"Hey George it's your ole made Vlad 'ere, just letting you know we'll be releasing one of our ole ICBMs from a silo, but don't worry George it's only a Jap Satelite", strike one Waco obliterated.
Better yet the Russians should try 'n get the contract for the Euro GPS network, that way they could disgise a fair dinkum 1st strike launch, by having a good excuse to send up a couple of dozen ICBMs at once, 'Hey George the Euros were getting impatiant about everyone still using your GPS setup so long, so they want us to launch all their satallites ASAP, so don't panic about the couple of dozen ole ICBMs going sky bound next week'
It's a pity the US's preperations for invading Iraq wasn't used a method to take down the dysfunctional nutjob Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia without warning. Even better the US should've serripticiously armed & backed a Baathist invasion of Saudi Arabia by Syria & Iraq (once daddy Assad died they became good mates again). Then the world would'be been graced by the Baathists purging every Wahhabi Salafist from the penisula the same way Saud ethnically cleansed all christians, Jews & Sufis from the Hijaz some 80 odd years ago (when he also ethnically claensed all the mainstream Sunnis there too who refused to accept Wahhabi tenents)
"Nope, we have too much military superiority to do a thing like that. Look through history and find a "third-world" country with complete military superiority."
A bunch of Mongols fighting in essentially the same way as the Attila's hordes nearly a millenium earlier totally destroyed the most advanced state in the West (west of the Oxus), the Abbisad Caliphate that had so easily routed the Armoured Knights of Europe from the Levant
They ate raw meat, drank sour horsemilk & went months without Bathing, yet they were able to sack the Greatest capital of the greatest Empire in the World (well the world west of the Oxus). We're speaking of Abbasid Bagdad, then the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (then the clossest Analogue of the US in the 13th century world, west of the Oxus)
The concept of citizen armies were dieing by the mid 3rd century, from then on, the rump of the Roman legions were Federati, IE Germanic Mercenries in the Western Roman Empire (both individually recruited & recruited as complete units) & Anatolian Galatians (Hellenised to various degrees) & Illyrians (longstanding citizens of the empire but still consided barbiarians by some in Italy) in the Eastern Roman Empire.
Guess which Roman Empire almost made it into the Renaissance?
Guess which Roman Empire failed to see out the 5th century?
BTW even the disunited Britons (made up of about 50 chiefdoms by then) that had lost most of their Island to the Anglo Saxons even managed to start a half century of 100% successful campaigning that cleared all of Briton of Anglo-Saxons bar the East coast by 540. But for the Brytonic population being decimated by the plague from the resurgent Eastern Roman Empire that reached Cornwell by arround the mid 6th century (the plague killed some 75% of the Brytonic population over about a generation), odds on the Anglo-Saxons would've left those shores altogether. Afterall during the previous 30 years the only significant Anglo-Saxon responce to the resurgent Brytonic campaign to claim back their Island was reverse immigration back to Frisland & Juteland by a substantial percentage of the Anglo-Saxon population, most of which had been in Briton for 3 or 4 generations, many even longer.
It's no coinicidence that the 3 biggest successor states of the Western Roman Empire were Ostragothic Italy, Visigothic Provence 'n Spain & Frankish Northern Gaul. All 3 states had their origins in huge tribal based Germanic Federati legions of the Western Roman Empire whose allegiance was payed off through the acceptance of the 3 huge vassel kingdoms formed wholy within the Western Empire all nominally sworn to Rome, thet their mere presence created. Which is why by the fall of the Western Roman Empire large percentages of Goths & Franks were more comfortable with colloquial Latin than the Germanic lingo of their own tribes (they had been born in the legions not born north of the Rhine).
BTW guess how the Anglo-Saxons got their foothold in Briton? As Federati in the Roman legions there from the beginning of the 4th century.
Chinese mode-average wage increasing from $2 a day or whatever to $4 a day or whatever, while the US mode-average wage drops from about $11 an hour to less than $11 a day. (I use mode averages because the US mean average wage is distorted to the point of statistical meaningless by the tiny proportion of Americans on hugely extreme 9 figure or greater incomes)
They add revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services & have the fringe benefit of helping nations impliment trade policies to the benefit of if's community.
Everything else being equal, if a govt decreases tariffs it has to look elsware to find the dosh they no longer recieve from that source, meaning potentially higher income tax rates.
Speaking of which income taxes that are only nominally progressive (once tax loopholes & corporate subsidies are taken into account) that then maybe even pan out as income nuetral or slightly regressive once the various state & local sales taxes enter into the equation, only have one function - revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services, they have no finge benefits in regards the implementation of trade, labour & region policies for the benefit of the community at the end of the day.
Now the fact is govts do provide many essential services & these need to be paid for, meaning we'll always have to have taxes. Well unless a govt can nationalise a proportion of it's nation's productive sector that's annual net revenue is equal or greater than it's expenditure requirements. Incidently this is how Brunai & Kuwait both manage to provide free cradle to grave education 'n healthcare to their citizens, & provide subsidized housing to any citizens that want it, combined with all the other services that govts normally provide, without having to resort to any income taxes at all. Incidently Baathist Iraq managed to do this as well in the 70's & in a few short years Iraq had pulled it's GNP per capita levels up to the same as Australia's (all while Iraq managed to employ primarily it's own people in every sector of it's economy, including the many sunrise industries & service sectors, something the dysfunctional Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia still hasn't managed to do, actually late 1970's & early 80's Baathist Iraq was the only petro-dollar state that has ever managed to do this). Pity Saddam made such a huge miscaculation in 1981 when he blew the Baathist success story away by invading Iran.
