Both electronic and paper documents are both equally necessary. They serve different purposes and are good for different reasons.
When I was in college, I finally hit upon the proper way to write a paper. Not the all-too-common stream of consciousness in Word, but the tried and true method. I would first go to the library and use the electronic catalogue to find the general locations of books on my subject (say, 19th century German naval policy). Then I'd go to that section and browse the shelves looking for more books on the subject than my search had turned up. You see, the old and the new methods were complimentary.
I'd fill my briefcase with books, then head out to the local pub and get a table. I'd spread the books in great piles around me, pull out a sheet of paper and write--in longhand--a very general outline of what I wanted. Writing by hand forced me to think harder about what I was doing, as it is slower than typing. I'd then thumb through the books, noting on index cards what items were interesting (so that I could refer to them later). I'd then improve my outline and flesh it out, each time rewriting it longhand--making me familiar with it, revealing where it lacked &c.
Then I'd write the paper, by hand, from the outline. I'd read through it, and make any corrections which revealed themselves. Finally, I'd return to my flat and format the whole thing in LaTeX. This is where footnotes and the like would be inserted, using those notecards I mentioned earlier. I'd print out a draft, read through it once more, then print a final copy for my professor.
This manual process enabled me to consider the thrust and flow of my papers, of the arguments therein. It enabled me to do far better research than students who relied solely on the electronic index of books. It enabled the best grades of my college career. It also enabled me to enjoy many fine beers at the local pub, which was just fine by me:-)
The computer was no less essential. A paper formatted in LaTeX is a thing of beauty--and this cannot be over-emphasised when discussing the resulting grades. A paper written longhand is unatttractive.
The technologies are not mutually exclusive, but rather complimentary.
Personally, I want to be buried unembalmed in a wooden coffin, with a tree planted over me. That way over the years it'll slowly break me down and thus to dust I'll return.
Cremation is a disgusting method of disposing a body. First it's roasted and burnt until everything burnable is gone. Then the remains are fed into a grinder to reduce the bits of bone and teeth to particles. It's a nasty way to go.
Embalming is even worse. Why would anyone pump preservatives into a body? It's not as though it'll remain unrotted forever.
I think that cremation, embalming and closed-casket funerals are ways for people to pretend that death isn't real. It is real, and it is a fact of life. Corpses should not be destroyed; they were human once. They should not be preserved, but should be allowed to return to the stuff whence they were formed. They should not be hidden, as something to be ashamed of, but given due honour as the mortal remains of men.
It's no big thing for a woman to be a good fighter to Westerners...
Tell that to N^2 statistical studies. Say, for example, those which have mandated 4-man stretcher teams rather than 2-man teams due to the oddly decreased amount of available strength. Hate to break it to you, but a million year of evolution aren't turned around in twenty years.
Sure, there are women who are good fighters. Indeed, there are many who could beat me easily. But I'm not a representative sample of the male population. ISTR that the world record for one of the women's footraces is the same as one needs to qualify for a highschool boys' team. The simple fact of the matter is that the average woman is nowhere near the average man in strength and fighting ability.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. The average man is nowhere near the average woman in other areas. We're just different, as any three-year-old can figure out, but apparently grown-up PC-types need to have explained.
Are you stupid? I truly wonder. Observe the following transactions, all from the point of view of the bank:
Joe -> $100 into Deposits
Deposits -> $10 into Reserves
Deposits -> $90 into Cash
Thus far the bank has a liability for $100 to Joe (i.e. Joe can drop by any time and request that $100). It also has $100 in assets--$10 in Reserves and $90 in Cash. The bank's books look like this: ($100) +$10 +$90 = $0. Which means that they're balanced.
Cash -> $90 into Bob
The bank has converted its asset of $90 cash into and asset of $90 in Bob. It still has its liability for $100 to Joe. It still has an asset of $10 in cash. The bank's books look like this: ($100) + $10 + $90 = $0. Which means that they're balanced. And, incidentally, the same as before. No money has been created. Not a single solitary cent.
