That may have been true in 2004, but since then Microsoft's giant pile of cash has dwindled. This past year it hit a 10 year low, with less than $30 billion cash on hand. Considering they have expenses of about $37 billion annually for 2007, they could only go about 9 months without revenues unless they combined that with massive lay offs.
Microsoft isn't exactly hurting right now, but their performance isn't as good as most analysts would like it to be.
That would be the Dilbert Principle, that incompetent people get promoted because their managers don't want to be responsible for incompetent people and promoting is better and easier than firing.
The problem with using a single number is simple: It is easily gamed and there's lots of incentive to do so.
So people will sell you worthless junk that technically has a high number rating because if you're relying on the number you'll pay them for their worthless junk.
Oh it's not nearly as complicated as that, after you got your sucker to do the deed, you fake his suicide and leave a note about how guilt stricken he is over his carelessness that caused the accident. If you do it right, no one will ever know it has anything but negligence.
You never actually pay the chump, that would leave tracks.
Not so, by my logic, attacks on Iraqi Christians would happen. I made no claims as to the moral justification of such attacks.
Policing your own is merely the best way to both show that you repudiate the actions of your extremists and prevent them from dragging you into a war only they want. In the case of Islam it turns the war from Islam versus everyone else into extremists versus moderates. This might not sound good for Islam, but I'm pretty sure that the extremists are not as numerous, well armed, or funded as "the rest of the world".
My analysis isn't about what's right or wrong, it's about what the consequences are likely to be.
An interesting question, but largely irrelevant as long as the extremists claim they are a part of the group, and that claim is not obviously and meaningfully repudiated. Remember, no group is ever perfectly homogeneous, so every group has factions within it. It will usually be difficult for people external to a group to accurately identify faction members within that group. And if it's difficult, many people won't make the effort to do it.
In the particular case of Islam, efforts to curtail the extremists seems to often be conflated by people in the larger, more moderate group, as an attack on that larger group. And the actions of the extremists often seem to have some level of approval from the moderate group's leaders. Thus leading me to the obvious conclusion that both moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims share a common group. I suspect this is a view shared (rightly or wrongly) by the majority of non-Muslims.
It's a difficult question to answer, but it's one that the moderates are going to have to figure out. Any group that can't police their own extremists will, sooner or later, find themselves dragged into a war with everyone else. That's the nature of fanatical extremism, they want a war. And if they try hard enough, eventually they're going to get one.
As for Baby P, I assume the people responsible are headed to trial for their crimes? Thus Britain is policing it's own even though the example you chose isn't even roughly the same situation.
"Frankly, what I would like to see, and what has even LESS chance to get set in than getting rid of the electoral college, is a test that must be taken when one votes that has basic principles of civics."
Yeah, how could that evergowrong. It's illegal for good reasons, but then again, you might prefer systematic racism if it puts your candidate into the white house.
Of course, this isn't really a race issue, it's a "my candidate didn't win, so the rules have to be changed so that he's guaranteed to win next time" issue.
Same Hardware and Same O/S. I seriously doubt the Xbox division of Microsoft wants to deal with the situation where someone's Xbox-PC won't work because they got 3 zero-day drive-by worms from Internet Explorer and a virus from opening an infected word file someone sent them from work.
Consoles are nice because they just work all the time. PCs are nice (for gaming) because you can tinker with them to get best performance out of them. Those two values sets are mutually exclusive in the same machine.
Like I said "most businesses", I'll give you funeral homes, car dealerships and realtors, because repeat business takes so long to come back. However, insurance, banks, cell phone providers and ISPs are all highly dependent on monthly (ie. repeat) services.
For most businesses, that's actually less important. It's usually much cheaper to get repeat business from an existing customer, than it is to seek out new customers.
The complete failure that the top level tailoring patterns represent might be coloring my view, but frankly, I don't want to spend time making gear is likely to be thrown out the first time I run Naxx. Given that I'm in a casual guild and some of our guildees have already done reasonably well in Naxx pugs. I'm expecting a little more than "worse than entry level raiding gear".
The Tailoring gear is just poor. I think I'd rather go with the blue crafted robe than one of the epic ones. There isn't even any gem slots in the epic crafted robe, and that pretty much makes them a complete failure. I mean my character's level 70 robe is almost as good as the lvl 80 epic crafted robe? That's just great.
The definition of "soloable" changes depending on what character class you're playing.
For example, the "March of the Giants" is very difficult for melee characters to solo because of the excessive Aura and magic damage on top of punishing physical damage.
While in most 3 person quests, like "Ursoc the Bear God" and "Reclusive Runemaster" the creatures you're supposed to kill are immune to snares and roots, and thus can't be solo'd by most non-tanking classes (might be possible for warlocks and hunters).
It's hard to identify where exactly you've gone wrong in your understanding of economics. I'm guessing it's the basics which you don't seem to have understood.
Simply put:
The economy can keep growing because of inventions and production. Wealth increases because we invent and then make new things. If the monetary supply doesn't increase, then it will inevitably suffer from deflation as new products compete for the limited supply of money.
