Just sign the contract as Bugs Bunny. Odds are, if your signature is bad enough, no one will notice.
That said, any doctor that is this afraid of bad reviews is a doctor you should be afraid of. I prefer the ones that offer a survey on my way out and let me know some of the common sites that they need more reviews. If you've looked for a doctor on the internet long enough, you find that they all have bad reviews, but not a lot have good reviews, especially ones that look like they were written by an actual person.
Given the prevailing options, I'll take nuclear for now. No power is safe, but we over emphasis the rare and unknown deaths while ignoring the common ones that happen every day:
That said, we need to figure out a better solution for the used fuel. And long term, we really need to work on energy storage so that renewable becomes a better option.
Instead of spending all the time, effort, and high risk should there be a failure, on an auto-pilot to handles real world situations perfectly, why not focus on the easy wins. Over long highways and busy cities, build HOV like lanes designed just for auto-pilot cars. If the car has the technology, it communicates with a gate that allows the car to enter the physically separate lane. When you get to the end of the special lane (or to your exit), you take control of the car before it lets you exit back on to the existing roads.
Include the technology for automatic valet parking that could be a seller for high end/big city areas, and you start the adoption process gradually. Even better is if the car can self-dock with a charging station while you're not using it. Companies like zipcar could purchase vehicles with the technology to get through rush-hour on the special lanes, and then the cars would reposition to high demand areas by themselves. Or the city could purchase vehicles and use them as an individual mass transit option that doesn't require building tracks, high voltage power lines, train stations, and the train cars.
For the paranoid, they don't have to give up control or even buy a car with the technology in it. But for the rest of us that would like to have our car drive at an optimal fuel efficient speed without any traffic jams while we read a book or talk on the phone, we can choose to trust the technology.
Where are they getting the prices for the smartphones in this table? For Sprint, I don't see anything resembling a $30 unlimited smartphone plan. The closest they have is a $70 plan with a 450 minute cap. Are they taking that plan and subtracting the 450 minute plan with no data for $40 to get the $30 for just the data? Something tells me you can't buy a plan like that. So while it's interesting for comparing data to data between carriers, it doesn't have a lot of practical use for anyone looking for the most affordable data plan.
Projects that can be pirated (software, movies, etc) have low maintenance costs and high creation costs. If the funds didn't exist to create the product, then it wouldn't be created and there's nothing to pirate. Once there is something to pirate, you can't kill the project, but you can make the venture unprofitable enough to discourage someone from doing it again. So the question isn't if a project has been killed due to piracy, but if someone has ever decided that a project isn't worth starting because the market isn't profitable enough. There can be a significant number of these but you'd never know, since the project was never started and therefore nothing exists to know about.
Unfortunately not all of us can put food on the table by giving everything away for free. There's a time and place for free/open software, but there's also an advantage to have people create something where the costs of that creation are spread across many customers rather than a single firm or with advertising.
As other's have mentioned, the first question is it fair use to download an mp3 of a cd/song that you have already purchased?
But, there's yet a further step, where time-shifting is allowed in the TV/video world for recording on a VCR. I presume that same shifting is permitted for recording off of the radio. Therefore, are you allowed to download/posses an mp3 of a song that you heard on the radio?
There's a slippery slope that I don't think we should say anyone can download content that's been played on some radio station at some point, but a lawyer would have a difficult time claiming that you hadn't already heard a collection of top-40 songs. And this also wouldn't excuse someone that turns around and shares the content with others.
Assuming that this is not VoIP to the home, but rather everything between the last miles, there's still some transitioning to be done. Mainly anything that is data over the phone, e.g. fax machines, alarm systems, and dial up networking. This requires some physical and procedural upgrades.
There are far too many legal and medical industries that won't accept a scan/pdf over email and insist on a fax for some simple forms. Heck, even Ameritrade asked me to fax in a form or to mail it in, you'd think they could setup a web page for updating personal data.
All of the major alarm companies that offer support over an IP line have a VoIP box to continue working with the older hardware. Switching to IP would allow 2 way communication, greater scalability, lower hardware costs, etc, but I've yet to see one do this.
Dial up networking is still used by not just the rural areas, but also things like credit card transactions that are performed over the stand alone readers.
All of these will need to be transitioned off of voice technology or updated to work reliably over a VoIP based connection. Personally I'll be happy to see the death of the fax machine and an upgrade of alarm systems, but I think we are stuck with some devices for rural locations.
