Ah, good. Now that I know you're a loony, this makes it much easier.
Anyone who equates putting anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of apartment buildings and chemical weapon factories in hospitals with putting nurseries in a building that manages Social Security paperwork is a loony.
Anyone who can ignore the hundreds of thousands killed in the inter-Muslim wars (Iran/Iraq, Iraq/Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria against its own population) and be mad that the US drove Iraqis out of Kuwait under a UN mandate with Arab countries as allies is a loony.
Anyone who think that the US is responsible for "suffering" from sanctions is a loony. Why aren't the Kurds suffering in their autonomous regions, given that they're under the same sanctions? Where is Saddam getting the money to give to the families of Palestinian Islamikazies? Maybe, just maybe, Saddam is starving his own people on purpose, and idiots like you are too stupid to figure this out.
The US' "unilateral support" argument is a canard. There was a great article on the history of US-Israeli relations in the Economist (a magazine noted for its anti-Israel bias). A hate-monger like you won't bother to read it, but anyone else can find it at: http://www.dean.usma.edu/socs/ir/ss307/readings/ne gotiations%20exercise/the%20unblessed%20peacemaker.htm
The US and UK didn't create Israel. This is more loony speak. The UN did. Sorry to burst your crazy bubble,but I'm sure facts just bounce off of it.
Protecting the Saudis and the Kuwaitis is now grounds for killing office workers in New York. The view into your loony world is amazing.
And why is a loony like you mad at the US for the war between Iran and Iraq? Didn't the USSR, France, England, and a host of other countries supply weapons to both sides? More crazy excuses from a hate monger.
America's problems with terrorists aren't limited to Al Qeada. They're caused by a backwards, hate-filled culture that doesn't want to own up to its own faults and would rather blame everything on the magic bogeymen of Jews and America. There was a fascinating report put together by Arab intellectuals this week that pointed out that Spain translates more books in a year than the entire Arab world has translated in the last 1,000 years. 65 million Arabs out of 280 million are illiterate. There isn't a single Arab democracy. This is a damaged society that wants to pull the rest of the world down to its level rather than improve itself. When Arabs start trying to fix their own problems, America's problem with terrorism will subside.
Now go off to your cave, beat a woman, and blame Jews for your miserable lot in life.
Ah. I think we basically agree. Whenever I hear people talking about "changing the system", I start thinking of bomb-throwing revolutionaries and their intellectual backers on college campuses. Invariably, the "people's revolution" involves the idjits with bombs partnering with the idjits in college to tell everyone else what to do, say, and think, while they get to live in luxury off the forced labor of everyone else. Too many people on/. still subscribe to this belief system, because they think they're going to be the intellectual overlords rather than the dog-boys pulling El Presidente's chariot. Glad to hear that's not what you're talking about.
Perhaps a better phrase would be "fixing the system," because there sure are problems with the current one, but all in all it beats all the other systems that have been proposed.
I just told you how; can't you read? There are mutual funds that only invest in companies with certain economic policies, that make certain products, that have certain political agendas. It's not much of a stretch for the fund to take a vote among its owners as to how it would like the fund to vote during shareholder voting periods. It could even propose items for vote, if it held enough stock.
Really, learn a bit more about how economics works.
It might be unfair, but it's more or less accurate. It's not like presented another way to solve the problem of corrupt corporate management.
And while "changing the rules" always sounds nice, it's also a dangerous game. Communist systems always fail because they expect human nature to change eventually, and in the meantime, we'll keep a gun pointed at your head to force you to change.
For all the awful things about the capitalist system, it is designed to model how humans actually act, which makes it a heck of a lot more likely to succeed than systems that rely on human nature to be different or that rely on a central body of "experts" to dictacte how things should be.
Current regulations in the US are more or less limited to disclosure: make sure that people are honestly reporting the state of the company. Dot-bomb failures were due to people pouring money into companies stupidly. There's not much that can be done about this. Enron et al are due to lying bastards who fudged the books. This needs to be fixed. The ways that they cheated need to be made impossible to replicate.
