And is Guantamano bay wrong? Maybe it is, I agree. And honestly, my answer would depend on what kind of "torture" they do there, and depending on how you define that "torture". Honestly, if flushing down a book and having a PMSing girl touch you is torture, those prisoners probably need to get something - civilized.
Seriously - how can you equate flushing down a book with torture for a war-criminal who tried to kill your soldiers? How can you equate having a girl touch you with people that kidnap and behead journalists on video tape for being Jewish?
My point is this - if we are treating them the way they treat us, I agree, there is no difference between them and us. But that does not mean we should not be firm, either. I think you can be firm and resort to putting someone down without actual physical torture - it's called psychological warfare.
And guess what? That is perfectly acceptable, because the only thing that's making them fall for that one is their own prejudice.
Like I said, comparing what we do to what they do is absolutely ridiculous.
The Jihadis out there do not care. There is no other way of handling them, you are either a Muslim that prays 5 times a day and follows their barbaric and uncivilized practices or you are a kafir, a non-believer. They would do anything and everything that they can to hurt you.
Of course, the left does not understand how rotten that is, because your very civility will be the death of you.
One would think that crashing planes into buildings, bombing embassies, burning people, chaining women, stoning people, beheading Americans on video and the like would make people realize that being "peaceful" with the Jihadis is not going to work, but apparently people can be really, *really* stupid.
It is either us or them. Islamic fundamentalism, and to a great extent Islam, is a scourge that needs to be taken care of. Ignoring it is not going to make it go away. If anything, it's going to make it worse. You would think that one Nazi Germany would have taught people a thing or two, but apparently people need reminders.
Sometimes, the best defense is offence. Kick them before they kick us. Shatter them before they have the power to do worse things than they already are.
Know something? There is a war going on. It's called a war against terror. It's the war against the western civilization that they are waging, and whether or not you realize it, we're fighting for survival.
From Palestinians fighting in Israel, Pakistanis fighting against Indians in Kashmir, Americans being attacked and the west being attacked, it's a war which the Muslims are waging against everyone else - Christians, Jews, Hindus and more.
But then again, some folks would not realize the problem until it's all over them. And by then, it's too late. That's okay, though. At least there are some of us out here who know when to do the right thing.
It's just that these days, you get to hear about it. When you are out there, you either kick ass or get your ass kicked.
These prisoners you keep talking about? Most of them are the same ones who'd have killed *American* soldiers if they were not caught first. Killed. Not held prisoner, not interrogated, but killed.
Secondly, I'm sure the President knows everything that's going on in every army barrack in this whole country, right? Right? Blaming him for something like Abu Gharib is just ridiculous.
And is Guantamano bay wrong? Maybe it is, I agree. And honestly, my answer would depend on what kind of "torture" they do there, and depending on how you define that "torture". Honestly, if flushing down a book and having a PMSing girl touch you is torture, those prisoners probably need to get something - civilized.
Seriously - how can you equate flushing down a book with torture for a war-criminal who tried to kill your soldiers? How can you equate having a girl touch you with people that kidnap and behead journalists on video tape for being Jewish?
My point is this - if we are treating them the way they treat us, I agree, there is no difference between them and us. But that does not mean we should not be firm, either. I think you can be firm and resort to putting someone down without actual physical torture - it's called psychological warfare.
And guess what? That is perfectly acceptable, because the only thing that's making them fall for that one is their own prejudice.
It's a quote from Stargate SG-1. It's a little out of context, so it probably does not make sense to someone who's not seen the show.
By evil, they were talking more about the temptation to do an act that could be construed as evil. The evil in this case is an internal conflict, not something outside.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
From the article:
"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."
And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.
The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.
Err, I'm sorry - but Google's spam handling is crappy.
Quite often, I have spam that shows up in my inbox - and more than a few times, I've had legitimate e-mail get marked as spam, despite repeatedly marking it as not-spam.
Google's spam handling is like Yahoo!'s - it occasionally works, but it's nothing to write home about. Subpar or mediocre would sum it up.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that not everybody has a page at GooglePages?
And maybe, just maybe - it has something to do with these itsy bitsy thing called usability (you know, cluttering a page because some Joe Random user wanted a link to his puppy) and minimizing server load?
You should search for "Joe Zbiciak" and not Joe Zbiciak.