H'mm I'm raving on 'n wafting onto tangents again, I obvioussly wacked up too much meth at that party last night.
IOW a CD cloner that copy's the CD perfectly, including all the anti-copy stuff, the same way a key cutter copys' keys, simply by tracking the bumbs & dots, whatever on the original & recreating the exactly same bumbs & dots, whatever on a blank CD. That way the newly created disc thinks it's the original copy protected disc too.
FWIU copy protection systems do things like having the index track misaligned with the rump content or something, so when ripped/burned the software try's to repair what it thinks is a error & in so doing the copy protection system knows the disc's a copy & stops it working. Well something along those lines anyway.
Meaning a copier system that simply just copy's the frequency of bits 'n bumps onto a blank (like as previously mentioned a key copier cutter in a hardware store copys old car keys) without any attempt at reading/decoding the track, will not get tricked by the copy protection & the copy will be a perfect copy protected clone of the original.
I see no reason why a machine as I have envisaged could not be built & work as I suggest successfully. Actually maybe they're are already out there - for a while some stores had CD copying vending machines in Adelaide (till the 'powers that be' demanded their removal) in which one just stuck a CD in one slot, a blank CD in the other slot & 2 AU$2 coins in the coin slot, & a couple of minutes later, add or take a minute, out comes the blank CD no longer blank. Well my brother had a go of copying the original Harry Potter game CD, which has Safedisc 2 copy protection, in one of those machines for our nephew (so there could be a copy of his game at his grandpa's) & it worked for all intence purposes like the original, to the point that even if one tried to copy the copy in a PC, one ended up with similar sorts of hassles one has when one tries to copy the original Safedisc 2 CD in a PC. Now whether those vending machines worked in a similar way to what I envisaged, I have no idea, but it seems like maybe they might have done something along such lines.
How come I don't here you demanding that US soldiers should be sacrificed invading & occupying the dozen or more countries in Africa with regimes as brutal as Baathist Iraq's circa 2000, or communist China for that matter?
If the US is in a war against Islamic fundamenmtalism (I'd say Sunni Salafism) then what the fuck was the US doing invading the strictly secular psuedo-socialist Arab nationalist Iraq & creating a power vacume by deposing the Baathists that Wahhabi nutjobs are taking advantage of?
Fact is the US war against Iraq was a PR, recruitment & strategic godsend to Al Qaeda & co.
He was saying TeeVee as in a weirdly spelt trademarked propietry alternative to the standard TV.
Seeing as Slashdot mainly aims for a American audience I s'pose he should've spelt things out by putting a "®" symbol after TeeVee (of course without the quotation fields)
Its the simplest best way to sell stuff in demand.
Why shouldn't domain names be any different? It someone buy's a domain name some trademark company forgot to buy, what's wrong with the market sorting it out?
There's nothing more hypocrital that corporate types who chose to make money by exploiting markets to demand the protections of govt & institutional regulations to protect themselves from other's exploiting markets.
Bugger Apple if they're unwilling to pay what the Yidd demands then fuck'em I say. They chose to exploit the market to make a profit then they should accept what the market deals out, IE what the Yidd demands, afterall it's his property.
Afterall how would a US election be any different that if Canada, the UK, Oz, Germany, France, Italy in Spain, etc, all held general elections on the same day. The UK having a election the same day as Oz wouldn't make any differance to the Oz election would it?
Well the US is simply 50 different states all having elections the same day, many smaller than the state of New South Wales.
So please explain why if people in suburban Sydney only take 20 minutes to vote, including traveling time & parking time, why doesn't it take just 20 minutes to vote (including travelling time & parking) in similar sized urban sprawls of similar densities in the US, even when those urban sprawls have voting rates half that of Sydney
IBM had a PC assembly factory in Oz but sold it about 3 years ago, a condition of the sale was that the factory would still supply PCs to IBM under contract (whether the buyer demanded that condition or IBM demanded that condition, I can't remember), along just-in-time lines, where they would manufacture each PC to a customised specification within a day of IBM recieving a order for the actual machine to that specification & the machine would then be sent out directly to the buyer. I remember reading a thing about this the Sydney Morning Herald's IT section. I thought it strange at the time as I thought IBM were pulling out of the PC market even then.
But even about a year ago I noticed a couple of IBM PCs for sale amongst the rows of demenstration models at a local computer super store. The 2 IBM models were pretty sparse & gave the appearance of bare bones enterprise workstations with base specifications & both had prominent signs listing IBM Lease terms & long-term support terms, so were obviously there for business customers. I think I recall noticing that they were assembled in Singapore or Malaysia, although it may have been Taiwan, as I remember reading about a year ago or more that both IBM & Dell were subcontracting manufacture of PCs to Acer, which built a new plant specifically for the job, & that those 3 companies had combined to order hard drives from the one supplier at a very good bulk price, it may have been Seagate.
