Governments need to be treated with care and respect. Independent monitoring is very important. Participation is very important. Careful contemplation is very important.
If the public starts to have a widespread distrust of the government, I don't think the government can persist very long before it is overthrown.
As I see it, the politicians who are able to make large changes have a lot of political power...in other words they have compromised many times and have a lot of people who owe them.
If you are elected president, how will you go about making changes?
I like Star Trek, I have probably watched every episode three times, but once I got into it, I really liked Farscape an order of magnitude more than I like the current star trek shows.
In fact, for most of the recent star trek shows, I fail to find any interesting meaning, and Farscape is usually more interesting even if it is completely plot development.
(Then again, I am one of those fans that the Farscape producers were talking about...I canceled my cable TV subscription when the Sci-Fi channel canceled Farscape and I have Farscape propoganda in my apartment windows.
I think that if you give it a chance and watch the episodes in order, you will really enjoy it too.
Having a TiVo helped me quite a bit when watching farscape. I watched the first episode and was religiously hooked to it ever since. When I would go on vacation or for some reason wasn't home when the episode aired, I could always still see it in order using my TiVo.
As far as the alien words go, I don't think they ever say what some of the words are, but after a while you do get the gist of their meanings.
It is a bit of a soap opera, but it is also a mind-warp and a lot more intelligent than many other sci-fi shows. Take for example how the translator microbes do a fine job on straightforward statements, but they get analogies and comparisons completely wrong. Things like that make it very interesting to me.
If you watch episodes out-of-order, you will get a bad experience. You want to watch them in-order, or else pick a season and watch it start to finish.
That said, this is a unique show that is well worth watching.
I work in Seattle and have had to sit down and explain to more than one co-worker (mostly recent transplants from the east coast) that Oregon is south of Washington, and Idaho (where I grew up) is due east of both Washington and Oregon.
Admittedly, with 50 states down here and as I have only visited 9 of them, I wouldn't be able to draw a good map of the east coast, but I do know where everything west of the Missisippi is.:)
I still can't understand why someone would move to the west coast and not bother to brush up on their geography. I even had a co-worker ask once if Seattle was near the ocean.
1) This is a feature in Active Directory Users and Computers, not normally used by Joe Sixpack, to give administrators a quick and easy way to see which groups have a bunch of users in them.
2) Joe Sixpack, while he might be able to with Windows Server 2003, isn't likely to spend the time to deploy DDNS, Windows Server 2000 or 2003, configure Active Directory, and then add his closest 500 friends into a single group and then wonder why the icon for the group changed color.
3) Out of 1000 administrators who would even hit this and be aware enough to notice it, how many do you expect would be disturbed enough by this feature to want to dig in and turn it off? My guess is that it would be in the single digits.
Depending on how you do it, you can get a lot more than the density that you assume. Check out www.paperdisk.com.
That said, this method would still be more than twice as expensive as storing data on hard drives, would still require a million pages, but would take a little under 2 weeks to print.
It still doesn't seem like a feasible option.
The up-side is that, if stored properly, the data would likely be safe potentially for many hundreds of years.
Just look at this number again: $480.000.000.000/Year plus currently $200.000.000.000 for Iraq. Does anybody realize how much money that is? Doesn't anybody else think this money could be better spent then using it to essentially piss of the rest of the population of this planet, and especially Muslims?
According to the CIA world factbook, USA has a population of: 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
Now, 20.8% of the population is estimated to be under 14 years old, and there is a 6.2% estimated unemployment rate (again from the CIA world factbook), so that is about $3123.72 per tax paying citizen of the USA.
This is yet another reason for the electoral college. The electoral college representatives do have a choice, they almost never switch their choice, but they can.
Imagine if the green party got 4 states, the republicans got 24 states, and the democrats got 22 states. In that case, I doubt that the green party electoral college people would want to see the republicans take the election and they could choose to cast their electoral college vote for the democratic candidate.