Doing the latter makes Google do an OR style search, resulting in a lot of results that just have Joe and Zbiciak in them, but not necessarily referring to you.
For instance, look at page 24 of the search link that you provided - only 3 results in that page are Joe Zbiciak. Most refer to some Joe and refer to some other Zbiciak. Given the number of Joes in this world, this is not surprising.
On the other hand, a search within quotes narrows it down just to your name. This seems to bring up 891 results, lower than what even my name would bring up.;-)
Yes. The US is most certainly successful, in ways that Denmark or Sweden would never be.
Your comparison is flawed for a number of reasons. For one, Scandinavian countries are extremely small in comparison, and they started out with a relatively higher standard of living to begin with. On the contrary, the US is a settlement of immigrants, so to speak.
Both in terms of size and number, US is much, much bigger and much more diverse.
Secondly, the US is extremely open to immigrants - the number of people of various cultures and ethnicities that move into the US every year makes it easy for us to attract new talent. In a socialist system, this would not be possible because the system would not be self-sustaining and the strain on the system would not balance itself against the benefits.
And finally, for a state of this size and this diversity, we need a system where the fittest survive - and capitalism provides that. The best come, and the best move up the ladder. If the US were a closed, monocultural society with a small (and possibly non-growing) population and a small area, then maybe a socialist state might be possible (not necessarily good, though).
Socialism in any form forgets the fact that we evolved from the fittest - capitalism is a system that lets the fittest fight his or her way to the top, and letting the rest die out. Nature does not know and does not show empathy to the weak. There are predators and there are prey.
Nobody is debating global warming, they are debating the cause behind it and whether it's entirely man-made, or could have natural roots.
And then of course, there are some people who would just draw conclusions without any evidence and pool everybody they disagree with into the "those others" camp.
See, you buy stock in a company hoping that it would not go bust, and that your share's price would increase.
Now, for someone to adequately know whether or not a particular stock is good or bad, they would most certainly need to know what the company has planned, and provide such data. You might argue that a stock-holder knew what s/he was getting into while buying the stock, but not providing enough data defeats the primary purpose that one buys the stock for.
By not providing such information, Google is leaving folks uncertain - now, honestly, if your data was good you'd release it because it would do good to your stock price. If you aren't, I'd be worried about what else is going on, and that is most definitely not a good sign.
Google's prospectus claims that the only reason they do not give quarterly guidance is because it encourages short term thinking - now, the analysts and investors would have no problem with it if Google's annual results were as good as they'd hoped. But it was not, so the analysts are claiming that if they had more information (i.e. the quarterly guidance) then this would not have happened.
Ultimately, the analysts are saying, "By not giving quarterly guidance you are not letting us do our jobs properly." While the long term investors (the kind GOOG wanted in their prospectus) may not need quarterly statements (long term investors can look at annual statements and either dump or buy), however if Google needs to survive in Wall Street, they may need to do both, since not giving quarterly statement introduces a lot of uncertainty.
Ultimately, it depends on how they want to grow. Schmidt has indiciated that they want to be a $100bn company, so for fast growth they may have to disclose such information.
Long term investors are going to be very minimal, and they seldom provide the kind of muscle that Google is looking for.
If the analysts can't predict, then the stock price would fluctuate.
This introduces uncertainty, and the last thing that Wallstreet likes is uncertainty. Sometimes, companies have their stock prices going up even after they've lost a major deal simply because the period of uncertainty is over.
So, this makes a lot of sense - Google is causing uncertainty in the price, and that is definitely not good for GOOG's shareholders (or for Wallstreet, for that matter).
Very different from a make-believe world, we meet together every weekend and play music, build things, socialize etc etc. Even in our real worlld, we own the copyrights to the things we create.
For example, just last week, we built a bed for my apartment which I own. All of this has led to some really creative and clever objects, such as lego beer dispensers.
Anyway, more to the point, music has really taken hold in our real lives. Me and my friends go to concerts, and we even play in a local band! There are several bars (Hofbrauhaus and Beer Sellar are two I can think of) where real musicians play in real bars with real beer and real women with real boobs. Okay, maybe not the last one. Sadly, not all of us are a cultured people, but it has however taught us such things as tolerance. For those of us do like tolerance, we go to these things called musicals, orchestras and theatre plays.
