I'm all for gay marriage. No, wait, I'm not. Why do gays want to get married in churches so bad? These are the same churches that tells them their lifestyle will cause them to burn in hell for eternity. And still they want to get married.
Gay people wanting to get married seems to me like black people wanting to burn crosses.
I mean in a church, if they want to have a civil ceremony that's fine with me. Frankly I'd marry my roommate if it means I could get on his health care plan.
OTOH, many laws are written with this marriage concept in mind. Like, what happens to your stuff when you die. It's certainly possible for any two people to bond closely enough ("life partner," what a gay term) to receive those benefits from the state.
I guess it comes down to the state's view of marriage, which bestows certain legal benefits on people who decide to get married, vs. the church's view of marriage, which bestows the benefit of a warm fuzzy feeling.
Can there ever be three-way marriages? Why draw the line at two people? The nose is poking under the tent.
I'm thinking it would be great for what we do here. But we're only a couple hundred employees. What's the cost look like?
I'm guessing that a dozen Windows servers must be an order of magnitude less expensive. Because after reading this whole thread, I can't quite understand why the server room isn't just one mainframe. Maybe this org is just too small/doesn't do enough computing to make it worth it. (We're a financial services company with plenty of in-house applications and databases)
Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on.
I heard stories of this happening with HP (I think) in the late 1970's. To "install" the additional 64K RAM the technician would flip a switch somewhere inside the computer. The bill for this was in the thousands. But I had no idea the industry still worked that way!
the HP+Compaq merger has already reportedly lowered the combined company's operating expenses.
of course it did. why else do you think they would merge?
when two comapnies that do the same thing merge, it's to "reduce costs" and "increase efficiency" i.e. fire people.
Re:Gee, Rocky, that M&A trick never works
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federal fucking regulators. if they weren't corrupt i wouldn't have a problem. but they're worse than socialist. in socialism we all get fucked equally. the feds, they fuck us all for the benefit of a few.
You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering...
Good lord, are you serious? I guess it's just the MSCE in me, but why wouldn't you just buy four different computers to do the work of four virtual computers?
In the next paragraph you sort of explain how the mainframe supplier, of I guess both hardware and software, is supporting the whole thing. You can actually buy that? Is it expensive? Do they build custom in-house applications for you??
I'm sure what you describe exists, yet I know nothing of that world. How old are you?
If you want to find someone to blame for the misery of the Iraqi people you'll find his picture on CNN/Foxnews/MSNBC as the guy we captured today!
See, this is where it gets really complicated. I suppose to the extent that Saddam Hussein could have went into exile or something, he was responsible for the suffering brought on by the sanctions. And I'm not trying to say that he isn't a bad person who'se clearly gone "old-school" on his people at times. For those atrocities he is to blame.
But for the sanctions, that doesn't really hold up. The whole point of sanctions is to exert pressure on a country by telling them that we aren't gonna play with them any more until they change their ways. The best example I can think of it working is South Africa, where the Apartheid government peacefully said bye-bye. But sanctions don't always work; witness Cuba and Iraq.
The hard truth of sanctions is that by ostracizing a nation you will lower the economic status of that nation. This will put stress on the existing political structure, with the intent that the political structure will acquiesce, conform to the demands of the community.
So is Saddam's fault that he didn't abdicate power? Kuwait was, in point of fact, drilling sideways into Iraq and tapping her oil. He was in the right to defend his natural resources, though he clearly underestimated the impact his invasion would have.
I think what happened with Iraq was: We wanted to show the rest of the world why you don't piss off America. Your people will have lives of shit for a decade if you fuck with us. Then we'll come over there, blow some shit up, and tell your shellshocked ass to pick up the fucking pieces because we need your oil. We liberated you, now it's time to get to work.
How can you know that Saddam's departure wouldn't make things worse for Iraq? For example, his sons could have started a civil war against each other for power. An islamist might sieze control. This latter option may yet happen, though we don't have to worry too much about a formal military coup. Come to think of it that may be why we disbanded the military. But back to the point.
I don't think it's fair to blame Saddam for the suffering caused by the sanctions. To me that sounds akin to you blindsiding me at an intersection, then you blaming the accident on me since I don't have car insurance and therefore shouldn't have been on the road in the first place. If you think that Saddam alone has caused suffering in Iraq you're looking past a few really important truths.