As for changing corporate policies, vote as a consumer; let these companies know that if they support building DRM into everything, you won't buy their products. Buy up their stock and get your guys on the board of directors. There are ways to do this, all within the system.
Let your elected officials know that if they pass laws requiring DRM in everything with a D/A converter, you're going to campaign to get them out of office. If it REALLY matters to you, you can do something about it within the system. Fritz Hollings will be up for re-election sooner or later; get him voted out of office. Form GeekPAC (which is something a lawyer friend of mine advised a year ago). Just do something, if it really matters to you.
Because he would have had more to lose. Lay was, by and large, being paid in OPTIONS to buy shares. Since his options were priced low, if he could temporarily drive up the price of the stock, he could flip his options and make millions. Of course, this is exactly what he did (along with most of the people who made money on worthless businesses in the 90s). The way options work as a tax write-off gives further incentive to use them to compensate employees, and they look like they are increasing shareholder value, so shareholders tend to go along with large option grants.
If Ken Lay had OWNED the stock outright, then the long-term survival of Enron would have been more important to him, as hiding debt in fake overseas corporations is not a long-term strategy. He would just have been screwing himself. Attempting to sell off a large chunk of stock (which must be registered with the SEC) has the effect of lowering the stock's price, and it tends to tip people off that something's up. Excercising options waves a lot fewer red flags.
I guess you could argue that Ken Lay is an amoral weasel who would have been corrupt no matter what. Perhaps. But let's recognize what incentives he had to be an amoral weasel first.
The problem has not been that shareholders came first. The problem was that the MANAGEMENT came first. Sure, management owned shares, but if Ken Lay was a majority owner of Enron, you could be damn sure that he wouldn't have pulled the tricks he did. He owned just enough to get rich through tricks, and then when the house of cards was about collapse, he cashed in and ran.
What happened in the various corporate failures is that the farmer put the fox in charge of the henhouse, and didn't complain as long as there were lots of eggs. When the eggs stopped coming, the farmer realized the fox had eaten the chickens, and had been supplying eggs to the farmer by promising chickens to another farmer down the road. Whose fault is it that the chickens are gone? I think it's the farmer. He should have either realized that he put a fox in charge, or he should have been checking up.
Your numbers are WAY too small. 10,000 people in a stock fund? Please. CALPERS (retirement fund for California state workers) has 1.3 million people, according to their numbers. It has $108 Billion in investments.
Do you think the highly-paid geeks of America and the world can scrape together more money than the paper pushers for California? I bet the answer is yes.
As long as people like you are going to sit on the sidelines, pissing and moaning about how little they can do, nothing is going to happen. Welcome to self-fufilling prophesy land...
Um, the investor you heard was correct: the shareholders of a corporation are its owners. The people running the corporation have a primary responsibility to the owners (shareholders) to run the company such that the owners get a return on their money (through dividends, which are not all that common any more) or to increase the value of what the owners, well, own.
If a corporation is too abstract of a concept, let's do a thought experiment. Pretend you have a child who wants to start a lawn-mowing business. The child needs money to buy a lawn mower, print up fliers, pay for gas, etc. You agree to give your kid the money in exchange for, say, 25% of the profits. In effect, you have just bought 25% of your kid's company.
Who is the kid responsible to? If you have a consciencious child, you hope that he wants to pay back your faith in him by making money. After all, that was the deal. The primary responsibilty, as you can see, is to the person who made this little company possible in the first place.
If screwing customers is a good plan for a company to make money and increase its value, you can hardly fault the company beacuse the customers put up with being screwed. Long-term, companies survive because the put out a product that people want. Generating ill will doesn't work long term. Unfortunately, the Enron/Worldcom/Adelphia/whoever's next bastards don't care about the long term, don't care about their customers, and don't care about their shareholders. If they did care about the shareholders, they wouldn't have been lying to them. The system needs fixes because it's too easy for lying weasels to get away with hiding things from shareholders. After that, everything else will fall into place, including customer satisfaction.