Now, Bob probably also owes interest on his loan--let's say 10%. So he pays the bank $99. This is a credit from the bank's Income account, and a debit to its Cash account. So the bank's books look like this: ($100) + $99 + $10 + ($9) = $0. Yes, income is a negatively-valued account (seems odd, but that's where money is coming out of)!
The bank now has $100 in liabilities and $109 in assets. Since it is only required to keep, say, 10% of its liabilities on hand, it can now lend out $99, and reap $108.9 in return for that loan. And it can lend that $108.9 and get $119.79. So now it'd have ($100) + $119.79 + $10 + ($29.79) = $0 (in terms of balanced books; in terms of assets and liabilities it has $129.79 in assets and $100 in liabilities). Still, no money has been created. Sure, the debtors paid more to the bank than they borrowed--but they got that money elsewhere, perhaps by (gasp!) working.
Now Joe redeems his money, withdrawing $100. The bank now has $29.79 + ($29.79) = $0. The books are balanced. In terms of assets and liabilities, it has no liabilities and $29.79 in assets. It's turned a nice profit, all enabled by Joe.
In real life, things are rather more complex, with a very great number of Joes, each of whom is paid a certain amount for the privilege of using his money for awhile, and an equally great number of Bobs, each of whom pays for the privilege of using money for awhile.
A company makes an innovative software product, and can't remain afloat, thanks in part to the pathological cheapness of the Linux crowd.
No--it's not pathological cheapness. It's an attachment to freedom. To quote Patrick Henry, `Give me liberty or give me death!'
Keep it up, cheapskates, and Linux will never grow (in the desktop market) beyond being a hacker toy.
And what, exactly, is wrong with that? So the lusers don't use our software--can that possibly be a bad thing? Look what they did to the Internet. Incidentally, Linux is my desktop at home, and I spend a good 80-85% of my time at work using it (Windows is reserved for Notes and other nasty IBM-internal software).
I hope you're happy; I'm sure Bill Gates is delighted by how savagely you treat your own.
But NaN are not our own. They wrote some very interesting code, certainly. I'm sure that they are very good people, loving their mothers, refraining from kicking dogs--that sort of thing. But their software was proprietary and encumbered. Hence, it is alien to what Linux stands for: freedom to code; freedom to hack; freedom in general. While they've all my very best wishes in their future endeavours, I've no intention to ever use their software--unless they write a game[1].
`Our own' are hackers. Our own are those who appreciate freedom. You, you animal, are most definitely not one of our own. Aures habet, sed non audiet. Or something like that; my Latin is rusty:-)
[1] I believe that the game industry is the one case in which free software does not necessarily make sense. It does for games such as NetHack, but for Quake and its ilk. Granted, I'm not certain that Quake and its ilk really are games. And I entertain a certain fancy that in a world of free software we'd have the graphics of Quake and the intricacy of NetHack. Still, I am quite willing to pay for the efforts of artists.
And no, I don't consider programmers artists in the sense that painters are. And I'm a programmer myself.
Yours is an excellent point: microkernels really shine on multiple-user (really, multiple-concurrent-user) systems. The problem is that such systems just don't exist like they used to. Nowadays the users have their own systems, and only use host-based apps in a client-server fashion. I recall a Solaris admin class I was in, in which those gathered reminisced about how much trouble users used to cause, but they just don't really exist anymore.
Now, it may be that this is slowly turning around. I've seen a lot of interest in Citrix, server consolidation and centralisation in general. But I don't know if we'll ever be back to the old days in any real sense.
More's the pity, really. I liked it when the entire computing population of DU (or the vast majority, anyway) were on phoebe.cair.du.edu all at once, and one could simply finger one's friends, and talk to them, and life was good and pure and simple.
Try out mutt. Incoming messages are automatically decrypted and/or verified. Outgoing messages can be signed by typing ps, encrypted with pe and both by pb. It can even be set to remember the PGP passphrase for a period of time. And mutt's a wonderful mailreader anyway--check it out when you get the chance.
