Are you seriously trying to say Locationfree and Win Media Center are equivalent devices? Seriously???
Putting that asside, lets "assume" that they are equivalent, and ask the question: When was the first time locationfree talked to the PSP or PS3 compared to when the original Xbox talked with Media Center? Then lets compare when I was able capture a HDTV OTA signal with Media Center compared to Locationfree. Then compare when Media Center could capture digital cable signals from a digital QAM source comapred to LocationFree. Then compare when Media Center would act like a true DVR, compared to Locationfree. and so on and so on.
Using a game console as a viewing device and having a secondary device to act as a TV tuner/Media manager... sure sounds like Xbox + Windows Media Center to me. I thought the PS3 was supposed to be leading the whole media front rather than playing catchup/me-too. Granted I'm not a big fan of the WMC look and feel, but they've been doing it for years already so the PS3 should have had this from the start (heck WMC can do encrypted cable card capture, and send it the Xbox) rather than months later.
The actual time that a system "exists" in Dell's shop is somewhere in the order of 15-20 minutes total. Everything is done "JIT" by Dell and primarily by third parties, companies lease parking spots across the street from Dell for their parts delivery trucks (Dell will actually fine a company for bringing parts to their dark 30 minutes too early). The time it takes to receive the parts from the dock, assemble it and put it in a box for shipping is less time that it would take to do dump of a disk image onto the drive.
They have such tight supply chain constraints, they have to have an extremely rigid assembly line; and due to quantities that they are shipping it would not surprise me a bit for the cost of the variation for even (what we would think) are large Linux orders to cost them the same ammount or even more than a Windows system.
Did you miss the part about the closed source module? There is no public interface. This isn't kexec. VMware are distributing the kernel and a closed source module together. Can you name another company that does that? How about the Linux flavor of the day Ubuntu? http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7895189911.html
Hmmm... boy it didn't take me 3 seconds on a search engine to find this or anything (stupid posts from people who couldn't take a single second to think annoy me)
1) If a forum member is a "journalist", than every single person here on slashdot is now a jounalist. 2) I guess you are OK with wiretapping you then because as you say "If you don't want your secrets getting out, protect them better."
So in your opinion it's better to lay off a bunch of innocent people than to request the log files from a website? It's better for a bunch of people with family's to get laid off, possibly lose their house, car, etc than it is to request the log files from a website... glad you aren't in charge of the world.
And just so you know, a subpoena is a LEGAL court order to turn over records, which is completely different than suing.
Unfortunately, the critics of global warming -- most of whom have no science credentials whatsoever, and certainly not in climatology, but will cherrypick scientific results to support their edified conclusions -- will be all over this "weakness." Now, whenever the subject of temperature records comes up, this error will be used to "invalidate" it, and they will ignore the fact that the data are now in fact stronger because these records have been independently reviewed and debugged.
Now, every time global warming comes up, especially in the MSM, this issue will be the distraction that prevents a real, rational discussion from taking place. And every critic of GW will latch on to this bug as "evidence" that global warming is a fallacy.
This is very bad news.
Now we have to wait for Manhattan and Ft. Meyers to be submerged before the critics will desist from their fanatical denials, hypocritical projections of bias, ad homenim attacks on past Vice Presidents, and willfully ignorant conflation of weather with climate.
Someone prominent needs to come out, and make a very big splash in the MSM to estabish the fact that the data - and whatever deductions can be made from them - are now stronger, rather than weaker.
That is what you posted, now try again to say with a straight face that you are agnostic on this issue. Wishy/washy hypocritics like you annoy the hell out of me, don't weasel out of something and try to say that you are playing both sides. If you are going to take such a strong position upfront, at least have enough spine to stay with it for at least a little bit, or at least engage in conversationg rather than jumping directly to being agnostic about it the first time you are questioned.
You are grasping at straws, I tried to be forceful enough last time for you to realize that shear stupidity of what you are saying, obviously you are a moron amongst morons and will have to be a bit more blunt.
