The Romans were broken by overextending their empire while using their external enemies as internal support, while the most ambitious moved East to Byzantium. The Byzantines were broken by relying on trade rather than military in a military world. The Muslim Caliphate absorbed too many foreign cultures without using enough of their traditional methods of living, so required forced ignorance to keep the old ways from creeping back and undoing the contrived faithy government. What happens to the US remains to be seen, but any collapse here will bring down the rest of the civilization, which is effectively a global American culture, while the US itself will have the strongest advantages in recovering, as has happened several times since the US became the crossroads of the global economy over a century ago.
BTW, "what's left" of those old empires is 1: Europe and global Christianity; 2: Turkey (which was still a serious empire until the British dismantled it and absorbed it commercially a century ago); 3: the Islamic world, containing a billion people, much of the world's cash, huge spans of territory, and domination of critical global industries like energy and shipping/ports. What will remain of the US hegemony after the current crisis is done will probably last a while, too, despite the current condition of direct competition among similar powers (all closely interconnected), unlike those past precedents.
But all of that is different from France's predicament. By the start of WWI France was largely already done with its leadership in everything but clothing style, some literature and painting, and some architecture - all of which were not only easily copied abroad, but influential only to the extent that they were copied abroad. And then sometime between 1870-1910 or so, France seems to have given up. Maybe successive defeats by Germany, or (or combined with) the collapse of its global agricultural empire (underway through the 1800s). But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined. You're comparing apples and oranges: military/political "world" (on whatever historical scale) domination to cultural "retirement". None of those predecessors offer a model for France.
There is a possible previous model: Colonial Spain. Mainly Spain's ascendance was due to the sudden tech leap turning distance from an impossible barrier into a conduit for power, in which Spain had all the advantages and few disadvantages. Long distance warships carrying cannon, rifles and horses, suddenly made available disadvantaged (and largely unknown) conquerable rivals unable to reach back to Spain, where the Church kept neighbors with military threats aligned under "Christendom" (and arranged marriages among an extended family ruling all of them). When the rivals caught up technologically and politically, Spain's temporary (a couple centuries) advantage collapsed, and with it Spain's cultural leadership. Maybe France's long-evolved leadership hit a similar tech/political wall, but no one's explained that yet.
Give me a break. The Chunnel and the Concorde were 50/50 partnerships with the UK, and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900.
You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast.
This isn't a question of whether France is cool - I love France. But the question is how they lost their leadership. Their performance since the end of the colonial era is as an also-ran, by a large nation that had been churning out innovation with the best of them for a long time. What happened?
I didn't say it was so great, and even mentioned that it featured executions. But it did finally get rid of a millenium of hereditary monarchy, and pave the way for republican democracy in France.
If you've got a point to make about how the French Revolution was so terrible that it was part of the reason France declined so dramatically in primacy by the 20th Century, then make it. Otherwise, your complaint is irrelevant here. This isn't a referendum on how terrible history's transitions are, but rather a discussion of how France managed to lose its lead.
I avoided mentioning it because it's a competitive advantage I'd prefer not to share with all of Slashdot (and my competitors, who read Slashdot, especially stories like this one).
You can feel free to believe that I'm making it up. I probably would, if I were in your shoes. I'm not making it up, but I'm not going to give it away here. Sorry.
Is there a way to start a minimal account at EC2 which just idles away doing nothing, and a virtualization account somewhere else (like at my cheap, but flat rate per server, provider), and then very quickly clone my running virtual session over the Internet to the EC2, where it quickly starts running to handle the spikes (then shuts down)? With that setup, I could use EC2 as purely generic spike capacity, and just need as much advance warning that a spike is going to max out my cheap provider as far ahead as the time it takes to send the virtualized session over to EC2 and start it up. Now that is some 21st Century load balancing, and really an example of using virtualization where nothing else will really do. "Just in time" virtual cloning for spike handling.
Because they can compete with me that way. If it drives me away, well, they got my money for a while, and maybe dealt me some blows in shutting me down and making me move around instead of competing.
This is always the general problem with the network vendor also competing in the other layers in which the network customers are competing.
Well, 250Mbps is (250 * 30.48 * 3600 / 8) 82.296TB:mo max. That would cost $12,439.28 per month at Amazon, and (at $0.05:GB->2TB/$1:GB@2TB+) $79,896 at my "cheaper" host, but only because the punitive per-GB cost of exceeding the 2TB cap at my host. Since I load balance already, the 82.296TB would be split across 41 or 42 $100:mo servers, which would cost $4200 at my host.
Spending that $4200 at Amazon gets 23.3TB, which at my host would cost $1200. That $1200 at Amazon would get 6.7TB, which would cost $400 at my host. $400 buys 2.2TB from Amazon, which is just a little more than what I get for $100 now.