A traditional English style sausage cooked on the barbie with fried onions in a bread roll or between a couple of slices of bread, with added tomato sauce or BBQ sauce.
The challenge is to keep one's shirt spotless while eating while walking back to the car.
IBM & other business machines firms of the 19th century owed the US census for their existence, but that market wasn't big enough for them, so they lobby state legislators & county managers to introduce voting machines, leading up to the mess we have today of even single states having a dozen different types of machines.
But for them the US would still have the most simplest user friendly & quickest system of the lot - hand counted 'tick the box' plain paper ballots, like most of the rest of the western world. Although in many other places its the 'number the boxes in order of preferance' preferential varient, like here in Oz. But even having to number all the boxes in the huge upper house (Senate) ballot it still only takes me 20 minutes to vote, & that includes driving to the local school, parking, queueing up, voting, buying a BBQ sausage & onion sanga from the parents raising money from the school on the way out, & driving home. Bugger spending 30 minutes to 6 hours in a queue & then having to buggerise arround with bloody levers & punchcards, like they do in the US. No wonder most Americans can't be bothered voting. Compare that with Oz where some 90% of those legible are registed & over 98% vote (contrary to popular belief it's not compulsary for adults to register to vote in Oz & it's not comulsary for those that are registed to actually vote either. It's just compulsary for those that are registed to turnup to vote, IE get their names crossed off. Once one has one's name crossed off one need not vote if one doesn't want to). Yet even with attendence figures more than double the US, it's still only take some 20 minutes for some 90% of Australians to vote, including travelling & parking time.
I remember reading somewhere that they signed a multimillion dollar deal to that effect.
I think Dell was involved in the same deal to, so Acer now manages a assembly plant for making Acer, IBM & Dell machines & all 3 companies combined to get a really good deal on Hard drives from the one supplier.
You'd be amazed at the number of people, particularly over 50, who'll only buy IBM PCs. I'm talking about people who'll still buy IBM even if they're $500 more than the exact same PC or laptop without the IBM badge.
Actually most of the 1st tier venders sub-contract their laptop manufacturing to firms like Twinhead, Quanta, Compal, Mitac, Arima, Inventec & Vecta in Taiwan & often these firms will sell exactly the same laptops out the backdoor with generic branding, & I wouldn't be surprised if IBM does sell their Thinkpads at significantly higher price than the equilivent generics off the same production lines (some 1st tiers sign exclusivity clauses on their designs & have had to sack their contractors & hired others because they were caught selling identical generics 'out the back door'), but I'm talking about a markup that not even attempting to be competitive on price.
Really in regards PCs IBM should not even be attempting to trade on price or marketshare & just scale back production of PCs till they only need to cover the IBM at any cost market & just make up on the lost economies of scale by having a markup of at least 50% (preferably 100%)
Afterall what's better business wise? Having a significant share of the market & huge economies of scale, but barelly breaking even; or having a business that's over 90% smaller in regards marketshare, but having a $500 markup on those PCs they do sell.
Look at Morgan, they make a bigger net total annual profit on just the dozen cars they sell a month than billion dollar companies like Volkswagon or Ford Europe that have huge turnovers & marketshare, but are losing huge amounts of money, billions annually. To me that makes Morgan a more successful business than Volkswagon or Ford Europe. Of course a paper loss might not be one in reality if all the management in those mega-manufacturing companies are paying huge salery increases & bonuses to the thousands of employees above the lowest management grades, & are covering expansion/takeover costs. In which case in a sense the official loss is just to minimise tax & to make sure shareholders don't get to rake out a cut dividend wise, but that's another story.
Anyway back on topic, IBM needs to have some sort of range of PCs for IBM's Enterprise sector anyway, so they may has well add some economies of scale that comes from selling extra on the retail side to the IBM at any cost brigade.
Mind you I have to admitt that the IBM at any cost brigade is of a generation that's already entering retirement & early death, but no doubt there's still up to 20 years of business supplying these types till they're all gone.
hunting's more humane than farming
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Just look at the quality of life & they're dead in seconds.
Now compare that to stock animals, whether pasture fed or feedlot stock.
Pasture fed stock can spend days squashed together like sardines as they are trucked/shipped for slaughter hundreds or even thousands of miles away, & then they are more often than not slaughtered in ways that are much crueller than a bullet in the head.
Feedlot animals are even worse. They're penned together like sardines most of their lives knee deep in shit & need to be pumped full of anti-biotics, hormones & suppliments just to survive. Ontop of which they're fed a diet they arn't designed to live off naturally & thus are ill for a signifivant proportion of their lives. Take cattle they're not designed to have a diet consisting of more than 15% grain for any sort of extended period, yet feedlot cattle have a diet that's more than 90% grain. Really feedlots are hell on earth for the animals in them.
Give me game any day - try one year old saltbush fed feral goat & one will never look back.
One thing I do disagree with is the hunting of native wildlife (that hasn't plagued out due to human driven enviromental changes), why someone would shoot a majestic creature like a mountain lion or bear is beyond me. Some people claim that bears & mountain lions can be dangerous, but only when humans intrude in their enviroments, either directly or via housing developments, in which case I feel bears & mountain lions should have every right to kill people, just as one by default should accept being potential shark bait when one swims in the sea.