Here's another thing that I've never understood. This idea that our troops would be met with flowers. Hell now that we've got Saddam... strike that... Hell now that we've given Saddam to the Iraqi people, or maybe to an International War Crimes Tribunal in Baghdad, we might actually get a smile. But we bombed Iraq several times a week from the end of the Gulf War until the recent occupation. That's twelve years of U.S. and British fighters dropping bombs on your country, virtually uncontested. Were someone to drop bombs on my country for a decade, I would not welcome them into my house.
Anybody who doesn't understand why the U.S. is not loved is a fool. That last's not directed at you stevew but it makes for a damn fine rant.
I agree with everything you say, and I like the way you say it, but you still sound like an apologist. Among the problems I have with the occupation of Iraq is that the way that Bush achieved buy-in, the WMD story, was a known, documented crock of shit.
"We're taking out one that's so bad he cannot be tolerated." Cough, cough. The reason Saddam Hussein was deposed has nothing to do with the way Saddam Hussein exercised power. Rather, it has everything to do with the way George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Project for the New American Century want to run the world.
If I were an Iraqi, I would be thankful that Saddam is gone, but I'd also be leery of my liberators, as the decision to remove Mr. Hussein was not made with my interests in mind whatsoever. Clearly, the puppet authority's strings, ("we're from the Government and we're here to help") terminate somewhere inside the Beltway.
Not only is such a system possible, it would be completely legal.
What you wouldn't have access to is the State database linking EZPass ID 80f5d36c56a9de8f0b32a6d to John. Q. Motorist, 123 Elm St. You'd have to recreate that on your own.
Though, the Feds can get that any time, and probably without a warrant, thanks to our PATRIOTS in Congress.
How small can an RFID tag be? What's a clever way to get someone to wear one? Maybe send the person you want to track a nice piece of jewelery, or embed one in their credit card. Maybe get somebody to eat one. Tracking is gonna get real easy.
What everybody needs to understand about the U.N. is that it was created after WWII to promote and act in the foreign policy interests of the United States.
For all those who are convinced that the U.N. is some sort of communist conspiracy: Do you think we routinely go around creating international organizations that aren't in our best interests?
the U.N. vigorously opposed the war in Iraq But were courteous enough to pass resolutions giving us the legal excuse for the invasion and occupation. So how much could they have opposed the war if they signed off on it?
In the case of the World Bank, the invaders are all camoflagued in business suits, so most people mistake them for hard-working decent people who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
The ITU as an organization exists to promote the interests of state-owned telecommunications monopolies, which today are the province of repressive and dysfunctional governments.
So you're saying that in the 80s the USA was a repressive and dysfunctional government, but after AT&T was broken up things magically got better?
I'm not trying to defend the ITU, but I refuse to believe that state-owned telecommunications monopolies can possibly be any worse than Qwest.
But seemingly, a lot of people here have an entitlement complex, where they think they can take whatever the fuck they want for no other reason than that they want it.
Ah, now I get it! As Internet users, it is our Manifest Destiny to trade in warez and mp3s.
(Tangent: What if stealing from the RIAA (or whatever you want to call it) somehow ends up benefitting our country greatly in a hundred years?)
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. Maybe the law should be changed... if only to acknowledge that about 25% of america is sharing MP3s.
In fact, maybe that's just where we're headed: File-sharing will become something that's illegal but widespread. Paying your out-of-court settlement to the RIAA will be viewed the same way we all view speeding tickets. Oh, and you'll have to pay more for the "insurance" on your Internet connection after you get busted. Repeat offenders will get their connection yanked, maybe even jail time.
Seriously, now that copyright violation is a federal criminal offense, a situation like the above is entirely possible. We could even see sentencing guidelines come out of Congress or the Justice Department.
We cannot scorch the earth with atomic bombs anymore. The people that perpetrated 9/11 know this. If we could, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq would have been over in a matter of minutes.
Actually, I think it's more a matter of: it would take so many atomic bombs to hit all the caves in Afghanistan where Osama might be hiding, or hit all the compounds in Iraq where Saddam might be, that we would have to launch hundreds or thousands of nuclear warheads and have them all hit at pretty much the same time. Such an act would (correctly) be viewed by the rest of the world as, at minimum, the biggest atrocity since WWII.
