I'd argue both Dell and Walmart are hard to duplicate, because they charge much lower prices than their competitors. If anyone could afford to slash prices as much as either of those companies have, they wouldn't be in the positions they are today.
Sometimes you don't have to have a brand new business idea to win, you just have to implement an old one better than anyone else has.
No, they're not. Amazon has no offline book stores, so they are not "click and mortar". BN.com, BestBuy.com, even ToysRUs.com (powered by Amazon, interestingly enough) are click and mortar stores, and aren't doing nearly as well as the pure dot-com, Amazon. So if anything, Amazon proves click and mortar *doesn't* work.
See how much clearer things are when you understand what the hell you're talking about?
I've ran a small computer repair shop since the early nineties, and let me tell you, when you have a small client base, business models and management techniques don't matter in the face of just providing a good service to the customer.
Hmm, seems like providing better customer service than your competitors would qualify as a business model or even a management technique, but what do I know?
This is interesting. If you add all of the columns except "unique addresses", it comes to 6,220,454. Which, of course, is the same as the number of unique addresses. So if an address appears more than once, how is it unique?
There are still 4,776,175 addresses unaccounted for. What happened to them?
if all of those penis enlargement products that spam tries to sell worked, and you used them all, you probably would pass out when you got an erection from loss of blood to the brain.
I think if you're willing to give your money to spammers, you've proven yourself safe from any harmful side effects to your alleged brain.
Note that I said little of Saddams hardware came directly from the USSR.
You also claimed that most or much of it came by the US, though via third parties. So you're willing to grant the Soviets a pass because they channeled actual military hardware (and lots of it) through client states, but you want to slam the US for allegedly doing the same? That's called a double standard.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how?
Because no ethical stance was considered.
No, actually, an ethical stance *was* considered: it's unethical to allow Communists to invade and conquer other countries. There have only been a few times the US has stepped in to stop them, with mixed success, but Afghanistan was one such success (successful at keeping the Soviets out, that is). Iran should be grateful to us, too, since the Soviet plan was to push through Afghanistan and take the Iranian oil fields.
While there's no direct correlation, most of the future Taliban were also members of the mujahadeen resistance during the Soviet incursion.
You might be right, I'm not 100% sure. However, I stand by my original assertion: other than helping them fight off an invader, we really didn't do anything to the Taliban. We encouraged them to clamp down on drug smuggling as recently as 2000 by sending them gobs of money, but for the most part we let them live their lives as they wanted. Which, again, gave them no reason to attack us (in the case of al-Qaeda, most of which were former mujahedeen), or support those who did (in the case of the Taliban themselves). We did nothing to earn their hate.
That kind of generalisation makes me suspect you are a US resident. When I lived in the States I was shocked at the type of bias in the media. All media is biased, fact of human nature, but I hadn't seen anything so obviously one sided before. This was prior to September 11th, but Arabs and Muslims were already portrayed as rabid maniacs, while I never saw any criticism of Israeli policies.
Wow, I never even mentioned Israel, now suddenly they're the bad guy in all this. Amazing, simply amazing.
I'm not a US resident, I'm a US citizen, and proud of it. And if the US media portrays Arabs and Muslims as "rabid maniacs", it could have something to do with them doing things like: * burning our flag whenever they get bored * blowing up airliners * killing innocent civilians (not referring to 9/11, referring to all the times previous to that that nutjob Muslims killed people just for not being Muslim)
Let me be clear: I don't hate all Muslims. I do hate Islam, and would like to see that religion wiped off the earth (preferrably by individual Muslims coming to their senses). The love of my life is a Muslim, and one of the reasons we can't be together is she is genuinely afraid of someone killing her if she married a Christian. Now tell me Islam is a peaceful religion.
Little of Saddams military material came directly from the USSR
So all those T-72's came from, where?, Poland?
Most of the Iraqi C4I equipment came from various Warsaw Pact countries, none of which really cared what the US thought at the time. China was also a major supplier of small arms. The only Western nation which sold military-only technology to Iraq was France. I'll grant that the US (and Canada, and the UK, and Germany) sold dual use equipment to Iraq, but considering just how much of their hardware came from the Soviet block, this was more of an attempt to balance things in that sphere of influence than anything else.
