And thanks for your efforts in elevating a small minority of US extremists into a majority mob, There are extremist on all sides but they represent a substantial minority of the total population. Most Americans are busy just living their lives instead of wasting it by standing around constantly bitching and moaning about how terrible things are. Promagating weak stereotypes does nothing but generate hate and anger which always leads to the same violent ends and when it does those doing the most complaining will look around and say maybe things were not that bad after all but it will be too late by then.
And when was the last time our "legislative" bodies fixed anything besides securing their funding sources for the next election cycle? The US really needs a change in our political model. One that allows for votes of no confidence at anytime using a straight up and down majority vote to replace the morons running our government. Take away some of their built in job security and they might just decide to work a little harder.
Dude do have a problem with critical analysis or do you just naturally use unsupported statements to validate your ideology? China's purchase of US securities is indeed an investment by them in the US. The US is not on the brink of economic collapse if you look at the economic figures and stop believing all the political clap trap surrounding the issue. Just one example would be Japan, their debt to GDP ratio is -200%. The US is 37th on the list of ranking debt versus GDP and posesses the resources to manage the debt taken on. Also compare the US GDP per person figures with China's. Your cheerleading for China is incredibly short sighted and you judge them in a vacuum while ignoring the fact that they are already facing greater competition from the emerging South Asian countries that are starting to get their shit together. China's sole advantage is the low labor cost which makes their exports cheaper and that advantage is shrinking. A rapidly growing economy is good but it can't go on forever without running into problems like inflation. China also needs to avoid problems with their citizens demanding change. I imagine they are more than a little concerned about what is going on in the world today in regards to citizen uprisings. Regardless of their efforts to censor the internet the news of world events today is getting through. And take a look at the manufacturing statistics by country. The US is still the leader. There are even foreign companies moving manufacturing jobs to the US, especially in the auto industry. I don't mean to give the impression that everything is perfect in the US and some changes are needed but spouting unsupported dogma is just silly.
Who really gives a shit about their "holy books". As it is the guards wear gloves when handling the Koran, signs have been posted showing which way is east, and they have provided with prayer mats. Muslims demand respect from others while giving none in return and that lack of reciprical respect is what is driving peoples hostility towards those practicing the Islam religion.
You win the award for putting the most BS in one post. Manning is not and will not ever be considered some kind of a hero. He broke the law and will be judged for his actions in a court of law. So far the information released has not did any harm to the US other than forcing the government to re-assign diplomatic personnel because of unflattering remarks they made in their private correspondence. If anything the released data effected other countries much more than the US. Manning's efforts will only result in more security being put in place to prevent this from happening in the future. It will reduce the openness and make collaboration between various agencies more problematic.
China only holds about 6% of all outstanding treasury certificates and they hold those because they consider the US to be a good investment when compared to other countries. They are not lending the US money they are investing in it. If the US was to collapse so would the rest of the world. Contrary to popular belief the US still has the largest economy as well as being the top manufacture on the planet. China has narrowed the gap but it will take years for them to catch the US and that is assuming they have no problems of their own along the way. They just reported their first trade deficit and are having inflationary problems which will increase the cost of their exports there by reducing the low labor costs that they depend on to compete internationally. They will also face competition from countries like India and Brazil.
Why do you assume if the US collapses something better would emerge? The current way of doing things has been slowly built up over the last 100 years or so. Today's pattern of non-cooperation due to ideological differences would impede the creation of a stable replacement any time soon. There are problems today but there have always been problems in the US, a lot of them were much more serious than the problems we have today. How long do you think it would take to create, approve, and enact a new Constitution or Bill of Rights? I am still amazed that our forefathers were able to produce these items because of the compromises needed which our leaders today avoid like the plague.
I follow your reasoning about open source being potentially more secure because you have access to the code. However, spotting security problems in the code is not for the faint of heart. Only a very small amount of people would even attempt this and an even a smaller amount of people would be capable of detecting and fixing any problems found. Applying the "many eyes" strategy when dealing with open source has not really made a noticeable difference when compared against closed source development. Coordinating and focusing the developers efforts is more important than the number of developers working on the code.
A nuclear weapon would only sign their death warrant. They have no long distance delivery system and even if they were able to sneak one into the country they could not even come close to preventing the US reprisal. Even passing one to a non-state actor could be traced back to it's original origin pretty easily. MADD has been effective for the bigger powers because they have enough weapons and the means of delivering them to destroy the entire planet several times over.