So the 3-4x cost of Amazon buys me instant scaling to the (more expensive) bandwidth tiers, without the lead time to buy and start up a new server. Conversely, my bandwidth has to drop to 1/3-4 at Amazon before I'm spending less there than at my cheaper but oversupplied host.
So if I know far enough in advance to deploy new servers that I'm going to grow more than 3-4x (or drop extra ones if I shrink that much), then my current host is cheaper. But spikes are a different story, because I do have to buy a whole month at least (and there's startup fees, but that's probably matched by all the other fees other than bandwidth at Amazon, which are included in my current host costs cited here). If my bandwidth spike doesn't consume at least 25-33% of the cheaper bandwidth, I'll have bought too much extra bandwidth, and could have saved at Amazon.
It's good to have the options. And maybe some of the customers at my current host will be tempted over to Amazon, because that choice is better for them. Which could spur my host to offer similar spike pricing models, at the current lower price rates. So, GO AMAZON!
The French were right up there at the forefront of progress and innovation for centuries. They practically defined the Enlightenment. Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. Their mathematicians and writers were among the very best, helping invent science and modern scholarship. Their engineering produced the Eiffel Tower. They gave us Jules Verne, imagining a future as fiercely as no one else except perhaps HG Wells.
But then it all hit the wall, apparently sometime in the late 1800s. Was it the Franco-Prussian War? Did they just get distracted by art and fashion long enough to get their derriere's torched in WWI? Did some magic spirit choke on a fin-de-siecle?
The calc shows that data transfer costs $0.18:GB out ($0.10:GB in), with no maximum (or minimum) charge. It doesn't show max bandwidth, but I'd expect Amazon to have some fat connectivity, though I'd want a CIR (Committed Information Rate, or guaranteed minimum rate) for any real pro application.
But I can get data transfer (in or out) for $0.05:GB up to 2TB:mo, with root access on an actual dedicated server, not VPS ($0.03:GB for VPS). At a datacenter I've used for a couple years, with good support, >99.99% uptime, never any bandwidth capping, on fast machines with good amounts of storage. With years of experience. GB after the cap are expensive, like $1:GB, but I use geographic diversity already, so I split my loads across multiple servers, pooling their caps across the balanced loads. Transfers within the hosting WAN are free.
So while Amazon looks interesting, I think I'll keep my existing hosting company, which is anywhere from 2-6x as cheap as Amazon's new, relatively untested service, with potential competition from Amazon's own services.
How much bandwidth transfer a month can I get there, and how much does it cost? What's the max sustained bandwidth that I can get from one of their servers?
And if I'm competing with Amazon by running a popular streaming radio station (even paying the required royalties, but of course not to Amazon), will they start shutting me down?
So? Only McCain is running for president. The rest of the Keating 5 aren't. And all of them except John Glenn ended their careers after their role was exposed.
McCain interfered with banking regulations to help a friend, regardless of how his crimes were whitewashed by a Congress eager to minimize exposure of that corruption (and which lost its 40-year majority shortly afterwards). Later, in 2000, McCain again interfered with regulators for the lobbyist he was committing adultery with, as was finally exposed last month since McCain is running for president on his Congressional record.
Why not "dredge up" the Keating 5? It shows that McCain has a record of corruption that doesn't even stop when he gets caught. Although I guess you Republicans only like "ancient history" when you're talking about a mythical Ronald Reagan who never existed outside an ad campaign. But with ancient McCain, nearly all his history is ancient. And damning.
Yes, a president can test things, even if it's just testing what others told him. We just had 8 years of someone as far from an engineer as possible never questioning anything "the smart people" ever told him, and it's been an unmitigated disaster. Jimmy Carter's admin wasn't nearly as much a failure as the corporate mass media (that loved Reagan, Nixon and both Bushes, but hated Clinton, the most successful admin of them all) would like to pretend. Or at least that media never talks about how the aftermath of Nixon and Ford running and losing the Vietnam war, losing the standoffs against OPEC/oilcorps, running the Watergate systematic corruption and resignation (and then pardoning it), and the actual rise of Russian global hegemony and Japanese manufacturing competition while we wasted time in an irrelevant Vietnam escapade, all handed Carter an overwhelming mass of problems, while Bush's CIA and his Reagan/Bush campaign manager running the SEC undermined him. Without making bad design decision like merely spending the country into unsupportable debt to hide the problems and get reelected, which is the Reagan/Bush hack every time. Against that kind of tidal wave, even a well-designed defense has little chance of remaining popular, as it calls for upfront sacrifice, even if the net result is a healthier country. The corporate mass media prefers the hacks.