I also know of these music festivals like the Celtic and Renaissance music festivals that have been happening for a couple of hundred years, where once again you get to meet real *shudder* people. Those that like this can actually go to the websites (virtual, virtual!) and look up cool stuff.
More important to the point, doing this has taught me and my friends some good social skills, gotten us free beer and live music - and sex.
But go ahead, though. I'm sure a virtual life is infinitely more enjoyable. I mean, we sure as hell can't do all that stuff in real life, right? Right?
It would be cool if Google provided automatic encryption, but I wouldn't care if they didn't.
Not a good idea, right? I mean, if you are going to encrypt it, Google can't do a thing - on the other hand, if they encrypted it for you, they can always be forced to give in.
And I'm sure that even if they did encrypt it for you, it would come with disclaimers that would effectively make the whole thing meaningless.
If you're real goal is genuine security, you're better off doing it yourself.
Remember, any security mechanism is as strong as its weakest link, and leaving the keys to your safe with a corporation is not particularly a good idea - even if that corporation is a Do-No-Evil (conditions apply *) corporation.
*Unless you are Chinese, in which case we don't care about your human rights.
However, it was a Ma-Bell subsidiary, and the reason they were not spun off was because AT&T owned just a minority interest at the time of the breakup.
Since there is no keyhole or contact point on the door, this unique mechanism offers a significantly higher level of security then existing technology.
Then is not a comparative, it's a conditional. It's than that needs to be used in its place.
The Christain approach is the untruthful one. The religion is filled with lies, contridictions, falsehoods, evils and hate; yet to proslyetise and indoctrinate it is legally protected.
Umm, not just the Christian approach - almost every religion out there is a bloody sham.
You'd think that in this day and age people will know better, but sadly this is a dark period for humanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, just ask at the Department of Homeworld Security.
Did you even bother reading my previous comment?
Here, let me paste it for you:
And is Guantamano bay wrong? Maybe it is, I agree. And honestly, my answer would depend on what kind of "torture" they do there, and depending on how you define that "torture". Honestly, if flushing down a book and having a PMSing girl touch you is torture, those prisoners probably need to get something - civilized.
Seriously - how can you equate flushing down a book with torture for a war-criminal who tried to kill your soldiers? How can you equate having a girl touch you with people that kidnap and behead journalists on video tape for being Jewish?
My point is this - if we are treating them the way they treat us, I agree, there is no difference between them and us. But that does not mean we should not be firm, either. I think you can be firm and resort to putting someone down without actual physical torture - it's called psychological warfare.
And guess what? That is perfectly acceptable, because the only thing that's making them fall for that one is their own prejudice.
Like I said, comparing what we do to what they do is absolutely ridiculous.
You don't understand, do you?
The Jihadis out there do not care. There is no other way of handling them, you are either a Muslim that prays 5 times a day and follows their barbaric and uncivilized practices or you are a kafir, a non-believer. They would do anything and everything that they can to hurt you.
Of course, the left does not understand how rotten that is, because your very civility will be the death of you.
One would think that crashing planes into buildings, bombing embassies, burning people, chaining women, stoning people, beheading Americans on video and the like would make people realize that being "peaceful" with the Jihadis is not going to work, but apparently people can be really, *really* stupid.
It is either us or them. Islamic fundamentalism, and to a great extent Islam, is a scourge that needs to be taken care of. Ignoring it is not going to make it go away. If anything, it's going to make it worse. You would think that one Nazi Germany would have taught people a thing or two, but apparently people need reminders.
Sometimes, the best defense is offence. Kick them before they kick us. Shatter them before they have the power to do worse things than they already are.
Know something? There is a war going on. It's called a war against terror. It's the war against the western civilization that they are waging, and whether or not you realize it, we're fighting for survival.
From Palestinians fighting in Israel, Pakistanis fighting against Indians in Kashmir, Americans being attacked and the west being attacked, it's a war which the Muslims are waging against everyone else - Christians, Jews, Hindus and more.
But then again, some folks would not realize the problem until it's all over them. And by then, it's too late. That's okay, though. At least there are some of us out here who know when to do the right thing.
Here's a piece of news - all war is ugly.
It's just that these days, you get to hear about it. When you are out there, you either kick ass or get your ass kicked.