Heck, if you don't like how record companies are currently working, start buying record company shares. Don't like how MS works? Buy MS shares. Set up a fund. Every time you want to buy a CD or DVD or piece of software, use that money to buy stock instead. Let lots of people pool their money, get a large voting bloc of stock. Then change the policies. That's how the system works.
I will use small words, because you are obviously too stupid to read large ones.
WE ARE LETTING LOTS OF RADIOACTIVE (sorry, long word, couldn't avoid it) WASTE OUT NOW BY BURNING COAL. IT IS STORED IN THE LUNGS OF EVERYONE. THIS CAUSES CANCER.
You seem to think it's a "radioactive/not radioactive" choice. It isn't. It's a choice between impossible-to-handle uranium particles in smoke from burning coal vs. relatively-easy-to-handle spent fuel rods.
I don't want to increase my risk of dying of lung cancer because stupid people like you failed basic science and logic. I want nuclear power.
The American army (really, the American Air Force) didn't attack civilian targets in Serbia that weren't part of the war effort. Taking out communication and transportation is a common tactic, because those are DUAL-PURPOSE. Food supplies and office buildings weren't targeted. When bombs went astray, the US actually APOLOGIZED, as it did in Afghanistan. I'm sure you didn't notice from within your spasms of anti-American hate.
And it is a war crime to place military facilities in civilian locations. That's what Iraq does, and that's what the Taliban did. Heck, the Taliban was abusing Red Cross facilities, stealing supplies and storing weapons there. They also stored weapons in Mosques. What great men you defend.
Al-Qaeda is, quite simply, insane. They want to establish a world-wide Islamic caliphate, presumably with bin Laden as the Caliph. They are mad that Saudi Arabia asked US troops to defend it against Iraq. They are mad that the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire. They are mad that Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Moors in Spain in freaking 1492. All of these complaints have NOTHING to do with the US. But the US is the target, because it's the lynchpin of the modern world.
So, if you're ready to worship bin Laden, you keep rooting for al Qaeda. I'm hoping those fucks are exterminated soon. Let's call it a difference of opinion.
Oh, the IRA is very much NOT alright with me. The difference is that the IRA (except for the splinter "Real IRA" group) has put down its arms. The Palestinians have not, and have made a holy cause out of genocide.
What I find interesting is that the British, by and large, accept (and even approve of) Palestinian terror attacks against Israel as "understandable", but find the IRA/Real IRA attacks against England awful. If the Real IRA assassinates Cherie Blair's husband or children, I hope that Ariel Sharon throws her hateful words back in her face.
That Jewish girl should hang her head in shame. She's dating someone who supports genocide against her.
Tell me, if you think there's justice in blowing up babies and grandmothers over a political disagreement, why don't you tell me where your family is, so I can apply your methods to them?
See, you just proved my point about doing math and thinking clearly. A "bucked of transuranic waste" is easy to contain. If I can put that bucket in a lead casket, then sure, I'll share a room with it, use it as a coffee table, whatever. Radioactive particles in the air are not easy to contain. I could wrap myself in a HEPA filter, I guess.
The moral of the story is: ONE LARGE MASS OF RADIOATIVE STUFF IS EASIER TO HANDLE THAN LOTS OF SMALL MASSES. But nitwits like you prefer the small masses because you can't see them. That's good thinking.
Nuclear power is fine, but idjits like the WWF are preventing it from being used. Burning coal (the chief supply of electrical power in the US) dumps TONS of uranium into the atmosphere in easy-to-breathe particle format. Does anyone complain about this radioactive waste, try to figure out how to store it? Of course not; it's being stored in the lungs of every American.
The real problem is that these are anti-science Luddites whose inability to do simple math or think clearly forces them to make a living by trying to scare everyone else.
In the 70's, it was global cooling that was going to kill us all. Now, it's global warming. What happened?
The guiding principle of the environmental movement is: claim EVERYTHING is going wrong. Eventually, you'll get something right due to sheer volume, and you can pretend that all the other predictions you made never occured. Psychics and other flim-flam artists work the same way.