Also, don't forget how dangerous Iran was/is. Supporting Iraq against them was viewed as the lessor of two evils for a long time (just like helping the Soviets against the Nazis). Diplomacy is a dirty business, and you often have to do things you later regret because at the time it's the only/best thing you can do.
However, the US cannot take any moral high ground over its actions in Afghaninstan. Nor can the United Kingdom, who also trained and covertly armed the mujahadeen.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how? We helped them fight off an invader, so that makes it OK for nutjobs to attack us? Only in the twisted mind of a Muslim does that make sense.
Oh, and don't forget, the Taliban != the mujahedeen. The Northern Alliance, who are the ones currently trying to rebuild their country with our help, were formed from most of the remains of the mujahedeen, what was left of them after the Taliban came in and took over in the early 90s. Don't forget that their name "Taliban" is a reference to Pakistani Islamic schools, whence they all came.
Backing Saddam with weapons against Iran is a funny way of leaving people alone.
Except that we didn't back Saddam with weapons against Iran, at least not in any meaningful way. The vast majority of his arms came from either Russia (then the Soviet Union) or France.
Training Osama in terrorist tactics to be used against our political foes is a funny way of leaving people alone.
Again, we didn't do this. We supplied the mujahedeen weapons and equipment in their fight against Soviet aggression. Oddly enough, at the time bin Laden and his friends were considered more trustworthy than the local Afghans, so we helped them even more. The fact that we aided them in their struggle seems an odd reason for them to later try to kill us all.
Have we ever planned for peaceful coexistance with Muslims?
Yeah, actually, we did: it's called "leave us alone and we'll leave you alone". Unfortunately, when people slam airplanes into buildings and kill thousands of innocent civilians, there's not much left to do but start lining those bastards' friends and family up against the wall and doing God's work.
That is what the US Secretary of defence said, whom, I'm sure, had the Cuba crisis fresh in mind.
Hmm, I wonder if the SecDef in 1973 could have had anything on his mind regarding warfare and Communists that was more recent than the Cuban Missile Crisis?....
I hope I'm still around in another half century, when China is stronger than the US, so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing these principles come back to bite them.
I'll grant you all the points you made about the US's behavior in the past regarding protecting our strategic interests (or as you put it, "maintain [our] level of resource consumption"). But then you claim that China could ever become stronger than us and that they'll "bite" us (presumably on the ass). I submit that the US won't let China get strong enough to be a serious threat, and if they ever got close to being one we'd start nudging them to see how far we can go before we have to start lobbing bombs on Beijing.
Besides, name one major power who hasn't done the exact same thing in the past, at least when they *were* a major power. Britain and France have both trounced other countries "rights" many times when it suited their interests, as have all other world powers at one time or another going back to Rome and beyond. In fact, it's one of the defining elements of being a world power that you can usually get away with this stuff.
Except that in this case, the fish is not natural to the environment, rather it was introduced by humans. So causing it to go extinct is actually a good thing (you'll be restoring the original ecosystem, in effect).
Interestingly, the monthly chart shows the average low over the past 30 years as 32 degrees. Granted, that's average, not mean, but still it suggests that about half of the time it's not cold enough to snow in NYC in December. So not only are cold rains unsurprising, they should be expected.
It's raining in NYC. We get a variety of weather in our temperate city, but I can't remember it ever raining on Christmas Eve in my life.
Pish posh. I remember two consecutive winters in South Philly twenty-some years ago ('79 and '80). The first had record high temperatures, I distinctly remember running around, playing with my friends in shorts and a tee-shirt. The Mummers' Parade almost got cancelled because so many of the mummers were collapsing from heat exhaustion (their costumes are designed to keep them cool in snow storms).
The next winter, we had a good three feet of snow by Christmas. What does this wide variation tell us that? That the weather is fickle, and not completely understood.
They believe in God without any scientific evidence but yet they don't think there is such a thing as global warming?
Belief in God is an article of faith; by defintion, there can be no proof. That's why it's called "faith", the evidence of things unseen. Are you suggesting belief in global warming is also motivated by faith, and not cold hard facts?