1) You don't know what you are talking about 2) You don't know what you are talking about 3) You don't know what you are talking about (is it finally sinking in?) 4) You are a complete moron for even thinking that, let alone suggesting it 5) The internet got a bit stupider soley because of you
An operating system's job is not to check for syntax input to programs, that's what the program is supposed to do, since the operating system has no knowledge of what the program is going to actually do. The arguments I give to a "rm" or "df" commands are not valid ones I'd give to fsck_ext3, and no person with half an understanding of how computers work would ever expect the operating system to have to keep a table of that information.
You really aren't this idiotic are you??? You expect the operating system to know how to filter the correct input to be given to all programs? That's completely stupid and would only work if all the applications came from the same vendor.
In your scenario the operating system should know that when I create a brand new program that "-h../../../etc/passwd" is a valid CLI argument for my program, but that the same one passed to some other app is bad. Do you have a single ounce of understanding of what you are saying or are just spouting BS?
Umm... look at the bottom link in that page, Firefox doesn't quote URI's either, so it is affected by the *exact* issue. Firefox will act the exact same way as IE does and directly pass the URI.
I would say though that a browser should *never* trust input, whether that input is from a webpage or being executed via a command line. So not only does Firefox not quote out URI parameters, it doesn't verify input either, so it gets a double whammy on this one.
The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error within the handling of system default URIs with registered URI handlers (e.g. "mailto", "news", "nntp", "snews", "telnet"). This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands when a user e.g. using Firefox visits a malicious website with a specially crafted "mailto" URI containing a "%" character and ends in a certain extension (e.g. ".bat", ".cmd")
But is it absurd to think that in a court case dealing with something illegal and the investigators doing forensic analysis of your harddrive come across something hidden/encrypted that it couldn't contain some from of illicit information? If one says that all encryption is only meant to hide illegal information that is stupid, but is also stupid to say that encryption isn't used to hide illegal information.
Just like burning all the clothes you had worn that day in the backyard at 4am, the before you call the police in the morning to tell them your wife is missing, by itself it isn't illegal in anyway (maybe you were in old clothes working in the garden and found some form of fungus and after cleaning it up you don't want to possibly spread by accident). But it would be stupid for someone not to have some interesting assumptions when she isn't found a year later.
By itself hiding/encrypting data is nothing, but coupled with other data I think some assumptions could be resonably made.
Actually he *is* talking about HTTPS, TLS is the successor to SSL it came about because the MD5 & SHA-1 algorithms have been "technically" compromised.
Actually it's not really the cable companies pushing DRM, it's the content providers; I'm fairly positive since in general the cable company doesn't create content they don't have an invested interest in the broadcast flag, etc (other than if they can't have the content they will go under). Really what is the benefit to the cable company to do any kind of DRM enforcement? It's not their content they are paying someone else to redistribute it, it increases their service calls, requires hardware upgrades, etc. The only reason why they do it, was becausee the content owners said they wouldn't get the movies, etc anymore if they didn't, and the government requires respecting of the broadcast flags. TimeWarner being a content creator is probably one of the few who might have a vested interest in using DRM to begin with, but Comcast, others... other than to keep getting content probably not (the support costs about HDCP DRM not working with their TV alone is probably in the millions).
The content owners lobied the government to push for requiring encryption of their content on cable, there is no such federal mandate for satellite, but sine satellite content is already encrypted and DRM encombered already they don't really need to. If one wants to get tin-foil hatish about it, one could say that the whole push for digital TV connections is a conspiracy to drop all analog & unencrypted QAM channels, in the future by the content owners; undet the guise of pushing technology "forward" so we don't stay in the stone-age of a 480i analog NTSC signal.
If you are going to try and say that it's about when logos and look and feel than how long has Linux has a standardized windows manager and logo that everybody associates Linux with? Even today, there isn't even really just one: is it the penguin, the Redhat logo, the Suse logo, Ubuntu's logo?? I'd say using your own requirements that Windows has had a brand longer the Linux.
Are people really seriously concerned about this?? Maybe its me but I dont boot my linux (or windows) systems daily, or even monthly. The flexibility that modules give me, more than outways shaving 3 seconds off the boot time...
Actually the schools aren't focusing on turning out MBA's, they are focusing on giving everyone a total education, where as a good portion of the rest of the world focus on giving only certain people total education, and others limited education.