It's not punishment, you inbred. It's freedom. The name of it is "freedom of association." You can choose who you want to be with you. Apple's management doesn't want certain people to get press passes (they can still get general admission passes). So they don't. Big deal. Apple has that right.
Now, there are limits to freedom of association in the US. If they were saying "we don't want any Blacks getting press passes", that's illegal. Saying "we don't want certain web sites that have a history of pre-announcing our products", that's OK.
Only a sick, sick fuck would compare someone being tortured by the Chinese government for wanting to have freedom with someone exercising their own freedom. But such is the product of most educational institutions.
Look, you're a rabid, lying troll. Give a single support for any of the wild claims you have made.
If you are incapable of telling the difference between thugs and defending yourself from thugs, then I pity you. You've probably been ruined by some teacher or professor and you're too weak-minded to think for yourself and realize their foolishness.
The US doesn't target hospitals in war. Saddam and Slobo, however, liked to put military instalations in civilian locations. That's a violation of the Geneva conventions, but brainwashed idjits like you don't want to call them on it. To you, the US is the root of all evil.
The US could easily kill virtually the entire population of the Arab world in about a half-hour. Why doesn't it, if it's as evil as you think?
Terrorism only equals war to a coward. And civilians are killed at a lower rate in modern war.
Just because two popular platforms (Windows and Java) make good non-threaded programming difficult doesn't mean you should cave in.
WTF? How does Java make it hard to write non-threaded programs? If anything Java makes it easy to START writing threaded programs. When all the details start hitting you, you realize that it's trickier than it looks.
No one (outside of a very small, insular community) cares about AmigaOS 4. What advantage does it provide for me over a Mac? What programs run on it that you can't get anywhere else? What industries depend on its technologies?
You have been able to run Classic Mac OS on Linux for years, so if this article is supposed to be celebrating that fact, it's kind of silly. If you want to run Linux on a PPC, just buy an Apple box. As I'm trying to point out, there is zero (and probably negative) price benefit from this Amiga board compared to an Apple. If the news is that someone is making a PPC-based motherboard besides Apple, um, OK, great. It'll be more expensive than a comparable Mac, less compatible with Apple operating systems, run an additional OS with zero application support, and be less supported than a Mac from Apple. Sounds like a dream.
What we've got here is a product that exists for no good reason. The market is going to correct for that pretty quickly.
Sigh, you are Idiot, right?
Terrorism has nothing to do with what "side" you are on. That's the typical moral relativist crap that people use to avoid making moral judgements that might mean they'd have to commit to taking a side.
Let me repeat this for the billionth time:
TERRORISTS INTENTIONALLY ATTACK CIVILIAN TARGETS TO ADVANCE A POLITICAL AGENDA.
Americans weren't targeting civilians on purpose in Afghanistan. If they were, a few nukes would have solved any problem with bin Laden real quick, and the collateral damage wouldn't have mattered. But since it DOES matter, the US has been doing things the hard way.
Notice that the US apologized for attacking a wedding by accident (the funny thing is that no one can find the graves for the 40 people supposedly killed in the attack. A two day search turned up only 5 graves), even though the people were firing weapons (and possibly an anti-aircraft gun) in the air in the middle of a war zone. See, that's because the US is the good guys and regrets killing innocents. I don't remember the al Qaeda apology for killing 3,000 Americans with those airliners. Do you?
Read: Politicial protestors who block traffic are terrorists.
No, but running them down with my car shouldn't be a crime.
Seriously, blocking ambulances or emergency vehicles are "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws". Do so, and I hope you get a nice long jail term.
Section 213 of the Act authorizes federal agents to conduct "sneak and peek searches," or covert searches of a person's home or office that are conducted without notifying the person of the execution [within a "reasonable period", ie 90 days] of the search warrant until after the search has been completed.
Right. Because if you TOLD criminals you were going to search their places ahead of time, they'd do NOTHING to remove evidence.
I'm not going to bother with the rest of your paranoia, because it mostly comes down to "Republicans are evil incarnate, and can't be trusted like those oppressive regimes that I love."
