Buying back your own stock is an admission you have nothing better to do with your money that give it back to your shareholders. This is usually because the shareholders are bitching about dilution, which is EXACTLY the case with Microsoft.
Apple isn't buying back its stock, it's buying new campuses, data centers, retail outlets, investing in building products to serve new markets, all of which are selling off the charts. So MS isn't making any new acquisitions? Can you back that up considering the topic is a major acquisition by MS?
And "all" of Apple's products are selling "off the charts"? Apple is the #1 retailer of MP3 players. That's it. RIM stomps all over them on smartphones, and HP, Dell, etc. stomp all over their desktop and laptop sales.
Microsoft is failing in every consumer electronics arena it enters. Except for mice, and game peripherals. And MP3 players (the new Zune is selling pretty well). Tho original XBOX was in some ways a financial disaster, but the 360 is doing pretty well. The only big disaster I can think of in recent years is WebTV. And personally, I *LIKED* WebTV. YMMV.
And that was a pretty crazy hit piece on MS. Why is he comparing iPods to XBOX (except the fact he is a slobbering Apple fan crowing about iPod sales)? Does he really believe there are 10 million unsold 360s sitting on store shelves? He also seems completely unaware of the Nvidia lawsuit which caused the early discontinuation of the original XBOX.
Microsoft can't sustain mild sales on Vista after spending billions to develop it over the last 6 years and having nothing really to show for all that. Fact: Vista is the fastest selling OS in history. It's beating Win98 for adoption. Simply because it hasn't replaced all WindowsXP installs in a year people are saying it's stillborn. Windows Me was sillborn. Vista is not. The major reason for the relatively slow adoption of Vista is that the relatively high hardware requirements means that most older PCs (built before 2007) can't be upgraded to Vista and that "upgrade" portion of sales (which has ALWAYS been a small part of sales) has been significantly reduced. Even worse, many entry level PCs sold in early 2007 couldn't run Vista which hurt adoption even more. And there were a number of serious bugs that weren't fixed until SP1. Ironically, despite all the delays, it now appears that Vista was launched too EARLY instead of too late. Lesson learned.
Apple took 15 years to ship a new version of it's OS. Apple fans should shut the fuck up about ship dates. I'd also point out that, at launch, OS X ran like complete shit on every system in Apple's lineup except the most expensive Power Macs.
Windows Mobile is a joke. It's the #2 mobile OS, beating iPhone, Palm, and Symbian sales handily. Lots of people, including myself, prefer the Windows Mobile platform. The iPhone is nice, but the keyboard is completely useless which makes the iPhone completely useless for ME. It's also a pretty crappy phone, the Tilt has better reception and a better speakerphone. As a media player, the iPhone stomps all over Windows Mobile. I think the iPod Touch is a great device and probably the best media player on the market. A little pricey though.
This law will go nowhere, even if it passes (which is unlikely). The Federal government has the sole regulatory authority over "interstate commerce". The term "interstate commerce" has been interpreted extremely broadly by Federal courts to mean basically everything. Yeah, EVERYTHING. Including transactions between individuals in the same state.
Trespassing is not automatic. Crossing an imaginary property line is not trespassing, even if prominent "No Trespassing" or "No Soliciting" signs are posted. If these people had had a LOCKED gate securing their private road and the Google vehicle had busted through it, THAT would be trespassing. If they had parked in the driveway and refused to leave when the homeowners asked, THAT would be trespassing. Merely parking in the driveway and taking photographs is not trespassing. Around here, real estate agents do this all the time.
Comcast is doing more than mere connection counts as you claimed. Comcast is making an effort to target selected protocols. On top of that Comcast is trying to selectively target based upon protocol states. Not that I can tell.