And now corporations are discouraged from doing the necessary research and development to create new medicines. If they make it, it'll just be freed by some penny-ante nation and the drug company can never recoup its investment and make a profit.
And so we end up without medicines which would have been possible. Yeah, that's really smart.
Native American is a miserable and stupid turn of phrase. I am a native American (in both meanings): I was born here; also, I am descended from Pocahontas. The proper term is aborigine. And, quite honestly, I don't have overmuch sympathy for their point of view. Granted, we treated them horribly in the 19th century, and we should do our best do remedy the harm we did. But OTOH the aborigines didn't do diddly-squat for this hemisphere when they had control. Heck, they were still practicing human sacrifice when we arrived!
Look at what the aborigines achieved with this continent. Then compare it to the United States, Canada and Mexico. They were truly savages, living off of the land, dirty, filthy, disease-ridden, pitiable. We have brought civilisation and order, science and reason. We have raised them from savages to citizens. We've also done an awful and shameful deal of nastinesses to them. And we should make reparations therefor. But no-one can forget the fact that without the Europeans the aboriginal inhabitants would still be living hand-to-mouth and running in fear from one another.
It's not an issue of black-and-white, of the noble savage versus the evil European. It's a matter of human beings who have mutually improved one another, and committed their share of evil along the way (look into the aboriginal treatment of captives, women and children sometime, along with the atrocities committed by the civilised).
In a trial on war crimes, the gov't of the United States could bring as much evidence against the aboriginals as the aboriginals could bring against the gov't. Neither side is pure, and neither side's hands are clean. The sole real difference is that we at least paid lip service to certain values--and the aboriginals did not.
I think it's again a case where developers need to create alternate versions for low-bandwidth connections or alternate displays.
I disagree: they need to create versions which display anywhere. This was what HTML was meant to do. This is why it is, even now, mostly structural markup. A website should not be about Flash or flash; it should be about content, information and data: things which matter. Not fluff.
In many ways, I think that the inclusion of the img tag began the downfall of HTML. I would much rather a web 1/100th the size but with 100 times the information than what we have now.
Engineers aren't na&ïve; scientists are. The difference between theory and practice & all that. The engineers of my acquaintance have been fairly realistic about this sort of thing; the physicists, astronomers, chemists & suchlike have tended to be rather more starry-eyed. There have been some notable exceptions, of course.
If Sun, Apple, MS, and Red Hat will suddenly all agree on a common UI, I'll drop my need for customization.)
If Sun, Apple, MS and Red Hat all agreed on a common UI, you'd get something like the result when the Unix vendors agreeing to implement a standard UI. We got CDE--the Common Desktop Environment--which is ugly as sin, not very usable and inelegant to boot. It has the advantage that migrating configurations from one vendor to another will almost-but-not-quite work.
I'd rather have many vendors, each attempting to create the most useful interface. From competition spring features and improvements. A single uniform UI standard would be like CDE and the US Post Office: boring and just barely acceptable.
Are you aware that a CEO is not in most cases the owner? He is an employee of the owners: the shareholders. Oftentimes he is also a shareholder--but so are many other employees. I'm a shareholder in my employer, albeit a very minor one indeed.
The CEO makes what he makes because the shareholders have decided to give him that much money in return for what he does. The job of CEO is different from that of, say, factory worker or system administrator. And, I believe, it merits quite a bit more pay than most positions.
Why don?t you tell us then, how Ken Lay is providing a direct means for a product and profit.
Ken Lay was an employee whose actions appear to have destroyed the company--thereby causing massive pain to the shareholders. He was also a shareholder--but apparently used his knowledge as an employee to cheat his fellow shareholders.
The people out there that should be able to get in on companies can?t really get in on a really meaningful level as easily as you would have us to believe.