And, with Bushes running first the Republican Party under Nixon and Ford, then the White House for 12 and 8 years, for 28 of 36 years, we can see just what a trainwreck even America, with all its other advantages, can become. Give me the engineer every time, but hire them a better PR team to keep the media from lying about who spent the costs they have to bear.
And fuckeads like you who'd sentence the US to a 3rd Bush term with McCain's face on it to piss off people like me who'll just benefit from the undeserved privileges, while fuckheads continue to get screwed, probably deserve the abuse.
But real people like me, who'd rather vote our self interest than squander our country on insane spite like that, will whip your ass. Because after the first two Bush terms, even the fuckheads are starting to either get a clue, or at least just stay home and leave the voting to people who understand how to do it.
But when Obama is running the country, I will indeed get a thrill now and then thinking of you frustrated fuckheads who threw away your vote for nothing.
America was created by foreigners and immigrants who annihilated the people they found here. If you're going to appeal to history for a guide to how to deal with foreigners, you're going to find that it says "fight to keep them out".
Of course, we've got a different system now. But we're also pretty full now, which we weren't before. And the countries we used to allow large influxes of working immigrants from used to run pogroms against them, or suffer from economic collapse, which H1B immigrants typically aren't fleeing. Along the way, our country instituted quotas long ago, as otherwise we'd be overrun. It's been centuries since we allowed unlimited immigration. And we've been allowing prioritized immigration on merit, entirely for the advantage of the people of this country with little regard for any competing interests of either foreign countries or people who just want to come here, for generations.
Our citizens and legal residents invest a lot in creating an economic infrastructure here, on the reasonable expectation that we'll have priority in reaping the returns from it. There's plenty of room for growth of our population, but not unlimited growth, nor has there been since the country grew into its modern condition over a century ago.
What would make IT better in this country would be more quality. Not just cheaper foreign workers, subsidized by all the time they spend (either before coming, or returning periodically) back in their cheaper country (that avoids the costs of labor and environmental protections that we have here, which makes this country worth coming to). More quality specifically in the management of finance, marketing and personnel, which is far more rudimentary and seat-of-the-pants than is the actual IT operations. Those other operations get propped up with more cheaper foreign labor, which is more likely to just toe the management line regardless of how useless or counterproductive it is, lest they lose their ticket to the US gravy train. IT wage costs for quality, manageable but proactive people are an excellent investment in profitable return. But hiring more foreign labor, especially labor that is much less likely to organize (either formally or informally) and demand competitive compensation at fully American levels, is the easy way out for bad managers. I'd note that the only exception I've seen is Canadian workers, who are excellent replacements for Americans in most cases - but they're not subsidized by their home country cheaping out on the cost of developing or housing them when they spend time back home. Other foreigners of course have a range of merit on an individual basis, but generally their average value is indexed to the overall investment in their home countries in producing and protecting quality, which in turn affects the cost of employing them here in the US.
And I'm not just talking about economic theory. I've owned IT businesses in the US and abroad. I've been a foreign IT worker, both production and management, abroad. I've managed foreign teams remotely. Both inside large and small non-IT corps, but working in IT, and in independent IT consultancies feeding hundreds of different businesses (IT and otherwise) of all sizes, in the US and foreign countries. And I can tell you that what I just described is actually how it works. Where I've put my own investment money - and gotten huge returns, at the top of the competitive heap.
Where we have IT people sitting idle or just unqualified but waiting for their entitlement checks is nearly always at corps where the management is incompetent. Usually through some kind of entitlement program of their own, like anticompetitive market structure, financial manipulation, or just unquestioned brand equity. And that management is solidly native-born American, even excluding American minorities. People who think they're entitled to hire anyone, no matter how unqualified, for production work, mainly on how cheap it is to keep them in the job. Usually because they don't understand either the nature of the production job, or the consequences of low quality producers.
No, that is a false dilemma: a choice presented as if there are only two alternatives, when there are more. In that case, the two presented are "lying ignoramus" and "honest ignoramus". I pointed out that it's possible to get someone who understands the economy, which is the preferable option, even though the choices presented excluded it.
What you just presented is the much more common case of "talking pure nonsense", built on the valid but worthless logic called "getting it totally wrong".
So the answer is: I'm right, you're wrong. You don't even rise to the level of Bush-lover shill. Now we can just get along with ignoring you on the basis of the most elementary analysis.
McCain is "moderate" only compared to the fascists in the Republican Party who hate him for being "liberal". When you're as far Right as they are, Nixon's a liberal.
The reason the government should protect jobs is because there is no free market for labor. The foreign labor competition is all subsidized. Especially at the bottom end of the skillsets, where immigrants go back to their countries for months each year, where their cheaper living cost is available because their own country sacrifices its home labor and environment to keep everything as cheap as possible.