Heck even if you only nuked Tripoli, you'll have to answer: Is one jet and one disco (disco bombing actually having been perpetrated by Syrian agents, but that was ignored) of innocent Americans (and a couple CIA operatives the plane) worth the deaths of a few bad guys and heaping thousands of innocent non-Americans?
I don't have an answer. Terrorism is tough to combat; fighting back inevitably leads to liberals like me pointing out that nine dead Afghan children don't care if they were killed by terrorists or counter-terrorists. I have to think we can find a better response than fighting fire with fire.
It's important to remember that the Davidians were tipped off that the ATF was coming
You mean by the fact that the ATF camped the compound for almost two months before going in?
One of the cited reasons they decided to go when they did was the fear that "operational fatigue" would lower the assault team's effectivenes if they didn't act soon. In other words: No sense getting the boys all pumped up for some action if you're just gonna park the tank on the lawn for six weeks!
D'oh, forgot about the food! And as I wrote that, I was eating microwave popcorn from ConAgra.
Some people would argue that moving away from factories means we're not really "making" anything more. Capitalism is taking raw materials, adding value, and turning a buck on the deal. I guess the raw materials now are things like the big mess in the wiring closet and the value gets added with the help of Visio. But it's difficult to see how wealth will be created in a "service based economy."
I meet a lot of people who are running "Windows 97." Of course that's because they see Office 97 whenever they launch Word. Most people don't really understand that Office isn't part of the OS. I have been party to purchasing decision where a person simply did not know if they were supposed to get Office XP or Windows XP.
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I'm all for gay marriage. No, wait, I'm not. Why do gays want to get married in churches so bad? These are the same churches that tells them their lifestyle will cause them to burn in hell for eternity. And still they want to get married.
Gay people wanting to get married seems to me like black people wanting to burn crosses.
I mean in a church, if they want to have a civil ceremony that's fine with me. Frankly I'd marry my roommate if it means I could get on his health care plan.
OTOH, many laws are written with this marriage concept in mind. Like, what happens to your stuff when you die. It's certainly possible for any two people to bond closely enough ("life partner," what a gay term) to receive those benefits from the state.
I guess it comes down to the state's view of marriage, which bestows certain legal benefits on people who decide to get married, vs. the church's view of marriage, which bestows the benefit of a warm fuzzy feeling.
Can there ever be three-way marriages? Why draw the line at two people? The nose is poking under the tent.
I agree. You guys have really gone overboard with these jokes.
I was gonna say something funny, but this thread is so bad, I just said frigate.
I'm thinking it would be great for what we do here. But we're only a couple hundred employees. What's the cost look like?
I'm guessing that a dozen Windows servers must be an order of magnitude less expensive. Because after reading this whole thread, I can't quite understand why the server room isn't just one mainframe. Maybe this org is just too small/doesn't do enough computing to make it worth it. (We're a financial services company with plenty of in-house applications and databases)
Want more processing power? Pay more money, and the "customer engineer" turns more of it on.
I heard stories of this happening with HP (I think) in the late 1970's. To "install" the additional 64K RAM the technician would flip a switch somewhere inside the computer. The bill for this was in the thousands. But I had no idea the industry still worked that way!
I think he meant non-incestuous mergers.
offtopic or not, it's pretty interesting how closely those two articles read. isn't it plaigarism when you just copy like that?
the HP+Compaq merger has already reportedly lowered the combined company's operating expenses.
of course it did. why else do you think they would merge?
when two comapnies that do the same thing merge, it's to "reduce costs" and "increase efficiency" i.e. fire people.
federal fucking regulators. if they weren't corrupt i wouldn't have a problem. but they're worse than socialist. in socialism we all get fucked equally. the feds, they fuck us all for the benefit of a few.
You might have a machine with 16 processors, of which you licensed 12 (the rest are in-place spares). You throw 4 of them into each of two multi-CPU partitions, one for accounting and one for engineering...
Good lord, are you serious? I guess it's just the MSCE in me, but why wouldn't you just buy four different computers to do the work of four virtual computers?
In the next paragraph you sort of explain how the mainframe supplier, of I guess both hardware and software, is supporting the whole thing. You can actually buy that? Is it expensive? Do they build custom in-house applications for you??
I'm sure what you describe exists, yet I know nothing of that world. How old are you?
They are liars, your naivete notwithstanding.