We are constantly fighting cell phones, texting (what about emailing), and other one offs without taking on the core issue, distracted driving. And as long as there are mothers on the road, with screaming children in the back seat, while they try to fix their makeup as they race to a play date, we'll never face this issue head on. No one wants to discuss how distracting a baby can be, least we suffer the wrath of the angry mother. So we're constantly doing one off bills that catch some people that are distracted and others that are completely safe.
Why build out the electric infrastructure at the bus stops when one already exists for the subway system? I don't believe there's anything in the current system to do regenerative braking or store power in the cars. So this would reduce the power requirements, eliminating the need to expand the electric capacity when adding more cars to the system.
Once the subway works, then consider building the bus based system, unless a flywheel and/or hydrogen are doing the job cheaper.
The head hunter won't have your best interest in mind, they are looking for money to act as the middle man. If they are altering your resume, I'd avoid working with them in the future. No need to tell someone to get lost, but you may want to resend your corrected resume, and only in pdf format (not fool proof, but I doubt many head hunters would change that). I tend to avoid working with people that demand my resume in Word format. And I'd only follow up on leads from them when you have nothing better to do.
And as others have suggested, have a copy of your original resume for any clients to see if you discover they received an altered version. If the client goes ballistic on you because of something the head hunter did, you didn't want to work for them anyway, so there's nothing lost.
In addition to the poor job cloning the windowsill, and the black hand, there's the complete difference in light sources on the faces. Everyone has a light source to the right of the photo, playing off the idea that there's a screen they're looking at. But the photoshop job used someone with a strong light coming out of the left. I'd also point out there was a bad job cloning the vertical column of the building outside the window.
This isn't some "cell phone tax" that companies are charged for owning cell phones. When you buy any equipment to run a business, and that equipment is expected to last more than a year, you have to depreciate it. There's a particular part of the depreciation schedule that you have to fill in for various pieces of technology, like cell phones, where you have to provide a percentage of usage that is personal rather than business. And you're only able to depreciate business use of the phone over a 5 year period.
What the IRS is saying is that the effort to calculate this percentage with itemized statements, and identifying every person called, is usually greater than the extra few dollars of tax they may collect. Contrary to popular belief, the IRS doesn't want your money, Congress does. The IRS is just making sure you've paid the right amount. If you want to be upset at someone for taking your money, be upset at your representatives in the Capital.
Food for thought, if the phone is destroyed or trashed before 5 years are up, I've yet to find a place in the tax code where you can write off the remaining value, and you're no longer allowed to depreciate a destroyed item. Another thought, if you start a company that earns $500k in its first year, but requires $400k in equipment, if depreciation lets you write off $100k, you'll be taxed on $300k of income that first year, or about $100k, the entire amount of profit for that year. The depreciation portion of the tax code is pretty messed up. And what the IRS gives back in business write offs, local governments take away in business taxes based on how much equipment your business has. For everyone that's against business people and their write offs, try running a business yourself before knocking it next time.
Like the Mac vs. PC guy ads said, the PC guy is against saying the word Vista (*buzz*) and with all the bugs, it made more sense to spend their money on marketing than on fixing the bugs. Windows 7 is Vista with a better marketing department, at least according to the Mac vs. PC ads.
It's not a cyberwar, it's government espionage. It's been done for as long as there have been governments, including the US going after nuclear and rocket scientist from Germany, and spying between the US and Russia during the cold war. Trying to steal government secrets that happen to be on a computer is nothing new. Covering your tracks, and maybe setting the other government back a bit in their research is normal. The US is almost certainly doing this today to all kinds of other countries. What did you think the NSA and CIA were doing before the war on terror started?
If this was an actual war, the foreign governments would be trying to destroy the US infrastructure via remote computer access. Open a few valves to flood our water supply with raw sewage, bring down the power grid in California, shutdown air traffic control, turn all stop lights to 4 way green during rush hour, etc. And major governments in the world just don't have an incentive to do this. China is already feeling the pain of owning too much US debt during our financial crisis and has seen their economy suffer as our imports slow. Africa keeps looking for foreign aid, India needs our outsourcing, and the middle east wants to sell us oil. Seeing how a housing bubble in the US has turned into a global recession, an organized government would be shooting themselves in the foot to start a war against the US now.
The exceptions to this would be Russia, and non-government affiliated terrorist groups (Al-Qaeda). Though Russia, like Brazil, is more talk than action. The risk with them is more from organized crime using computer bot-nets to profit from illegal activities.