In short, while the system may not be able to continue forever, we have no indications yet that we've actually run out of science and technology to create.
That's why continuous growth is considered normal, because generally speaking daily the world as whole becomes a wealthier place.
Worse still, many people actually believe that whatever recession we'll end up having is exclusively the fault of only the current President, and can't look back to anything before the year 2000 [meridianmagazine.com] for any blame whatsoever. The egregious irresponsibility of the sub-prime lending has a long and sordid history.
I know this may be hard for some people to believe, but Orson Scott Card is wrong on this case. The loans he's complaining about represent less than 25% of the bad loans which were the trigger for the crisis. More than 50% were made under no obligation whatsoever.
Furthermore, Bush does deserve the lion's share of the blame. He's been in charge for 8 years, that's more than enough time to do something about it. Unfortunately for everyone else, he was too busy fighting his silly little war in Iraq and playing at being Mr. Tough Guy President to actually do the job of managing the country responsibly.
Simply put, he actually deserves the majority of the blame. If he had actually taken any measures to prepare for or avoid the crisis, then his responsibility would be reduced. But as far as I can tell, despite being repeatedly warned about problems by his advisors, he chose to do nothing. He's had at least 5 years of warnings that large economic problems were coming, but he figured he could keep the economy running long enough to make it someone else's problem. He was wrong.
A car analogy isn't going to work very well here because your car doesn't do anything on it's own, and if someone drives off with you'd probably notice.
Let's be clear on what a botnet does. When your computer is infected, your computer goes out and picks up instructions from secret locations and then acts on the instructions. If someone else leaves a message saying "shut down and warn your owner", then they've done you a favour.
Frankly, I find it amazing that you seem to harbour no anger towards the person who infected your computer with the botnet in the first place, but instead are angry with the person who tells you it's infected. Does the phrase "killing the messenger" mean nothing to you?
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That's what Americans get for electing an idiot to run the country. The person following just has to not screw up as much to be a success.
Frankly, this works in every single facet of life. Following incompetence, makes competence look like genius.
That may have been true in 2004, but since then Microsoft's giant pile of cash has dwindled. This past year it hit a 10 year low, with less than $30 billion cash on hand. Considering they have expenses of about $37 billion annually for 2007, they could only go about 9 months without revenues unless they combined that with massive lay offs.
Microsoft isn't exactly hurting right now, but their performance isn't as good as most analysts would like it to be.
That would be the Dilbert Principle, that incompetent people get promoted because their managers don't want to be responsible for incompetent people and promoting is better and easier than firing.
The problem with using a single number is simple: It is easily gamed and there's lots of incentive to do so.
So people will sell you worthless junk that technically has a high number rating because if you're relying on the number you'll pay them for their worthless junk.
I find it telling that you seem to be more concerned with what he was required to do than with what he could have done and what he did do.
Not being "required" to do something doesn't get you off the hook for not doing it.
No thanks, it looks like intellectual monomania to me.
Oh it's not nearly as complicated as that, after you got your sucker to do the deed, you fake his suicide and leave a note about how guilt stricken he is over his carelessness that caused the accident. If you do it right, no one will ever know it has anything but negligence.
You never actually pay the chump, that would leave tracks.
I don't think the words "open" and "standards" mean what you think they mean.
Not so, by my logic, attacks on Iraqi Christians would happen. I made no claims as to the moral justification of such attacks.
Policing your own is merely the best way to both show that you repudiate the actions of your extremists and prevent them from dragging you into a war only they want. In the case of Islam it turns the war from Islam versus everyone else into extremists versus moderates. This might not sound good for Islam, but I'm pretty sure that the extremists are not as numerous, well armed, or funded as "the rest of the world".
My analysis isn't about what's right or wrong, it's about what the consequences are likely to be.
An interesting question, but largely irrelevant as long as the extremists claim they are a part of the group, and that claim is not obviously and meaningfully repudiated. Remember, no group is ever perfectly homogeneous, so every group has factions within it. It will usually be difficult for people external to a group to accurately identify faction members within that group. And if it's difficult, many people won't make the effort to do it.
In the particular case of Islam, efforts to curtail the extremists seems to often be conflated by people in the larger, more moderate group, as an attack on that larger group. And the actions of the extremists often seem to have some level of approval from the moderate group's leaders. Thus leading me to the obvious conclusion that both moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims share a common group. I suspect this is a view shared (rightly or wrongly) by the majority of non-Muslims.
It's a difficult question to answer, but it's one that the moderates are going to have to figure out. Any group that can't police their own extremists will, sooner or later, find themselves dragged into a war with everyone else. That's the nature of fanatical extremism, they want a war. And if they try hard enough, eventually they're going to get one.
As for Baby P, I assume the people responsible are headed to trial for their crimes? Thus Britain is policing it's own even though the example you chose isn't even roughly the same situation.
"Frankly, what I would like to see, and what has even LESS chance to get set in than getting rid of the electoral college, is a test that must be taken when one votes that has basic principles of civics."