Now, splitting the percentagages within districts is more problematic...
If we want real change, we need to stop assuming that we know what the rest of the world is going to do because of what the polls say and then we need to go vote for the candidate that we think will do the best job. Choosing a representative based on their percieved electability and because they are "not the other guy" is a bad idea. Would you choose a doctor because he is popular and isn't mentioned in the current scandal list, or would you choose him for his skill, success rate, and ability to heal your illnesses?
Right now, most people are not represented - in some precincts, as many as 90% of the registered voters don't show up. To me, that says either the status quo is great, or voters are heavily disenfranchised and don't feel like Dem/Rep *IS* a choice.
To me Dem/Rep is no choice at all! Like you said, the Kerry campaign site issues are not that different from the republicans. To me, *THAT* is the problem and I for one will be voting 3rd party.
I like the libertarian mindset. I look at government much like an operating system. Big and bloated operating systems may provide a rich feature-set, but they can be slow to react, have large surface areas for exploitation, and use a lot of resources. Democrats and Republicans are both "Desktop Operating Systems" in their level of services and bloat.
From the 2003 financial statements, the nearly $50 billion would be enough to keep the entire company afloat for two years if income dropped to nothing, and it would be enough to keep R&D operating for 10 years if the rest of the expenses were cut.
As far as earnings/share value relationship, I don't know what the trend has been.
As far as the pile of cash, the EU anti-trust trial is still open as are a lot of smaller lawsuits, the executives did consider using it to buy SAP, and there may be other considerations.
Consider the criteria for a "Just War", I think these originated with Saint Augustine and were also discussed by Martin Luther:
1) Are you protecting your country from being harmed? 2) Have you tried other ways to resolve the conflict? 3) Have you formally declared war? 4) Is the goal to return to peace? 5) No scorched earth tactic - don't attack civilians, don't attack infrastructure. 6) Use only vocationed military - no civilian contractors or mobs of common people.
I may not have remembered these exactly right, but most war wouldn't meet these criteria for a Just War and in my view, anything other than a Just War is irresponsible.
In an election as close as I think this one's going to be, a vote for a 3rd-party candidate is a vote to maintain the status quo-- which in this case would mean four more years of a warmongering, pro-upper-class-at-the-expense-of-the-other-classe s moron. Do the world a favor (literally) and, just this once, vote Democrat.
First, I should explain that I do have a little bit of a luxury to vote as I please because my precinct, county, and state are so democratic that Kerry will take it by at least 10% without a sweat so this is my way of sending a message.
Second, from what have seen, I wouldn't trust either Bush or Kerry at anything they say.
Third, I WILL NOT let public opinion polls tell me which way to vote!
If even 10% of the population voted for a 3rd party, any 3rd party, the major parties would get the message that they need to listen to the public and represent us if they want to keep their power.
Vote your concience, not the lesser of the two evils and if you really want change then talk to and get to understand someone from an opposing party.
In the theater where I saw it, the audience was cheering, jeering, and applauding wildly on key with the points that Moore was trying to make.
I found this slightly startling as some of the cheers came in points that, after listening to the entire 9/11 report, I am confident that the 9/11 report findings contradicted what Moore was saying.
For me, several points like this counteracted the entire persuasive success of this film to change my opinions. If I can't trust the accuracy of information that I can collaberate, how can I trust the information that I can't easily collaberate?
What did strike me, something that hadn't sunk in for me before, is how emotional and deep the divide is between the extreeme right and extreeme left. I suspect that I would have been mobbed if I had stood up after the movie and yelled "This movie contained lies and I am still voting Republican." (btw, I am not voting Republican, and I am not voting Democrat, but I am voting)
Read, listen, think for yourself, discuss it with people you know, make up your own mind and gain some more understanding of others.
I am not assuming that highly intelligent people lack something else, I am observing that many people who have heavily focused in one area tend to systematically make mistakes in other areas.
