Re:Nukes, shmukes, Iran is going to get Regime Cha
on
Iran's Nuclear Ambitions
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Much like in the (somewhat) open stock markets of the world, immediate value is not the only backing for a currency or stock. The largest thing "backing" the value of US currency (and the reason it doesn't collapse like simple analysis would indicate) is the value of American innovation and industry. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. The world puts a lot of value on our future ability to continue being a dominant power in the world through innovation and bleeding-edge industry.
Iran has never attacked a foreign country -- That statement is absurdly false, even using a definition of "attack" that only includes traditional hot wars. If you extend the definition of "attack" to include clandestine operations, supplying arms and money to terrorists and self-acknowledged terror-sponsoring states, which I think is reasonable, the statement is even more absurd. Iran is not ruled by mad suicidal clerics -- This statement has been false in the past, and could be false in the future.
Actually, high ranking UN officials were playing key roles in that "redistribution". Google it. Clinton goes for sanctions through the UN, and the UN guys help Saddam profit from the oil for food program in order to get kickbacks. Bottom line: don't ever trust bureaucracy to do the right thing, and the UN is the biggest bureaucracy on the planet.
GP's point still stands. You said: "Iran has plentiful natural resources but does not have the capacity to refine it and must import gas. Any type of war and they could easily be cut off of that gas." Alright, well what's the easiest route in terms of science and use of local resources? Build a secret nuclear refining capacity and anger the world, or build more gas refineries that don't anger the world and are *much* easier and cheaper to build than nuclear refining capacity. Iran's actions still indicate either it fails at basic logic, or it intends to build weapons.
As far as the "everyone else has them" argument, it's horse-shit. The world (being the superpowers) already played the nuke game once, and we all as a planet decided that further proliferation of nuclear weapons is a really bad idea. The smaller and less-stable the country is, the worse the risk is. The existing nuclear powers enforce this because they're already in the game and it's a really hard game to back out of (although we and the other superpowers do make progress on reduction every year). The only legitimate concern Iran has re: nukes is this idea that his neighbors have been invaded and regime-changed recently. The simple answer to that is to stop being a state sponsor of terrorism. The US (and the west by extension, in general) isn't out to topple random countries for profit: they're seeking to prevent terrorism breeding grounds and safe-havens. It's a whole lot easier to just co-operate the UN and the US and stop enabling terrorism and join the rest of the responsible citizens of the world than it is to bulk up on nukes to protect your right to be a terrorism supporter.
It may not require direct reciprocation, but there is an element of preventing abuse involved. In the case where a company extends GPL software and then only sells the resulting binaries commercially, they are still required to provide any customers with the resulting source code under the GPL license, which further allows them to re-distribute it if they see fit. That means there's no effective way to hoard this code or lord it over others. If your derivative product sucks so bad or has such limited applicability that only a handful of people ever buy it and thus get access to the derived code, perhaps they will never re-distribute it, and perhaps the world could care less. But for any derived code with wide applicability or value, enough people will purchase the product and gain access to the code that it's virtually inevitable that someone will legally "leak" it to the rest of the un-paying public, who can then compile it for themselves (again, legally) without paying for the product. This makes it pretty unrealistic to build a business plan around selling software derived from GPL software commercially.
That is the GPL's intent: it is a license for authors who wish to say: "I give this work to the world, and I don't want some greedy person down the line to be able to make money by locking up a modified form of my code from the users of said code, which is something I don't approve of. If you want to derive your work from mine, you must adhere to what I consider to be basic principles of software ethics, the main ones being that you can't sell people binaries and refuse them access to the source code, and you also can't tell them who they can or can't give that source code to themselves".
That's not to say you can't build a successful business around reselling (slightly modified or not) GPL software, it's just that you can't hoard the code in order to force people to pay you. You have to make your money by offering something else: support, services, hardware, etc.
I used to lament the fact that Radio Shack was going downhill and not doing nearly as good a job as they used to about selling actual electronic components and kits and manuals (like the old Forrest Mims books, and actual chips and resistors and board etching kits and such).
