggest someone... maybe a corporation or two... have been whispering in his ear. Or does he actually claim to be a programmer and know WTF he's talking about?
Thailand is sliding downhill. Pretty soon Thais will look over the border at Cambodia and long for their transparent government:)
Re:READ THIS (if you thought parent was insightful
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
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· Score: 1
The thing is, if the Jews weren't there
Yes indeed... if the Jews weren't in Palestine, we certainly would find someone else to criticize and oppose. But not because they're a minority group and the left enjoy persecuting them! It's because we stand up against oppression, and there is a hell of a lot of oppression and injustice going on in Palestine at the moment.
Our techniques have matured and advanced with the times, and we no longer go on honorable Muslim-killing crusades for Glory and God.
That's utter crap and you know it. Statistically, there are an order of magnitude more Western people killing Muslim people than the other way around. The West has certainly NOT transcended their era of military crusades, and the Muslim world's response to this is largely perfectly acceptable. Of course there are always extremists - in any group of people - but we can hardly point the finger at the Muslims when it is our extremism that is causing theirs.
IT'S NOT BECAUSE OF OUR POLICIES and IT'S NOT BECAUSE OF OUR CULTURE. It's because of us. We're here. That's enough to royally piss them off.
That is also bullshit, unless when you say 'here', you actually mean 'in Palestine'. The Muslim world couldn't give two hoots about where the rest of the world 'is', as long as it's not in their own backyard, with weapons of mass destruction and a bag full of 'good intentions'.
Israel is a gem of democracy in a desert of corrupt totalitarianism, religious extremism, and suffering.
Well, well, you just shot all the rest of your credibility to pieces. Israel is a gem of a racist, apartheid state... an imperialist disaster... a human rights abomination... a military outpost... a chemical weapons laboritory. It is also a desert of corrupt totalitarianism, religious extremism, and suffering, as you suggest the Islamic world is. You sure have some interesting misconceptions about what Israel is. That's pretty funny dude.
Without planting these seeds, the cancer of fanatical Islam will inevitably spread unchecked and take over the entire world by numbers and by force.
Oh, put a plug in it, you racist idiot. The same can and has been said about the Jews. I don't see any sizable numbers of Islamic fanatics on the verge of taking over the world, but if I did, then I would blame dickheads like you first.
It's great Saddam has been found guilty of these crimes. I have always said that supporting Saddam, giving him chemical weapons, and handing him funds under the table ( such as through the Australian Wheat Board ) has been one of the worst foreign policy blunders of the Western world.
However justice must be even-handed. If Saddam gets the death penalty for killing a handful of Iraqis, then George Dubya, Tony Bliar and Johnny Coward must also receive the death penalty for their part in causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since the illegal invasion, and the millions of deaths due to the UN sanctions that has crippled the country ( softening it up ) for a decade. When will I see their trials,and will their executions be televised?
"Military spending is estimated at 20%-25% of GNP, which would mean that the DPRK spends the largest proportion of its GNP on its military in the world"
Yes but its GNP is pathetically small, and yet it still takes a sizable swag of money to arm and defend yourself. Anyone who thinks North Korea has plans to take over the world, or even its southern neighbour, needs to get themselves a large dose of reality... and no, not Fox reality or Sky News reality... I mean reality as in stuff that is actually going on. It's the western powers, with the US at the helm, that has the expansionist policy. Everyone else is rushing to defend themselves. There's a big difference.
I'd like to see the US rock up to multilateral talks where they are threatened with sanctions and military strikes if they don't discontinue their nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction programs. After all, the majority world opinion is that it is the US that poses the largest threat to world peace, not North Korea. When is the last time North Korea did something more provocative than: the US, or Israel, or the UK, or Australia, or China? Perhaps people should be more worried about their own WOMD and less about North Koreas?
One point of sanity, exactly 50% down the page! Everybody above and below completely oblivious to the fact that they are arguing over fuck-all content-wise. It must be the general attitude of the 'article' that gets everybody revved up.
Iran has agreed to all inspections mandated under the Nuclear Non-Profileration agreement, and also to extra inspections which they were not required to agree to.
The problem is that twits like you push outright lies from News Limited.
Not as naive as believing that the US military industrial complex would refrain from using it. I think the Iranians and North Koreans deserve the benefit of the doubt. The US has destroyed said benefit.
This is NOT democracy. Anyone who tells that this is democracy, are probably other paid propagandists.
I haven't made up my mind on this issue.