This doesn't mean that everyone who is technically intelligent is a social dweebe, in fact some of the most socially adept people that I know are also highly technical.
I also wouldn't discount the possibility that I work with a number of people who are borderline idiot savants. I have even paused in meetings at work as I noticed that everyone in the room was involved in one quirky behavior or another.
I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, or maybe two or three, and I try hard not to make assumptions about people, but my observations make me cautious about being over-confident in my intelligence.
Well, maybe I personally know a disproportionate number of idiot savants.
It may be that they don't place priorities the same way and get clueless, but it still results in them doing stupid things, and I am not talking about keeping up with the Joneses.
One example - Calling in sick, going sailing for the day, and returning the next day with a bright red suntan.
I could easily give a dozen examples, each person is very smart in several areas, but frequently (or consistently) does something that I would consider stupid and by doing so they reduce their long term happiness, employment opportunities, and/or health.
I came to two important realizations a couple years ago.
First, people who are intensely brilliant in one or more areas are usually intensely stupid in other areas.
Second, brilliance does not count for anything if you don't have the discipline to stick to the task.
You may be bright in computers and normally insightful in many technical areas, but that frequently means that you are stupid about human nature, politics, music, religion, or some other basic area. I have a co-worker who is brilliant with a debugger, but who is constantly afraid that he will be fired because he can't communicate well with his manager.
One of my friends in college had amazing intuition. He skipped 90% of the classes one semester and consistently got A's or B's on the exams. However, when he got a job, he stopped showing up for work for two weeks, was nearly fired, and pulled the same stunt again a month later and was fired. As for myself, I would be making 10% to 15% more right now, in my 4 year old post-college career, than I currently am if I would have had the discipline to work on what I was supposed to be doing rather than what I felt like doing.
Before you get the attitude that you are so smart, ask yourself who you are comparing yourself with. I grew up in Southern Idaho, in a town of 5000 people where I would guess that less than 1/20th of the population had a bachelors degree or better. Now I live in Seattle where most of the population has a college degree and I work for a company that employs more than twice the number of people in the county that I grew up in. In Idaho, I got the same comments that you claim to get, and in Seattle I am just one of thousands.
Life is in constant flux. Tomorrow, psychology may be the hot field and software may be the next "automotive industry", don't choose a field because of the pay.
Today, a college degree is frequently a prereq for consideration for any desirable job. I wouldn't skip college, mostly because of all of the extras that you learn. Life in the dorms or in a fraternity and make friends.
Don't forget about finding someone to spend your life with, at some point computers won't mean all that much and you will want to know how to talk to someone that you are attracted to.
If you are passionate about something and make it your job, make a point to develop a hobby or else you will burn out. Computers have been my obsession for 15+ years and software has been my carrer for the last 4 and now I play with my container garden and listen to music instead of sitting on the computer when I come home.
Aside from that, figure out what you want to do and go do it. Life is to short to be doing something you hate.....Most of all, take all of this with $.02....it is your life, choose for yourself.
YankeeInExile, I wasn't involved in Windows 2000, but I was responsible for the quality of DNS Manager in Windows 2003 and it would be very helpful if you would explain what you tried before determining that network configuration is "near impossible".
If you like administration via configuration files, Microsoft DNS will allow you to use zone files just like BIND does. If you like the command line, there are several command-line tools for managing DNS that can be found in the Resource Kit.
For more help with your DNS questions, there are several newsgroups for discussing Microsoft DNS with very helpful members that reply within a day to nearly all questions and last I checked the DNS team was also regularly checking and replying to questions on the newsgroups.
Thanks for the feedback.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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Or, rich boy buys a $2,000 used car and pays about $150 or less than .1% of his income because he doesn't need to have an expensive car.
...since when do "poor" people buy $20,000 cars?
Just because you *have* the money doesn't mean you have to spend it.
Here Here!