It certainly is unreasonable for this issue to fester as long as it has. I really have no clue why the problem has not been addressed. If there was ever a non-partisan issue it seems to me this would be it. Unfortunately our current Congress is stacked with incompetence and idiots of the worse kind. I don't believe the President can do any thing about this either other than pressure Congress to do something, A Presidential order would not solve the problem because it would just pass the problem to someone else in the future.
I tend to stay away from the MSDN information unless I can not find any other sources. But the fact is there are a lot of very good alternative sources that deal with real world implementation instead of just descriptions of the technology. MS documentation is always a little verbose for me but it is pretty good for syntax questions and generic product information. One thing MS got right was in how much they support the developers. The more developers using MS tech means more Windows systems sold. I know I will get slammed for this next comment but I believe that one of MS's best products was VB. It was a weak as hell development environment but eventually grew to be somewhat useful. The thing that made it good was it lowered the bar for developers working on MS tech and like mentioned before the more developers, regardless of skill, still resulted in pushing the platform adoption. The current.NET platform is not that bad. It offers a combination of functionality and rapid application development. I have been building all kinds of systems for over 23 years using a wide variety of tools and platforms and the one thing I have noticed is that software tends to have a short shelf life especially in regards to specialized corporate applications. Development time shouldn't take longer than the life span of the application itself. In the end it's all about trade-offs and not getting emotionally involved in the tools or platforms you are using. And as it pertains to moving to Linux I have encountered several instances where I was requested to build a cross platform app targeted at Linux because the customer was moving to a Linux platform but after deploying the application I was requested to re-install the Windows only version because the customer had run into other critical apps that had no Linux equivalent and they had to back out of the migration. This happened to me in 2 of 6 deployments. Moving from Windows to Linux also requires a massive re-training effort for the developers and tech support personnel.
I agree with everything you say. My original statement was just saying that when deciding how to handle these prisoners the US justice system does not really cover these types of cases. The question also remains that if they are released unconditionally what is to prevent them from committing the same offenses knowing that nothing really bad can happen to them if they avoid being killed in the first place.
I agree that there should be a mass release of all but those who are raving lunatics. I believe the torture claims are over blown. Not that there wasn't any but I doubt is was SOP. In cases where torture was applied the government needs to publicize some of the critical intelligence gathered using those methods if any exists. They did that for the guy blamed for planning 9/11 and the information they gained resulted in the capture or killing of the real bad guys. Even the recently released documents by Wiki-leaks showed that the prisoners were lying about their treatment. Understandable since what have you got to lose. If it was me I would be swearing up and down that I was being tortured whether it happened or not. It also seems to me that everyone automatically believes everything the prisoners claim. Just as a lot of people believe in the unquestioned veracity of anyone making claims against the US in general. None of the terrorist groups can take on the military directly other than suicide attacks. Their real weapon has always been in the propaganda they push which the media eats up which in turn causes the military to ease up to prove the propaganda is not true.
Combat operations in Afghanistan means walking down the road. And the neighbors turning people for cash does not mean those turned in were not involved in the fighting. I would have to see some hard statistics on this before I get too upset that innocents were being turned in wholesale. I am sure that some did turn in innocents but I doubt it was a lot since those doing the turning in would have to live in the neighborhood and deal with payback from the family or friends of those turned in.
Maybe understanding is that these prisoners do not fall into any previously defined categoy. Are they prisoners of war or are they criminals? Should we apply our criminal law statutes to people who were detained by US soldiers in combat operations? There are clearly defined POW rules and citizen criminal laws but where do most of these people fall. If you say POW than by rights they could have been immediately executed for not wearing identifying markers denoting them as enemy soldiers. If you say just criminals then how do you handle rules of evidence on offenses committed in foreign countries which fall outside of US statutes? Do you just release them so they can go back to creating havoc without any consequnces for their actions? And yes there are those who were innocent but even the US justice system has convicted innocent people, no justice is 100% without error. So what is the best solution or do you really care and just want to use the issue to make political statements.
There has been CIA participation in a lot of questionable enterprises over the years and they may occassionally do their job which is to protect US foreign interests but they usually cause more problems than they fix. I always find it amusing when people talk about how powerful the CIA or the US is with Isreal running the entire show behind the scenes. If Israel or the US was that powerful how come they still end up having all these problems. Especially Israel, if they were as powerful as people say wouldn't they have solved that whole Palestenian issue by now? If you really have that much power why continue putting up with the troublesome neighbors for almost 50 years?