Speaking about non-higher education (equivalent K-12 education), in europe, asia, etc. when your age is in the single digits (US's grade school) you get a standardized test to see if the state is willing to spend resources to continue to educate you academically or not. If not you get put into a track that is geared more toward manual labor, etc. A little bit older and another round too see if they should continue to spend money on training you for bigger and better things. They basically weed out people that they don't believe have the value to receive further higher-education and believe that they are better suited to something a little less. There is an assumption that not everybody is equal and that even for a base education that it is wasteful to try and bring everybody to the same level.
In the US everybody gets the same education end to end, that everybody can have an equal base education. They believe that weeding people out is discriminatory, every should get the same base education. There is no official blue-collar educational tracks for the K-12 years in the US, a person will not be prevented from trying to take higher classes because they didn't do perfectly on a standardized test from years ago. (some of this is changing with acknowledging gifted students more and more, but the US still does not categorize kids in gradeschool and determine there future education options and what schools they will not be able to goto in the future)
The US system is really about equality, at the expense of quality; whereas asia & europe (talking in general as I'm sure there are a number of countries that don't still do it this way) tends to be quality at the expense of equality (again not talking about higher-ed)
Prove the source is crap, here is where you fail, and show your stupidity
1) You haven't provide a single reference that refutes factcheck's information on Chenney 2) Tried to provide a completely separate instance where there is a disagreement on whether or not a political add about soldier helmet re-imbursement was a vote on body armor or not. 3) Mediamatters has repeatedly used factcheck as a source of data (you know the same one you linked to), in fact multiple politicians (dem, repub & indep) used it multiple times as a reliable source of data and repeatedly referenced it in their campaign speaches
You haven't proved anything that factcheck is crap... Can you prove anything about Chenney there on the factcheck.org links are incorrect? If it was incorrect, you surely could point to a link on that, that should be seriously easy.
Again, how is it a conflict of interest? He can receive no benefits, period, in fact he loses money. If he were to receive a kick-back on it sure, that would be a conflict of interest. You keep avoiding the issue, show me where the conflict is.. step me through it, from where he gets the stocks, etc. and when the actual point of conflict of interst is. The answer is simply, that you can't if you could you would have done it already. Keep digging that hole deeper, because you are looking more and more childish.
hahaha... so that's the game you want to play... try and attack the source and try to discredit it, try to discredit it using a topic that isn't in play using a strawman argument. Nice try, but I'm not a dumbass... but apparently you are.
Again what is the obvious conflict of interest, there is no possible way he can profit from it period. Just answer that simple question than avoiding it like you tried to do.
Or how about the complete misunderstanding (or more likely intentional *twisting* but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) of the truth that flew over *your* head
He had the stock prior to taking office from when he was an executive in Halliburton, before he became VP he setup a number of things just to make sure that there wouldn't be any financial profiting: http://www.factcheck.org/article261.html
1) He receives a residual income from Halliburton from when he was working there, this is a guaranteed quantity of money if Halliburton does well or does poorly. The only way it could be at risk is if Halliburton would go bankrupt (like that's going to happen), but to placate even that chance he took out an insurance policy prior to becoming VP that would continue this income even if Halliburton went bankrupt. So he has absolutely no benefit if Halliburton profits or not from the war regarding this income.
2) The stock option deal was in place again prior to becoming VP, 2 days before he became the VP he singed a legal document that could not be waived or revoked that from that point on any and all after tax profits going forward would be given to three charities. So rather than any profiting those options are losing money every year as the value of them decrease due to inflation every year. He can't receive any benefits from war profiting, but the university of washington (40%), George Washington University (40%), and Capital Partners for Education (20%) would, and I'm sure that he started a war so that the universities could increase there coffers.
Would you like to show me the massively *OBVIOUS* conflict of interest there? Please do, back what you are saying up.
Actually it wasn't an issue back when they had bo bid contracts before:
Halliburton had won the LOGCAP contract with the government in 92, later on in the 90's they lost that contract; but Clinton in 97 went ahead and gave them no bid contracts for the Balkans even though they had lost their LOGCAP contract, nobody made a peep (in fact Clinton had even given Halliburton under Chenney an award). In 2001 the US LOGCAP contract is backup for renewal and Halliburton wins the contract again and everybody is fine with it. After regaining the LOGCAP contract the US makes a no bid deal to extinguish oil-fires in Iraq and then people have a problem with them, and it's a big conspiracy.