Then we got a Fry's in town, and it blew Radio Shack outta the water. Way bigger selection of electronics components. Bye bye Radio Shack. I miss the old you, but I won't miss the decaying corpse you've become lately.
I've used both pretty extensively in a wide variety of environments, and I don't take such a balanced view at all. IMHO, the best answer to most database-related problems is to use PostgreSQL or SQLite. MySQL sits somewhere between them in terms of reliability, scalability, ACIDity, etc, and kinda fails at being good at anything in particular. For that matter, even if you *like* where MySQL lies on those tradeoffs, compared to either of the other two mentioned products (especially Pg), the quality of the code and the development process both flat-out suck, and are very amateurish in places by comparison. The only reason I use it anymore is for applications that require it and haven't been ported to PostgreSQL or SQLite (as appropriate) yet.
And that was before all the fiasco in recent years with Oracle buying Innobase, then Oracle buying Sun which had bought MySQL, and the several emerging MySQL forks, etc... which doesn't leave me feeling great about the future of MySQL if I were starting a new project today.
Both parties are stealing money from the public to give to their preferred interests. Republicans tend to steal to give to the needlessly greedy, and Democrats to give to the needlessly needy. I think the point the GP was making was that one thing Democrats tend to steal money for is university systems, which has a direct economic impact on the lives of scientists.
Having a checklist of standard validators for rational lines of argument actually is a pretty useful tool for critical thinking. You should try it sometime.
I don't think the 55% Dem 6% Repub number says anything in particular about the validity of the parties or the bias of the science. I think more likely than not, this is the fallout of the obvious facts:Scientists spend a long time at universities, in many cases their whole lives. Universities have an extremely liberal population makeup, both among students and professors. Therefore most scientists are basically bathed in liberalism every day of their adult lives, and face pretty strong scorn from university peers if they don't follow that trend.
Personally, I'm somewhere in the conservative-libertarian camp. That is, I hate right-wing-nuts (especially the religious kind) and left-wing-nuts (especially the socialist-leaning kind), and wish the government would just stay the hell out of everything that isn't strictly necessary (which is about 5% of what it does today). I really wish either the democrats would drop socialist tendencies (not gonna happen), or the republicans would kick out the religious nuts (also very unlikely, but less so), so that there would be some semi-rational major party in this country I could somewhat stand behind.
Yes, these newer simple key/value databases like BigTable and CouchDB are effectively a subset of RDBMS functionality, so of course the same thing can be implemented relationally by just not using features.
The reason these projects have taken off is that the relational features being skipped comprise most of the complexity of an RDBMS. Without them, it's relatively trivial to write new database engines from scratch instead of re-using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and so-on. These new feature-poor rewrites can take on many challenges that are harder for the big relational guys, like stellar performance on huge datasets, and being truly distributed in nature.
Economic considerations are quite valid, because they deal in the realm of how wasteful we are in dealing with the problem of waste. Regardless of the authenticity of the arguments, there's huge hype and political pressure for everything to be Green now. Some people are going to make (and have already made) really stupid "Green" decisions that actually just make things worse for humans in the long run.
In my area, all fuel has been mandated to be 10% ethanol in the name of Green-ness already, and it's been that way for a few years. While I am not an expert, I gather from my own unbiased readings of the experts that Ethanol production (and consumption in cars) is a net bad thing for the planet, and is only really a win for certain politicians and subsidized corn farmers. The fact that adding ethanol makes fuel more expensive and get less miles per gallon (as well as being worse for the internals of your engine) is an economic argument that helps shed light on the problem here.
"You DID break the law. You SHOULD have paid the fine" - and then calling him a criminal.
Get it through your thick skull: People who commit clear and direct acts that harm another's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are criminals. A rapist is a criminal. A burglar is a criminal. A murderer is a criminal. A person who commits fraud against another, or violates the terms of a contract, could be a criminal depending on the nature. Etc..