Governments need to be treated with care and respect. Independent monitoring is very important. Participation is very important. Careful contemplation is very important.
If the public starts to have a widespread distrust of the government, I don't think the government can persist very long before it is overthrown.
Which changes and platform positions do you see as most likely to be implemented? Which are least likely to be implemented?
As I see it, the politicians who are able to make large changes have a lot of political power...in other words they have compromised many times and have a lot of people who owe them.
If you are elected president, how will you go about making changes?
Fahrenheit 9/11 is about as documentary as Starship Troopers!
The 9/11 commission report is out in paperback and it is very readable...go read it.
I like Star Trek, I have probably watched every episode three times, but once I got into it, I really liked Farscape an order of magnitude more than I like the current star trek shows.
In fact, for most of the recent star trek shows, I fail to find any interesting meaning, and Farscape is usually more interesting even if it is completely plot development.
(Then again, I am one of those fans that the Farscape producers were talking about...I canceled my cable TV subscription when the Sci-Fi channel canceled Farscape and I have Farscape propoganda in my apartment windows.
I think that if you give it a chance and watch the episodes in order, you will really enjoy it too.
Having a TiVo helped me quite a bit when watching farscape. I watched the first episode and was religiously hooked to it ever since. When I would go on vacation or for some reason wasn't home when the episode aired, I could always still see it in order using my TiVo.
As far as the alien words go, I don't think they ever say what some of the words are, but after a while you do get the gist of their meanings.
It is a bit of a soap opera, but it is also a mind-warp and a lot more intelligent than many other sci-fi shows. Take for example how the translator microbes do a fine job on straightforward statements, but they get analogies and comparisons completely wrong. Things like that make it very interesting to me.
If you watch episodes out-of-order, you will get a bad experience. You want to watch them in-order, or else pick a season and watch it start to finish.
That said, this is a unique show that is well worth watching.
I work in Seattle and have had to sit down and explain to more than one co-worker (mostly recent transplants from the east coast) that Oregon is south of Washington, and Idaho (where I grew up) is due east of both Washington and Oregon.
:)
Admittedly, with 50 states down here and as I have only visited 9 of them, I wouldn't be able to draw a good map of the east coast, but I do know where everything west of the Missisippi is.
I still can't understand why someone would move to the west coast and not bother to brush up on their geography. I even had a co-worker ask once if Seattle was near the ocean.
For the people that do read, but do not see, they have a text transcript.
1) This is a feature in Active Directory Users and Computers, not normally used by Joe Sixpack, to give administrators a quick and easy way to see which groups have a bunch of users in them.
2) Joe Sixpack, while he might be able to with Windows Server 2003, isn't likely to spend the time to deploy DDNS, Windows Server 2000 or 2003, configure Active Directory, and then add his closest 500 friends into a single group and then wonder why the icon for the group changed color.
3) Out of 1000 administrators who would even hit this and be aware enough to notice it, how many do you expect would be disturbed enough by this feature to want to dig in and turn it off? My guess is that it would be in the single digits.
Depending on how you do it, you can get a lot more than the density that you assume. Check out www.paperdisk.com.
That said, this method would still be more than twice as expensive as storing data on hard drives, would still require a million pages, but would take a little under 2 weeks to print.
It still doesn't seem like a feasible option.
The up-side is that, if stored properly, the data would likely be safe potentially for many hundreds of years.
I was thinking about a ball too, but then the description of the 80mph winds didn't sound too friendly pushing up against a ball.
Something resting on sno-cat treads might be okay.
According to the CIA world factbook, USA has a population of: 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
Now, 20.8% of the population is estimated to be under 14 years old, and there is a 6.2% estimated unemployment rate (again from the CIA world factbook), so that is about $3123.72 per tax paying citizen of the USA.
That is a large chunk of money.
This is yet another reason for the electoral college. The electoral college representatives do have a choice, they almost never switch their choice, but they can.