These prisoners you keep talking about? Most of them are the same ones who'd have killed *American* soldiers if they were not caught first. Killed. Not held prisoner, not interrogated, but killed.
Secondly, I'm sure the President knows everything that's going on in every army barrack in this whole country, right? Right? Blaming him for something like Abu Gharib is just ridiculous.
And is Guantamano bay wrong? Maybe it is, I agree. And honestly, my answer would depend on what kind of "torture" they do there, and depending on how you define that "torture". Honestly, if flushing down a book and having a PMSing girl touch you is torture, those prisoners probably need to get something - civilized.
Seriously - how can you equate flushing down a book with torture for a war-criminal who tried to kill your soldiers? How can you equate having a girl touch you with people that kidnap and behead journalists on video tape for being Jewish?
My point is this - if we are treating them the way they treat us, I agree, there is no difference between them and us. But that does not mean we should not be firm, either. I think you can be firm and resort to putting someone down without actual physical torture - it's called psychological warfare.
And guess what? That is perfectly acceptable, because the only thing that's making them fall for that one is their own prejudice.
Love, my friend, love.
In the words of a great man, "Make love, not war."
We all just need more love, that is the answer. =)
It's a quote from Stargate SG-1. It's a little out of context, so it probably does not make sense to someone who's not seen the show.
By evil, they were talking more about the temptation to do an act that could be construed as evil. The evil in this case is an internal conflict, not something outside.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
From the article:
"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."
And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.
The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.
Err, I'm sorry - but Google's spam handling is crappy.
Quite often, I have spam that shows up in my inbox - and more than a few times, I've had legitimate e-mail get marked as spam, despite repeatedly marking it as not-spam.
Google's spam handling is like Yahoo!'s - it occasionally works, but it's nothing to write home about. Subpar or mediocre would sum it up.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that not everybody has a page at GooglePages?
And maybe, just maybe - it has something to do with these itsy bitsy thing called usability (you know, cluttering a page because some Joe Random user wanted a link to his puppy) and minimizing server load?
You know, just a thought, that's all.
Dear Joe,
;-)
Welcome to Search Engine 101.
You should search for "Joe Zbiciak" and not Joe Zbiciak.
Doing the latter makes Google do an OR style search, resulting in a lot of results that just have Joe and Zbiciak in them, but not necessarily referring to you.
For instance, look at page 24 of the search link that you provided - only 3 results in that page are Joe Zbiciak. Most refer to some Joe and refer to some other Zbiciak. Given the number of Joes in this world, this is not surprising.
On the other hand, a search within quotes narrows it down just to your name. This seems to bring up 891 results, lower than what even my name would bring up.
Use an iPod.
I use my iPod shuffle more for data than for music. It's great, reliable and is quite robust.
Yes. The US is most certainly successful, in ways that Denmark or Sweden would never be.
Your comparison is flawed for a number of reasons. For one, Scandinavian countries are extremely small in comparison, and they started out with a relatively higher standard of living to begin with. On the contrary, the US is a settlement of immigrants, so to speak.
Both in terms of size and number, US is much, much bigger and much more diverse.
Secondly, the US is extremely open to immigrants - the number of people of various cultures and ethnicities that move into the US every year makes it easy for us to attract new talent. In a socialist system, this would not be possible because the system would not be self-sustaining and the strain on the system would not balance itself against the benefits.
And finally, for a state of this size and this diversity, we need a system where the fittest survive - and capitalism provides that. The best come, and the best move up the ladder. If the US were a closed, monocultural society with a small (and possibly non-growing) population and a small area, then maybe a socialist state might be possible (not necessarily good, though).
Socialism in any form forgets the fact that we evolved from the fittest - capitalism is a system that lets the fittest fight his or her way to the top, and letting the rest die out. Nature does not know and does not show empathy to the weak. There are predators and there are prey.
It's spelt pursued, not persued.
Nobody is debating global warming, they are debating the cause behind it and whether it's entirely man-made, or could have natural roots.
And then of course, there are some people who would just draw conclusions without any evidence and pool everybody they disagree with into the "those others" camp.
Gee.
See, you buy stock in a company hoping that it would not go bust, and that your share's price would increase.
Now, for someone to adequately know whether or not a particular stock is good or bad, they would most certainly need to know what the company has planned, and provide such data. You might argue that a stock-holder knew what s/he was getting into while buying the stock, but not providing enough data defeats the primary purpose that one buys the stock for.