I think it's just that people like seeing conspiracies where they can, rather than rational thought.
The cost to make isn't in the physical media. If I measured cost to make the linux kernel only with physical CD media, I would then say that the kernel is worth less than a a single US dollar. All the thousands and thousands of man hours worked to get the kernel to it's kernel state are completely ignored under your model, because you assume that the cost to deliver the physical media is where the value is, when that actually is the least costly and least profitable part of the business.
It's the equivalent of saying we'll spend 40 million dollars (going rate for a new game) in paying coders to create a new game. And we'll make a huge profit by selling CD's of it for $1.00, when it only cost us $.10 to make the CD by using cheap laber China labor. If we sell a million copies we'll have a profit of $900,000 we'll be rolling in the cash!!! (do you see something missing here... something like you are still down $39,100,000). The reason the game costs $40,50,60 is because you have to recoup the costs you paid upfront to create the game to begin with.
Ha! Wii is having month long shortages because, while the PS3 sales rate were so overestimated that they now are trying to use that surplus for other things. If the PS3 was kicking as much ass, they would be telling everybody else to go pound sand; because they have so much consumer interest they couldn't chain their supply chain so early in the product's lifespan.
Because the PS3 is kicking so little ass compared to Sony's expectations they have a glut and are now looking for unusual ways to reduce stocks outside of consumer gaming. It's positive sign when you do that for a mature product that has limited growth potential in it's current markets, it's a bad sign when you do that for a product early in it's lifetime when it's primary market is supposed to be growing quickly.
But it's infinetly more useful than the wifi on any other mp3 player (as there are none). I don't quite understand how people think it's a ding against Microsoft when even in a crippled fashion it has more functionality than the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you seriously trying to say Locationfree and Win Media Center are equivalent devices? Seriously???
Putting that asside, lets "assume" that they are equivalent, and ask the question: When was the first time locationfree talked to the PSP or PS3 compared to when the original Xbox talked with Media Center? Then lets compare when I was able capture a HDTV OTA signal with Media Center compared to Locationfree. Then compare when Media Center could capture digital cable signals from a digital QAM source comapred to LocationFree. Then compare when Media Center would act like a true DVR, compared to Locationfree. and so on and so on.
Using a game console as a viewing device and having a secondary device to act as a TV tuner/Media manager... sure sounds like Xbox + Windows Media Center to me. I thought the PS3 was supposed to be leading the whole media front rather than playing catchup/me-too. Granted I'm not a big fan of the WMC look and feel, but they've been doing it for years already so the PS3 should have had this from the start (heck WMC can do encrypted cable card capture, and send it the Xbox) rather than months later.
The actual time that a system "exists" in Dell's shop is somewhere in the order of 15-20 minutes total. Everything is done "JIT" by Dell and primarily by third parties, companies lease parking spots across the street from Dell for their parts delivery trucks (Dell will actually fine a company for bringing parts to their dark 30 minutes too early). The time it takes to receive the parts from the dock, assemble it and put it in a box for shipping is less time that it would take to do dump of a disk image onto the drive.
They have such tight supply chain constraints, they have to have an extremely rigid assembly line; and due to quantities that they are shipping it would not surprise me a bit for the cost of the variation for even (what we would think) are large Linux orders to cost them the same ammount or even more than a Windows system.
Hmmm... boy it didn't take me 3 seconds on a search engine to find this or anything (stupid posts from people who couldn't take a single second to think annoy me)
m l
http://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html
Heck the ESX EULA, gives you a nice hyperlink to the downloads even
http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/esx_server.ht
1) If a forum member is a "journalist", than every single person here on slashdot is now a jounalist.
2) I guess you are OK with wiretapping you then because as you say "If you don't want your secrets getting out, protect them better."
So in your opinion it's better to lay off a bunch of innocent people than to request the log files from a website? It's better for a bunch of people with family's to get laid off, possibly lose their house, car, etc than it is to request the log files from a website... glad you aren't in charge of the world.