And ban them from being a passenger in any car, they can just be pushed in the stroller. No more concern about rear facing car seats, air bags, etc.
Next, let's remove the passenger seats, cup holders, cigarette lighters, car stereos, and anything else that can distract the driver. Until we're ready to remove all the distractions, we need proof that the "singled out distractions" are worse than all the others. Without that, we're just making more stupid laws, which would be the status quo for politicians.
<personal rant> I just mailed a check to the Maryland Traffic Processing center for speeding down I-95. I broke the law, so I'm paying like I should. But the cops were out in force ticketing to help minimize car-pedestrian accidents. Something tells me there aren't a lot of pedestrians being hit by cars on I-95. And it's not like there was a car within 20 lengths in front of me, or that the car I was passing wasn't within 5 mph of my speed. So while I mail the check, I'm forced to wonder if this is just to help fix the police budget for the year, or are they really trying to improve safety on the roads? </personal rant>
I drive long distances with gaps in radio coverage on a regular basis, I recently purchased a new car that has XM built in, and yet when the free trial expires, I have no intention of buying a subscription. First of all, you need to consider the cost vs the time you would use it. And while I do travel for work frequently, I don't listen to the radio while at a client site, and per week, I average maybe 5 hours in the car, of which only 15 minutes I'd have a hard time finding an FM station. It's hard to justify the monthly costs for something I need so little.
However, the real competition isn't streaming wifi over the iphone, it's listening to already downloaded content on the ipod or mp3 player. For keeping up to date on the day to day world (those of us that don't listen to FM may still keep ourselves up to date), I use an RSS reader, and that also has feeds from several podcasts. In my new car, it included not only XM and the now mandatory line in for the mp3 player, but a usb plug so I can just load up a thumb drive of podcasts and do something useful with my 4 hour trip. With the usb, there's no more reaching down to operate some tiny controls on a little mp3 player screen since the audio is played directly on the car stereo with the steering wheel controls completely functional.
Don't be surprised if cable and satellite TV providers have a harder time in the future if the interesting content is provided for download online and DVR's improve support for downloading and viewing this content automatically. As content moves online, and the methods for getting this content becomes easier, the vendors that do nothing other than repackage and deliver this content will find it more difficult to make a profit in the future.
In the spirit of http://xkcd.com/463/, commercial software that competes like this will slowly lose the battle.
Instead of fighting for the same turf as open source, they should be finding markets that aren't served by open source. Niche markets and new markets are great places for commercial vendors. Generic applications used by everyone that are constantly reinventing the same wheel will be open sourced and the market will shift.
Don't try to make a better web browser or office application. Instead, focus on the pace maker control system or credit card fraud detection system. Focus on things that are worth money to a narrow market and don't have a lot of competition from open source because their isn't demand for bored developers to build a cheaper mouse trap.
... that they are guests while in China, and should obey Chinese laws while there. They should also try to behave like proper representatives of their respective country, just as the (mostly non-political) athletes are doing.
I'm a fan of freedom, but before we run around and tell every other country how to do it, we should make sure we aren't hypocrites in the process. Whether that's Guantanamo, DC gun laws, seizing laptops by customs, illegal wire taps, a limited immigration policy that creates the illegal immigrant demand, etc, we have lots of examples of not practicing what we preach. Before we go around telling China everything they are doing wrong, perhaps we should offer automatic citizenship for anyone that wants to leave their "oppressive government" for the US?
That and people don't like to be told why their country is bad. Just look at America.
It's a little ironic. Americans are fighting for the independence of Tibet. And yet despite the slavery issues, the civil war was very much about the rights of the southern states to succeed from the union (in case anyone forgets, the south lost, so much for independence).
In a similar vein, we label people as terrorist and assume they are wrong, and yet terrorism is the fighting strategy of the underdog. I'm sure Britain considered us terrorist when we had that revolution thing and threw all the tea off the ships.
History is written by the victor, and recently the media, though the internet is putting up a good fight these days.
Is the CIA willing to raise their right hand and swear that they haven't tried to steal any secrets from other countries? If we are going to do these sorts of things, it's a little hypocritical to go off the deep end when another country does the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Just sign the contract as Bugs Bunny. Odds are, if your signature is bad enough, no one will notice.