The vast majority of shotguns purchased by the US military for both WWI & WWII (like more than 90%) were used by/issued to Airfield security personel , MPs & the Shore Patrol & used as police weapons for things like riot work etc.
Just as many police units keep a shotgun in the Trunk, it was the same for Shore Patrol & MP units during the 2 world wars. When you consider such units existed where ever Americans were based, from Iran to Australia to Africa to China, India, Iceland, etc, etc, etc, let alone combat zones, you'll see that such units were easily able to fully utilise shotguns stocks purchased by the military.
So in reality the use of shotguns as trench guns & jungle guns were more rare exceptions than the rule. Just ask war veterans, I bet at least 98% will say they never saw shotguns being used in combat situations by US forces.
Even the most popular insurgencies are the same
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Fact is the vast majority of people in any 3rd world country are too busy surviving to bother with taking up arms against the occupier.
But the fact is most Iraqis are worse off now. Unemployment has doubled with the coming of the Americans (& inflation due to the higher incomes of those that do work & the high incomes of contractors, means that the 50% that are unemployed are worse off than the odd 20% that were unemployed in embargo era Iraq) & death rates in the country have tripled (just ask any morgue employee), meaning a significant percentage maybe a majority sympathise with some insurgents.
I say some because so far more than 300 seperate insurgent groups have been positively identified (there are probably thousands) & it seems most are not of the extremist Wahhabi/salafist variety that go arround executing aid workers.
Generalising about insurgents as all being war criminals & terrorists because of the actions of Zarqawi & co is no more logical & accurate than generalising about all American soldiers being war criminals because a small minority abused prisoners & a Marine shot dead a disarmed wounded insurgent on camera.
Americans never meet the majority
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Lets be honest the vast majority of Americans in Iraq rarely get beyond the Green zones except when in armed convoys. As such they only ever meet quisling Iraqis that work in Green zones or Iraqis that are saying whatever they think the American wants them to say because there's a heavily armed convoy backing the American up.
I thought hunting was about 4 yobs driving down creekbeds in a old ute with a car load of beer 'n blasting anything that falls in the beam of the spotties with a.303, a.223, a.22 Magnum & Macca's double barrel shottie.
The simple fact is that eating pasture fed animals that are slaughtered on home pastures (whether game or stock) is much more humane than the alternatives.
The alternatives being:-
1/ pasture fed stock that are packed together like sardines & truck/trained/shipped hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles for slaughtering.
2/ Feedlot stock that are penned like tinned sardines virtually all their lives in knee high shit & need to be pumped full of anti-biotics to survive & are fed on a diet that's totally unnatural (when young feedlot cattle are weaned off milk & pasture to a diet that's virtually all grain that's forced onto them, they can be chonically ill for at least a month, as cattle just arn't designed to eat a diet that's more than 15% grain for extended periods). Don't let us start on the problems caused by the lack of sunlight, etc.
It's a real pity govt regulations have meant virtually the end of on-farm slaughtering (trucking pre-slaughtered animals in refridgerated trucks is infinitly more humane). What's even worse is the govt tax policies & subsidies that encourage feedlot meat, when without such artificial influences, feedlot meat would be totally unviable compared to pasture beef/lamp/pork/whatever except for very high price niche gourmet supplies.
You see feedlot stock require constant attention, drugs, suppliments, hormones, etc, while many types of pasture stock need not ever see a human being till slaughter time.
I use to work on a 100,000 acre outback sheep station, that also kept cattle & pigs, plus feral pigs 'n goats & wild roos, so I know what I'm talking about.
Of course the sheep did need attention, including mulesing at lamp marking, shearing & diping every year & crutching mid term between the shearing, but most of the cattle only ever saw human beings up close when being rounded up for slaughter. The pigs were kept in a huge pen out the back & got the slops from the kitchens (the sheep station was a research station owned by a Uni) & were let out to graze during the day on pasture 'n saltbush. For most of the pigs the 1st time they experianced humans up close was at slaughter time, when one of the Kelpie/Border Collie crosses led them up the race to face a.22 between the eyes. We also had a contract for wild goat meat with a supplier to a number of ethnic restaurants. This meant every couple of months having the Kelpie/Border Collies round up a mob of goats (with the help of a Jackaroo on a Ag-bike) & penning them in a large yard with electric fencing that contained suffient pasture &/or saltbush. Then every week, depending on demand between 1 & a dozen or more would be slaughtered, which involved them being run up a race one by one by a dog, & then having their throats deeply slashed as their heads were ripped back so their necks broke at the same time. It may sound gruesome but their quality of life was much better than feedlot stock & their last days were much better than the lasts days of pasture stock that are trucked off to the meatworks, often via the markets as well.
Ontop of that we had a contracted Roo shooter working the property when Roos plagued up. Mind you only the 2 Roo species that were in plague numbers were slaughtered, The Roos probably had the most humane deaths of all - not knowing they were going to be a meal till they fell within the beam of a spotlight & were instantly killed by a.223 or a.303 bullet passing through their heads. Well other then the pouched Joeys that had their skulld smashed, but being a research station that was in the public eye (that had city types often visiting) the Roo shooter was told not to shoot obvious mature females for this very reason. He could take 50 roos a night, work that out over a year.
Slashdot Mirror
What a good way to disguise a 1st launch strike.