When you start getting into laws about indirect consequences, it's all a slippery slope towards a socialist nanny state that robs you of personal freedom and privacy. We've been sliding down that slope for a *long* time now, and it's sad.
Red light laws, especially when camera enforced, are another example of this sort of nanny pre-emption. Do you know what percentage of red-light runners actually get in accidents? Does it matter much what that number is?
The vast majority of all traffic citations are just excuses to invade privacy, harass citizens, and collect money. So get off your fucking high horse and stop calling a red-light runner a criminal.
If someone's driving is so truly unsafe as to be reasonably called "criminal", I don't think an officer would have any problem flagging down a few witnesses and taking the guy down on a legitimate "reckless driving" charge that could actually be prosecuted in a real court setting (as opposed to the utterly lame non-justice that passes for a "court" for most driving offenses). Those cases are rare, as are accidents (considering the total car-miles). The rest is bullshit.
Oh, you mean the weapons inspectors who basically gave up and left because they never got any meaningful co-operation from the Iraqi government? The same ones that recommended sactions against him numerous times between the two us/iraq wars? Only one of them came out said, for apparently political reasons, that he thought iraq didn't have WMD's.
Question: if he used up or destroyed his stockpiles, then why did he refuse to co-operate with the inspectors and stall them out for over a decade?
Yes, but we've got an unstable dictator who (a) we know we *gave* WMD to in the past to fight the iran/iraq war, (b) we know developed and used his own WMD's during subsequent actions, such as the issue with the poison gas and the kurds, and (c) refused, for more than 10 years, to ever sustain substantial co-operation with UN weapons inspectors on documenting his inventory and capabilities, in spite of numerous sanctions and threats over the years.
In that scenario, a claim that he destroyed them does not suffice. Either he allows the inspections to prove it or he's just making crap up. Nobody else in the world is going to believe him on his word at that point.
It's crazy how much you people ignore the facts when you politicize this.
Race isn't the only determinant either, though. Also consider that generalization is a common and useful human optimization for the problem of not knowing everyone in a large society well enough to judge them accurately on their individual merits.
I don't consider myself a racist because I don't believe that the color of a person's skin is a direct determinant of their behavior. But certainly I do make a lot of rational generalizations about the behaviors of groups of people to better inform my initial reactions to them, and some people like to cry "racism" when they see this behavior.
For example, I react very different when approached by a stranger on the street depending on the obvious clues about their social stature. If they're clearly middle or upper class based on the clothing, mannerisms, speech, and behavior cues, I'm more likely to be receptive to the approach. On the other hand if they're clearly a street bum, I'm a lot more wary and guarded, because that class of people are known to scam people like me on the street on a regular basis.
If the bum happens to be black, it's easy for someone (perhaps the bum himself) to accuse me of racism, when I'm not in fact racist.
I'm fine with the "NT law overwrites OT law" explanation if Christians want to use that. But if they nix OT law, they have to nix all of it, and IIRC all of the anti-gay agenda from the Christians is OT based is it not?
Because its javascript performance is through the roof compared to every other browser. Or because tabs are separate processes, meaning one misbehaving website doesn't kill your whole long-running browsing session with 20 tabs open. Or because they're being even more innovative than FF with address/search input box functionality.
But that's not what the TTL is for in the first place. The TTL was not intended to mean "I will hold this record for this duration, ignoring any other updates in the meantime". It was meant to mean, "I will not under any circumstances remember this record any longer than this duration". The difference has practical implications for DNS operations.
I agree. I've traveled all over the US (and abroad), and on average, Houston has more restaurants with better quality food (and a wider variety of cuisines) than just about anywhere in the US. If you love eating out, Houston is the place to live really.
That being said, while there are a number of *great* sushi places in Houston with some really creative chefs making great preparations, the quality of the actual fish meat itself is noticeably superior in the SF Bay Area.