That said, any doctor that is this afraid of bad reviews is a doctor you should be afraid of. I prefer the ones that offer a survey on my way out and let me know some of the common sites that they need more reviews. If you've looked for a doctor on the internet long enough, you find that they all have bad reviews, but not a lot have good reviews, especially ones that look like they were written by an actual person.
Given the prevailing options, I'll take nuclear for now. No power is safe, but we over emphasis the rare and unknown deaths while ignoring the common ones that happen every day:
http://www.geekosystem.com/coal-oil-nuclear-deaths-chart/
That said, we need to figure out a better solution for the used fuel. And long term, we really need to work on energy storage so that renewable becomes a better option.
Instead of spending all the time, effort, and high risk should there be a failure, on an auto-pilot to handles real world situations perfectly, why not focus on the easy wins. Over long highways and busy cities, build HOV like lanes designed just for auto-pilot cars. If the car has the technology, it communicates with a gate that allows the car to enter the physically separate lane. When you get to the end of the special lane (or to your exit), you take control of the car before it lets you exit back on to the existing roads.
Include the technology for automatic valet parking that could be a seller for high end/big city areas, and you start the adoption process gradually. Even better is if the car can self-dock with a charging station while you're not using it. Companies like zipcar could purchase vehicles with the technology to get through rush-hour on the special lanes, and then the cars would reposition to high demand areas by themselves. Or the city could purchase vehicles and use them as an individual mass transit option that doesn't require building tracks, high voltage power lines, train stations, and the train cars.
For the paranoid, they don't have to give up control or even buy a car with the technology in it. But for the rest of us that would like to have our car drive at an optimal fuel efficient speed without any traffic jams while we read a book or talk on the phone, we can choose to trust the technology.
Where are they getting the prices for the smartphones in this table? For Sprint, I don't see anything resembling a $30 unlimited smartphone plan. The closest they have is a $70 plan with a 450 minute cap. Are they taking that plan and subtracting the 450 minute plan with no data for $40 to get the $30 for just the data? Something tells me you can't buy a plan like that. So while it's interesting for comparing data to data between carriers, it doesn't have a lot of practical use for anyone looking for the most affordable data plan.
Ref: http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPlans?INTNAV=ATG:HE:Plans
Projects that can be pirated (software, movies, etc) have low maintenance costs and high creation costs. If the funds didn't exist to create the product, then it wouldn't be created and there's nothing to pirate. Once there is something to pirate, you can't kill the project, but you can make the venture unprofitable enough to discourage someone from doing it again. So the question isn't if a project has been killed due to piracy, but if someone has ever decided that a project isn't worth starting because the market isn't profitable enough. There can be a significant number of these but you'd never know, since the project was never started and therefore nothing exists to know about.
Unfortunately not all of us can put food on the table by giving everything away for free. There's a time and place for free/open software, but there's also an advantage to have people create something where the costs of that creation are spread across many customers rather than a single firm or with advertising.
As other's have mentioned, the first question is it fair use to download an mp3 of a cd/song that you have already purchased?
But, there's yet a further step, where time-shifting is allowed in the TV/video world for recording on a VCR. I presume that same shifting is permitted for recording off of the radio. Therefore, are you allowed to download/posses an mp3 of a song that you heard on the radio?
There's a slippery slope that I don't think we should say anyone can download content that's been played on some radio station at some point, but a lawyer would have a difficult time claiming that you hadn't already heard a collection of top-40 songs. And this also wouldn't excuse someone that turns around and shares the content with others.
Assuming that this is not VoIP to the home, but rather everything between the last miles, there's still some transitioning to be done. Mainly anything that is data over the phone, e.g. fax machines, alarm systems, and dial up networking. This requires some physical and procedural upgrades.
There are far too many legal and medical industries that won't accept a scan/pdf over email and insist on a fax for some simple forms. Heck, even Ameritrade asked me to fax in a form or to mail it in, you'd think they could setup a web page for updating personal data.
All of the major alarm companies that offer support over an IP line have a VoIP box to continue working with the older hardware. Switching to IP would allow 2 way communication, greater scalability, lower hardware costs, etc, but I've yet to see one do this.
Dial up networking is still used by not just the rural areas, but also things like credit card transactions that are performed over the stand alone readers.
All of these will need to be transitioned off of voice technology or updated to work reliably over a VoIP based connection. Personally I'll be happy to see the death of the fax machine and an upgrade of alarm systems, but I think we are stuck with some devices for rural locations.