False. You do NOT need to be able to decrypt the data to be able to observe analyze the handshake establishing that connection and to observe and analyze the the behavior of that connection to generally identify that protocol and further to track the behavior and state of that protocol. You certainly do if the application attempts to obscure the protocol header, which many Bittorrent clients do. Bittorrent clients that encrypt the handshake look exactly like SSL tunnels because that's what they are. If they're going by behavior, that's BEHAVIOR, not looking at the packets. If you're saying they've discovered a way to identify the payload of a SSL tunnel I'd be very impressed.
I happen to know if encrypted torrents are getting blocked or not. I significantly suspect that they ARE being blocked. Again, how? Encrypted Bittorrent traffic looks exactly like all other SSL traffic.
I hadn't heard of HTTPS being blocked It is not normal for a host to open hundreds of HTTPS connections to different IPs. I did this for testing purposes. I started getting throttled at around the 50 mark. I'm not sure if my testing was typical because a lot of those IPs were contiguous (I didn't have a botnet or something similar to test with). I couldn't get it to trigger with about 100 HTTP connections though, so interpret that result however you want.
The Sandvine boxes they are using don't do DPI. I've read the documentation on 'em, and they don't do DPI. They're mainly for content filtering (hence the TCP RSTs).
Even if they did, most Bittorrent traffic is encrypted nowadays so DPI is useless. What you're talking about simply isn't possible with encrypted bittorrent traffic. They would have to do MitM attacks against 128bit AES-encrypted streams. Do you have any idea how much horsepower that would take? Try billions of dollars in hardware. This is simply not happening.
If they were doing protocol inspection, why did Sandvine catch Lotus Notes? Why can I trigger the throttling with HTTPS connections?
Show me some documentation saying Sandvine boxes can do DPI and I'll concede this one.
I'd assumed that they were simply targeting any application that uses too many TCP connections
No, Comcast is specifically examining your data and is specifically forging packets to kill P2P connections. The OP is correct. They Sandvine boxes they've installed are rather crude and do not do any kind of DPI. They send spoofed TCP RST packets to both ends of a connection over a certain limit of TCP connections. That's it. You can get throttled if you open too many browser windows. Lotus Notes, which also uses lots of TCP connections, was blocked by Sandvine until they whitelisted the port (1352/TCP).
1) Apple drove the company I worked for (an online music company) out of business through deception.
2) Apple screwed MacOS users for years, floundering with MacOS 9. I had to support MacOS 9 and it was very painful.
3) While I like most iPods, iTunes sucks. It mangles all your files and metadata into a proprietary database that makes it near-impossible to do very simple things: like add a track from someone else's MP3 player and completely locks you into the iPod because you can't easily transfer your music to another player. No other music manager software does anything like this.
4) iMacs are a ripoff designed to force more frequent desktop replacement.
5) MacOS X, when first introduced, was slow and buggy. I probably shouldn't have tried to run it on a Gen2 iMac. It's not that way now, but it left a bad first impression on me.
and most importantly...
6) If I wanted a alternative to Windows I'd use the less expensive, more powerful, Linux operating system which I can install on commodity hardware. None of Apple's vendor lock-in or proprietary bullshit. I fail to see much of a market for MacOS with excellent Linux distributions like Ubuntu available.
You were the first to make racist claims: you should be first to give reliable evidence. What claim was that? That residents of Sderot were forming terrorist groups? They are. Here's former NY mayor Ed Koch: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/koch/entry/israel
Many of them did hate the Jews: anti-Semitism has always been popular and was perpetuated among the Arab population during the 1940's by certain elements siding with various sides in the Second World War.... Many more simply did not want to get in the way of the Arab states who invaded the region, and many more did it out of self-interest: the belief that if they evacuated during the war, the Arab states would let them return, take back their own homes and property, and take back the homes and property of their Jewish neighbors as well. Pure greed. Again, EVIDENCE. Where is a single document, recording, or eyewitness account from an Arab that supports any of this?
Zionists constantly promote this racist lie to justify their treatment of Arabs. They are filled with absurd anti-Arab propaganda, like claiming the Arabs were Nazis who helped execute Jews despite the fact the Palestinians and most Arabs fought on the side of the Allies in WWII and had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Holocaust. Or that Arabs wanted to greedily steal "Jewish land", which is an absurd claim to make when it was the Zionist militias driving them out and stealing THEIR land.