Really? What an odd claim to make. There is lots of evidence for global warming and many studies have been done on it. Maybe the evidence is not conclusive but it exists and is widespread.
You should read the speech, this is exactly the attitude he attacks. If the "evidence is not conclusive", how can you draw conclusions from it?
The real problem with roaming and Wi-Fi lies with customers who try to cheat the system.
I'm not a cell phone expert, but I'm pretty sure a portion of the roaming charges you pay on your cell phone get passed on to the owner of the network you're roaming on. For instance, if you're a T-Mobile customer in a location with no T-Mobile cell, and you roam through an AT&T cell, part of the extra money T-Mobile charges you gets passed on to AT&T. A lot of big cell providers will negotiate roaming charges between themselves, so they can offer lower rates to their customers, and be more competitive than smaller cell providers.
The same would likely happen here. WISPs like Boingo and such would pass on some of the roaming charges to their competitors to gain access to their networks, allowing the customer to roam in the first place. And most likely, they would negotiate for better prices depending on how large their own network is (the more hotspots they operate, the less they have to pay someone else to use theirs). So while competition would drive prices down (which is a good thing), noone will be getting anything for free. At least not until the WISPs have paid off their investment into their infrastructure.
I don't which makes me laugh more, getting marked "Flamebait" when I didn't insult anyone, or marked "Troll" when I asked a polite question which directly followed from a comment in the parent post.
If you want to see a good British-film-with-Indians-in-it, check out "East is East".
And a good American-film-wtih-Indians-in-it is "Praying in Anger", the first movie by M. Night Shylamalan, made years before "The Sixth Sense" made him famous. Excellent movie.
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I'd argue both Dell and Walmart are hard to duplicate, because they charge much lower prices than their competitors. If anyone could afford to slash prices as much as either of those companies have, they wouldn't be in the positions they are today.
Sometimes you don't have to have a brand new business idea to win, you just have to implement an old one better than anyone else has.
Amazon.com is proof that click and mortar works.
No, they're not. Amazon has no offline book stores, so they are not "click and mortar". BN.com, BestBuy.com, even ToysRUs.com (powered by Amazon, interestingly enough) are click and mortar stores, and aren't doing nearly as well as the pure dot-com, Amazon. So if anything, Amazon proves click and mortar *doesn't* work.
See how much clearer things are when you understand what the hell you're talking about?
I've ran a small computer repair shop since the early nineties, and let me tell you, when you have a small client base, business models and management techniques don't matter in the face of just providing a good service to the customer.
Hmm, seems like providing better customer service than your competitors would qualify as a business model or even a management technique, but what do I know?
This is interesting. If you add all of the columns except "unique addresses", it comes to 6,220,454. Which, of course, is the same as the number of unique addresses. So if an address appears more than once, how is it unique?
There are still 4,776,175 addresses unaccounted for. What happened to them?
if all of those penis enlargement products that spam tries to sell worked, and you used them all, you probably would pass out when you got an erection from loss of blood to the brain.
I think if you're willing to give your money to spammers, you've proven yourself safe from any harmful side effects to your alleged brain.
Note that I said little of Saddams hardware came directly from the USSR.
You also claimed that most or much of it came by the US, though via third parties. So you're willing to grant the Soviets a pass because they channeled actual military hardware (and lots of it) through client states, but you want to slam the US for allegedly doing the same? That's called a double standard.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how?
Because no ethical stance was considered.
No, actually, an ethical stance *was* considered: it's unethical to allow Communists to invade and conquer other countries. There have only been a few times the US has stepped in to stop them, with mixed success, but Afghanistan was one such success (successful at keeping the Soviets out, that is). Iran should be grateful to us, too, since the Soviet plan was to push through Afghanistan and take the Iranian oil fields.
While there's no direct correlation, most of the future Taliban were also members of the mujahadeen resistance during the Soviet incursion.
You might be right, I'm not 100% sure. However, I stand by my original assertion: other than helping them fight off an invader, we really didn't do anything to the Taliban. We encouraged them to clamp down on drug smuggling as recently as 2000 by sending them gobs of money, but for the most part we let them live their lives as they wanted. Which, again, gave them no reason to attack us (in the case of al-Qaeda, most of which were former mujahedeen), or support those who did (in the case of the Taliban themselves). We did nothing to earn their hate.