We create governments to protect us. When there is indeed a free market, then we can talk about dropping protections. Until then, being the only one to show up at the hockey game without helmet or kneepads just guarantees getting the crap kicked out of you.
Or you could just be an incurable racist, looking for excuses to put Black people "at the back of the bus", and never listen to anything reasonable.
Like freaking out when he called his own grandmother a "typical White person" because he sympathized with her fear of strangers on the street who are Black, even though she has a Black grandson she loves and trusts.
Yeah, racism in America is a problem. And people like you, who can't even bother to listen to what it's like to live through and transcend it, without pretending you're a saint or cutting off everyone who might have some racist taint - which is impossible - as Obama has clearly explained, you people are the problem.
People who will start spurting gibberish like "Obama slandered our Constitution". Jackasses.
Like I said, Obama made two major policy speeches in the two days following his "Wright/race" speech, on Iraq and the economy. Detailed policies to address the two most pressing crises that most Americans say they care about most. What more can he do than that? He's the likely president, these are the policies people will be living with for at least 4 years, he makes speeches to large crowds in his trademark masterful style, none of the TV news covers it.
It's perfectly clear that the corporate mass media in this country totally define these races purely in terms of highschool homeroom bickering. And of course that doesn't stop with the inauguration. The link in the cycle between the officials and the people that's supposed to be the media is broken, badly broken, creating a vacuum into which ever more power flows for nothing. No wonder we never solve any of our problems.
But the Internet is different. The content is out there, even if only one person on the campaign with a camera posts it to YouTube or their website. So people can find it. It's only a matter of time before media entrepreneurs make brands under which it's easier to find those pieces of media and analysis, and put them together into some statement of "what's going on". Which is what all the old media did, and which some Internet media (video blogs) are now doing in a very rudimentary way. It's early, but it seems to take forever as the mass media just sinks deeper into irrelevancy and we live through crisis after crisis without a functioning feedback system.
And thank you for making clear that there's more people willing to post than just the people still stuck in parroting the Fox Noise froth over this whole contrived conflict.
So how does yet another Republican boondoggle contract for an essential government service mean that "computers" will thwart the 2010 Census? Are these incompetent Republicans really just a computer simulation?
Maybe this really is all just some kind of Y2K bug VR nightmare. Would someone please reboot Gore, so I can go back to watching _the Simpsons_ when it was still funny?
Your entire argument has now devolved to a gross oversimplification of every possible difference it references.
For one, I'm not reframing your entire argument to center on "big government". You said that this nuke trigger "mistake" was just "big government" at work, asked for an example to show that's wrong. I gave you an example of another nuke "mistake" recently. These nuke management systems are supposed to be run with many layers of failsafes, and have been up until recently. They're now failing, as are all the "failsafes", which are evidently gone. That's a new development, and, just like the rest of the Bush administration, lack of oversight and failsafes result in serious "mistakes" that somehow always fail in a way that benefits Bush and his agenda. Which happens to be built on these myths about "big government" failing, instead of putting blame on bad government run to remove protections and increase profitable threats.
So you might regret suggesting it was "just big government", but in fact you keep insisting that's what's at work anyway. And while you're in no position to guarantee these aren't examples of "a Republican plot to destroy the world" (a hyperbolic straw man I didn't suggest), you're instead just insisting on some kind of coincidence theory that you've got no evidence for.
I'm not implying that Clinton/Gore didn't do wrong, or that they didn't invade countries. But if you're going to say that there's no difference between invading the ex-Yugoslavian countries to stop their horrific violence (which tends to spread to the rest of Europe, though Europe failed to protect its own backyard), and our crazy, catastrophic invasion of Iraq, then there's no talking to you. If you're going to compare the Clinton/Gore ATF and Echelon to the Bush/Cheney NSA/CIA/Pentagon, TIA, FEMA, and the endless list of real catastrophes, compare Gore's Climate Change activism to Bush/Cheney's denial, then there's no talking to you. Because then you have no sense of proportion. You think there's some kind of comparison between "good vs evil" going on here. What there is to compare is competence vs catastrophe. If you can't see the difference, go ahead and find some other candidate who you can rely on to do no harm with all that power and yes, that big government.
You've found a way to ignore that a huge percentage of Americans who founded this country and built it were slaves denied any rights for generations. Your method? Screaming "fuck" at me, despite all I've offered you as education. While refusing to cite any of your arguments.
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The Romans were broken by overextending their empire while using their external enemies as internal support, while the most ambitious moved East to Byzantium. The Byzantines were broken by relying on trade rather than military in a military world. The Muslim Caliphate absorbed too many foreign cultures without using enough of their traditional methods of living, so required forced ignorance to keep the old ways from creeping back and undoing the contrived faithy government. What happens to the US remains to be seen, but any collapse here will bring down the rest of the civilization, which is effectively a global American culture, while the US itself will have the strongest advantages in recovering, as has happened several times since the US became the crossroads of the global economy over a century ago.