Even the whole notion of the "war" is a little off. Both sides rejected the partion plan, but the Zionists chose to respond by unilaterally invading and and attacking Arab villages.
But to say that public anonymous critiques of particular people are simply "annoying" is incredibly naive. Let's have a concrete example of ACTUAL PHYSICAL OR FINANCIAL HARM. You can't come up with one because there isn't any.
While I can't say that public non-anonymous critique isn't ripe for retribution, I think you may as well allow cops to respond with the charge given to their critic. You could use a drop-down menu, for crying out loud. Why do police have the need to "respond" to anonymous critics?
Small town cops will pay the highest price through unfounded rumors and retaliatory comments. Again, what "price" are they supposedly paying other than hurt feelings?
It is truly unfortunate that people make up their minds with ridiculous assertions based on anecdotal evidence. And yes, your personal bad experience with law enforcement does count as anecdotal evidence. You're a computer programmer, not a criminal defense lawyer. How is your bullshit anecdotal evidence better than my bullshit anecdotal evidence?
Fortunately, most criminal cases do NOT involve coercion or entrapment. I'm not using the LEGAL definition of "coercion" or "entrapment". If the prosecutor gives cash money or a reduced sentence to prosecuting witnesses that is entrapment. If a police officer questions you without a lawyer present, even if the suspect has specifically waived that right, that is coercion. As you can see, my definitions are much, much, much, broader.
I have been around lawyers long enough and participated in enough criminal trials to know that even the most inexperienced lawyer is much more likely than not going to be able to have charges dismissed if there was any sort of coercion or entrapment going on. Really? "Even the most inexperienced lawyer" can win a "he said/she said" with a police officer? Are you serious? Please show me a list of cases where a defendant was acquitted (or charges dismissed) because the judge took the defendant's word (and NO other evidence) over that of a police officer.
Or how about snitches? Many cases involve "cooperating witnesses" that are ALMOST ALWAYS lying (in part), but people seem to get convicted anyway.
That's not a layoff, that's a shrinking police force. And police forces don't necessarily need to grow. If the economy picks up and crime goes down, so does the need for police.
Of course, that's not the reason for the "shrinking police force" you describe. The reason for that is tighter city/county budgets. Not every city thinks it's a great idea to raise taxes to hire more cops.
It should be noted that up until 1948 Ashkelon used to be called al-Majdal and was home to some 10,000 Arabs. Their homes were taken and they were ethnically cleansed and moved to Gaza.
They evacuated the country and collaborated with Egypt to exterminate their former neighbors. The Arabs who stayed in Israel rather than doing that became citizens and continue to hold full civil rights, as do their descendants. Prove this racist lie.
What you're CLAIMING is that the Arab residents of al-Majdal CHOSE to abandon their homes, property, etc. because they hated the Jews so much that they were willing to see their homes destroyed just to kill a few Jews. Not because of fears of being massacred by Jewish militia.
Can you provide any evidence that the evacuation was voluntary? Zionists keep claiming this yet are unable to come up with a single recording or document that encouraged the Palestinians to flee. The Arab eyewitnesses ALL disagree with these assertions. In fact, the only people that made these assertions were the Zionist militia themselves.
Can we all please make an effort to keep the comments on track, and not diverge into a "Israelis/Jews are evil" fest? How about the fact that this system does NOT work, CAN NOT work (the whole idea is retarded), and this whole effort is just a ploy by Israeli defense contractors to line their pockets at the expense of the people of the United States of America who are expected to pay for this piece of shit?
If only everyone in the region sought such a solution, instead of violence meets violence. How is a giant freaking laser cannon a "solution" and not "violence"?
I could also point out that the residents of Sderot haven't been sitting around desperately begging for peace. They have been organizing terrorist forces that attack Gaza.