"Hey George it's your ole made Vlad 'ere, just letting you know we'll be releasing one of our ole ICBMs from a silo, but don't worry George it's only a Jap Satelite", strike one Waco obliterated.
Better yet the Russians should try 'n get the contract for the Euro GPS network, that way they could disgise a fair dinkum 1st strike launch, by having a good excuse to send up a couple of dozen ICBMs at once, 'Hey George the Euros were getting impatiant about everyone still using your GPS setup so long, so they want us to launch all their satallites ASAP, so don't panic about the couple of dozen ole ICBMs going sky bound next week'
It's a pity the US's preperations for invading Iraq wasn't used a method to take down the dysfunctional nutjob Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia without warning. Even better the US should've serripticiously armed & backed a Baathist invasion of Saudi Arabia by Syria & Iraq (once daddy Assad died they became good mates again). Then the world would'be been graced by the Baathists purging every Wahhabi Salafist from the penisula the same way Saud ethnically cleansed all christians, Jews & Sufis from the Hijaz some 80 odd years ago (when he also ethnically claensed all the mainstream Sunnis there too who refused to accept Wahhabi tenents)
"Nope, we have too much military superiority to do a thing like that. Look through history and find a "third-world" country with complete military superiority."
A bunch of Mongols fighting in essentially the same way as the Attila's hordes nearly a millenium earlier totally destroyed the most advanced state in the West (west of the Oxus), the Abbisad Caliphate that had so easily routed the Armoured Knights of Europe from the Levant
They ate raw meat, drank sour horsemilk & went months without Bathing, yet they were able to sack the Greatest capital of the greatest Empire in the World (well the world west of the Oxus). We're speaking of Abbasid Bagdad, then the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (then the clossest Analogue of the US in the 13th century world, west of the Oxus)
The concept of citizen armies were dieing by the mid 3rd century, from then on, the rump of the Roman legions were Federati, IE Germanic Mercenries in the Western Roman Empire (both individually recruited & recruited as complete units) & Anatolian Galatians (Hellenised to various degrees) & Illyrians (longstanding citizens of the empire but still consided barbiarians by some in Italy) in the Eastern Roman Empire .
Guess which Roman Empire almost made it into the Renaissance?
Guess which Roman Empire failed to see out the 5th century?
BTW even the disunited Britons (made up of about 50 chiefdoms by then) that had lost most of their Island to the Anglo Saxons even managed to start a half century of 100% successful campaigning that cleared all of Briton of Anglo-Saxons bar the East coast by 540. But for the Brytonic population being decimated by the plague from the resurgent Eastern Roman Empire that reached Cornwell by arround the mid 6th century (the plague killed some 75% of the Brytonic population over about a generation), odds on the Anglo-Saxons would've left those shores altogether. Afterall during the previous 30 years the only significant Anglo-Saxon responce to the resurgent Brytonic campaign to claim back their Island was reverse immigration back to Frisland & Juteland by a substantial percentage of the Anglo-Saxon population, most of which had been in Briton for 3 or 4 generations, many even longer.
It's no coinicidence that the 3 biggest successor states of the Western Roman Empire were Ostragothic Italy, Visigothic Provence 'n Spain & Frankish Northern Gaul. All 3 states had their origins in huge tribal based Germanic Federati legions of the Western Roman Empire whose allegiance was payed off through the acceptance of the 3 huge vassel kingdoms formed wholy within the Western Empire all nominally sworn to Rome, thet their mere presence created. Which is why by the fall of the Western Roman Empire large percentages of Goths & Franks were more comfortable with colloquial Latin than the Germanic lingo of their own tribes (they had been born in the legions not born north of the Rhine).
BTW guess how the Anglo-Saxons got their foothold in Briton? As Federati in the Roman legions there from the beginning of the 4th century.
Chinese mode-average wage increasing from $2 a day or whatever to $4 a day or whatever, while the US mode-average wage drops from about $11 an hour to less than $11 a day. (I use mode averages because the US mean average wage is distorted to the point of statistical meaningless by the tiny proportion of Americans on hugely extreme 9 figure or greater incomes)
They add revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services & have the fringe benefit of helping nations impliment trade policies to the benefit of if's community.
Everything else being equal, if a govt decreases tariffs it has to look elsware to find the dosh they no longer recieve from that source, meaning potentially higher income tax rates.
Speaking of which income taxes that are only nominally progressive (once tax loopholes & corporate subsidies are taken into account) that then maybe even pan out as income nuetral or slightly regressive once the various state & local sales taxes enter into the equation, only have one function - revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services, they have no finge benefits in regards the implementation of trade, labour & region policies for the benefit of the community at the end of the day.
Now the fact is govts do provide many essential services & these need to be paid for, meaning we'll always have to have taxes. Well unless a govt can nationalise a proportion of it's nation's productive sector that's annual net revenue is equal or greater than it's expenditure requirements. Incidently this is how Brunai & Kuwait both manage to provide free cradle to grave education 'n healthcare to their citizens, & provide subsidized housing to any citizens that want it, combined with all the other services that govts normally provide, without having to resort to any income taxes at all. Incidently Baathist Iraq managed to do this as well in the 70's & in a few short years Iraq had pulled it's GNP per capita levels up to the same as Australia's (all while Iraq managed to employ primarily it's own people in every sector of it's economy, including the many sunrise industries & service sectors, something the dysfunctional Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia still hasn't managed to do, actually late 1970's & early 80's Baathist Iraq was the only petro-dollar state that has ever managed to do this). Pity Saddam made such a huge miscaculation in 1981 when he blew the Baathist success story away by invading Iran.