We are constantly fighting cell phones, texting (what about emailing), and other one offs without taking on the core issue, distracted driving. And as long as there are mothers on the road, with screaming children in the back seat, while they try to fix their makeup as they race to a play date, we'll never face this issue head on. No one wants to discuss how distracting a baby can be, least we suffer the wrath of the angry mother. So we're constantly doing one off bills that catch some people that are distracted and others that are completely safe.
Why build out the electric infrastructure at the bus stops when one already exists for the subway system? I don't believe there's anything in the current system to do regenerative braking or store power in the cars. So this would reduce the power requirements, eliminating the need to expand the electric capacity when adding more cars to the system.
Once the subway works, then consider building the bus based system, unless a flywheel and/or hydrogen are doing the job cheaper.
The head hunter won't have your best interest in mind, they are looking for money to act as the middle man. If they are altering your resume, I'd avoid working with them in the future. No need to tell someone to get lost, but you may want to resend your corrected resume, and only in pdf format (not fool proof, but I doubt many head hunters would change that). I tend to avoid working with people that demand my resume in Word format. And I'd only follow up on leads from them when you have nothing better to do.
And as others have suggested, have a copy of your original resume for any clients to see if you discover they received an altered version. If the client goes ballistic on you because of something the head hunter did, you didn't want to work for them anyway, so there's nothing lost.
In addition to the poor job cloning the windowsill, and the black hand, there's the complete difference in light sources on the faces. Everyone has a light source to the right of the photo, playing off the idea that there's a screen they're looking at. But the photoshop job used someone with a strong light coming out of the left. I'd also point out there was a bad job cloning the vertical column of the building outside the window.
This isn't some "cell phone tax" that companies are charged for owning cell phones. When you buy any equipment to run a business, and that equipment is expected to last more than a year, you have to depreciate it. There's a particular part of the depreciation schedule that you have to fill in for various pieces of technology, like cell phones, where you have to provide a percentage of usage that is personal rather than business. And you're only able to depreciate business use of the phone over a 5 year period.
What the IRS is saying is that the effort to calculate this percentage with itemized statements, and identifying every person called, is usually greater than the extra few dollars of tax they may collect. Contrary to popular belief, the IRS doesn't want your money, Congress does. The IRS is just making sure you've paid the right amount. If you want to be upset at someone for taking your money, be upset at your representatives in the Capital.
Food for thought, if the phone is destroyed or trashed before 5 years are up, I've yet to find a place in the tax code where you can write off the remaining value, and you're no longer allowed to depreciate a destroyed item. Another thought, if you start a company that earns $500k in its first year, but requires $400k in equipment, if depreciation lets you write off $100k, you'll be taxed on $300k of income that first year, or about $100k, the entire amount of profit for that year. The depreciation portion of the tax code is pretty messed up. And what the IRS gives back in business write offs, local governments take away in business taxes based on how much equipment your business has. For everyone that's against business people and their write offs, try running a business yourself before knocking it next time.
Like the Mac vs. PC guy ads said, the PC guy is against saying the word Vista (*buzz*) and with all the bugs, it made more sense to spend their money on marketing than on fixing the bugs. Windows 7 is Vista with a better marketing department, at least according to the Mac vs. PC ads.
It's not a cyberwar, it's government espionage. It's been done for as long as there have been governments, including the US going after nuclear and rocket scientist from Germany, and spying between the US and Russia during the cold war. Trying to steal government secrets that happen to be on a computer is nothing new. Covering your tracks, and maybe setting the other government back a bit in their research is normal. The US is almost certainly doing this today to all kinds of other countries. What did you think the NSA and CIA were doing before the war on terror started?
If this was an actual war, the foreign governments would be trying to destroy the US infrastructure via remote computer access. Open a few valves to flood our water supply with raw sewage, bring down the power grid in California, shutdown air traffic control, turn all stop lights to 4 way green during rush hour, etc. And major governments in the world just don't have an incentive to do this. China is already feeling the pain of owning too much US debt during our financial crisis and has seen their economy suffer as our imports slow. Africa keeps looking for foreign aid, India needs our outsourcing, and the middle east wants to sell us oil. Seeing how a housing bubble in the US has turned into a global recession, an organized government would be shooting themselves in the foot to start a war against the US now.
The exceptions to this would be Russia, and non-government affiliated terrorist groups (Al-Qaeda). Though Russia, like Brazil, is more talk than action. The risk with them is more from organized crime using computer bot-nets to profit from illegal activities.