That is entrapment. It is illegal, and the evidence cannot be used in court. Have you ever appeared in court against a police officer? Do you really know anything about law enforcement? Most criminal cases involve coercion or entrapment.
There is a legitimate concern for cops that do go undercover (they tend to do so off and on throughout a career), This is simply not true. Undercover cops are usually recruited at the academy for exactly this reason (and because of the need for most undercovers to be as young as possible). When they're out, they're out. Again, because they might be identified. If the police department in question doesn't bother to take these simple precautions then they DEFINITELY should have additional scrutiny because they're obviously incompetent.
It's FEDERAL agents that often drop in and out, especially DEA, which is why the DEA tries to keep the identity of all their agents secret. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that 75% of DEA agents are dealing drugs on the side.
Cops have a sucky enough job as it is and while I see a rating system like this as useful for many things, it'll be used for pettiness most of all. The serious issues cops get called out on have more efficient means of getting handled. It's very difficult for me to imagine what tangible harm could be caused by internet review of police officers. Sure, they might be ANNOYED that people on the internet are talking smack about them, but so what? What do they really "suffer" exactly? You mentioned games, are game designers cripped by the criticism they receive on web forums? I don't think so.
And police officers aren't like game designers. Police officers have the right to come into your house and kill you. Given that, I think they deserve a bit of scrutiny. Hell, I think they deserve a LOT of scrutiny, like 24/7 surveillance, GPS implants, weekly gas spectrograph drug tests, yearly competency testing, affirmative action, no unions, etc.
Obviously the problems with police officers aren't getting handled, that's why there is all the guerrilla surveillance going on.
You put your bid in early into the auction for $500 because that is "the maximum you are willing to pay".
The bidding reaches $500 (your max) and you are the high bidder until the last 60 seconds of the auction when someone else puts in a bid for $501 and gets the item.
THIS is the problem. Buyers are almost always willing to pay slightly more than their normal "maximum bid", and would do so if given the chance, but sniping prevents this. So sniping prevents a seller from getting the best possible price on his item.
I once sold an old PC that had been in my family's possession for years. Some jackass decided to be an asshole buyer and came back with "this is missing, that's not working", apparently assuming that I was some kind of clearing house who moves too much stock to know the details about a particular item. I responded by describing exactly that PCs condition as shipped as well as the statement that my family had owned that PC for years, so I knew every detail about it. I never heard back from the guy once he realized that I called his bluff and that I could have easily slammed him with a negative about trying to scam me. So what?
Really, what harm did you actually suffer here? ABSOLUTELY NONE. You didn't lose one red cent.
And say he had given you negative feedback. So what? That's one out of hundreds. Nobody will reject you because your feedback is only 99.9%. Again, you haven't lost one red cent.
The worst thing a buyer can really do is use a fake credit card, and PayPal has additional identity protections to prevent this. You can even limit your sales to "Verified" Paypal people which is even safer. Checks (assuming you wait for them to clear) and money orders are the same as cash. And buyers who use fake credit cards don't get negative feedback, they're kicked off eBay and/or thrown in jail.
Now think about the damage a rogue SELLER could do. He sells you defective merchandise: you're out money AND you face retaliation for negative feedback. But it's really the fact that you're out the money that hurts you.
I'd also point out that you're wrongly assuming malice in the above scenario. It's possible your customer ordered several similar items from different sellers at the same time and got confused. This has certainly happened to me.
No amount of studies will convince the anti-video game people they are wrong. They ALREADY KNOW they're wrong. The reality is that they're either front groups for religious organizations trying to get donations by focusing on the "hot button" issue of video game violence, or they're front groups sponsored by television and film groups afraid of the competition. They exact same thing played out with comic books and roleplaying games.
Religious organizations pretend they're "fighting" X to solicit donations so they can get rich/spread their religious ideas. Nobody involved cares about kids at all.