BTW, "what's left" of those old empires is 1: Europe and global Christianity; 2: Turkey (which was still a serious empire until the British dismantled it and absorbed it commercially a century ago); 3: the Islamic world, containing a billion people, much of the world's cash, huge spans of territory, and domination of critical global industries like energy and shipping/ports. What will remain of the US hegemony after the current crisis is done will probably last a while, too, despite the current condition of direct competition among similar powers (all closely interconnected), unlike those past precedents.
But all of that is different from France's predicament. By the start of WWI France was largely already done with its leadership in everything but clothing style, some literature and painting, and some architecture - all of which were not only easily copied abroad, but influential only to the extent that they were copied abroad. And then sometime between 1870-1910 or so, France seems to have given up. Maybe successive defeats by Germany, or (or combined with) the collapse of its global agricultural empire (underway through the 1800s). But not really comparable to those others you cited, because France wasn't the dominant empire in its territory before it suddenly declined. You're comparing apples and oranges: military/political "world" (on whatever historical scale) domination to cultural "retirement". None of those predecessors offer a model for France.
There is a possible previous model: Colonial Spain. Mainly Spain's ascendance was due to the sudden tech leap turning distance from an impossible barrier into a conduit for power, in which Spain had all the advantages and few disadvantages. Long distance warships carrying cannon, rifles and horses, suddenly made available disadvantaged (and largely unknown) conquerable rivals unable to reach back to Spain, where the Church kept neighbors with military threats aligned under "Christendom" (and arranged marriages among an extended family ruling all of them). When the rivals caught up technologically and politically, Spain's temporary (a couple centuries) advantage collapsed, and with it Spain's cultural leadership. Maybe France's long-evolved leadership hit a similar tech/political wall, but no one's explained that yet.
Something happened. What?
As soon as we can, we're gonna make him boil himself in oil, which we'll give away to hippies for their biofuel cars.
Give me a break. The Chunnel and the Concorde were 50/50 partnerships with the UK, and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900.
You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast.
This isn't a question of whether France is cool - I love France. But the question is how they lost their leadership. Their performance since the end of the colonial era is as an also-ran, by a large nation that had been churning out innovation with the best of them for a long time. What happened?
I didn't say it was so great, and even mentioned that it featured executions. But it did finally get rid of a millenium of hereditary monarchy, and pave the way for republican democracy in France.
If you've got a point to make about how the French Revolution was so terrible that it was part of the reason France declined so dramatically in primacy by the 20th Century, then make it. Otherwise, your complaint is irrelevant here. This isn't a referendum on how terrible history's transitions are, but rather a discussion of how France managed to lose its lead.
I avoided mentioning it because it's a competitive advantage I'd prefer not to share with all of Slashdot (and my competitors, who read Slashdot, especially stories like this one).
You can feel free to believe that I'm making it up. I probably would, if I were in your shoes. I'm not making it up, but I'm not going to give it away here. Sorry.
That is an excellent compromise.
Is there a way to start a minimal account at EC2 which just idles away doing nothing, and a virtualization account somewhere else (like at my cheap, but flat rate per server, provider), and then very quickly clone my running virtual session over the Internet to the EC2, where it quickly starts running to handle the spikes (then shuts down)? With that setup, I could use EC2 as purely generic spike capacity, and just need as much advance warning that a spike is going to max out my cheap provider as far ahead as the time it takes to send the virtualized session over to EC2 and start it up. Now that is some 21st Century load balancing, and really an example of using virtualization where nothing else will really do. "Just in time" virtual cloning for spike handling.
Because they can compete with me that way. If it drives me away, well, they got my money for a while, and maybe dealt me some blows in shutting me down and making me move around instead of competing.
This is always the general problem with the network vendor also competing in the other layers in which the network customers are competing.
Well, 250Mbps is (250 * 30.48 * 3600 / 8) 82.296TB:mo max. That would cost $12,439.28 per month at Amazon, and (at $0.05:GB->2TB/$1:GB@2TB+) $79,896 at my "cheaper" host, but only because the punitive per-GB cost of exceeding the 2TB cap at my host. Since I load balance already, the 82.296TB would be split across 41 or 42 $100:mo servers, which would cost $4200 at my host.
Spending that $4200 at Amazon gets 23.3TB, which at my host would cost $1200. That $1200 at Amazon would get 6.7TB, which would cost $400 at my host. $400 buys 2.2TB from Amazon, which is just a little more than what I get for $100 now.