H'mm I'm raving on 'n wafting onto tangents again, I obvioussly wacked up too much meth at that party last night.
IOW a CD cloner that copy's the CD perfectly, including all the anti-copy stuff, the same way a key cutter copys' keys, simply by tracking the bumbs & dots, whatever on the original & recreating the exactly same bumbs & dots, whatever on a blank CD. That way the newly created disc thinks it's the original copy protected disc too.
FWIU copy protection systems do things like having the index track misaligned with the rump content or something, so when ripped/burned the software try's to repair what it thinks is a error & in so doing the copy protection system knows the disc's a copy & stops it working. Well something along those lines anyway.
Meaning a copier system that simply just copy's the frequency of bits 'n bumps onto a blank (like as previously mentioned a key copier cutter in a hardware store copys old car keys) without any attempt at reading/decoding the track, will not get tricked by the copy protection & the copy will be a perfect copy protected clone of the original.
I see no reason why a machine as I have envisaged could not be built & work as I suggest successfully. Actually maybe they're are already out there - for a while some stores had CD copying vending machines in Adelaide (till the 'powers that be' demanded their removal) in which one just stuck a CD in one slot, a blank CD in the other slot & 2 AU$2 coins in the coin slot, & a couple of minutes later, add or take a minute, out comes the blank CD no longer blank. Well my brother had a go of copying the original Harry Potter game CD, which has Safedisc 2 copy protection, in one of those machines for our nephew (so there could be a copy of his game at his grandpa's) & it worked for all intence purposes like the original, to the point that even if one tried to copy the copy in a PC, one ended up with similar sorts of hassles one has when one tries to copy the original Safedisc 2 CD in a PC. Now whether those vending machines worked in a similar way to what I envisaged, I have no idea, but it seems like maybe they might have done something along such lines.
...into New York (although it may have been another river they followed)
How come I don't here you demanding that US soldiers should be sacrificed invading & occupying the dozen or more countries in Africa with regimes as brutal as Baathist Iraq's circa 2000, or communist China for that matter?
If the US is in a war against Islamic fundamenmtalism (I'd say Sunni Salafism) then what the fuck was the US doing invading the strictly secular psuedo-socialist Arab nationalist Iraq & creating a power vacume by deposing the Baathists that Wahhabi nutjobs are taking advantage of?
Fact is the US war against Iraq was a PR, recruitment & strategic godsend to Al Qaeda & co.
Or are you a idiot?
He was saying TeeVee as in a weirdly spelt trademarked propietry alternative to the standard TV.
Seeing as Slashdot mainly aims for a American audience I s'pose he should've spelt things out by putting a "®" symbol after TeeVee (of course without the quotation fields)
Its the simplest best way to sell stuff in demand.
Why shouldn't domain names be any different? It someone buy's a domain name some trademark company forgot to buy, what's wrong with the market sorting it out?
There's nothing more hypocrital that corporate types who chose to make money by exploiting markets to demand the protections of govt & institutional regulations to protect themselves from other's exploiting markets.
Bugger Apple if they're unwilling to pay what the Yidd demands then fuck'em I say. They chose to exploit the market to make a profit then they should accept what the market deals out, IE what the Yidd demands, afterall it's his property.
So please explain why voting doesn't scale?
Afterall how would a US election be any different that if Canada, the UK, Oz, Germany, France, Italy in Spain, etc, all held general elections on the same day. The UK having a election the same day as Oz wouldn't make any differance to the Oz election would it?
Well the US is simply 50 different states all having elections the same day, many smaller than the state of New South Wales.
So please explain why if people in suburban Sydney only take 20 minutes to vote, including traveling time & parking time, why doesn't it take just 20 minutes to vote (including travelling time & parking) in similar sized urban sprawls of similar densities in the US, even when those urban sprawls have voting rates half that of Sydney
IBM had a PC assembly factory in Oz but sold it about 3 years ago, a condition of the sale was that the factory would still supply PCs to IBM under contract (whether the buyer demanded that condition or IBM demanded that condition, I can't remember), along just-in-time lines, where they would manufacture each PC to a customised specification within a day of IBM recieving a order for the actual machine to that specification & the machine would then be sent out directly to the buyer. I remember reading a thing about this the Sydney Morning Herald's IT section. I thought it strange at the time as I thought IBM were pulling out of the PC market even then.
But even about a year ago I noticed a couple of IBM PCs for sale amongst the rows of demenstration models at a local computer super store. The 2 IBM models were pretty sparse & gave the appearance of bare bones enterprise workstations with base specifications & both had prominent signs listing IBM Lease terms & long-term support terms, so were obviously there for business customers. I think I recall noticing that they were assembled in Singapore or Malaysia, although it may have been Taiwan, as I remember reading about a year ago or more that both IBM & Dell were subcontracting manufacture of PCs to Acer, which built a new plant specifically for the job, & that those 3 companies had combined to order hard drives from the one supplier at a very good bulk price, it may have been Seagate.