I would have liked to have Bush (1 or 2) in office during the hostage standoff. I would have giving it about a week before they started cratering entire towns until the hostaqes were released. Sure the hostages would have probably been killed but the death exchange rate would have most like been 1000 to 1 in favor of the US. And remember the US didn't have any of the fancy smancy precision bombs or current generation cruise missles at the time and would have had to rely on heavy bombers with fighter escorts so the accuracy or lack there of would have necessitated multiple runs just to be sure. I bet the great Islamic reveloutionaries would have also found themselves to busy running for their lives to setup their glorious Islamic Republic.
Even if the NSA was monitoring all the traffic wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a random message generator to create traffic containing all the potential gotcha keywords or phrases the NSA might be filtering on? After a while I imagine the staff responsible for monitoring these automated detections would become hopelessly overwhelmed making the whole process useless for timely intelligence gathering.
Yeah mainly suppressing the radical fucks causing all the problems in the middle east today. Now look at the results. And the CIA had a lot of help in getting the Shah into power starting with the British who were the ones getting screwed by the nationalization of their oil assets and the substantial amount of IRANIAN politicians themselves who wanted a new government. The CIA did not over throw anybody, at most they spread a little money around and promised future help to those IRANIAN's who wanted control of their government. In 1953 the US and CIA was not the global powerhouse super spies and troublemakers of today. The US was focused on the little problem in Korea at the time and the entire middle east had been British territory who were in the midst of losing their influence after WW2 and did not like having their assets nationalized. They even blockaded the Iranian ports in an effort to weaken the government the CIA supposedly overthrew all by themselves.
Of course the US got along with Iran but this "puppet" descriptive gets applied to any country that is not actively espousing hate and vitriol for the US. Regardless of US influence in any foreign government it is the foriegn government itself who make and implement their decisions. Sure the US has influence just like any other country looking for economic and security agreements but the people running the foreign countries can always say "no thank you" but then that means they would not be able to collect any of the goodies the US provides for cooperating. Does anyone think that France, England, Germany, Russia, and China do not offer "incentives" to government officials in the course of looking for the same thing the US is? The US got stuck supporting dictators and autocrats during the cold war becuase if they didn't the Soviet Union would have been glad to step into the void. The US had to work with what was available at the time and they didn't have a lot of good choices in most circumstances. A lot of the small proxy countries had a lot of influence when playing the US against the USSR during the cold war. But nobody ever seems to recognize that fact because all of these "poor" and "downtrodden" countries couldn't possibly be smart enough to use tactics like that.
I am still waiting for the announcement "We can get someone to Mars AND bring him BACK in X number of years". I mean we could put people on the Moon everyday by strapping them on one our fairly limited rockets shot off on the right trajectory. It might take a while to get there and the landing could be a little rough but by god they would eventually get there. Of course that would leave us with the big question of What Next? I still think trying to capture a good sized asteroid and placing it in orbit so we could work at turning it into a generation ship for those who really want to get a good look at space and all it's wonders. Such a project would allow us to really get the hang of working and testing new ideas in space manufacturing and life support adaptations for low gravity environments.
Oh I forgot about our neighbors to the North. We do buy a lot of oil from them good folks but if you take a good look at their operations you have to wonder how the oil sands projects even got off the ground giving the toll on the environment and water use it takes for extraction.
China is also the main source cause they don't give a damn about contaminating the environment. The US mines shut down because environmental measures raised the cost and it was cheaper to buy from others. US on land oil drilling and shale processing has never taken off for the same reason. The costs are greater than buying foreign sources. But never fear when the US finally gets fed up with financing China and the wonderful folks we buy oil from we still have a ready supply of fossil fuels until we figure out how to move off them for good. And it finally looks like the government and private sector is workin towards alternate energy sources. It won't happen fast but it is happening. It takes a long time for awareness and reality to take hold in a population as diverse as the US but it finally is.
And what is so special about Canonical forums. There is more information on windows and specifically windows development on the net that you would be hard pressed to run into a problem and find no one else who hasn't had the same problem and provided the information to correct the problem. That's not counting the MS published information for developers.