So the 3-4x cost of Amazon buys me instant scaling to the (more expensive) bandwidth tiers, without the lead time to buy and start up a new server. Conversely, my bandwidth has to drop to 1/3-4 at Amazon before I'm spending less there than at my cheaper but oversupplied host.
So if I know far enough in advance to deploy new servers that I'm going to grow more than 3-4x (or drop extra ones if I shrink that much), then my current host is cheaper. But spikes are a different story, because I do have to buy a whole month at least (and there's startup fees, but that's probably matched by all the other fees other than bandwidth at Amazon, which are included in my current host costs cited here). If my bandwidth spike doesn't consume at least 25-33% of the cheaper bandwidth, I'll have bought too much extra bandwidth, and could have saved at Amazon.
It's good to have the options. And maybe some of the customers at my current host will be tempted over to Amazon, because that choice is better for them. Which could spur my host to offer similar spike pricing models, at the current lower price rates. So, GO AMAZON!
The French were right up there at the forefront of progress and innovation for centuries. They practically defined the Enlightenment. Their democratic revolution followed the US lead, and even went so far as to execute their tyrant, not just kick him out. Their mathematicians and writers were among the very best, helping invent science and modern scholarship. Their engineering produced the Eiffel Tower. They gave us Jules Verne, imagining a future as fiercely as no one else except perhaps HG Wells.
But then it all hit the wall, apparently sometime in the late 1800s. Was it the Franco-Prussian War? Did they just get distracted by art and fashion long enough to get their derriere's torched in WWI? Did some magic spirit choke on a fin-de-siecle?
What happened?
The calc shows that data transfer costs $0.18:GB out ($0.10:GB in), with no maximum (or minimum) charge. It doesn't show max bandwidth, but I'd expect Amazon to have some fat connectivity, though I'd want a CIR (Committed Information Rate, or guaranteed minimum rate) for any real pro application.
But I can get data transfer (in or out) for $0.05:GB up to 2TB:mo, with root access on an actual dedicated server, not VPS ($0.03:GB for VPS). At a datacenter I've used for a couple years, with good support, >99.99% uptime, never any bandwidth capping, on fast machines with good amounts of storage. With years of experience. GB after the cap are expensive, like $1:GB, but I use geographic diversity already, so I split my loads across multiple servers, pooling their caps across the balanced loads. Transfers within the hosting WAN are free.
So while Amazon looks interesting, I think I'll keep my existing hosting company, which is anywhere from 2-6x as cheap as Amazon's new, relatively untested service, with potential competition from Amazon's own services.
How much bandwidth transfer a month can I get there, and how much does it cost? What's the max sustained bandwidth that I can get from one of their servers?
And if I'm competing with Amazon by running a popular streaming radio station (even paying the required royalties, but of course not to Amazon), will they start shutting me down?
So? Only McCain is running for president. The rest of the Keating 5 aren't. And all of them except John Glenn ended their careers after their role was exposed.
McCain interfered with banking regulations to help a friend, regardless of how his crimes were whitewashed by a Congress eager to minimize exposure of that corruption (and which lost its 40-year majority shortly afterwards). Later, in 2000, McCain again interfered with regulators for the lobbyist he was committing adultery with, as was finally exposed last month since McCain is running for president on his Congressional record.
Why not "dredge up" the Keating 5? It shows that McCain has a record of corruption that doesn't even stop when he gets caught. Although I guess you Republicans only like "ancient history" when you're talking about a mythical Ronald Reagan who never existed outside an ad campaign. But with ancient McCain, nearly all his history is ancient. And damning.
Yes, a president can test things, even if it's just testing what others told him. We just had 8 years of someone as far from an engineer as possible never questioning anything "the smart people" ever told him, and it's been an unmitigated disaster. Jimmy Carter's admin wasn't nearly as much a failure as the corporate mass media (that loved Reagan, Nixon and both Bushes, but hated Clinton, the most successful admin of them all) would like to pretend. Or at least that media never talks about how the aftermath of Nixon and Ford running and losing the Vietnam war, losing the standoffs against OPEC/oilcorps, running the Watergate systematic corruption and resignation (and then pardoning it), and the actual rise of Russian global hegemony and Japanese manufacturing competition while we wasted time in an irrelevant Vietnam escapade, all handed Carter an overwhelming mass of problems, while Bush's CIA and his Reagan/Bush campaign manager running the SEC undermined him. Without making bad design decision like merely spending the country into unsupportable debt to hide the problems and get reelected, which is the Reagan/Bush hack every time. Against that kind of tidal wave, even a well-designed defense has little chance of remaining popular, as it calls for upfront sacrifice, even if the net result is a healthier country. The corporate mass media prefers the hacks.