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who equates putting anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of apartment buildings and chemical weapon factories in hospitals with putting nurseries in a building that manages Social Security paperwork is a loony.
Anyone who can ignore the hundreds of thousands killed in the inter-Muslim wars (Iran/Iraq, Iraq/Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria against its own population) and be mad that the US drove Iraqis out of Kuwait under a UN mandate with Arab countries as allies is a loony.
Anyone who think that the US is responsible for "suffering" from sanctions is a loony. Why aren't the Kurds suffering in their autonomous regions, given that they're under the same sanctions? Where is Saddam getting the money to give to the families of Palestinian Islamikazies? Maybe, just maybe, Saddam is starving his own people on purpose, and idiots like you are too stupid to figure this out.
The US' "unilateral support" argument is a canard. There was a great article on the history of US-Israeli relations in the Economist (a magazine noted for its anti-Israel bias). A hate-monger like you won't bother to read it, but anyone else can find it at: http://www.dean.usma.edu/socs/ir/ss307/readings/ne gotiations%20exercise/the%20unblessed%20peacemaker .htm
The US and UK didn't create Israel. This is more loony speak. The UN did. Sorry to burst your crazy bubble,but I'm sure facts just bounce off of it.
Protecting the Saudis and the Kuwaitis is now grounds for killing office workers in New York. The view into your loony world is amazing.
And why is a loony like you mad at the US for the war between Iran and Iraq? Didn't the USSR, France, England, and a host of other countries supply weapons to both sides? More crazy excuses from a hate monger.
America's problems with terrorists aren't limited to Al Qeada. They're caused by a backwards, hate-filled culture that doesn't want to own up to its own faults and would rather blame everything on the magic bogeymen of Jews and America. There was a fascinating report put together by Arab intellectuals this week that pointed out that Spain translates more books in a year than the entire Arab world has translated in the last 1,000 years. 65 million Arabs out of 280 million are illiterate. There isn't a single Arab democracy. This is a damaged society that wants to pull the rest of the world down to its level rather than improve itself. When Arabs start trying to fix their own problems, America's problem with terrorism will subside.
Now go off to your cave, beat a woman, and blame Jews for your miserable lot in life.
-jon
-jon
Perhaps a better phrase would be "fixing the system," because there sure are problems with the current one, but all in all it beats all the other systems that have been proposed.
-jon
Really, learn a bit more about how economics works.
-jon
And while "changing the rules" always sounds nice, it's also a dangerous game. Communist systems always fail because they expect human nature to change eventually, and in the meantime, we'll keep a gun pointed at your head to force you to change.
For all the awful things about the capitalist system, it is designed to model how humans actually act, which makes it a heck of a lot more likely to succeed than systems that rely on human nature to be different or that rely on a central body of "experts" to dictacte how things should be.
Current regulations in the US are more or less limited to disclosure: make sure that people are honestly reporting the state of the company. Dot-bomb failures were due to people pouring money into companies stupidly. There's not much that can be done about this. Enron et al are due to lying bastards who fudged the books. This needs to be fixed. The ways that they cheated need to be made impossible to replicate.
As for changing corporate policies, vote as a consumer; let these companies know that if they support building DRM into everything, you won't buy their products. Buy up their stock and get your guys on the board of directors. There are ways to do this, all within the system.
Let your elected officials know that if they pass laws requiring DRM in everything with a D/A converter, you're going to campaign to get them out of office. If it REALLY matters to you, you can do something about it within the system. Fritz Hollings will be up for re-election sooner or later; get him voted out of office. Form GeekPAC (which is something a lawyer friend of mine advised a year ago). Just do something, if it really matters to you.
-jon
If Ken Lay had OWNED the stock outright, then the long-term survival of Enron would have been more important to him, as hiding debt in fake overseas corporations is not a long-term strategy. He would just have been screwing himself. Attempting to sell off a large chunk of stock (which must be registered with the SEC) has the effect of lowering the stock's price, and it tends to tip people off that something's up. Excercising options waves a lot fewer red flags.