And just so you know, a subpoena is a LEGAL court order to turn over records, which is completely different than suing.
Unfortunately, the critics of global warming -- most of whom have no science credentials whatsoever, and certainly not in climatology, but will cherrypick scientific results to support their edified conclusions -- will be all over this "weakness." Now, whenever the subject of temperature records comes up, this error will be used to "invalidate" it, and they will ignore the fact that the data are now in fact stronger because these records have been independently reviewed and debugged.
Now, every time global warming comes up, especially in the MSM, this issue will be the distraction that prevents a real, rational discussion from taking place. And every critic of GW will latch on to this bug as "evidence" that global warming is a fallacy.
This is very bad news.
Now we have to wait for Manhattan and Ft. Meyers to be submerged before the critics will desist from their fanatical denials, hypocritical projections of bias, ad homenim attacks on past Vice Presidents, and willfully ignorant conflation of weather with climate.
Someone prominent needs to come out, and make a very big splash in the MSM to estabish the fact that the data - and whatever deductions can be made from them - are now stronger, rather than weaker.
That is what you posted, now try again to say with a straight face that you are agnostic on this issue. Wishy/washy hypocritics like you annoy the hell out of me, don't weasel out of something and try to say that you are playing both sides. If you are going to take such a strong position upfront, at least have enough spine to stay with it for at least a little bit, or at least engage in conversationg rather than jumping directly to being agnostic about it the first time you are questioned.
You are grasping at straws, I tried to be forceful enough last time for you to realize that shear stupidity of what you are saying, obviously you are a moron amongst morons and will have to be a bit more blunt.
1) You don't know what you are talking about
2) You don't know what you are talking about
3) You don't know what you are talking about (is it finally sinking in?)
4) You are a complete moron for even thinking that, let alone suggesting it
5) The internet got a bit stupider soley because of you
An operating system's job is not to check for syntax input to programs, that's what the program is supposed to do, since the operating system has no knowledge of what the program is going to actually do. The arguments I give to a "rm" or "df" commands are not valid ones I'd give to fsck_ext3, and no person with half an understanding of how computers work would ever expect the operating system to have to keep a table of that information.
You really aren't this idiotic are you??? You expect the operating system to know how to filter the correct input to be given to all programs? That's completely stupid and would only work if all the applications came from the same vendor.
../../../etc/passwd" is a valid CLI argument for my program, but that the same one passed to some other app is bad. Do you have a single ounce of understanding of what you are saying or are just spouting BS?
In your scenario the operating system should know that when I create a brand new program that "-h
Umm... look at the bottom link in that page, Firefox doesn't quote URI's either, so it is affected by the *exact* issue. Firefox will act the exact same way as IE does and directly pass the URI.
0 7/07/20/hey-mozilla-quotes-are-not-legal-in-a-url. aspx
I would say though that a browser should *never* trust input, whether that input is from a webpage or being executed via a command line. So not only does Firefox not quote out URI parameters, it doesn't verify input either, so it gets a double whammy on this one.
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/20
> When was the last time you saw Firefox or Safari or Konquror able to be crashed with a malformed web page?
. exe firefox.cmd
Umm... 9 days ago?
http://secunia.com/advisories/26201/
The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error within the handling of system default URIs with registered URI handlers (e.g. "mailto", "news", "nntp", "snews", "telnet"). This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands when a user e.g. using Firefox visits a malicious website with a specially crafted "mailto" URI containing a "%" character and ends in a certain extension (e.g. ".bat", ".cmd")
This command would make firefox go "away"
mailto:test%25../../../../windows/system32/tskill
But is it absurd to think that in a court case dealing with something illegal and the investigators doing forensic analysis of your harddrive come across something hidden/encrypted that it couldn't contain some from of illicit information? If one says that all encryption is only meant to hide illegal information that is stupid, but is also stupid to say that encryption isn't used to hide illegal information.
Just like burning all the clothes you had worn that day in the backyard at 4am, the before you call the police in the morning to tell them your wife is missing, by itself it isn't illegal in anyway (maybe you were in old clothes working in the garden and found some form of fungus and after cleaning it up you don't want to possibly spread by accident). But it would be stupid for someone not to have some interesting assumptions when she isn't found a year later.