If I am really good I also silenty get rid of 60 cops and score another headline NOT with the firing but with the budget savings I have been managing. Ain't I good, can you guess how the next election will go? Interesting, except that police layoffs are extremely rare and the police ALWAYS fight in court and make a big public scene. There is no way a mayor or city council can hide a police layoff.
By your logic all farmers are subsidized. Almost all, yeah.
His water is well water, no subsidy. Possibly. In many areas the government will actually pay you to sink a well and/or pay for the well. While that almost certainly happened in his case, I'll concede the point.
No fertilizer, he's not a crop farmer. His grain he buys from my pap, who farms for fun since he is retired (he receives no subsidy), bail's his own hay. Ok.
His equipment? hmmm...last I checked, all out of pocket The manufacturers receive subsidies that he benefits from. If he's getting it all shipped in from Europe I'll concede he's not getting a subsidy here.
He's also getting steep fuel discounts.
So before you go making sweeping generalizations maybe you should know the facts. I do know the facts. The agricultural industry is the most heavily subsidized industry in the USA by a wide margin. Virtually every aspect of agriculture is subsidized in some way. This goes all the way down to home gardeners who still benefit from "victory garden" legislation during WW2.
You might argue that your father isn't getting much, but I didn't get ANYTHING for my computer consulting business or my webhosting business. I could have taken out a small business loan subsidized by the government, but so could your father. And his rates would be a lot better because it's agribusiness.
The government patted a few people on the back for some votes. That's why there are subsidies. Not everyone was in on it. I've BEEN to town hall meetings in farm states. And candidate who comes out against farm subsidies has absolutely no chance of getting elected in rural areas. Farmers simply do not vote for candidates that oppose farm subsidies. It's been this way for ALMOST 200 YEARS. It's difficult for me to believe there is a few "bad apples" pushing this.
The problem is Congressional districting. Rural Americans have too much power. This is why they are able to push policies through, like farm subsidies and (most famously) Prohibition, on the vast majority of Americans who disagree with them.
From line 739, the low estimate is 500, mid-range is 1,000, and the high estimate is 20,000, a figure provided by Castro. Yup.
From line 848, the low estimate for Castro's democide is 35,000, mid-range is 73,000, and the high estimate is 141,000. Wrong line. The correct comparable line is 788, and even then I don't know if it's comparable. The statistics for Batista's regime are very sparse. Was nobody in prison? Was nobody executed?
Suharto is nowhere in the same league as Hitler or Pol Pot. I disagree. Pol Pot and Suharto are about even for killing by my count. Tells you how much debate there really is here.
Anyway, I stand by my statement. You can't actually prove that the Castro regime is worse than that one it replaced. Nor can you prove that left-wing dictators (like Castro) always mass slaughter their people unlike right-wing dictators (like Hitler) who don't.
My dad is a farmer, no subsidies. Does he grow marijuana or heroin organically? If not, he's getting subsidies. His equipment is subsidized. His seed grain is subsidized. His fertilizer is subsidized. His water is subsidized. His gasoline and heating oil are subsidized. I could go on. He gets some of this from just living in farm country.
Cattle eat corn, pigs, chickens, and just about every other live stock. We ship a lot over seas as well. If it makes the animals fatter quicker and that is good for business then why not feed it to them? We ONLY grow corn because the huge subsidies make it so cheap. It's more expensive to produce that other grains which are perfectly adequate food sources for most animals. Corn only makes PIGS fatter quicker, it's just cheap food for other animals. I would have no problem with corn cultivation if we ended the subsidies and banned HFCS from human consumption. Of course, if we did that corn production would drop to almost nothing in the USA.
So the fact that it makes animals grow faster would suggest it has more nutritional value for the animal? No, it makes PIGS FATTER. F-A-T. It has LESS nutritional value than most grains because you're basically feeding your pigs bags of sugar. Now, I like pork. And I agree that sugar-fed pork tastes better. And I don't give a damn if it makes the pigs unhealthy, they're up for slaughter.
However these same qualities make it a TERRIBLE food for human beings.