Slashdot Mirror
And thanks for your efforts in elevating a small minority of US extremists into a majority mob, There are extremist on all sides but they represent a substantial minority of the total population. Most Americans are busy just living their lives instead of wasting it by standing around constantly bitching and moaning about how terrible things are. Promagating weak stereotypes does nothing but generate hate and anger which always leads to the same violent ends and when it does those doing the most complaining will look around and say maybe things were not that bad after all but it will be too late by then.
And when was the last time our "legislative" bodies fixed anything besides securing their funding sources for the next election cycle? The US really needs a change in our political model. One that allows for votes of no confidence at anytime using a straight up and down majority vote to replace the morons running our government. Take away some of their built in job security and they might just decide to work a little harder.
As long as they fund things like this I don't see any reason they can't include their name.
Dude do have a problem with critical analysis or do you just naturally use unsupported statements to validate your ideology? China's purchase of US securities is indeed an investment by them in the US. The US is not on the brink of economic collapse if you look at the economic figures and stop believing all the political clap trap surrounding the issue. Just one example would be Japan, their debt to GDP ratio is -200%. The US is 37th on the list of ranking debt versus GDP and posesses the resources to manage the debt taken on. Also compare the US GDP per person figures with China's. Your cheerleading for China is incredibly short sighted and you judge them in a vacuum while ignoring the fact that they are already facing greater competition from the emerging South Asian countries that are starting to get their shit together. China's sole advantage is the low labor cost which makes their exports cheaper and that advantage is shrinking. A rapidly growing economy is good but it can't go on forever without running into problems like inflation. China also needs to avoid problems with their citizens demanding change. I imagine they are more than a little concerned about what is going on in the world today in regards to citizen uprisings. Regardless of their efforts to censor the internet the news of world events today is getting through. And take a look at the manufacturing statistics by country. The US is still the leader. There are even foreign companies moving manufacturing jobs to the US, especially in the auto industry. I don't mean to give the impression that everything is perfect in the US and some changes are needed but spouting unsupported dogma is just silly.
Who really gives a shit about their "holy books". As it is the guards wear gloves when handling the Koran, signs have been posted showing which way is east, and they have provided with prayer mats. Muslims demand respect from others while giving none in return and that lack of reciprical respect is what is driving peoples hostility towards those practicing the Islam religion.
You win the award for putting the most BS in one post. Manning is not and will not ever be considered some kind of a hero. He broke the law and will be judged for his actions in a court of law. So far the information released has not did any harm to the US other than forcing the government to re-assign diplomatic personnel because of unflattering remarks they made in their private correspondence. If anything the released data effected other countries much more than the US. Manning's efforts will only result in more security being put in place to prevent this from happening in the future. It will reduce the openness and make collaboration between various agencies more problematic. China only holds about 6% of all outstanding treasury certificates and they hold those because they consider the US to be a good investment when compared to other countries. They are not lending the US money they are investing in it. If the US was to collapse so would the rest of the world. Contrary to popular belief the US still has the largest economy as well as being the top manufacture on the planet. China has narrowed the gap but it will take years for them to catch the US and that is assuming they have no problems of their own along the way. They just reported their first trade deficit and are having inflationary problems which will increase the cost of their exports there by reducing the low labor costs that they depend on to compete internationally. They will also face competition from countries like India and Brazil. Why do you assume if the US collapses something better would emerge? The current way of doing things has been slowly built up over the last 100 years or so. Today's pattern of non-cooperation due to ideological differences would impede the creation of a stable replacement any time soon. There are problems today but there have always been problems in the US, a lot of them were much more serious than the problems we have today. How long do you think it would take to create, approve, and enact a new Constitution or Bill of Rights? I am still amazed that our forefathers were able to produce these items because of the compromises needed which our leaders today avoid like the plague.
I follow your reasoning about open source being potentially more secure because you have access to the code. However, spotting security problems in the code is not for the faint of heart. Only a very small amount of people would even attempt this and an even a smaller amount of people would be capable of detecting and fixing any problems found. Applying the "many eyes" strategy when dealing with open source has not really made a noticeable difference when compared against closed source development. Coordinating and focusing the developers efforts is more important than the number of developers working on the code.
A nuclear weapon would only sign their death warrant. They have no long distance delivery system and even if they were able to sneak one into the country they could not even come close to preventing the US reprisal. Even passing one to a non-state actor could be traced back to it's original origin pretty easily. MADD has been effective for the bigger powers because they have enough weapons and the means of delivering them to destroy the entire planet several times over.