By itself hiding/encrypting data is nothing, but coupled with other data I think some assumptions could be resonably made.
Actually he *is* talking about HTTPS, TLS is the successor to SSL it came about because the MD5 & SHA-1 algorithms have been "technically" compromised.
Actually it's not really the cable companies pushing DRM, it's the content providers; I'm fairly positive since in general the cable company doesn't create content they don't have an invested interest in the broadcast flag, etc (other than if they can't have the content they will go under). Really what is the benefit to the cable company to do any kind of DRM enforcement? It's not their content they are paying someone else to redistribute it, it increases their service calls, requires hardware upgrades, etc. The only reason why they do it, was becausee the content owners said they wouldn't get the movies, etc anymore if they didn't, and the government requires respecting of the broadcast flags. TimeWarner being a content creator is probably one of the few who might have a vested interest in using DRM to begin with, but Comcast, others... other than to keep getting content probably not (the support costs about HDCP DRM not working with their TV alone is probably in the millions).
The content owners lobied the government to push for requiring encryption of their content on cable, there is no such federal mandate for satellite, but sine satellite content is already encrypted and DRM encombered already they don't really need to. If one wants to get tin-foil hatish about it, one could say that the whole push for digital TV connections is a conspiracy to drop all analog & unencrypted QAM channels, in the future by the content owners; undet the guise of pushing technology "forward" so we don't stay in the stone-age of a 480i analog NTSC signal.
If you are going to try and say that it's about when logos and look and feel than how long has Linux has a standardized windows manager and logo that everybody associates Linux with? Even today, there isn't even really just one: is it the penguin, the Redhat logo, the Suse logo, Ubuntu's logo?? I'd say using your own requirements that Windows has had a brand longer the Linux.
Are people really seriously concerned about this?? Maybe its me but I dont boot my linux (or windows) systems daily, or even monthly. The flexibility that modules give me, more than outways shaving 3 seconds off the boot time...
Actually the schools aren't focusing on turning out MBA's, they are focusing on giving everyone a total education, where as a good portion of the rest of the world focus on giving only certain people total education, and others limited education.
Speaking about non-higher education (equivalent K-12 education), in europe, asia, etc. when your age is in the single digits (US's grade school) you get a standardized test to see if the state is willing to spend resources to continue to educate you academically or not. If not you get put into a track that is geared more toward manual labor, etc. A little bit older and another round too see if they should continue to spend money on training you for bigger and better things. They basically weed out people that they don't believe have the value to receive further higher-education and believe that they are better suited to something a little less. There is an assumption that not everybody is equal and that even for a base education that it is wasteful to try and bring everybody to the same level.
In the US everybody gets the same education end to end, that everybody can have an equal base education. They believe that weeding people out is discriminatory, every should get the same base education. There is no official blue-collar educational tracks for the K-12 years in the US, a person will not be prevented from trying to take higher classes because they didn't do perfectly on a standardized test from years ago. (some of this is changing with acknowledging gifted students more and more, but the US still does not categorize kids in gradeschool and determine there future education options and what schools they will not be able to goto in the future)
The US system is really about equality, at the expense of quality; whereas asia & europe (talking in general as I'm sure there are a number of countries that don't still do it this way) tends to be quality at the expense of equality (again not talking about higher-ed)
Prove the source is crap, here is where you fail, and show your stupidity
1) You haven't provide a single reference that refutes factcheck's information on Chenney
2) Tried to provide a completely separate instance where there is a disagreement on whether or not a political add about soldier helmet re-imbursement was a vote on body armor or not.
3) Mediamatters has repeatedly used factcheck as a source of data (you know the same one you linked to), in fact multiple politicians (dem, repub & indep) used it multiple times as a reliable source of data and repeatedly referenced it in their campaign speaches
You haven't proved anything that factcheck is crap... Can you prove anything about Chenney there on the factcheck.org links are incorrect? If it was incorrect, you surely could point to a link on that, that should be seriously easy.