Imagine if the green party got 4 states, the republicans got 24 states, and the democrats got 22 states. In that case, I doubt that the green party electoral college people would want to see the republicans take the election and they could choose to cast their electoral college vote for the democratic candidate.
Now, splitting the percentagages within districts is more problematic...
If we want real change, we need to stop assuming that we know what the rest of the world is going to do because of what the polls say and then we need to go vote for the candidate that we think will do the best job. Choosing a representative based on their percieved electability and because they are "not the other guy" is a bad idea. Would you choose a doctor because he is popular and isn't mentioned in the current scandal list, or would you choose him for his skill, success rate, and ability to heal your illnesses?
Right now, most people are not represented - in some precincts, as many as 90% of the registered voters don't show up. To me, that says either the status quo is great, or voters are heavily disenfranchised and don't feel like Dem/Rep *IS* a choice.
To me Dem/Rep is no choice at all! Like you said, the Kerry campaign site issues are not that different from the republicans. To me, *THAT* is the problem and I for one will be voting 3rd party.
I like the libertarian mindset. I look at government much like an operating system. Big and bloated operating systems may provide a rich feature-set, but they can be slow to react, have large surface areas for exploitation, and use a lot of resources. Democrats and Republicans are both "Desktop Operating Systems" in their level of services and bloat.
I want my goverment to be a Micro-Kernel!
Correction: Microsoft only started paying dividends last year, and the dividends have been relatively small. The announcement of this change last year.
From the 2003 financial statements, the nearly $50 billion would be enough to keep the entire company afloat for two years if income dropped to nothing, and it would be enough to keep R&D operating for 10 years if the rest of the expenses were cut.
As far as earnings/share value relationship, I don't know what the trend has been.
As far as the pile of cash, the EU anti-trust trial is still open as are a lot of smaller lawsuits, the executives did consider using it to buy SAP, and there may be other considerations.
Consider the criteria for a "Just War", I think these originated with Saint Augustine and were also discussed by Martin Luther:
1) Are you protecting your country from being harmed?
2) Have you tried other ways to resolve the conflict?
3) Have you formally declared war?
4) Is the goal to return to peace?
5) No scorched earth tactic - don't attack civilians, don't attack infrastructure.
6) Use only vocationed military - no civilian contractors or mobs of common people.
I may not have remembered these exactly right, but most war wouldn't meet these criteria for a Just War and in my view, anything other than a Just War is irresponsible.
My appologies, instead of "9/11 report", I should have said "9/11 hearing testimony". Specifically the NPR coverage found here.
First, I should explain that I do have a little bit of a luxury to vote as I please because my precinct, county, and state are so democratic that Kerry will take it by at least 10% without a sweat so this is my way of sending a message.
Second, from what have seen, I wouldn't trust either Bush or Kerry at anything they say.
Third, I WILL NOT let public opinion polls tell me which way to vote!
If even 10% of the population voted for a 3rd party, any 3rd party, the major parties would get the message that they need to listen to the public and represent us if they want to keep their power.
Vote your concience, not the lesser of the two evils and if you really want change then talk to and get to understand someone from an opposing party.
In the theater where I saw it, the audience was cheering, jeering, and applauding wildly on key with the points that Moore was trying to make.
I found this slightly startling as some of the cheers came in points that, after listening to the entire 9/11 report, I am confident that the 9/11 report findings contradicted what Moore was saying.
For me, several points like this counteracted the entire persuasive success of this film to change my opinions. If I can't trust the accuracy of information that I can collaberate, how can I trust the information that I can't easily collaberate?
What did strike me, something that hadn't sunk in for me before, is how emotional and deep the divide is between the extreeme right and extreeme left. I suspect that I would have been mobbed if I had stood up after the movie and yelled "This movie contained lies and I am still voting Republican." (btw, I am not voting Republican, and I am not voting Democrat, but I am voting)
Read, listen, think for yourself, discuss it with people you know, make up your own mind and gain some more understanding of others.