That kind of generalisation makes me suspect you are a US resident. When I lived in the States I was shocked at the type of bias in the media. All media is biased, fact of human nature, but I hadn't seen anything so obviously one sided before. This was prior to September 11th, but Arabs and Muslims were already portrayed as rabid maniacs, while I never saw any criticism of Israeli policies.
Wow, I never even mentioned Israel, now suddenly they're the bad guy in all this. Amazing, simply amazing.
I'm not a US resident, I'm a US citizen, and proud of it. And if the US media portrays Arabs and Muslims as "rabid maniacs", it could have something to do with them doing things like:
* burning our flag whenever they get bored
* blowing up airliners
* killing innocent civilians (not referring to 9/11, referring to all the times previous to that that nutjob Muslims killed people just for not being Muslim)
Let me be clear: I don't hate all Muslims. I do hate Islam, and would like to see that religion wiped off the earth (preferrably by individual Muslims coming to their senses). The love of my life is a Muslim, and one of the reasons we can't be together is she is genuinely afraid of someone killing her if she married a Christian. Now tell me Islam is a peaceful religion.
Little of Saddams military material came directly from the USSR
So all those T-72's came from, where?, Poland?
Most of the Iraqi C4I equipment came from various Warsaw Pact countries, none of which really cared what the US thought at the time. China was also a major supplier of small arms. The only Western nation which sold military-only technology to Iraq was France. I'll grant that the US (and Canada, and the UK, and Germany) sold dual use equipment to Iraq, but considering just how much of their hardware came from the Soviet block, this was more of an attempt to balance things in that sphere of influence than anything else.
Also, don't forget how dangerous Iran was/is. Supporting Iraq against them was viewed as the lessor of two evils for a long time (just like helping the Soviets against the Nazis). Diplomacy is a dirty business, and you often have to do things you later regret because at the time it's the only/best thing you can do.
However, the US cannot take any moral high ground over its actions in Afghaninstan. Nor can the United Kingdom, who also trained and covertly armed the mujahadeen.
And helping the mujahedeen makes us bad guys how? We helped them fight off an invader, so that makes it OK for nutjobs to attack us? Only in the twisted mind of a Muslim does that make sense.
Oh, and don't forget, the Taliban != the mujahedeen. The Northern Alliance, who are the ones currently trying to rebuild their country with our help, were formed from most of the remains of the mujahedeen, what was left of them after the Taliban came in and took over in the early 90s. Don't forget that their name "Taliban" is a reference to Pakistani Islamic schools, whence they all came.
Backing Saddam with weapons against Iran is a funny way of leaving people alone.
Except that we didn't back Saddam with weapons against Iran, at least not in any meaningful way. The vast majority of his arms came from either Russia (then the Soviet Union) or France.
Training Osama in terrorist tactics to be used against our political foes is a funny way of leaving people alone.
Again, we didn't do this. We supplied the mujahedeen weapons and equipment in their fight against Soviet aggression. Oddly enough, at the time bin Laden and his friends were considered more trustworthy than the local Afghans, so we helped them even more. The fact that we aided them in their struggle seems an odd reason for them to later try to kill us all.
Have we ever planned for peaceful coexistance with Muslims?
Yeah, actually, we did: it's called "leave us alone and we'll leave you alone". Unfortunately, when people slam airplanes into buildings and kill thousands of innocent civilians, there's not much left to do but start lining those bastards' friends and family up against the wall and doing God's work.
That is what the US Secretary of defence said, whom, I'm sure, had the Cuba crisis fresh in mind.
Hmm, I wonder if the SecDef in 1973 could have had anything on his mind regarding warfare and Communists that was more recent than the Cuban Missile Crisis?....
I hope I'm still around in another half century, when China is stronger than the US, so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing these principles come back to bite them.