Again, how is it a conflict of interest? He can receive no benefits, period, in fact he loses money. If he were to receive a kick-back on it sure, that would be a conflict of interest. You keep avoiding the issue, show me where the conflict is.. step me through it, from where he gets the stocks, etc. and when the actual point of conflict of interst is. The answer is simply, that you can't if you could you would have done it already. Keep digging that hole deeper, because you are looking more and more childish.
hahaha... so that's the game you want to play... try and attack the source and try to discredit it, try to discredit it using a topic that isn't in play using a strawman argument. Nice try, but I'm not a dumbass... but apparently you are.
Again what is the obvious conflict of interest, there is no possible way he can profit from it period. Just answer that simple question than avoiding it like you tried to do.
Or how about the complete misunderstanding (or more likely intentional *twisting* but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) of the truth that flew over *your* head
He had the stock prior to taking office from when he was an executive in Halliburton, before he became VP he setup a number of things just to make sure that there wouldn't be any financial profiting: http://www.factcheck.org/article261.html
1) He receives a residual income from Halliburton from when he was working there, this is a guaranteed quantity of money if Halliburton does well or does poorly. The only way it could be at risk is if Halliburton would go bankrupt (like that's going to happen), but to placate even that chance he took out an insurance policy prior to becoming VP that would continue this income even if Halliburton went bankrupt. So he has absolutely no benefit if Halliburton profits or not from the war regarding this income.
2) The stock option deal was in place again prior to becoming VP, 2 days before he became the VP he singed a legal document that could not be waived or revoked that from that point on any and all after tax profits going forward would be given to three charities. So rather than any profiting those options are losing money every year as the value of them decrease due to inflation every year. He can't receive any benefits from war profiting, but the university of washington (40%), George Washington University (40%), and Capital Partners for Education (20%) would, and I'm sure that he started a war so that the universities could increase there coffers.
Would you like to show me the massively *OBVIOUS* conflict of interest there? Please do, back what you are saying up.
Actually it wasn't an issue back when they had bo bid contracts before:
Halliburton had won the LOGCAP contract with the government in 92, later on in the 90's they lost that contract; but Clinton in 97 went ahead and gave them no bid contracts for the Balkans even though they had lost their LOGCAP contract, nobody made a peep (in fact Clinton had even given Halliburton under Chenney an award). In 2001 the US LOGCAP contract is backup for renewal and Halliburton wins the contract again and everybody is fine with it. After regaining the LOGCAP contract the US makes a no bid deal to extinguish oil-fires in Iraq and then people have a problem with them, and it's a big conspiracy.
I think it's just that people like seeing conspiracies where they can, rather than rational thought.
The cost to make isn't in the physical media. If I measured cost to make the linux kernel only with physical CD media, I would then say that the kernel is worth less than a a single US dollar. All the thousands and thousands of man hours worked to get the kernel to it's kernel state are completely ignored under your model, because you assume that the cost to deliver the physical media is where the value is, when that actually is the least costly and least profitable part of the business.
It's the equivalent of saying we'll spend 40 million dollars (going rate for a new game) in paying coders to create a new game. And we'll make a huge profit by selling CD's of it for $1.00, when it only cost us $.10 to make the CD by using cheap laber China labor. If we sell a million copies we'll have a profit of $900,000 we'll be rolling in the cash!!! (do you see something missing here... something like you are still down $39,100,000). The reason the game costs $40,50,60 is because you have to recoup the costs you paid upfront to create the game to begin with.
Ha! Wii is having month long shortages because, while the PS3 sales rate were so overestimated that they now are trying to use that surplus for other things. If the PS3 was kicking as much ass, they would be telling everybody else to go pound sand; because they have so much consumer interest they couldn't chain their supply chain so early in the product's lifespan.
Because the PS3 is kicking so little ass compared to Sony's expectations they have a glut and are now looking for unusual ways to reduce stocks outside of consumer gaming. It's positive sign when you do that for a mature product that has limited growth potential in it's current markets, it's a bad sign when you do that for a product early in it's lifetime when it's primary market is supposed to be growing quickly.
But it's infinetly more useful than the wifi on any other mp3 player (as there are none). I don't quite understand how people think it's a ding against Microsoft when even in a crippled fashion it has more functionality than the others.