It's a bit of a murky issue until you consider the extent to which it occurs. In the US in particular, there is an overwhelming amount of pro-market, conservative propaganda... masquerading as impartial information, while at the same time you'd be hard pushed to find anything that even acknowledges the validity of an opposing view. To me, this fails the 'free access to accurate information' test, which is a requirement of democracy.
communism probably invites government official corruption
I would say that capitalism invites government corruption far more than communism, simply because privately owned companies are given the green light to do 'whatever it takes' to maximize profit. You don't get that bullshit under communism, so you don't have unbelievable amounts of money available for bribing with.
Maybe it's just that democracy doesn't scale well, or that the US form of democracy hasn't scaled well.
Democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive.
Under capitalism, whatever makes the most money goes. Individuals can accumulate as much as they like - at the expense of everyone else - and then use those assets as they see fit. A quick look at the oh-so-close relationship between big business and the major governments tells you that our governments are in on it, and have no intention of reigning things in.
Under socialism, resources are collectively owned, and so each person gets a say in how those resources are used. THIS is what democracy is about. Voting on how our resources are used... not voting for one corrupt arsehole over another.
There is very little room for middle-ground between the 2 - and certainly nothing stable. Either you give the keys to big business, or you give them to every individual. You can't have it both ways.
CanIt works a charm for me. It's free ( beer free ) for 50 users, and uses open-source tools to get the job done. I used to get 30 - 50 spam messages per day ( and this was years back, before there was so much spam ). I might get 2 per week now, and the bayesian filter learns from experience, so whatever comes in at least helps you block more of the same stuff.
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That's ridiculous! How can you possibly say that they're pulling their own weight? They earn thousands of times what the average worker does. Surely they don't work thousands of times harder. It is these people exactly that bludge off society, hence their massive income without having to work for it. Their welfare might not be paid for directly by the state, but the state intervenes to make sure that they can continue to extract their magnificent profits from everyone else, while not actually doing anything productive. Sure, there are people on welfare that take a small proportion of the GDP, but by comparison, the top end of town take hundreds of times more.
Perhaps they wouldn't. If that were the case, I would say that would be a good thing. Corporations have no business owning patents to medical technology. Because of the nature of the product, it should be owned collectively. Therefore governments should invest in medical research, not corporations. This way it is even more clear that the benefits of the research should be shared by all, and not just be auctioned to the highest bidder.
This would only apply if your cup of coffee could heal the sick. Clearly this is not the case, so your comparison is quite childish. Do you understand the difference between medical technology that can ease suffering and cure disease, and your cup of coffee? Think about it.
You can't steal knowledge. And what of the lives that are being stolen because this technology is not shared?
Oh the melodrama! Sure people are always dying. But some are dying unnecessarily. And if you look at my post, I said that people should be able to make a fair living off their research, which is a far cry from your claim that I'm trying to 'steal' it from them. Pirates! Everywhere! Pirates! HELP!
You mean like people's lives ? You, too, need to have a good hard think about yourself. Perhaps a dash of curable disease that you can't afford treatment for would do you some good.
Maybe it's time you woke up from your capitalist holier than thou ideals? Profit only lubricates society when you allow cold, callous bastards who care of nothing else to control things. The simple fact is that profits are not required for medical research to occur. Governments can allocate as much money as they desire to medical research.
And where did this inventor get their education from? And their materials? And their food?
It is the responsibility of inventors to share their ideas with all society. As others have pointed out, they have a right to make a fair living off these ideas. But there is a limit to how 'fair' you can get, and making billions of dollars in profits while others are suffering and dying is going way past that point.
Joelt, You need to have a good, long think about yourself. Profit is not the most important thing in the world.
You're that Postgres user I hear so much from, aren't you? Run along, son, and vacuum me a database while you're at it.
Oh please! You're one of those window wankers, aren't you? The ones that sit in OS-X all day with the aptly-named 'mail' app running, wildly wanking it from side to side, and also sometimes from top to bottom, salivating over the speed your wallpaper is being redrawn at. Oh! You can wank SO fast! Look at how fast it wanks!
Problem is that most people
What did you try? Personally I don't believe you tried anything - you're just saying you did. I was running EXA drivers on a 1Ghz Powerbook ( a TiBook ) years ago. It was silky smooth, and I remember my friend who sold me the Powerbook looking at it in awe, asking how I got the video card to do transparency. Of course he had shown me a 'transparent' terminal of some sort, which used fake transparency - just used a pixmap from the desktop wallpaper.