I'll grant you all the points you made about the US's behavior in the past regarding protecting our strategic interests (or as you put it, "maintain [our] level of resource consumption"). But then you claim that China could ever become stronger than us and that they'll "bite" us (presumably on the ass). I submit that the US won't let China get strong enough to be a serious threat, and if they ever got close to being one we'd start nudging them to see how far we can go before we have to start lobbing bombs on Beijing.
Besides, name one major power who hasn't done the exact same thing in the past, at least when they *were* a major power. Britain and France have both trounced other countries "rights" many times when it suited their interests, as have all other world powers at one time or another going back to Rome and beyond. In fact, it's one of the defining elements of being a world power that you can usually get away with this stuff.
I'll not saying best or worst though.
It's OK, you don't have to.
Except that in this case, the fish is not natural to the environment, rather it was introduced by humans. So causing it to go extinct is actually a good thing (you'll be restoring the original ecosystem, in effect).
Is it trollish to quote George Carlin now? Or maybe he *is* George Carlin. Uncle George?? Is that you???
Even better, get yourself an ex-wife. Then you won't have enough money to pay your bills, so who cares how they're sorted?
One thing and one thing well is it. We have a fax-email gateway at work.
Well, call me crazy, but a fax-email gateway isn't really doing just *one* thing, now is it?
Interestingly, the monthly chart shows the average low over the past 30 years as 32 degrees. Granted, that's average, not mean, but still it suggests that about half of the time it's not cold enough to snow in NYC in December. So not only are cold rains unsurprising, they should be expected.
It's raining in NYC. We get a variety of weather in our temperate city, but I can't remember it ever raining on Christmas Eve in my life.
Pish posh. I remember two consecutive winters in South Philly twenty-some years ago ('79 and '80). The first had record high temperatures, I distinctly remember running around, playing with my friends in shorts and a tee-shirt. The Mummers' Parade almost got cancelled because so many of the mummers were collapsing from heat exhaustion (their costumes are designed to keep them cool in snow storms).
The next winter, we had a good three feet of snow by Christmas. What does this wide variation tell us that? That the weather is fickle, and not completely understood.
Two words: Kyoto Protocol
Say, isn't that the one that Russia recently decided to vote down? Didn't know Russia was controlled by bible thumping Southern Baptist Republicans.
They believe in God without any scientific evidence but yet they don't think there is such a thing as global warming?
Belief in God is an article of faith; by defintion, there can be no proof. That's why it's called "faith", the evidence of things unseen. Are you suggesting belief in global warming is also motivated by faith, and not cold hard facts?
Really? What an odd claim to make. There is lots of evidence for global warming and many studies have been done on it. Maybe the evidence is not conclusive but it exists and is widespread.
You should read the speech, this is exactly the attitude he attacks. If the "evidence is not conclusive", how can you draw conclusions from it?
The real problem with roaming and Wi-Fi lies with customers who try to cheat the system.
I'm not a cell phone expert, but I'm pretty sure a portion of the roaming charges you pay on your cell phone get passed on to the owner of the network you're roaming on. For instance, if you're a T-Mobile customer in a location with no T-Mobile cell, and you roam through an AT&T cell, part of the extra money T-Mobile charges you gets passed on to AT&T. A lot of big cell providers will negotiate roaming charges between themselves, so they can offer lower rates to their customers, and be more competitive than smaller cell providers.
The same would likely happen here. WISPs like Boingo and such would pass on some of the roaming charges to their competitors to gain access to their networks, allowing the customer to roam in the first place. And most likely, they would negotiate for better prices depending on how large their own network is (the more hotspots they operate, the less they have to pay someone else to use theirs). So while competition would drive prices down (which is a good thing), noone will be getting anything for free. At least not until the WISPs have paid off their investment into their infrastructure.
There is a proverb in my language which says when loosely translated "The support of a straw for a drowning man".
The American version is "grasping at straws".
I don't which makes me laugh more, getting marked "Flamebait" when I didn't insult anyone, or marked "Troll" when I asked a polite question which directly followed from a comment in the parent post.
If you want to see a good British-film-with-Indians-in-it, check out "East is East".
And a good American-film-wtih-Indians-in-it is "Praying in Anger", the first movie by M. Night Shylamalan, made years before "The Sixth Sense" made him famous. Excellent movie.