A traditional English style sausage cooked on the barbie with fried onions in a bread roll or between a couple of slices of bread, with added tomato sauce or BBQ sauce.
The challenge is to keep one's shirt spotless while eating while walking back to the car.
IBM & other business machines firms of the 19th century owed the US census for their existence, but that market wasn't big enough for them, so they lobby state legislators & county managers to introduce voting machines, leading up to the mess we have today of even single states having a dozen different types of machines.
But for them the US would still have the most simplest user friendly & quickest system of the lot - hand counted 'tick the box' plain paper ballots, like most of the rest of the western world. Although in many other places its the 'number the boxes in order of preferance' preferential varient, like here in Oz. But even having to number all the boxes in the huge upper house (Senate) ballot it still only takes me 20 minutes to vote, & that includes driving to the local school, parking, queueing up, voting, buying a BBQ sausage & onion sanga from the parents raising money from the school on the way out, & driving home. Bugger spending 30 minutes to 6 hours in a queue & then having to buggerise arround with bloody levers & punchcards, like they do in the US. No wonder most Americans can't be bothered voting. Compare that with Oz where some 90% of those legible are registed & over 98% vote (contrary to popular belief it's not compulsary for adults to register to vote in Oz & it's not comulsary for those that are registed to actually vote either. It's just compulsary for those that are registed to turnup to vote, IE get their names crossed off. Once one has one's name crossed off one need not vote if one doesn't want to). Yet even with attendence figures more than double the US, it's still only take some 20 minutes for some 90% of Australians to vote, including travelling & parking time.
I remember reading somewhere that they signed a multimillion dollar deal to that effect.
I think Dell was involved in the same deal to, so Acer now manages a assembly plant for making Acer, IBM & Dell machines & all 3 companies combined to get a really good deal on Hard drives from the one supplier.
You'd be amazed at the number of people, particularly over 50, who'll only buy IBM PCs. I'm talking about people who'll still buy IBM even if they're $500 more than the exact same PC or laptop without the IBM badge.
Actually most of the 1st tier venders sub-contract their laptop manufacturing to firms like Twinhead, Quanta, Compal, Mitac, Arima, Inventec & Vecta in Taiwan & often these firms will sell exactly the same laptops out the backdoor with generic branding, & I wouldn't be surprised if IBM does sell their Thinkpads at significantly higher price than the equilivent generics off the same production lines (some 1st tiers sign exclusivity clauses on their designs & have had to sack their contractors & hired others because they were caught selling identical generics 'out the back door'), but I'm talking about a markup that not even attempting to be competitive on price.
Really in regards PCs IBM should not even be attempting to trade on price or marketshare & just scale back production of PCs till they only need to cover the IBM at any cost market & just make up on the lost economies of scale by having a markup of at least 50% (preferably 100%)
Afterall what's better business wise? Having a significant share of the market & huge economies of scale, but barelly breaking even; or having a business that's over 90% smaller in regards marketshare, but having a $500 markup on those PCs they do sell.
Look at Morgan, they make a bigger net total annual profit on just the dozen cars they sell a month than billion dollar companies like Volkswagon or Ford Europe that have huge turnovers & marketshare, but are losing huge amounts of money, billions annually. To me that makes Morgan a more successful business than Volkswagon or Ford Europe. Of course a paper loss might not be one in reality if all the management in those mega-manufacturing companies are paying huge salery increases & bonuses to the thousands of employees above the lowest management grades, & are covering expansion/takeover costs. In which case in a sense the official loss is just to minimise tax & to make sure shareholders don't get to rake out a cut dividend wise, but that's another story.
Anyway back on topic, IBM needs to have some sort of range of PCs for IBM's Enterprise sector anyway, so they may has well add some economies of scale that comes from selling extra on the retail side to the IBM at any cost brigade.
Mind you I have to admitt that the IBM at any cost brigade is of a generation that's already entering retirement & early death, but no doubt there's still up to 20 years of business supplying these types till they're all gone.
like bicycles
Just look at the quality of life & they're dead in seconds.
Now compare that to stock animals, whether pasture fed or feedlot stock.
Pasture fed stock can spend days squashed together like sardines as they are trucked/shipped for slaughter hundreds or even thousands of miles away, & then they are more often than not slaughtered in ways that are much crueller than a bullet in the head.
Feedlot animals are even worse. They're penned together like sardines most of their lives knee deep in shit & need to be pumped full of anti-biotics, hormones & suppliments just to survive. Ontop of which they're fed a diet they arn't designed to live off naturally & thus are ill for a signifivant proportion of their lives. Take cattle they're not designed to have a diet consisting of more than 15% grain for any sort of extended period, yet feedlot cattle have a diet that's more than 90% grain. Really feedlots are hell on earth for the animals in them.
Give me game any day - try one year old saltbush fed feral goat & one will never look back.
One thing I do disagree with is the hunting of native wildlife (that hasn't plagued out due to human driven enviromental changes), why someone would shoot a majestic creature like a mountain lion or bear is beyond me. Some people claim that bears & mountain lions can be dangerous, but only when humans intrude in their enviroments, either directly or via housing developments, in which case I feel bears & mountain lions should have every right to kill people, just as one by default should accept being potential shark bait when one swims in the sea.