I've also run compiz / beryl for a number of months. I haven't had any crashes in it since I first started, so I'm not sure why you think it's unstable or unusable. Perhaps user error?
And as for having a hardware accelerated compositing manager for all setups
What the fuck is Quartz2D, what the fuck is QuickDraw, which part is impressive, and how does this relate to X? If you haven't seen any performance improvements in X recently, it's because you haven't been using X, you've been window-wanking in OS-X. Wank me another window there, boy.
I was running Gentoo on a similar system - a 350Mhz G3. It worked so well I used it as my email / web / imap / database / file server for 18 months or something. Then the damned thing started having troubles detecting the hard disk when starting up. It would just throw the disk heads around, making a horrible sound, until you stopped it. But take the disk out and put it in other computer, and it was fine - could read all stuff off, etc. I would have to sit at the thing and hit the reset button for hours sometimes until it would detect the disk. After 6 months of such crap, I've finally given up and moved everything to the next slowest system around - an Athlon 1800XP.
...
... until I couldn't trust it's HD controller that is. It certainly looked the part too - nice green space-age look. It showed up many a newer server in the looks department.
But back the the G3
Other than the above, it really was a descent computer. It ran E17 fine. It was a little slow to start Firefox, but leave it running, and it was fine. It was a trusty old beast
I've already maintained that there is more at work in evolution than purely DNA. An animal ( or plant ) is more than it's genetic makeup. For example it's mind and chemical states are direct descendants of it's parents - in particular it's mother - the process is one of continuous emergence. This process allows much more than DNA to be passed on. Of course locating the exact mechanisms by which this occurs is not easy - especially for armchair specialists such as myself ( programmer ) - but this by no means detracts from the theory.
What's more, consider the 98% or so 'junk' DNA that scientists are so eager to sweep under the carpet. What if each individual were a genetic experiment, and the results were stored in 'junk' DNA, which could then guide the gene activation in future generations? Or the current individual?
The Darwinian revelation was quite an important one, granted, but it is far from complete.
I can probably help you out there. It's called corruption. Howard's Liberals are 2nd only to Dubya's Republicans at this game. The problem is that the Liberals are much better at covering their tracks. It's a very rare occasion, eg AWB ( Australian Weapons-For-Oil scandal ), that they get caught out.
If only Labor offered an alternative
The point was that you can hardly expect things to go forward thanks to a coup. I realise that Thaksin was more than a little corrupt. The same could be said of leaders of more prominent nations. I also hope Thailand will see elections 'soon', but I'm highly suspicious that the source of the problems have been addressed.
I'm right there with you so far :)
Actually, this is precisely what happens under capitalism. The so-called free market is a myth ... a fairy-tale that capitalists tell us, including tales of great competition and freedom. In reality, competition never ever even approaches the lofty freedom we are told about, and any competition that does exist is transitory. A idealistic market, with lots of competitors all striving to produce a better product gives way to a smaller and smaller number of corporations, who become less competitive and more co-operative. Smaller players are bought out or driven out, and the large players ( if there are more than 1 left ), divide the market up amongst themselves and form a cartel. They use ALL the dirty tricks in the book, including copyright law, patents, etc, to keep the market to themselves. This is not a revelation. It's simply what we see around us every day. Fanciful theory on free-market economics and competition has no place in our reality.
I think you'll find that anti-trust law defines Microsoft as a monopoly. This, again, is no revelation. Anti-trust law was introduced to attempt to hide one of the contradictions between capitalist theory and reality. On the one hand, as you point out, the state allows corporations to use intellectual 'property' as a barrier to entry ( where it most certainly should not be allowed ). But without antitrust law, nothing stops one corporation from rising to the top, at the expense of every other competitor, and of course society. Therefore, to keep a lid on anti-capitalist sentiment and attempt to maintain the myths of capitalist 'competition', the state steps in a attempts to prevent absolute monopolies. It's a contradiction in their policy, for sure.
There are easier ways to pad your accounts. This is a semi-serious attempt to maintain some competition. It's not working that well, but being in contradiction with the rest of their free-market policies, you have to expect some problems.
Again, there are other, easier ways to do this. Keep in mind that the people actually pursuing this are themselves talking of downsizing the state and 'freeing' the market. They have other reasons for pursuing Microsoft and other monopolists.
Of course, that the way Microsoft will choose to see it. But a decision against them here sets a precedent, and if Microsoft get cute and create new 'secrets', the case against them will be a lot easier to make the 2nd time around. They will also likely get slapped with larger fines next time.