Wrong again. You can buy shares of most companies for under $200. Voila--you're now in on a company, on a meaningful level (e.g. you'll be paid dividends, you'll receive the annual report, and hopefully your investment will appreciate). Granted--it would take decades to build up any sort of significant share. But nowadays it's quite common for there to be no--or very few--significant shareholders.
It does take quite a long time to turn $100 into $1,000,000. TANSTAAFL. But anyone can put his capital to work for him. That is, essentially, what work is: putting your labour capital to work. It is also what investment is: putting your money to work.
The best thieves are the men who do nothing all day except own a large corporation and soak up profit from their thousands of workers.
You are so ignorant that I am afraid the English language has no words for fools such as you. I shudder even at quoting your foul lie. Owners do not `soak up profit'; they provide the means without which there would be no product, no profit, no jobs and no workers. Here's how it works: you have $1,000; I need $1,000 to finance my idea. You give me the money, and in return I give you a stake in my idea.
You do realise that ownership is within the reach of all, don't you? That's the whole purpose of stock splits: keeping the price low enough that the individual investor can get into the action. If you want to own a share in your company, go out and buy one. It's not that expensive--and a few thousand now, invested wisely, can mean a comfortable retirement later on life.
Someone mod the above down as far as possible. It demonstrates an appalling failure to understand the principles of libertarianism--e.g. the non-aggression principle--and contributes absolutely nothing to the argument.
You've got be kidding. Wal-Mart is great. It brings decent quality goods at great prices to rural towns. The local retailers can't compete: that's their problem. The populace chooses Wal-Mart. They'd be fools not to. In the town of Sherman, Tx. (where I went to college), the Wal-Mart was a 24 grocery, toy store, gun & ammo shop and furniture store. They had lobsters, for Pete's sake! Only some big-city high-income-bracket sort would begrudge those in the boonies the joy of a Wal-Mart.
What's wrong with being concerned with money? It's the oil which greases the wheels of our lives. It's the sine qua non of the pleasant life. With it, any man may be comfortable; without it, no man can be. Sure--it can be taken too far. But, so long as resources are limited, money is a necessity. To chastise one for wanting money is like chastising another for wanting air.
Money may not buy happiness, but happiness definitely doesn't buy food for the table.
Am I the only one who feels a but funny about taking business advice from someone who a) is named Fnkmaster and b) links to a Flash site in his comment header?
I believe that there are a number of reasons which contribute to the distinct lack of `geek girls.' Individually they'd not be that big a deal--but taken as a whole they influence the situation quite a bit.
First of all, there's simple biology. Guys and gals are different, as we all started noticing in grade school. Guys tend more towards sciences; girls more towards the humanities. Certainly, there are a number who do just the opposite. But think of the twin stereotypes of the high-school social outcast: the poetry club and the computer club. Which is going to be predominantly male? Which predominantly female? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
It's tough for girls to break into the geek clique, because we guys, having been deprived of female company, have a certain degree of trouble viewing the female members as other than date material. Think back to when you were in high school and college: the few girls who were into computers and technology were probably constantly being pestered and/or fawned over. Some gals can put up with that; some even enjoy the attention. But for others it makes them quite uncomfortable. So a group which is predominantly male becomes even more so, as females are driven away by testosterone poisoning.
Lastly, I figure that women are not nearly as idealistic as men. Think about it: we guys are not exactly down-to-earth. We philosophise; we blather on about the big picture; we act very silly indeed. Women are, I believe, rather more practical. And--let's face it--Free Software is not exactly the most practical course to follow. It appeals to the idealistic adolescent male mindset, the sort which dreams of dying for some girl, of fighting the good fight, of generally being a bloody nuisance &c. Heck, it's why I'm writing !
The question becomes, then: would you rather be shot by a dozen BB pellets or a single shotgun blast?