And ban them from being a passenger in any car, they can just be pushed in the stroller. No more concern about rear facing car seats, air bags, etc.
Next, let's remove the passenger seats, cup holders, cigarette lighters, car stereos, and anything else that can distract the driver. Until we're ready to remove all the distractions, we need proof that the "singled out distractions" are worse than all the others. Without that, we're just making more stupid laws, which would be the status quo for politicians.
<personal rant>
I just mailed a check to the Maryland Traffic Processing center for speeding down I-95. I broke the law, so I'm paying like I should. But the cops were out in force ticketing to help minimize car-pedestrian accidents. Something tells me there aren't a lot of pedestrians being hit by cars on I-95. And it's not like there was a car within 20 lengths in front of me, or that the car I was passing wasn't within 5 mph of my speed. So while I mail the check, I'm forced to wonder if this is just to help fix the police budget for the year, or are they really trying to improve safety on the roads?
</personal rant>
I drive long distances with gaps in radio coverage on a regular basis, I recently purchased a new car that has XM built in, and yet when the free trial expires, I have no intention of buying a subscription. First of all, you need to consider the cost vs the time you would use it. And while I do travel for work frequently, I don't listen to the radio while at a client site, and per week, I average maybe 5 hours in the car, of which only 15 minutes I'd have a hard time finding an FM station. It's hard to justify the monthly costs for something I need so little.
However, the real competition isn't streaming wifi over the iphone, it's listening to already downloaded content on the ipod or mp3 player. For keeping up to date on the day to day world (those of us that don't listen to FM may still keep ourselves up to date), I use an RSS reader, and that also has feeds from several podcasts. In my new car, it included not only XM and the now mandatory line in for the mp3 player, but a usb plug so I can just load up a thumb drive of podcasts and do something useful with my 4 hour trip. With the usb, there's no more reaching down to operate some tiny controls on a little mp3 player screen since the audio is played directly on the car stereo with the steering wheel controls completely functional.
Don't be surprised if cable and satellite TV providers have a harder time in the future if the interesting content is provided for download online and DVR's improve support for downloading and viewing this content automatically. As content moves online, and the methods for getting this content becomes easier, the vendors that do nothing other than repackage and deliver this content will find it more difficult to make a profit in the future.
In the spirit of http://xkcd.com/463/, commercial software that competes like this will slowly lose the battle.
Instead of fighting for the same turf as open source, they should be finding markets that aren't served by open source. Niche markets and new markets are great places for commercial vendors. Generic applications used by everyone that are constantly reinventing the same wheel will be open sourced and the market will shift.
Don't try to make a better web browser or office application. Instead, focus on the pace maker control system or credit card fraud detection system. Focus on things that are worth money to a narrow market and don't have a lot of competition from open source because their isn't demand for bored developers to build a cheaper mouse trap.
Stop doing it wrong.
"Come with me if you want to CODE"
... that they are guests while in China, and should obey Chinese laws while there. They should also try to behave like proper representatives of their respective country, just as the (mostly non-political) athletes are doing.
I'm a fan of freedom, but before we run around and tell every other country how to do it, we should make sure we aren't hypocrites in the process. Whether that's Guantanamo, DC gun laws, seizing laptops by customs, illegal wire taps, a limited immigration policy that creates the illegal immigrant demand, etc, we have lots of examples of not practicing what we preach. Before we go around telling China everything they are doing wrong, perhaps we should offer automatic citizenship for anyone that wants to leave their "oppressive government" for the US?
Costco is for? You may need a forklift for the box, but think of the deal you're getting!
They're pulling support for the Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). You're supposed to be developing for Omnibus now.
It's a little ironic. Americans are fighting for the independence of Tibet. And yet despite the slavery issues, the civil war was very much about the rights of the southern states to succeed from the union (in case anyone forgets, the south lost, so much for independence).
In a similar vein, we label people as terrorist and assume they are wrong, and yet terrorism is the fighting strategy of the underdog. I'm sure Britain considered us terrorist when we had that revolution thing and threw all the tea off the ships.
History is written by the victor, and recently the media, though the internet is putting up a good fight these days.
Is the CIA willing to raise their right hand and swear that they haven't tried to steal any secrets from other countries? If we are going to do these sorts of things, it's a little hypocritical to go off the deep end when another country does the same.
I often wonder what it was like when government agencies actually served the people and not the other way around.