This is the guy who rose to power due to a military coup. Who's saying he's not more corrupt that the ones they booted out? His comments seem to suggest someone ... maybe a corporation or two ... have been whispering in his ear. Or does he actually claim to be a programmer and know WTF he's talking about?
:)
Thailand is sliding downhill. Pretty soon Thais will look over the border at Cambodia and long for their transparent government
Yes indeed
That's utter crap and you know it. Statistically, there are an order of magnitude more Western people killing Muslim people than the other way around. The West has certainly NOT transcended their era of military crusades, and the Muslim world's response to this is largely perfectly acceptable. Of course there are always extremists - in any group of people - but we can hardly point the finger at the Muslims when it is our extremism that is causing theirs.
That is also bullshit, unless when you say 'here', you actually mean 'in Palestine'. The Muslim world couldn't give two hoots about where the rest of the world 'is', as long as it's not in their own backyard, with weapons of mass destruction and a bag full of 'good intentions'.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Ha!
Ha!
Oh dear
Well, well, you just shot all the rest of your credibility to pieces. Israel is a gem of a racist, apartheid state
Oh, put a plug in it, you racist idiot. The same can and has been said about the Jews. I don't see any sizable numbers of Islamic fanatics on the verge of taking over the world, but if I did , then I would blame dickheads like you first.
It's great Saddam has been found guilty of these crimes. I have always said that supporting Saddam, giving him chemical weapons, and handing him funds under the table ( such as through the Australian Wheat Board ) has been one of the worst foreign policy blunders of the Western world.
However justice must be even-handed. If Saddam gets the death penalty for killing a handful of Iraqis, then George Dubya, Tony Bliar and Johnny Coward must also receive the death penalty for their part in causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis since the illegal invasion, and the millions of deaths due to the UN sanctions that has crippled the country ( softening it up ) for a decade. When will I see their trials,and will their executions be televised?
Yes but its GNP is pathetically small, and yet it still takes a sizable swag of money to arm and defend yourself. Anyone who thinks North Korea has plans to take over the world, or even its southern neighbour, needs to get themselves a large dose of reality
I'd like to see the US rock up to multilateral talks where they are threatened with sanctions and military strikes if they don't discontinue their nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction programs. After all, the majority world opinion is that it is the US that poses the largest threat to world peace, not North Korea. When is the last time North Korea did something more provocative than: the US, or Israel, or the UK, or Australia, or China? Perhaps people should be more worried about their own WOMD and less about North Koreas?
You don't need a Windows license to run CrossOver. You only need licenses for the products that you are installing into CrossOver - eg MS Office, etc.
Ha!
One point of sanity, exactly 50% down the page! Everybody above and below completely oblivious to the fact that they are arguing over fuck-all content-wise. It must be the general attitude of the 'article' that gets everybody revved up.
The CIA are too well armed?
That's complete bullshit.
Iran has agreed to all inspections mandated under the Nuclear Non-Profileration agreement, and also to extra inspections which they were not required to agree to.
The problem is that twits like you push outright lies from News Limited.
Not as naive as believing that the US military industrial complex would refrain from using it. I think the Iranians and North Koreans deserve the benefit of the doubt. The US has destroyed said benefit.
I don't have any moderation points, so I'll just congratulate you outright. That's pretty funny :)
It's a bit of a murky issue until you consider the extent to which it occurs. In the US in particular, there is an overwhelming amount of pro-market, conservative propaganda
I would say that capitalism invites government corruption far more than communism, simply because privately owned companies are given the green light to do 'whatever it takes' to maximize profit. You don't get that bullshit under communism, so you don't have unbelievable amounts of money available for bribing with.
Democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive.
Under capitalism, whatever makes the most money goes. Individuals can accumulate as much as they like - at the expense of everyone else - and then use those assets as they see fit. A quick look at the oh-so-close relationship between big business and the major governments tells you that our governments are in on it, and have no intention of reigning things in.
Under socialism, resources are collectively owned, and so each person gets a say in how those resources are used. THIS is what democracy is about. Voting on how our resources are used
There is very little room for middle-ground between the 2 - and certainly nothing stable. Either you give the keys to big business, or you give them to every individual. You can't have it both ways.
CanIt works a charm for me. It's free ( beer free ) for 50 users, and uses open-source tools to get the job done. I used to get 30 - 50 spam messages per day ( and this was years back, before there was so much spam ). I might get 2 per week now, and the bayesian filter learns from experience, so whatever comes in at least helps you block more of the same stuff.