Farmers represent less than 1% of the population. They themselves cannot keep candidates out of office that would end the subsidies. You'd be wrong about this. There are these things called "Congressional districts". If you do some digging you'll find that per capita rural Americans (that tend to be farmers and ranchers) have FAR more representation in Congress than urban Americans. 85% of Americans live in major urban cities like NY and LA, but are 85% of Congressmen from big cities? Hell no. It's less than half.
People will argue that it would put them all out of business Not ALL, but almost all. The US can't compete with labor prices in Central and South America so it's likely that almost all sugar production would move south. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's not like we grow bananas and coffee in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
And "all" of Apple's products are selling "off the charts"? Apple is the #1 retailer of MP3 players. That's it. RIM stomps all over them on smartphones, and HP, Dell, etc. stomp all over their desktop and laptop sales. Microsoft is failing in every consumer electronics arena it enters. Except for mice, and game peripherals. And MP3 players (the new Zune is selling pretty well). Tho original XBOX was in some ways a financial disaster, but the 360 is doing pretty well. The only big disaster I can think of in recent years is WebTV. And personally, I *LIKED* WebTV. YMMV.
And that was a pretty crazy hit piece on MS. Why is he comparing iPods to XBOX (except the fact he is a slobbering Apple fan crowing about iPod sales)? Does he really believe there are 10 million unsold 360s sitting on store shelves? He also seems completely unaware of the Nvidia lawsuit which caused the early discontinuation of the original XBOX. Microsoft can't sustain mild sales on Vista after spending billions to develop it over the last 6 years and having nothing really to show for all that. Fact: Vista is the fastest selling OS in history. It's beating Win98 for adoption. Simply because it hasn't replaced all WindowsXP installs in a year people are saying it's stillborn. Windows Me was sillborn. Vista is not. The major reason for the relatively slow adoption of Vista is that the relatively high hardware requirements means that most older PCs (built before 2007) can't be upgraded to Vista and that "upgrade" portion of sales (which has ALWAYS been a small part of sales) has been significantly reduced. Even worse, many entry level PCs sold in early 2007 couldn't run Vista which hurt adoption even more. And there were a number of serious bugs that weren't fixed until SP1. Ironically, despite all the delays, it now appears that Vista was launched too EARLY instead of too late. Lesson learned.
Apple took 15 years to ship a new version of it's OS. Apple fans should shut the fuck up about ship dates. I'd also point out that, at launch, OS X ran like complete shit on every system in Apple's lineup except the most expensive Power Macs. Windows Mobile is a joke. It's the #2 mobile OS, beating iPhone, Palm, and Symbian sales handily. Lots of people, including myself, prefer the Windows Mobile platform. The iPhone is nice, but the keyboard is completely useless which makes the iPhone completely useless for ME. It's also a pretty crappy phone, the Tilt has better reception and a better speakerphone. As a media player, the iPhone stomps all over Windows Mobile. I think the iPod Touch is a great device and probably the best media player on the market. A little pricey though.
This law will go nowhere, even if it passes (which is unlikely). The Federal government has the sole regulatory authority over "interstate commerce". The term "interstate commerce" has been interpreted extremely broadly by Federal courts to mean basically everything. Yeah, EVERYTHING. Including transactions between individuals in the same state.
Trespassing is not automatic. Crossing an imaginary property line is not trespassing, even if prominent "No Trespassing" or "No Soliciting" signs are posted. If these people had had a LOCKED gate securing their private road and the Google vehicle had busted through it, THAT would be trespassing. If they had parked in the driveway and refused to leave when the homeowners asked, THAT would be trespassing. Merely parking in the driveway and taking photographs is not trespassing. Around here, real estate agents do this all the time.
Comcast is lying.
The Sandvine boxes they are using don't do DPI. I've read the documentation on 'em, and they don't do DPI. They're mainly for content filtering (hence the TCP RSTs).