I guess you could argue that Ken Lay is an amoral weasel who would have been corrupt no matter what. Perhaps. But let's recognize what incentives he had to be an amoral weasel first.
-jon
What happened in the various corporate failures is that the farmer put the fox in charge of the henhouse, and didn't complain as long as there were lots of eggs. When the eggs stopped coming, the farmer realized the fox had eaten the chickens, and had been supplying eggs to the farmer by promising chickens to another farmer down the road. Whose fault is it that the chickens are gone? I think it's the farmer. He should have either realized that he put a fox in charge, or he should have been checking up.
-jon
Do you think the highly-paid geeks of America and the world can scrape together more money than the paper pushers for California? I bet the answer is yes.
As long as people like you are going to sit on the sidelines, pissing and moaning about how little they can do, nothing is going to happen. Welcome to self-fufilling prophesy land...
-jon
If a corporation is too abstract of a concept, let's do a thought experiment. Pretend you have a child who wants to start a lawn-mowing business. The child needs money to buy a lawn mower, print up fliers, pay for gas, etc. You agree to give your kid the money in exchange for, say, 25% of the profits. In effect, you have just bought 25% of your kid's company.
Who is the kid responsible to? If you have a consciencious child, you hope that he wants to pay back your faith in him by making money. After all, that was the deal. The primary responsibilty, as you can see, is to the person who made this little company possible in the first place.
If screwing customers is a good plan for a company to make money and increase its value, you can hardly fault the company beacuse the customers put up with being screwed. Long-term, companies survive because the put out a product that people want. Generating ill will doesn't work long term. Unfortunately, the Enron/Worldcom/Adelphia/whoever's next bastards don't care about the long term, don't care about their customers, and don't care about their shareholders. If they did care about the shareholders, they wouldn't have been lying to them. The system needs fixes because it's too easy for lying weasels to get away with hiding things from shareholders. After that, everything else will fall into place, including customer satisfaction.
Heck, if you don't like how record companies are currently working, start buying record company shares. Don't like how MS works? Buy MS shares. Set up a fund. Every time you want to buy a CD or DVD or piece of software, use that money to buy stock instead. Let lots of people pool their money, get a large voting bloc of stock. Then change the policies. That's how the system works.
-jon
WE ARE LETTING LOTS OF RADIOACTIVE (sorry, long word, couldn't avoid it) WASTE OUT NOW BY BURNING COAL. IT IS STORED IN THE LUNGS OF EVERYONE. THIS CAUSES CANCER.
You seem to think it's a "radioactive/not radioactive" choice. It isn't. It's a choice between impossible-to-handle uranium particles in smoke from burning coal vs. relatively-easy-to-handle spent fuel rods.
I don't want to increase my risk of dying of lung cancer because stupid people like you failed basic science and logic. I want nuclear power.
-jon
And it is a war crime to place military facilities in civilian locations. That's what Iraq does, and that's what the Taliban did. Heck, the Taliban was abusing Red Cross facilities, stealing supplies and storing weapons there. They also stored weapons in Mosques. What great men you defend.
Al-Qaeda is, quite simply, insane. They want to establish a world-wide Islamic caliphate, presumably with bin Laden as the Caliph. They are mad that Saudi Arabia asked US troops to defend it against Iraq. They are mad that the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire. They are mad that Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Moors in Spain in freaking 1492. All of these complaints have NOTHING to do with the US. But the US is the target, because it's the lynchpin of the modern world.
So, if you're ready to worship bin Laden, you keep rooting for al Qaeda. I'm hoping those fucks are exterminated soon. Let's call it a difference of opinion.
-jon
What I find interesting is that the British, by and large, accept (and even approve of) Palestinian terror attacks against Israel as "understandable", but find the IRA/Real IRA attacks against England awful. If the Real IRA assassinates Cherie Blair's husband or children, I hope that Ariel Sharon throws her hateful words back in her face.
-jon
Tell me, if you think there's justice in blowing up babies and grandmothers over a political disagreement, why don't you tell me where your family is, so I can apply your methods to them?