What's amusing is that BB is a size of shot. So getting hit with a dozen BBs is the same as catching part of a shotgun blast. And, in fact, a dozen BBs could cause a much nastier wound than, say, a single.40 round. So it's not quite so cut-and-dry.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in college, I finally hit upon the proper way to write a paper. Not the all-too-common stream of consciousness in Word, but the tried and true method. I would first go to the library and use the electronic catalogue to find the general locations of books on my subject (say, 19th century German naval policy). Then I'd go to that section and browse the shelves looking for more books on the subject than my search had turned up. You see, the old and the new methods were complimentary.
I'd fill my briefcase with books, then head out to the local pub and get a table. I'd spread the books in great piles around me, pull out a sheet of paper and write--in longhand--a very general outline of what I wanted. Writing by hand forced me to think harder about what I was doing, as it is slower than typing. I'd then thumb through the books, noting on index cards what items were interesting (so that I could refer to them later). I'd then improve my outline and flesh it out, each time rewriting it longhand--making me familiar with it, revealing where it lacked &c.
Then I'd write the paper, by hand, from the outline. I'd read through it, and make any corrections which revealed themselves. Finally, I'd return to my flat and format the whole thing in LaTeX. This is where footnotes and the like would be inserted, using those notecards I mentioned earlier. I'd print out a draft, read through it once more, then print a final copy for my professor.
This manual process enabled me to consider the thrust and flow of my papers, of the arguments therein. It enabled me to do far better research than students who relied solely on the electronic index of books. It enabled the best grades of my college career. It also enabled me to enjoy many fine beers at the local pub, which was just fine by me:-)
The computer was no less essential. A paper formatted in LaTeX is a thing of beauty--and this cannot be over-emphasised when discussing the resulting grades. A paper written longhand is unatttractive.
The technologies are not mutually exclusive, but rather complimentary.
I dunno--rubbing one's underwear on another seems somewhat nutty, don't you think?
Ummm, LotR was released December '01--an August '02 DVD release is 9 months from then.
Cremation is a disgusting method of disposing a body. First it's roasted and burnt until everything burnable is gone. Then the remains are fed into a grinder to reduce the bits of bone and teeth to particles. It's a nasty way to go.
Embalming is even worse. Why would anyone pump preservatives into a body? It's not as though it'll remain unrotted forever.
I think that cremation, embalming and closed-casket funerals are ways for people to pretend that death isn't real. It is real, and it is a fact of life. Corpses should not be destroyed; they were human once. They should not be preserved, but should be allowed to return to the stuff whence they were formed. They should not be hidden, as something to be ashamed of, but given due honour as the mortal remains of men.
Tell that to N^2 statistical studies. Say, for example, those which have mandated 4-man stretcher teams rather than 2-man teams due to the oddly decreased amount of available strength. Hate to break it to you, but a million year of evolution aren't turned around in twenty years.
Sure, there are women who are good fighters. Indeed, there are many who could beat me easily. But I'm not a representative sample of the male population. ISTR that the world record for one of the women's footraces is the same as one needs to qualify for a highschool boys' team. The simple fact of the matter is that the average woman is nowhere near the average man in strength and fighting ability.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. The average man is nowhere near the average woman in other areas. We're just different, as any three-year-old can figure out, but apparently grown-up PC-types need to have explained.
Joe -> $100 into Deposits
Deposits -> $10 into Reserves
Deposits -> $90 into Cash
Thus far the bank has a liability for $100 to Joe (i.e. Joe can drop by any time and request that $100). It also has $100 in assets--$10 in Reserves and $90 in Cash. The bank's books look like this: ($100) +$10 +$90 = $0. Which means that they're balanced.
Cash -> $90 into Bob
The bank has converted its asset of $90 cash into and asset of $90 in Bob. It still has its liability for $100 to Joe. It still has an asset of $10 in cash. The bank's books look like this: ($100) + $10 + $90 = $0. Which means that they're balanced. And, incidentally, the same as before. No money has been created. Not a single solitary cent.