I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion on the FEMA issue in New Orleans. States are supposed to have some kind of emergency preparedness of their own. It's not enough to just fall apart and beg for FEMA to save you. FEMA's traditional role has been to show up late and provide sustaining support in the aftermath of an event, not to be the first responders at the moment of crisis. Many other states understand this. Texas (a nearby neighbor who ended up bearing the brunt of the NO disaster refugees) for example rarely needs FEMA - when hurricanes head for Texas, they deploy their local resources to remedy the immediate situation.
The problem with the NO disaster was not FEMA. The problem was the bankrupt, ineffective, unprepared, and completely corrupt local and state governments in the area who had nothing to offer their citizens when disaster struck.
First, you're answering an IBM vs MS post with an IBM vs Apple comparison. Then, you're comparing your 3.1 -> XP timeframe (what 15 years) to the timeframe of the parent (more like 40+). Then there's the fact that Windows 3.1-era apps that run on modern XP are the exception rather than the rule. A lot of older windows software that did interesting things doesn't work on XP, and even more don't work on Vista.
The GP isn't a load of anti-MS crap. It's the truth.
It's actually very relevant. The issue here is personal privacy. They're trying to prevent unregulated and sometimes downright criminal people from offering "PC Repair" as a cover for identify theft activities they engage in while "repairing" a person's computer. The PI licensing setup in TX is already geared towards vetting and regulating people with access to sensitive information (like state databases of driver's license data, vehicle registration, warrants, court information, property tax data, etc).
You can argue about whether or not saving grandma from the conman repairing her PC is worth putting so many legit PC repairment through the PI licensing BS, but it *is* related and relevant.
If you don't like Texas, why don't you gtfo of my state then. The last thing I need is you trying to ruin it with braindead socialist policy. If you're going to enjoy the benefits of Texas (cheap land, reasonably limited government, low taxes, etc) you could at least not bash on it.
People who move to places like Texas (and Colorado, which is further along this track already) from places like CA just don't seem to understand that the things they want to change about their new home are the things that made it great to begin with. They ruin their own states with retarded laws and then move into ours and try to ruin them too.
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Much like in the (somewhat) open stock markets of the world, immediate value is not the only backing for a currency or stock. The largest thing "backing" the value of US currency (and the reason it doesn't collapse like simple analysis would indicate) is the value of American innovation and industry. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. The world puts a lot of value on our future ability to continue being a dominant power in the world through innovation and bleeding-edge industry.
Iran has never attacked a foreign country -- That statement is absurdly false, even using a definition of "attack" that only includes traditional hot wars. If you extend the definition of "attack" to include clandestine operations, supplying arms and money to terrorists and self-acknowledged terror-sponsoring states, which I think is reasonable, the statement is even more absurd.
Iran is not ruled by mad suicidal clerics -- This statement has been false in the past, and could be false in the future.
Actually, high ranking UN officials were playing key roles in that "redistribution". Google it. Clinton goes for sanctions through the UN, and the UN guys help Saddam profit from the oil for food program in order to get kickbacks. Bottom line: don't ever trust bureaucracy to do the right thing, and the UN is the biggest bureaucracy on the planet.
GP's point still stands. You said: "Iran has plentiful natural resources but does not have the capacity to refine it and must import gas. Any type of war and they could easily be cut off of that gas." Alright, well what's the easiest route in terms of science and use of local resources? Build a secret nuclear refining capacity and anger the world, or build more gas refineries that don't anger the world and are *much* easier and cheaper to build than nuclear refining capacity. Iran's actions still indicate either it fails at basic logic, or it intends to build weapons.
As far as the "everyone else has them" argument, it's horse-shit. The world (being the superpowers) already played the nuke game once, and we all as a planet decided that further proliferation of nuclear weapons is a really bad idea. The smaller and less-stable the country is, the worse the risk is. The existing nuclear powers enforce this because they're already in the game and it's a really hard game to back out of (although we and the other superpowers do make progress on reduction every year). The only legitimate concern Iran has re: nukes is this idea that his neighbors have been invaded and regime-changed recently. The simple answer to that is to stop being a state sponsor of terrorism. The US (and the west by extension, in general) isn't out to topple random countries for profit: they're seeking to prevent terrorism breeding grounds and safe-havens. It's a whole lot easier to just co-operate the UN and the US and stop enabling terrorism and join the rest of the responsible citizens of the world than it is to bulk up on nukes to protect your right to be a terrorism supporter.