By not providing such information, Google is leaving folks uncertain - now, honestly, if your data was good you'd release it because it would do good to your stock price. If you aren't, I'd be worried about what else is going on, and that is most definitely not a good sign.
Google's prospectus claims that the only reason they do not give quarterly guidance is because it encourages short term thinking - now, the analysts and investors would have no problem with it if Google's annual results were as good as they'd hoped. But it was not, so the analysts are claiming that if they had more information (i.e. the quarterly guidance) then this would not have happened.
Ultimately, the analysts are saying, "By not giving quarterly guidance you are not letting us do our jobs properly." While the long term investors (the kind GOOG wanted in their prospectus) may not need quarterly statements (long term investors can look at annual statements and either dump or buy), however if Google needs to survive in Wall Street, they may need to do both, since not giving quarterly statement introduces a lot of uncertainty.
Ultimately, it depends on how they want to grow. Schmidt has indiciated that they want to be a $100bn company, so for fast growth they may have to disclose such information.
Long term investors are going to be very minimal, and they seldom provide the kind of muscle that Google is looking for.
If the analysts can't predict, then the stock price would fluctuate.
This introduces uncertainty, and the last thing that Wallstreet likes is uncertainty. Sometimes, companies have their stock prices going up even after they've lost a major deal simply because the period of uncertainty is over.
So, this makes a lot of sense - Google is causing uncertainty in the price, and that is definitely not good for GOOG's shareholders (or for Wallstreet, for that matter).
I'm a resident of real life.
Very different from a make-believe world, we meet together every weekend and play music, build things, socialize etc etc. Even in our real worlld, we own the copyrights to the things we create.
For example, just last week, we built a bed for my apartment which I own. All of this has led to some really creative and clever objects, such as lego beer dispensers.
Anyway, more to the point, music has really taken hold in our real lives. Me and my friends go to concerts, and we even play in a local band! There are several bars (Hofbrauhaus and Beer Sellar are two I can think of) where real musicians play in real bars with real beer and real women with real boobs. Okay, maybe not the last one. Sadly, not all of us are a cultured people, but it has however taught us such things as tolerance. For those of us do like tolerance, we go to these things called musicals, orchestras and theatre plays.
I also know of these music festivals like the Celtic and Renaissance music festivals that have been happening for a couple of hundred years, where once again you get to meet real *shudder* people. Those that like this can actually go to the websites (virtual, virtual!) and look up cool stuff.
More important to the point, doing this has taught me and my friends some good social skills, gotten us free beer and live music - and sex.
But go ahead, though. I'm sure a virtual life is infinitely more enjoyable. I mean, we sure as hell can't do all that stuff in real life, right? Right?
If you're real goal is genuine security, you're better off doing it yourself.
:)
Your goal, not you're goal. Sorry, brain fart - post lunch disorder.
It would be cool if Google provided automatic encryption, but I wouldn't care if they didn't.
Not a good idea, right? I mean, if you are going to encrypt it, Google can't do a thing - on the other hand, if they encrypted it for you, they can always be forced to give in.
And I'm sure that even if they did encrypt it for you, it would come with disclaimers that would effectively make the whole thing meaningless.
If you're real goal is genuine security, you're better off doing it yourself.
Remember, any security mechanism is as strong as its weakest link, and leaving the keys to your safe with a corporation is not particularly a good idea - even if that corporation is a Do-No-Evil (conditions apply *) corporation.
*Unless you are Chinese, in which case we don't care about your human rights.
Well, I think Apple could use with some lessons in usability.
Your point?
However, it was a Ma-Bell subsidiary, and the reason they were not spun off was because AT&T owned just a minority interest at the time of the breakup.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
That, sir, was fantastic. Badiya!
Land ki dawai.
Since there is no keyhole or contact point on the door, this unique mechanism offers a significantly higher level of security then existing technology.
Then is not a comparative, it's a conditional. It's than that needs to be used in its place.
*shakes head*
The Christain approach is the untruthful one. The religion is filled with lies, contridictions, falsehoods, evils and hate; yet to proslyetise and indoctrinate it is legally protected.
Umm, not just the Christian approach - almost every religion out there is a bloody sham.
You'd think that in this day and age people will know better, but sadly this is a dark period for humanity.