It certainly is unreasonable for this issue to fester as long as it has. I really have no clue why the problem has not been addressed. If there was ever a non-partisan issue it seems to me this would be it. Unfortunately our current Congress is stacked with incompetence and idiots of the worse kind. I don't believe the President can do any thing about this either other than pressure Congress to do something, A Presidential order would not solve the problem because it would just pass the problem to someone else in the future.
No disagreement from me but the issue still needs to be resolved some how. And No I don't have any suggestions on how to accomplish it.
I tend to stay away from the MSDN information unless I can not find any other sources. But the fact is there are a lot of very good alternative sources that deal with real world implementation instead of just descriptions of the technology. MS documentation is always a little verbose for me but it is pretty good for syntax questions and generic product information. One thing MS got right was in how much they support the developers. The more developers using MS tech means more Windows systems sold. I know I will get slammed for this next comment but I believe that one of MS's best products was VB. It was a weak as hell development environment but eventually grew to be somewhat useful. The thing that made it good was it lowered the bar for developers working on MS tech and like mentioned before the more developers, regardless of skill, still resulted in pushing the platform adoption. The current .NET platform is not that bad. It offers a combination of functionality and rapid application development. I have been building all kinds of systems for over 23 years using a wide variety of tools and platforms and the one thing I have noticed is that software tends to have a short shelf life especially in regards to specialized corporate applications. Development time shouldn't take longer than the life span of the application itself. In the end it's all about trade-offs and not getting emotionally involved in the tools or platforms you are using. And as it pertains to moving to Linux I have encountered several instances where I was requested to build a cross platform app targeted at Linux because the customer was moving to a Linux platform but after deploying the application I was requested to re-install the Windows only version because the customer had run into other critical apps that had no Linux equivalent and they had to back out of the migration. This happened to me in 2 of 6 deployments. Moving from Windows to Linux also requires a massive re-training effort for the developers and tech support personnel.
I agree with everything you say. My original statement was just saying that when deciding how to handle these prisoners the US justice system does not really cover these types of cases. The question also remains that if they are released unconditionally what is to prevent them from committing the same offenses knowing that nothing really bad can happen to them if they avoid being killed in the first place.
I agree that there should be a mass release of all but those who are raving lunatics. I believe the torture claims are over blown. Not that there wasn't any but I doubt is was SOP. In cases where torture was applied the government needs to publicize some of the critical intelligence gathered using those methods if any exists. They did that for the guy blamed for planning 9/11 and the information they gained resulted in the capture or killing of the real bad guys. Even the recently released documents by Wiki-leaks showed that the prisoners were lying about their treatment. Understandable since what have you got to lose. If it was me I would be swearing up and down that I was being tortured whether it happened or not. It also seems to me that everyone automatically believes everything the prisoners claim. Just as a lot of people believe in the unquestioned veracity of anyone making claims against the US in general. None of the terrorist groups can take on the military directly other than suicide attacks. Their real weapon has always been in the propaganda they push which the media eats up which in turn causes the military to ease up to prove the propaganda is not true.
Combat operations in Afghanistan means walking down the road. And the neighbors turning people for cash does not mean those turned in were not involved in the fighting. I would have to see some hard statistics on this before I get too upset that innocents were being turned in wholesale. I am sure that some did turn in innocents but I doubt it was a lot since those doing the turning in would have to live in the neighborhood and deal with payback from the family or friends of those turned in.
Maybe understanding is that these prisoners do not fall into any previously defined categoy. Are they prisoners of war or are they criminals? Should we apply our criminal law statutes to people who were detained by US soldiers in combat operations? There are clearly defined POW rules and citizen criminal laws but where do most of these people fall. If you say POW than by rights they could have been immediately executed for not wearing identifying markers denoting them as enemy soldiers. If you say just criminals then how do you handle rules of evidence on offenses committed in foreign countries which fall outside of US statutes? Do you just release them so they can go back to creating havoc without any consequnces for their actions? And yes there are those who were innocent but even the US justice system has convicted innocent people, no justice is 100% without error. So what is the best solution or do you really care and just want to use the issue to make political statements.
There has been CIA participation in a lot of questionable enterprises over the years and they may occassionally do their job which is to protect US foreign interests but they usually cause more problems than they fix. I always find it amusing when people talk about how powerful the CIA or the US is with Isreal running the entire show behind the scenes. If Israel or the US was that powerful how come they still end up having all these problems. Especially Israel, if they were as powerful as people say wouldn't they have solved that whole Palestenian issue by now? If you really have that much power why continue putting up with the troublesome neighbors for almost 50 years?