It may not require direct reciprocation, but there is an element of preventing abuse involved. In the case where a company extends GPL software and then only sells the resulting binaries commercially, they are still required to provide any customers with the resulting source code under the GPL license, which further allows them to re-distribute it if they see fit. That means there's no effective way to hoard this code or lord it over others. If your derivative product sucks so bad or has such limited applicability that only a handful of people ever buy it and thus get access to the derived code, perhaps they will never re-distribute it, and perhaps the world could care less. But for any derived code with wide applicability or value, enough people will purchase the product and gain access to the code that it's virtually inevitable that someone will legally "leak" it to the rest of the un-paying public, who can then compile it for themselves (again, legally) without paying for the product. This makes it pretty unrealistic to build a business plan around selling software derived from GPL software commercially.
That is the GPL's intent: it is a license for authors who wish to say: "I give this work to the world, and I don't want some greedy person down the line to be able to make money by locking up a modified form of my code from the users of said code, which is something I don't approve of. If you want to derive your work from mine, you must adhere to what I consider to be basic principles of software ethics, the main ones being that you can't sell people binaries and refuse them access to the source code, and you also can't tell them who they can or can't give that source code to themselves".
That's not to say you can't build a successful business around reselling (slightly modified or not) GPL software, it's just that you can't hoard the code in order to force people to pay you. You have to make your money by offering something else: support, services, hardware, etc.
I used to lament the fact that Radio Shack was going downhill and not doing nearly as good a job as they used to about selling actual electronic components and kits and manuals (like the old Forrest Mims books, and actual chips and resistors and board etching kits and such). Then we got a Fry's in town, and it blew Radio Shack outta the water. Way bigger selection of electronics components. Bye bye Radio Shack. I miss the old you, but I won't miss the decaying corpse you've become lately.
I've used both pretty extensively in a wide variety of environments, and I don't take such a balanced view at all. IMHO, the best answer to most database-related problems is to use PostgreSQL or SQLite. MySQL sits somewhere between them in terms of reliability, scalability, ACIDity, etc, and kinda fails at being good at anything in particular. For that matter, even if you *like* where MySQL lies on those tradeoffs, compared to either of the other two mentioned products (especially Pg), the quality of the code and the development process both flat-out suck, and are very amateurish in places by comparison. The only reason I use it anymore is for applications that require it and haven't been ported to PostgreSQL or SQLite (as appropriate) yet.
And that was before all the fiasco in recent years with Oracle buying Innobase, then Oracle buying Sun which had bought MySQL, and the several emerging MySQL forks, etc... which doesn't leave me feeling great about the future of MySQL if I were starting a new project today.
Both parties are stealing money from the public to give to their preferred interests. Republicans tend to steal to give to the needlessly greedy, and Democrats to give to the needlessly needy. I think the point the GP was making was that one thing Democrats tend to steal money for is university systems, which has a direct economic impact on the lives of scientists.
Having a checklist of standard validators for rational lines of argument actually is a pretty useful tool for critical thinking. You should try it sometime.
I don't think the 55% Dem 6% Repub number says anything in particular about the validity of the parties or the bias of the science. I think more likely than not, this is the fallout of the obvious facts:Scientists spend a long time at universities, in many cases their whole lives. Universities have an extremely liberal population makeup, both among students and professors. Therefore most scientists are basically bathed in liberalism every day of their adult lives, and face pretty strong scorn from university peers if they don't follow that trend.
Personally, I'm somewhere in the conservative-libertarian camp. That is, I hate right-wing-nuts (especially the religious kind) and left-wing-nuts (especially the socialist-leaning kind), and wish the government would just stay the hell out of everything that isn't strictly necessary (which is about 5% of what it does today). I really wish either the democrats would drop socialist tendencies (not gonna happen), or the republicans would kick out the religious nuts (also very unlikely, but less so), so that there would be some semi-rational major party in this country I could somewhat stand behind.