Even if they did, most Bittorrent traffic is encrypted nowadays so DPI is useless. What you're talking about simply isn't possible with encrypted bittorrent traffic. They would have to do MitM attacks against 128bit AES-encrypted streams. Do you have any idea how much horsepower that would take? Try billions of dollars in hardware. This is simply not happening.
If they were doing protocol inspection, why did Sandvine catch Lotus Notes? Why can I trigger the throttling with HTTPS connections?
Show me some documentation saying Sandvine boxes can do DPI and I'll concede this one.
Why do I hate Apple?
1) Apple drove the company I worked for (an online music company) out of business through deception.
2) Apple screwed MacOS users for years, floundering with MacOS 9. I had to support MacOS 9 and it was very painful.
3) While I like most iPods, iTunes sucks. It mangles all your files and metadata into a proprietary database that makes it near-impossible to do very simple things: like add a track from someone else's MP3 player and completely locks you into the iPod because you can't easily transfer your music to another player. No other music manager software does anything like this.
4) iMacs are a ripoff designed to force more frequent desktop replacement.
5) MacOS X, when first introduced, was slow and buggy. I probably shouldn't have tried to run it on a Gen2 iMac. It's not that way now, but it left a bad first impression on me.
and most importantly...
6) If I wanted a alternative to Windows I'd use the less expensive, more powerful, Linux operating system which I can install on commodity hardware. None of Apple's vendor lock-in or proprietary bullshit. I fail to see much of a market for MacOS with excellent Linux distributions like Ubuntu available.
Zionists constantly promote this racist lie to justify their treatment of Arabs. They are filled with absurd anti-Arab propaganda, like claiming the Arabs were Nazis who helped execute Jews despite the fact the Palestinians and most Arabs fought on the side of the Allies in WWII and had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Holocaust. Or that Arabs wanted to greedily steal "Jewish land", which is an absurd claim to make when it was the Zionist militias driving them out and stealing THEIR land.
Even the whole notion of the "war" is a little off. Both sides rejected the partion plan, but the Zionists chose to respond by unilaterally invading and and attacking Arab villages.
Or how about snitches? Many cases involve "cooperating witnesses" that are ALMOST ALWAYS lying (in part), but people seem to get convicted anyway.
You simply don't know what you're talking about.
That's not a layoff, that's a shrinking police force. And police forces don't necessarily need to grow. If the economy picks up and crime goes down, so does the need for police.
Of course, that's not the reason for the "shrinking police force" you describe. The reason for that is tighter city/county budgets. Not every city thinks it's a great idea to raise taxes to hire more cops.
They evacuated the country and collaborated with Egypt to exterminate their former neighbors. The Arabs who stayed in Israel rather than doing that became citizens and continue to hold full civil rights, as do their descendants. Prove this racist lie.
What you're CLAIMING is that the Arab residents of al-Majdal CHOSE to abandon their homes, property, etc. because they hated the Jews so much that they were willing to see their homes destroyed just to kill a few Jews. Not because of fears of being massacred by Jewish militia.
Can you provide any evidence that the evacuation was voluntary? Zionists keep claiming this yet are unable to come up with a single recording or document that encouraged the Palestinians to flee. The Arab eyewitnesses ALL disagree with these assertions. In fact, the only people that made these assertions were the Zionist militia themselves.
I could also point out that the residents of Sderot haven't been sitting around desperately begging for peace. They have been organizing terrorist forces that attack Gaza.
It's FEDERAL agents that often drop in and out, especially DEA, which is why the DEA tries to keep the identity of all their agents secret. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that 75% of DEA agents are dealing drugs on the side.
And police officers aren't like game designers. Police officers have the right to come into your house and kill you. Given that, I think they deserve a bit of scrutiny. Hell, I think they deserve a LOT of scrutiny, like 24/7 surveillance, GPS implants, weekly gas spectrograph drug tests, yearly competency testing, affirmative action, no unions, etc.
Obviously the problems with police officers aren't getting handled, that's why there is all the guerrilla surveillance going on.