And, with Bushes running first the Republican Party under Nixon and Ford, then the White House for 12 and 8 years, for 28 of 36 years, we can see just what a trainwreck even America, with all its other advantages, can become. Give me the engineer every time, but hire them a better PR team to keep the media from lying about who spent the costs they have to bear.
And fuckeads like you who'd sentence the US to a 3rd Bush term with McCain's face on it to piss off people like me who'll just benefit from the undeserved privileges, while fuckheads continue to get screwed, probably deserve the abuse.
But real people like me, who'd rather vote our self interest than squander our country on insane spite like that, will whip your ass. Because after the first two Bush terms, even the fuckheads are starting to either get a clue, or at least just stay home and leave the voting to people who understand how to do it.
But when Obama is running the country, I will indeed get a thrill now and then thinking of you frustrated fuckheads who threw away your vote for nothing.
America was created by foreigners and immigrants who annihilated the people they found here. If you're going to appeal to history for a guide to how to deal with foreigners, you're going to find that it says "fight to keep them out".
Of course, we've got a different system now. But we're also pretty full now, which we weren't before. And the countries we used to allow large influxes of working immigrants from used to run pogroms against them, or suffer from economic collapse, which H1B immigrants typically aren't fleeing. Along the way, our country instituted quotas long ago, as otherwise we'd be overrun. It's been centuries since we allowed unlimited immigration. And we've been allowing prioritized immigration on merit, entirely for the advantage of the people of this country with little regard for any competing interests of either foreign countries or people who just want to come here, for generations.
Our citizens and legal residents invest a lot in creating an economic infrastructure here, on the reasonable expectation that we'll have priority in reaping the returns from it. There's plenty of room for growth of our population, but not unlimited growth, nor has there been since the country grew into its modern condition over a century ago.
What would make IT better in this country would be more quality. Not just cheaper foreign workers, subsidized by all the time they spend (either before coming, or returning periodically) back in their cheaper country (that avoids the costs of labor and environmental protections that we have here, which makes this country worth coming to). More quality specifically in the management of finance, marketing and personnel, which is far more rudimentary and seat-of-the-pants than is the actual IT operations. Those other operations get propped up with more cheaper foreign labor, which is more likely to just toe the management line regardless of how useless or counterproductive it is, lest they lose their ticket to the US gravy train. IT wage costs for quality, manageable but proactive people are an excellent investment in profitable return. But hiring more foreign labor, especially labor that is much less likely to organize (either formally or informally) and demand competitive compensation at fully American levels, is the easy way out for bad managers. I'd note that the only exception I've seen is Canadian workers, who are excellent replacements for Americans in most cases - but they're not subsidized by their home country cheaping out on the cost of developing or housing them when they spend time back home. Other foreigners of course have a range of merit on an individual basis, but generally their average value is indexed to the overall investment in their home countries in producing and protecting quality, which in turn affects the cost of employing them here in the US.
And I'm not just talking about economic theory. I've owned IT businesses in the US and abroad. I've been a foreign IT worker, both production and management, abroad. I've managed foreign teams remotely. Both inside large and small non-IT corps, but working in IT, and in independent IT consultancies feeding hundreds of different businesses (IT and otherwise) of all sizes, in the US and foreign countries. And I can tell you that what I just described is actually how it works. Where I've put my own investment money - and gotten huge returns, at the top of the competitive heap.
Where we have IT people sitting idle or just unqualified but waiting for their entitlement checks is nearly always at corps where the management is incompetent. Usually through some kind of entitlement program of their own, like anticompetitive market structure, financial manipulation, or just unquestioned brand equity. And that management is solidly native-born American, even excluding American minorities. People who think they're entitled to hire anyone, no matter how unqualified, for production work, mainly on how cheap it is to keep them in the job. Usually because they don't understand either the nature of the production job, or the consequences of low quality producers.
No, that is a false dilemma: a choice presented as if there are only two alternatives, when there are more. In that case, the two presented are "lying ignoramus" and "honest ignoramus". I pointed out that it's possible to get someone who understands the economy, which is the preferable option, even though the choices presented excluded it.
What you just presented is the much more common case of "talking pure nonsense", built on the valid but worthless logic called "getting it totally wrong".
So the answer is: I'm right, you're wrong. You don't even rise to the level of Bush-lover shill. Now we can just get along with ignoring you on the basis of the most elementary analysis.
McCain is "moderate" only compared to the fascists in the Republican Party who hate him for being "liberal". When you're as far Right as they are, Nixon's a liberal.
The reason the government should protect jobs is because there is no free market for labor. The foreign labor competition is all subsidized. Especially at the bottom end of the skillsets, where immigrants go back to their countries for months each year, where their cheaper living cost is available because their own country sacrifices its home labor and environment to keep everything as cheap as possible.