The vast majority of shotguns purchased by the US military for both WWI & WWII (like more than 90%) were used by/issued to Airfield security personel , MPs & the Shore Patrol & used as police weapons for things like riot work etc.
Just as many police units keep a shotgun in the Trunk, it was the same for Shore Patrol & MP units during the 2 world wars. When you consider such units existed where ever Americans were based, from Iran to Australia to Africa to China, India, Iceland, etc, etc, etc, let alone combat zones, you'll see that such units were easily able to fully utilise shotguns stocks purchased by the military.
So in reality the use of shotguns as trench guns & jungle guns were more rare exceptions than the rule. Just ask war veterans, I bet at least 98% will say they never saw shotguns being used in combat situations by US forces.
Fact is the vast majority of people in any 3rd world country are too busy surviving to bother with taking up arms against the occupier.
But the fact is most Iraqis are worse off now. Unemployment has doubled with the coming of the Americans (& inflation due to the higher incomes of those that do work & the high incomes of contractors, means that the 50% that are unemployed are worse off than the odd 20% that were unemployed in embargo era Iraq) & death rates in the country have tripled (just ask any morgue employee), meaning a significant percentage maybe a majority sympathise with some insurgents.
I say some because so far more than 300 seperate insurgent groups have been positively identified (there are probably thousands) & it seems most are not of the extremist Wahhabi/salafist variety that go arround executing aid workers.
Generalising about insurgents as all being war criminals & terrorists because of the actions of Zarqawi & co is no more logical & accurate than generalising about all American soldiers being war criminals because a small minority abused prisoners & a Marine shot dead a disarmed wounded insurgent on camera.
Lets be honest the vast majority of Americans in Iraq rarely get beyond the Green zones except when in armed convoys. As such they only ever meet quisling Iraqis that work in Green zones or Iraqis that are saying whatever they think the American wants them to say because there's a heavily armed convoy backing the American up.
I thought hunting was about 4 yobs driving down creekbeds in a old ute with a car load of beer 'n blasting anything that falls in the beam of the spotties with a .303, a .223, a .22 Magnum & Macca's double barrel shottie.
The simple fact is that eating pasture fed animals that are slaughtered on home pastures (whether game or stock) is much more humane than the alternatives.
.22 between the eyes. We also had a contract for wild goat meat with a supplier to a number of ethnic restaurants. This meant every couple of months having the Kelpie/Border Collies round up a mob of goats (with the help of a Jackaroo on a Ag-bike) & penning them in a large yard with electric fencing that contained suffient pasture &/or saltbush. Then every week, depending on demand between 1 & a dozen or more would be slaughtered, which involved them being run up a race one by one by a dog, & then having their throats deeply slashed as their heads were ripped back so their necks broke at the same time. It may sound gruesome but their quality of life was much better than feedlot stock & their last days were much better than the lasts days of pasture stock that are trucked off to the meatworks, often via the markets as well.
.223 or a .303 bullet passing through their heads. Well other then the pouched Joeys that had their skulld smashed, but being a research station that was in the public eye (that had city types often visiting) the Roo shooter was told not to shoot obvious mature females for this very reason. He could take 50 roos a night, work that out over a year.
The alternatives being:-
1/ pasture fed stock that are packed together like sardines & truck/trained/shipped hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles for slaughtering.
2/ Feedlot stock that are penned like tinned sardines virtually all their lives in knee high shit & need to be pumped full of anti-biotics to survive & are fed on a diet that's totally unnatural (when young feedlot cattle are weaned off milk & pasture to a diet that's virtually all grain that's forced onto them, they can be chonically ill for at least a month, as cattle just arn't designed to eat a diet that's more than 15% grain for extended periods). Don't let us start on the problems caused by the lack of sunlight, etc.
It's a real pity govt regulations have meant virtually the end of on-farm slaughtering (trucking pre-slaughtered animals in refridgerated trucks is infinitly more humane). What's even worse is the govt tax policies & subsidies that encourage feedlot meat, when without such artificial influences, feedlot meat would be totally unviable compared to pasture beef/lamp/pork/whatever except for very high price niche gourmet supplies.
You see feedlot stock require constant attention, drugs, suppliments, hormones, etc, while many types of pasture stock need not ever see a human being till slaughter time.
I use to work on a 100,000 acre outback sheep station, that also kept cattle & pigs, plus feral pigs 'n goats & wild roos, so I know what I'm talking about.
Of course the sheep did need attention, including mulesing at lamp marking, shearing & diping every year & crutching mid term between the shearing, but most of the cattle only ever saw human beings up close when being rounded up for slaughter. The pigs were kept in a huge pen out the back & got the slops from the kitchens (the sheep station was a research station owned by a Uni) & were let out to graze during the day on pasture 'n saltbush. For most of the pigs the 1st time they experianced humans up close was at slaughter time, when one of the Kelpie/Border Collie crosses led them up the race to face a
Ontop of that we had a contracted Roo shooter working the property when Roos plagued up. Mind you only the 2 Roo species that were in plague numbers were slaughtered, The Roos probably had the most humane deaths of all - not knowing they were going to be a meal till they fell within the beam of a spotlight & were instantly killed by a