I would have liked to have Bush (1 or 2) in office during the hostage standoff. I would have giving it about a week before they started cratering entire towns until the hostaqes were released. Sure the hostages would have probably been killed but the death exchange rate would have most like been 1000 to 1 in favor of the US. And remember the US didn't have any of the fancy smancy precision bombs or current generation cruise missles at the time and would have had to rely on heavy bombers with fighter escorts so the accuracy or lack there of would have necessitated multiple runs just to be sure. I bet the great Islamic reveloutionaries would have also found themselves to busy running for their lives to setup their glorious Islamic Republic.
Even if the NSA was monitoring all the traffic wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a random message generator to create traffic containing all the potential gotcha keywords or phrases the NSA might be filtering on? After a while I imagine the staff responsible for monitoring these automated detections would become hopelessly overwhelmed making the whole process useless for timely intelligence gathering.
I think they just installed a new Service Pack and the results were just as devestating as Stutnex.
Yeah mainly suppressing the radical fucks causing all the problems in the middle east today. Now look at the results. And the CIA had a lot of help in getting the Shah into power starting with the British who were the ones getting screwed by the nationalization of their oil assets and the substantial amount of IRANIAN politicians themselves who wanted a new government. The CIA did not over throw anybody, at most they spread a little money around and promised future help to those IRANIAN's who wanted control of their government. In 1953 the US and CIA was not the global powerhouse super spies and troublemakers of today. The US was focused on the little problem in Korea at the time and the entire middle east had been British territory who were in the midst of losing their influence after WW2 and did not like having their assets nationalized. They even blockaded the Iranian ports in an effort to weaken the government the CIA supposedly overthrew all by themselves.
Of course the US got along with Iran but this "puppet" descriptive gets applied to any country that is not actively espousing hate and vitriol for the US. Regardless of US influence in any foreign government it is the foriegn government itself who make and implement their decisions. Sure the US has influence just like any other country looking for economic and security agreements but the people running the foreign countries can always say "no thank you" but then that means they would not be able to collect any of the goodies the US provides for cooperating. Does anyone think that France, England, Germany, Russia, and China do not offer "incentives" to government officials in the course of looking for the same thing the US is? The US got stuck supporting dictators and autocrats during the cold war becuase if they didn't the Soviet Union would have been glad to step into the void. The US had to work with what was available at the time and they didn't have a lot of good choices in most circumstances. A lot of the small proxy countries had a lot of influence when playing the US against the USSR during the cold war. But nobody ever seems to recognize that fact because all of these "poor" and "downtrodden" countries couldn't possibly be smart enough to use tactics like that.
I am still waiting for the announcement "We can get someone to Mars AND bring him BACK in X number of years". I mean we could put people on the Moon everyday by strapping them on one our fairly limited rockets shot off on the right trajectory. It might take a while to get there and the landing could be a little rough but by god they would eventually get there. Of course that would leave us with the big question of What Next? I still think trying to capture a good sized asteroid and placing it in orbit so we could work at turning it into a generation ship for those who really want to get a good look at space and all it's wonders. Such a project would allow us to really get the hang of working and testing new ideas in space manufacturing and life support adaptations for low gravity environments.
Oh I forgot about our neighbors to the North. We do buy a lot of oil from them good folks but if you take a good look at their operations you have to wonder how the oil sands projects even got off the ground giving the toll on the environment and water use it takes for extraction.
China is also the main source cause they don't give a damn about contaminating the environment. The US mines shut down because environmental measures raised the cost and it was cheaper to buy from others. US on land oil drilling and shale processing has never taken off for the same reason. The costs are greater than buying foreign sources. But never fear when the US finally gets fed up with financing China and the wonderful folks we buy oil from we still have a ready supply of fossil fuels until we figure out how to move off them for good. And it finally looks like the government and private sector is workin towards alternate energy sources. It won't happen fast but it is happening. It takes a long time for awareness and reality to take hold in a population as diverse as the US but it finally is.
And what is so special about Canonical forums. There is more information on windows and specifically windows development on the net that you would be hard pressed to run into a problem and find no one else who hasn't had the same problem and provided the information to correct the problem. That's not counting the MS published information for developers.