The best odds are obviously on sports betting where the house doesn't set arbitrary odds in their favor. Card games are for suckers.
Example:
You put your bid in early into the auction for $500 because that is "the maximum you are willing to pay".
The bidding reaches $500 (your max) and you are the high bidder until the last 60 seconds of the auction when someone else puts in a bid for $501 and gets the item.
THIS is the problem. Buyers are almost always willing to pay slightly more than their normal "maximum bid", and would do so if given the chance, but sniping prevents this. So sniping prevents a seller from getting the best possible price on his item.
Really, what harm did you actually suffer here? ABSOLUTELY NONE. You didn't lose one red cent.
And say he had given you negative feedback. So what? That's one out of hundreds. Nobody will reject you because your feedback is only 99.9%. Again, you haven't lost one red cent.
The worst thing a buyer can really do is use a fake credit card, and PayPal has additional identity protections to prevent this. You can even limit your sales to "Verified" Paypal people which is even safer. Checks (assuming you wait for them to clear) and money orders are the same as cash. And buyers who use fake credit cards don't get negative feedback, they're kicked off eBay and/or thrown in jail.
Now think about the damage a rogue SELLER could do. He sells you defective merchandise: you're out money AND you face retaliation for negative feedback. But it's really the fact that you're out the money that hurts you.
I'd also point out that you're wrongly assuming malice in the above scenario. It's possible your customer ordered several similar items from different sellers at the same time and got confused. This has certainly happened to me.
No amount of studies will convince the anti-video game people they are wrong. They ALREADY KNOW they're wrong. The reality is that they're either front groups for religious organizations trying to get donations by focusing on the "hot button" issue of video game violence, or they're front groups sponsored by television and film groups afraid of the competition. They exact same thing played out with comic books and roleplaying games.
Religious organizations pretend they're "fighting" X to solicit donations so they can get rich/spread their religious ideas. Nobody involved cares about kids at all.
It's amazing the crap ex-cops and their friends can get away with.
He's also getting steep fuel discounts. So before you go making sweeping generalizations maybe you should know the facts. I do know the facts. The agricultural industry is the most heavily subsidized industry in the USA by a wide margin. Virtually every aspect of agriculture is subsidized in some way. This goes all the way down to home gardeners who still benefit from "victory garden" legislation during WW2.
You might argue that your father isn't getting much, but I didn't get ANYTHING for my computer consulting business or my webhosting business. I could have taken out a small business loan subsidized by the government, but so could your father. And his rates would be a lot better because it's agribusiness. The government patted a few people on the back for some votes. That's why there are subsidies. Not everyone was in on it. I've BEEN to town hall meetings in farm states. And candidate who comes out against farm subsidies has absolutely no chance of getting elected in rural areas. Farmers simply do not vote for candidates that oppose farm subsidies. It's been this way for ALMOST 200 YEARS. It's difficult for me to believe there is a few "bad apples" pushing this.
The problem is Congressional districting. Rural Americans have too much power. This is why they are able to push policies through, like farm subsidies and (most famously) Prohibition, on the vast majority of Americans who disagree with them.
Anyway, I stand by my statement. You can't actually prove that the Castro regime is worse than that one it replaced. Nor can you prove that left-wing dictators (like Castro) always mass slaughter their people unlike right-wing dictators (like Hitler) who don't.
However these same qualities make it a TERRIBLE food for human beings. Farmers represent less than 1% of the population. They themselves cannot keep candidates out of office that would end the subsidies. You'd be wrong about this. There are these things called "Congressional districts". If you do some digging you'll find that per capita rural Americans (that tend to be farmers and ranchers) have FAR more representation in Congress than urban Americans. 85% of Americans live in major urban cities like NY and LA, but are 85% of Congressmen from big cities? Hell no. It's less than half. People will argue that it would put them all out of business Not ALL, but almost all. The US can't compete with labor prices in Central and South America so it's likely that almost all sugar production would move south. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's not like we grow bananas and coffee in the US.