Yes, these newer simple key/value databases like BigTable and CouchDB are effectively a subset of RDBMS functionality, so of course the same thing can be implemented relationally by just not using features.
The reason these projects have taken off is that the relational features being skipped comprise most of the complexity of an RDBMS. Without them, it's relatively trivial to write new database engines from scratch instead of re-using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and so-on. These new feature-poor rewrites can take on many challenges that are harder for the big relational guys, like stellar performance on huge datasets, and being truly distributed in nature.
Economic considerations are quite valid, because they deal in the realm of how wasteful we are in dealing with the problem of waste. Regardless of the authenticity of the arguments, there's huge hype and political pressure for everything to be Green now. Some people are going to make (and have already made) really stupid "Green" decisions that actually just make things worse for humans in the long run.
In my area, all fuel has been mandated to be 10% ethanol in the name of Green-ness already, and it's been that way for a few years. While I am not an expert, I gather from my own unbiased readings of the experts that Ethanol production (and consumption in cars) is a net bad thing for the planet, and is only really a win for certain politicians and subsidized corn farmers. The fact that adding ethanol makes fuel more expensive and get less miles per gallon (as well as being worse for the internals of your engine) is an economic argument that helps shed light on the problem here.
"You DID break the law. You SHOULD have paid the fine" - and then calling him a criminal.
Get it through your thick skull: People who commit clear and direct acts that harm another's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are criminals. A rapist is a criminal. A burglar is a criminal. A murderer is a criminal. A person who commits fraud against another, or violates the terms of a contract, could be a criminal depending on the nature. Etc..
When you start getting into laws about indirect consequences, it's all a slippery slope towards a socialist nanny state that robs you of personal freedom and privacy. We've been sliding down that slope for a *long* time now, and it's sad.
Red light laws, especially when camera enforced, are another example of this sort of nanny pre-emption. Do you know what percentage of red-light runners actually get in accidents? Does it matter much what that number is?
The vast majority of all traffic citations are just excuses to invade privacy, harass citizens, and collect money. So get off your fucking high horse and stop calling a red-light runner a criminal.
If someone's driving is so truly unsafe as to be reasonably called "criminal", I don't think an officer would have any problem flagging down a few witnesses and taking the guy down on a legitimate "reckless driving" charge that could actually be prosecuted in a real court setting (as opposed to the utterly lame non-justice that passes for a "court" for most driving offenses). Those cases are rare, as are accidents (considering the total car-miles). The rest is bullshit.
"International inspectors with pretty much unrestricted access to Iraqi facilities found none"
Bullshit. He failed to co-operate for a decade. Hence all of the sanctions during the time between the two iraq wars.
Oh, you mean the weapons inspectors who basically gave up and left because they never got any meaningful co-operation from the Iraqi government? The same ones that recommended sactions against him numerous times between the two us/iraq wars? Only one of them came out said, for apparently political reasons, that he thought iraq didn't have WMD's.
Question: if he used up or destroyed his stockpiles, then why did he refuse to co-operate with the inspectors and stall them out for over a decade?
Yes, but we've got an unstable dictator who (a) we know we *gave* WMD to in the past to fight the iran/iraq war, (b) we know developed and used his own WMD's during subsequent actions, such as the issue with the poison gas and the kurds, and (c) refused, for more than 10 years, to ever sustain substantial co-operation with UN weapons inspectors on documenting his inventory and capabilities, in spite of numerous sanctions and threats over the years.
In that scenario, a claim that he destroyed them does not suffice. Either he allows the inspections to prove it or he's just making crap up. Nobody else in the world is going to believe him on his word at that point.
It's crazy how much you people ignore the facts when you politicize this.
Race isn't the only determinant either, though. Also consider that generalization is a common and useful human optimization for the problem of not knowing everyone in a large society well enough to judge them accurately on their individual merits.