Yeah, how could that ever go wrong. It's illegal for good reasons, but then again, you might prefer systematic racism if it puts your candidate into the white house.
Of course, this isn't really a race issue, it's a "my candidate didn't win, so the rules have to be changed so that he's guaranteed to win next time" issue.
Indeed! I heard it's 10x faster than this guy's computer.
More importantly:
Same Hardware and Same O/S. I seriously doubt the Xbox division of Microsoft wants to deal with the situation where someone's Xbox-PC won't work because they got 3 zero-day drive-by worms from Internet Explorer and a virus from opening an infected word file someone sent them from work.
Consoles are nice because they just work all the time. PCs are nice (for gaming) because you can tinker with them to get best performance out of them. Those two values sets are mutually exclusive in the same machine.
I think something like the Bugzilla flag that marks a bug as a duplicate of a different bug and links to the authoritative one would be ideal.
Like I said "most businesses", I'll give you funeral homes, car dealerships and realtors, because repeat business takes so long to come back. However, insurance, banks, cell phone providers and ISPs are all highly dependent on monthly (ie. repeat) services.
For most businesses, that's actually less important. It's usually much cheaper to get repeat business from an existing customer, than it is to seek out new customers.
The complete failure that the top level tailoring patterns represent might be coloring my view, but frankly, I don't want to spend time making gear is likely to be thrown out the first time I run Naxx. Given that I'm in a casual guild and some of our guildees have already done reasonably well in Naxx pugs. I'm expecting a little more than "worse than entry level raiding gear".
The Tailoring gear is just poor. I think I'd rather go with the blue crafted robe than one of the epic ones. There isn't even any gem slots in the epic crafted robe, and that pretty much makes them a complete failure. I mean my character's level 70 robe is almost as good as the lvl 80 epic crafted robe? That's just great.
That hasn't been fixed, there isn't any good high level BOE items either. Most of the crafting guides currently say something along the lines of:
"Once you hit 420 don't bother trying to level up your skill, it's pointless".
That's just a sad comment on the state of crafting in WoW.
The definition of "soloable" changes depending on what character class you're playing.
For example, the "March of the Giants" is very difficult for melee characters to solo because of the excessive Aura and magic damage on top of punishing physical damage.
While in most 3 person quests, like "Ursoc the Bear God" and "Reclusive Runemaster" the creatures you're supposed to kill are immune to snares and roots, and thus can't be solo'd by most non-tanking classes (might be possible for warlocks and hunters).
Absolutely true. There's a pretty good interface that shields car from the internal mechanics of generators and vice versa, we call it electricity!
Fortunately both generating stations and cars are protected objects.
It's hard to identify where exactly you've gone wrong in your understanding of economics. I'm guessing it's the basics which you don't seem to have understood.
Simply put:
The economy can keep growing because of inventions and production. Wealth increases because we invent and then make new things. If the monetary supply doesn't increase, then it will inevitably suffer from deflation as new products compete for the limited supply of money.
In short, while the system may not be able to continue forever, we have no indications yet that we've actually run out of science and technology to create.
That's why continuous growth is considered normal, because generally speaking daily the world as whole becomes a wealthier place.
Worse still, many people actually believe that whatever recession we'll end up having is exclusively the fault of only the current President, and can't look back to anything before the year 2000 [meridianmagazine.com] for any blame whatsoever. The egregious irresponsibility of the sub-prime lending has a long and sordid history.
I know this may be hard for some people to believe, but Orson Scott Card is wrong on this case. The loans he's complaining about represent less than 25% of the bad loans which were the trigger for the crisis. More than 50% were made under no obligation whatsoever.
Furthermore, Bush does deserve the lion's share of the blame. He's been in charge for 8 years, that's more than enough time to do something about it. Unfortunately for everyone else, he was too busy fighting his silly little war in Iraq and playing at being Mr. Tough Guy President to actually do the job of managing the country responsibly.
Simply put, he actually deserves the majority of the blame. If he had actually taken any measures to prepare for or avoid the crisis, then his responsibility would be reduced. But as far as I can tell, despite being repeatedly warned about problems by his advisors, he chose to do nothing. He's had at least 5 years of warnings that large economic problems were coming, but he figured he could keep the economy running long enough to make it someone else's problem. He was wrong.
That's a profoundly ignorant analogy.
A car analogy isn't going to work very well here because your car doesn't do anything on it's own, and if someone drives off with you'd probably notice.
Let's be clear on what a botnet does. When your computer is infected, your computer goes out and picks up instructions from secret locations and then acts on the instructions. If someone else leaves a message saying "shut down and warn your owner", then they've done you a favour.
Frankly, I find it amazing that you seem to harbour no anger towards the person who infected your computer with the botnet in the first place, but instead are angry with the person who tells you it's infected. Does the phrase "killing the messenger" mean nothing to you?
It was a phone poll, so I'm guessing that 18% of respondents indicated that some SD channels were HD channels.