-jon
If you think they are capable, cite for me chapter and verse from a peer-reviewed science journal that shows that they can.
You are just spewing more ignorance and wishful thinking from the tree huggers.
-jon
The moral of the story is: ONE LARGE MASS OF RADIOATIVE STUFF IS EASIER TO HANDLE THAN LOTS OF SMALL MASSES. But nitwits like you prefer the small masses because you can't see them. That's good thinking.
-jon
The real problem is that these are anti-science Luddites whose inability to do simple math or think clearly forces them to make a living by trying to scare everyone else.
-jon
-jon
The guiding principle of the environmental movement is: claim EVERYTHING is going wrong. Eventually, you'll get something right due to sheer volume, and you can pretend that all the other predictions you made never occured. Psychics and other flim-flam artists work the same way.
-jon
Now, there are limits to freedom of association in the US. If they were saying "we don't want any Blacks getting press passes", that's illegal. Saying "we don't want certain web sites that have a history of pre-announcing our products", that's OK.
Only a sick, sick fuck would compare someone being tortured by the Chinese government for wanting to have freedom with someone exercising their own freedom. But such is the product of most educational institutions.
-jon
If you are incapable of telling the difference between thugs and defending yourself from thugs, then I pity you. You've probably been ruined by some teacher or professor and you're too weak-minded to think for yourself and realize their foolishness.
-jon
The US doesn't target hospitals in war. Saddam and Slobo, however, liked to put military instalations in civilian locations. That's a violation of the Geneva conventions, but brainwashed idjits like you don't want to call them on it. To you, the US is the root of all evil.
The US could easily kill virtually the entire population of the Arab world in about a half-hour. Why doesn't it, if it's as evil as you think?
Terrorism only equals war to a coward. And civilians are killed at a lower rate in modern war.
-jon
WTF? How does Java make it hard to write non-threaded programs? If anything Java makes it easy to START writing threaded programs. When all the details start hitting you, you realize that it's trickier than it looks.
-jon
You have been able to run Classic Mac OS on Linux for years, so if this article is supposed to be celebrating that fact, it's kind of silly. If you want to run Linux on a PPC, just buy an Apple box. As I'm trying to point out, there is zero (and probably negative) price benefit from this Amiga board compared to an Apple. If the news is that someone is making a PPC-based motherboard besides Apple, um, OK, great. It'll be more expensive than a comparable Mac, less compatible with Apple operating systems, run an additional OS with zero application support, and be less supported than a Mac from Apple. Sounds like a dream.
What we've got here is a product that exists for no good reason. The market is going to correct for that pretty quickly.
-jon
Let me repeat this for the billionth time:
TERRORISTS INTENTIONALLY ATTACK CIVILIAN TARGETS TO ADVANCE A POLITICAL AGENDA.
Americans weren't targeting civilians on purpose in Afghanistan. If they were, a few nukes would have solved any problem with bin Laden real quick, and the collateral damage wouldn't have mattered. But since it DOES matter, the US has been doing things the hard way.
Notice that the US apologized for attacking a wedding by accident (the funny thing is that no one can find the graves for the 40 people supposedly killed in the attack. A two day search turned up only 5 graves), even though the people were firing weapons (and possibly an anti-aircraft gun) in the air in the middle of a war zone. See, that's because the US is the good guys and regrets killing innocents. I don't remember the al Qaeda apology for killing 3,000 Americans with those airliners. Do you?
-jon
No, but running them down with my car shouldn't be a crime.
Seriously, blocking ambulances or emergency vehicles are "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws". Do so, and I hope you get a nice long jail term.
Section 213 of the Act authorizes federal agents to conduct "sneak and peek searches," or covert searches of a person's home or office that are conducted without notifying the person of the execution [within a "reasonable period", ie 90 days] of the search warrant until after the search has been completed.
Right. Because if you TOLD criminals you were going to search their places ahead of time, they'd do NOTHING to remove evidence.
I'm not going to bother with the rest of your paranoia, because it mostly comes down to "Republicans are evil incarnate, and can't be trusted like those oppressive regimes that I love."
-jon