This is obviously a major victory. And not just for America and the Iraqi people, but for the promotion of this new form of modern warfare.
I'm not trying to troll, I am wondering what this new form of warfare is.
I mean, we captured the guy hiding in a ditch after sweating the locals for almost a year. What's new about that?
BEGIN TROLL MODE>
EXEC HYPERBOLE>
Or did you think it was some great new form of warfare when the Nazis came for Anne Frank?
END TROLL MODE>
Whew, had to get that out. There's lots of emotion on this fucking thread. We needed another Nazi post too.
If you want to find someone to blame for the misery of the Iraqi people you'll find his picture on CNN/Foxnews/MSNBC as the guy we captured today!
See, this is where it gets really complicated. I suppose to the extent that Saddam Hussein could have went into exile or something, he was responsible for the suffering brought on by the sanctions. And I'm not trying to say that he isn't a bad person who'se clearly gone "old-school" on his people at times. For those atrocities he is to blame.
But for the sanctions, that doesn't really hold up. The whole point of sanctions is to exert pressure on a country by telling them that we aren't gonna play with them any more until they change their ways. The best example I can think of it working is South Africa, where the Apartheid government peacefully said bye-bye. But sanctions don't always work; witness Cuba and Iraq.
The hard truth of sanctions is that by ostracizing a nation you will lower the economic status of that nation. This will put stress on the existing political structure, with the intent that the political structure will acquiesce, conform to the demands of the community.
So is Saddam's fault that he didn't abdicate power? Kuwait was, in point of fact, drilling sideways into Iraq and tapping her oil. He was in the right to defend his natural resources, though he clearly underestimated the impact his invasion would have.
I think what happened with Iraq was: We wanted to show the rest of the world why you don't piss off America. Your people will have lives of shit for a decade if you fuck with us. Then we'll come over there, blow some shit up, and tell your shellshocked ass to pick up the fucking pieces because we need your oil. We liberated you, now it's time to get to work.
How can you know that Saddam's departure wouldn't make things worse for Iraq? For example, his sons could have started a civil war against each other for power. An islamist might sieze control. This latter option may yet happen, though we don't have to worry too much about a formal military coup. Come to think of it that may be why we disbanded the military. But back to the point.
I don't think it's fair to blame Saddam for the suffering caused by the sanctions. To me that sounds akin to you blindsiding me at an intersection, then you blaming the accident on me since I don't have car insurance and therefore shouldn't have been on the road in the first place. If you think that Saddam alone has caused suffering in Iraq you're looking past a few really important truths.
Here's another thing that I've never understood. This idea that our troops would be met with flowers. Hell now that we've got Saddam... strike that... Hell now that we've given Saddam to the Iraqi people, or maybe to an International War Crimes Tribunal in Baghdad, we might actually get a smile. But we bombed Iraq several times a week from the end of the Gulf War until the recent occupation. That's twelve years of U.S. and British fighters dropping bombs on your country, virtually uncontested. Were someone to drop bombs on my country for a decade, I would not welcome them into my house.
Anybody who doesn't understand why the U.S. is not loved is a fool. That last's not directed at you stevew but it makes for a damn fine rant.
I agree with everything you say, and I like the way you say it, but you still sound like an apologist. Among the problems I have with the occupation of Iraq is that the way that Bush achieved buy-in, the WMD story, was a known, documented crock of shit.
"We're taking out one that's so bad he cannot be tolerated." Cough, cough. The reason Saddam Hussein was deposed has nothing to do with the way Saddam Hussein exercised power. Rather, it has everything to do with the way George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Project for the New American Century want to run the world.
If I were an Iraqi, I would be thankful that Saddam is gone, but I'd also be leery of my liberators, as the decision to remove Mr. Hussein was not made with my interests in mind whatsoever. Clearly, the puppet authority's strings, ("we're from the Government and we're here to help") terminate somewhere inside the Beltway.
Not only is such a system possible, it would be completely legal.
What you wouldn't have access to is the State database linking EZPass ID 80f5d36c56a9de8f0b32a6d to John. Q. Motorist, 123 Elm St. You'd have to recreate that on your own.
Though, the Feds can get that any time, and probably without a warrant, thanks to our PATRIOTS in Congress.
How small can an RFID tag be? What's a clever way to get someone to wear one? Maybe send the person you want to track a nice piece of jewelery, or embed one in their credit card. Maybe get somebody to eat one. Tracking is gonna get real easy.