I don't consider myself a racist because I don't believe that the color of a person's skin is a direct determinant of their behavior. But certainly I do make a lot of rational generalizations about the behaviors of groups of people to better inform my initial reactions to them, and some people like to cry "racism" when they see this behavior.
For example, I react very different when approached by a stranger on the street depending on the obvious clues about their social stature. If they're clearly middle or upper class based on the clothing, mannerisms, speech, and behavior cues, I'm more likely to be receptive to the approach. On the other hand if they're clearly a street bum, I'm a lot more wary and guarded, because that class of people are known to scam people like me on the street on a regular basis.
If the bum happens to be black, it's easy for someone (perhaps the bum himself) to accuse me of racism, when I'm not in fact racist.
I'm fine with the "NT law overwrites OT law" explanation if Christians want to use that. But if they nix OT law, they have to nix all of it, and IIRC all of the anti-gay agenda from the Christians is OT based is it not?
Because its javascript performance is through the roof compared to every other browser. Or because tabs are separate processes, meaning one misbehaving website doesn't kill your whole long-running browsing session with 20 tabs open. Or because they're being even more innovative than FF with address/search input box functionality.
But that's not what the TTL is for in the first place. The TTL was not intended to mean "I will hold this record for this duration, ignoring any other updates in the meantime". It was meant to mean, "I will not under any circumstances remember this record any longer than this duration". The difference has practical implications for DNS operations.
I agree. I've traveled all over the US (and abroad), and on average, Houston has more restaurants with better quality food (and a wider variety of cuisines) than just about anywhere in the US. If you love eating out, Houston is the place to live really.
That being said, while there are a number of *great* sushi places in Houston with some really creative chefs making great preparations, the quality of the actual fish meat itself is noticeably superior in the SF Bay Area.
I'd like to offer a dissenting opinion on the FEMA issue in New Orleans. States are supposed to have some kind of emergency preparedness of their own. It's not enough to just fall apart and beg for FEMA to save you. FEMA's traditional role has been to show up late and provide sustaining support in the aftermath of an event, not to be the first responders at the moment of crisis. Many other states understand this. Texas (a nearby neighbor who ended up bearing the brunt of the NO disaster refugees) for example rarely needs FEMA - when hurricanes head for Texas, they deploy their local resources to remedy the immediate situation.
The problem with the NO disaster was not FEMA. The problem was the bankrupt, ineffective, unprepared, and completely corrupt local and state governments in the area who had nothing to offer their citizens when disaster struck.
First, you're answering an IBM vs MS post with an IBM vs Apple comparison. Then, you're comparing your 3.1 -> XP timeframe (what 15 years) to the timeframe of the parent (more like 40+). Then there's the fact that Windows 3.1-era apps that run on modern XP are the exception rather than the rule. A lot of older windows software that did interesting things doesn't work on XP, and even more don't work on Vista.
The GP isn't a load of anti-MS crap. It's the truth.
It's actually very relevant. The issue here is personal privacy. They're trying to prevent unregulated and sometimes downright criminal people from offering "PC Repair" as a cover for identify theft activities they engage in while "repairing" a person's computer. The PI licensing setup in TX is already geared towards vetting and regulating people with access to sensitive information (like state databases of driver's license data, vehicle registration, warrants, court information, property tax data, etc).
You can argue about whether or not saving grandma from the conman repairing her PC is worth putting so many legit PC repairment through the PI licensing BS, but it *is* related and relevant.
If you don't like Texas, why don't you gtfo of my state then. The last thing I need is you trying to ruin it with braindead socialist policy. If you're going to enjoy the benefits of Texas (cheap land, reasonably limited government, low taxes, etc) you could at least not bash on it.
People who move to places like Texas (and Colorado, which is further along this track already) from places like CA just don't seem to understand that the things they want to change about their new home are the things that made it great to begin with. They ruin their own states with retarded laws and then move into ours and try to ruin them too.