We create governments to protect us. When there is indeed a free market, then we can talk about dropping protections. Until then, being the only one to show up at the hockey game without helmet or kneepads just guarantees getting the crap kicked out of you.
Or you could just be an incurable racist, looking for excuses to put Black people "at the back of the bus", and never listen to anything reasonable.
Like freaking out when he called his own grandmother a "typical White person" because he sympathized with her fear of strangers on the street who are Black, even though she has a Black grandson she loves and trusts.
Yeah, racism in America is a problem. And people like you, who can't even bother to listen to what it's like to live through and transcend it, without pretending you're a saint or cutting off everyone who might have some racist taint - which is impossible - as Obama has clearly explained, you people are the problem.
People who will start spurting gibberish like "Obama slandered our Constitution". Jackasses.
Like I said, Obama made two major policy speeches in the two days following his "Wright/race" speech, on Iraq and the economy. Detailed policies to address the two most pressing crises that most Americans say they care about most. What more can he do than that? He's the likely president, these are the policies people will be living with for at least 4 years, he makes speeches to large crowds in his trademark masterful style, none of the TV news covers it.
It's perfectly clear that the corporate mass media in this country totally define these races purely in terms of highschool homeroom bickering. And of course that doesn't stop with the inauguration. The link in the cycle between the officials and the people that's supposed to be the media is broken, badly broken, creating a vacuum into which ever more power flows for nothing. No wonder we never solve any of our problems.
But the Internet is different. The content is out there, even if only one person on the campaign with a camera posts it to YouTube or their website. So people can find it. It's only a matter of time before media entrepreneurs make brands under which it's easier to find those pieces of media and analysis, and put them together into some statement of "what's going on". Which is what all the old media did, and which some Internet media (video blogs) are now doing in a very rudimentary way. It's early, but it seems to take forever as the mass media just sinks deeper into irrelevancy and we live through crisis after crisis without a functioning feedback system.
But it's coming along. And we're not dead yet.
You're welcome.
And thank you for making clear that there's more people willing to post than just the people still stuck in parroting the Fox Noise froth over this whole contrived conflict.
So how does yet another Republican boondoggle contract for an essential government service mean that "computers" will thwart the 2010 Census? Are these incompetent Republicans really just a computer simulation?
Maybe this really is all just some kind of Y2K bug VR nightmare. Would someone please reboot Gore, so I can go back to watching _the Simpsons_ when it was still funny?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22jeremiah+wright%22+transcript
Goodbye, fuckhead.
Your entire argument has now devolved to a gross oversimplification of every possible difference it references.
For one, I'm not reframing your entire argument to center on "big government". You said that this nuke trigger "mistake" was just "big government" at work, asked for an example to show that's wrong. I gave you an example of another nuke "mistake" recently. These nuke management systems are supposed to be run with many layers of failsafes, and have been up until recently. They're now failing, as are all the "failsafes", which are evidently gone. That's a new development, and, just like the rest of the Bush administration, lack of oversight and failsafes result in serious "mistakes" that somehow always fail in a way that benefits Bush and his agenda. Which happens to be built on these myths about "big government" failing, instead of putting blame on bad government run to remove protections and increase profitable threats.
So you might regret suggesting it was "just big government", but in fact you keep insisting that's what's at work anyway. And while you're in no position to guarantee these aren't examples of "a Republican plot to destroy the world" (a hyperbolic straw man I didn't suggest), you're instead just insisting on some kind of coincidence theory that you've got no evidence for.
I'm not implying that Clinton/Gore didn't do wrong, or that they didn't invade countries. But if you're going to say that there's no difference between invading the ex-Yugoslavian countries to stop their horrific violence (which tends to spread to the rest of Europe, though Europe failed to protect its own backyard), and our crazy, catastrophic invasion of Iraq, then there's no talking to you. If you're going to compare the Clinton/Gore ATF and Echelon to the Bush/Cheney NSA/CIA/Pentagon, TIA, FEMA, and the endless list of real catastrophes, compare Gore's Climate Change activism to Bush/Cheney's denial, then there's no talking to you. Because then you have no sense of proportion. You think there's some kind of comparison between "good vs evil" going on here. What there is to compare is competence vs catastrophe. If you can't see the difference, go ahead and find some other candidate who you can rely on to do no harm with all that power and yes, that big government.
You talk like the only Slaves were in the South.
You talk like there's no such thing as transcripts. And that it's OK to make a claim without citing it when asked.
In fact, you talk like a total cunt.
No more of that. Fuck you very much, and goodbye.
Fuck you.
You've found a way to ignore that a huge percentage of Americans who founded this country and built it were slaves denied any rights for generations. Your method? Screaming "fuck" at me, despite all I've offered you as education. While refusing to cite any of your arguments.
Go fuck yourself.