However, I wouldn't switch to Qwest DSL just to get VOIP.
Don't switch to Qwest for anything, ever.
Your timing is perfect... the lead story right now is "Qwest launches VoIP trial"
Cheers!
That's more people than bought the last Information Society CD!
I agree.
What everybody needs to understand about the U.N. is that it was created after WWII to promote and act in the foreign policy interests of the United States.
For all those who are convinced that the U.N. is some sort of communist conspiracy: Do you think we routinely go around creating international organizations that aren't in our best interests?
the U.N. vigorously opposed the war in Iraq But were courteous enough to pass resolutions giving us the legal excuse for the invasion and occupation. So how much could they have opposed the war if they signed off on it?
In the case of the World Bank, the invaders are all camoflagued in business suits, so most people mistake them for hard-working decent people who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
The ITU as an organization exists to promote the interests of state-owned telecommunications monopolies, which today are the province of repressive and dysfunctional governments.
So you're saying that in the 80s the USA was a repressive and dysfunctional government, but after AT&T was broken up things magically got better?
I'm not trying to defend the ITU, but I refuse to believe that state-owned telecommunications monopolies can possibly be any worse than Qwest.
and quite frankly, my time is too valuable to waste it on flakey hardware.
BEGONE, HEATHEN!!!
But seemingly, a lot of people here have an entitlement complex, where they think they can take whatever the fuck they want for no other reason than that they want it.
Ah, now I get it! As Internet users, it is our Manifest Destiny to trade in warez and mp3s.
(Tangent: What if stealing from the RIAA (or whatever you want to call it) somehow ends up benefitting our country greatly in a hundred years?)
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. Maybe the law should be changed... if only to acknowledge that about 25% of america is sharing MP3s.
In fact, maybe that's just where we're headed: File-sharing will become something that's illegal but widespread. Paying your out-of-court settlement to the RIAA will be viewed the same way we all view speeding tickets. Oh, and you'll have to pay more for the "insurance" on your Internet connection after you get busted. Repeat offenders will get their connection yanked, maybe even jail time.
Seriously, now that copyright violation is a federal criminal offense, a situation like the above is entirely possible. We could even see sentencing guidelines come out of Congress or the Justice Department.
We cannot scorch the earth with atomic bombs anymore. The people that perpetrated 9/11 know this. If we could, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq would have been over in a matter of minutes.
Actually, I think it's more a matter of: it would take so many atomic bombs to hit all the caves in Afghanistan where Osama might be hiding, or hit all the compounds in Iraq where Saddam might be, that we would have to launch hundreds or thousands of nuclear warheads and have them all hit at pretty much the same time. Such an act would (correctly) be viewed by the rest of the world as, at minimum, the biggest atrocity since WWII.
Heck even if you only nuked Tripoli, you'll have to answer: Is one jet and one disco (disco bombing actually having been perpetrated by Syrian agents, but that was ignored) of innocent Americans (and a couple CIA operatives the plane) worth the deaths of a few bad guys and heaping thousands of innocent non-Americans?
I don't have an answer. Terrorism is tough to combat; fighting back inevitably leads to liberals like me pointing out that nine dead Afghan children don't care if they were killed by terrorists or counter-terrorists. I have to think we can find a better response than fighting fire with fire.
It's important to remember that the Davidians were tipped off that the ATF was coming
You mean by the fact that the ATF camped the compound for almost two months before going in?
One of the cited reasons they decided to go when they did was the fear that "operational fatigue" would lower the assault team's effectivenes if they didn't act soon. In other words: No sense getting the boys all pumped up for some action if you're just gonna park the tank on the lawn for six weeks!
D'oh, forgot about the food! And as I wrote that, I was eating microwave popcorn from ConAgra.
Some people would argue that moving away from factories means we're not really "making" anything more. Capitalism is taking raw materials, adding value, and turning a buck on the deal. I guess the raw materials now are things like the big mess in the wiring closet and the value gets added with the help of Visio. But it's difficult to see how wealth will be created in a "service based economy."
I meet a lot of people who are running "Windows 97." Of course that's because they see Office 97 whenever they launch Word. Most people don't really understand that Office isn't part of the OS. I have been party to purchasing decision where a person simply did not know if they were supposed to get Office XP or Windows XP.