I am not assuming that highly intelligent people lack something else, I am observing that many people who have heavily focused in one area tend to systematically make mistakes in other areas.
This doesn't mean that everyone who is technically intelligent is a social dweebe, in fact some of the most socially adept people that I know are also highly technical.
I also wouldn't discount the possibility that I work with a number of people who are borderline idiot savants. I have even paused in meetings at work as I noticed that everyone in the room was involved in one quirky behavior or another.
I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, or maybe two or three, and I try hard not to make assumptions about people, but my observations make me cautious about being over-confident in my intelligence.
Well, maybe I personally know a disproportionate number of idiot savants.
It may be that they don't place priorities the same way and get clueless, but it still results in them doing stupid things, and I am not talking about keeping up with the Joneses.
One example - Calling in sick, going sailing for the day, and returning the next day with a bright red suntan.
I could easily give a dozen examples, each person is very smart in several areas, but frequently (or consistently) does something that I would consider stupid and by doing so they reduce their long term happiness, employment opportunities, and/or health.
I came to two important realizations a couple years ago.
....Most of all, take all of this with $.02....it is your life, choose for yourself.
First, people who are intensely brilliant in one or more areas are usually intensely stupid in other areas.
Second, brilliance does not count for anything if you don't have the discipline to stick to the task.
You may be bright in computers and normally insightful in many technical areas, but that frequently means that you are stupid about human nature, politics, music, religion, or some other basic area. I have a co-worker who is brilliant with a debugger, but who is constantly afraid that he will be fired because he can't communicate well with his manager.
One of my friends in college had amazing intuition. He skipped 90% of the classes one semester and consistently got A's or B's on the exams. However, when he got a job, he stopped showing up for work for two weeks, was nearly fired, and pulled the same stunt again a month later and was fired. As for myself, I would be making 10% to 15% more right now, in my 4 year old post-college career, than I currently am if I would have had the discipline to work on what I was supposed to be doing rather than what I felt like doing.
Before you get the attitude that you are so smart, ask yourself who you are comparing yourself with. I grew up in Southern Idaho, in a town of 5000 people where I would guess that less than 1/20th of the population had a bachelors degree or better. Now I live in Seattle where most of the population has a college degree and I work for a company that employs more than twice the number of people in the county that I grew up in. In Idaho, I got the same comments that you claim to get, and in Seattle I am just one of thousands.
Life is in constant flux. Tomorrow, psychology may be the hot field and software may be the next "automotive industry", don't choose a field because of the pay.
Today, a college degree is frequently a prereq for consideration for any desirable job. I wouldn't skip college, mostly because of all of the extras that you learn. Life in the dorms or in a fraternity and make friends.
Don't forget about finding someone to spend your life with, at some point computers won't mean all that much and you will want to know how to talk to someone that you are attracted to.
If you are passionate about something and make it your job, make a point to develop a hobby or else you will burn out. Computers have been my obsession for 15+ years and software has been my carrer for the last 4 and now I play with my container garden and listen to music instead of sitting on the computer when I come home.
Aside from that, figure out what you want to do and go do it. Life is to short to be doing something you hate.
Only it debugging is enabled, otherwise the bugs eat the log file.
Bugs love the token fibers in log files.
YankeeInExile,
I wasn't involved in Windows 2000, but I was responsible for the quality of DNS Manager in Windows 2003 and it would be very helpful if you would explain what you tried before determining that network configuration is "near impossible".
If you like administration via configuration files, Microsoft DNS will allow you to use zone files just like BIND does. If you like the command line, there are several command-line tools for managing DNS that can be found in the Resource Kit.
For more help with your DNS questions, there are several newsgroups for discussing Microsoft DNS with very helpful members that reply within a day to nearly all questions and last I checked the DNS team was also regularly checking and replying to questions on the newsgroups.
Thanks for the feedback.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.