Now, Bob probably also owes interest on his loan--let's say 10%. So he pays the bank $99. This is a credit from the bank's Income account, and a debit to its Cash account. So the bank's books look like this: ($100) + $99 + $10 + ($9) = $0. Yes, income is a negatively-valued account (seems odd, but that's where money is coming out of)! The bank now has $100 in liabilities and $109 in assets. Since it is only required to keep, say, 10% of its liabilities on hand, it can now lend out $99, and reap $108.9 in return for that loan. And it can lend that $108.9 and get $119.79. So now it'd have ($100) + $119.79 + $10 + ($29.79) = $0 (in terms of balanced books; in terms of assets and liabilities it has $129.79 in assets and $100 in liabilities). Still, no money has been created. Sure, the debtors paid more to the bank than they borrowed--but they got that money elsewhere, perhaps by (gasp!) working.
Now Joe redeems his money, withdrawing $100. The bank now has $29.79 + ($29.79) = $0. The books are balanced. In terms of assets and liabilities, it has no liabilities and $29.79 in assets. It's turned a nice profit, all enabled by Joe.
In real life, things are rather more complex, with a very great number of Joes, each of whom is paid a certain amount for the privilege of using his money for awhile, and an equally great number of Bobs, each of whom pays for the privilege of using money for awhile.
That's all that banking is.
You'll note that nowhere is money created.
`Our own' are hackers. Our own are those who appreciate freedom. You, you animal, are most definitely not one of our own. Aures habet, sed non audiet. Or something like that; my Latin is rusty:-)
[1] I believe that the game industry is the one case in which free software does not necessarily make sense. It does for games such as NetHack, but for Quake and its ilk. Granted, I'm not certain that Quake and its ilk really are games. And I entertain a certain fancy that in a world of free software we'd have the graphics of Quake and the intricacy of NetHack. Still, I am quite willing to pay for the efforts of artists.
And no, I don't consider programmers artists in the sense that painters are. And I'm a programmer myself.
Now, it may be that this is slowly turning around. I've seen a lot of interest in Citrix, server consolidation and centralisation in general. But I don't know if we'll ever be back to the old days in any real sense.
More's the pity, really. I liked it when the entire computing population of DU (or the vast majority, anyway) were on phoebe.cair.du.edu all at once, and one could simply finger one's friends, and talk to them, and life was good and pure and simple.
Try out mutt. Incoming messages are automatically decrypted and/or verified. Outgoing messages can be signed by typing ps, encrypted with pe and both by pb. It can even be set to remember the PGP passphrase for a period of time. And mutt's a wonderful mailreader anyway--check it out when you get the chance.
And so we end up without medicines which would have been possible. Yeah, that's really smart.
Look at what the aborigines achieved with this continent. Then compare it to the United States, Canada and Mexico. They were truly savages, living off of the land, dirty, filthy, disease-ridden, pitiable. We have brought civilisation and order, science and reason. We have raised them from savages to citizens. We've also done an awful and shameful deal of nastinesses to them. And we should make reparations therefor. But no-one can forget the fact that without the Europeans the aboriginal inhabitants would still be living hand-to-mouth and running in fear from one another.
It's not an issue of black-and-white, of the noble savage versus the evil European. It's a matter of human beings who have mutually improved one another, and committed their share of evil along the way (look into the aboriginal treatment of captives, women and children sometime, along with the atrocities committed by the civilised).
In a trial on war crimes, the gov't of the United States could bring as much evidence against the aboriginals as the aboriginals could bring against the gov't. Neither side is pure, and neither side's hands are clean. The sole real difference is that we at least paid lip service to certain values--and the aboriginals did not.
I disagree: they need to create versions which display anywhere. This was what HTML was meant to do. This is why it is, even now, mostly structural markup. A website should not be about Flash or flash; it should be about content, information and data: things which matter. Not fluff.
In many ways, I think that the inclusion of the img tag began the downfall of HTML. I would much rather a web 1/100th the size but with 100 times the information than what we have now.
It might not be common knowledge, so I figured that I'd point out that beowulf is Old English for bear...
M-x ispell-region and M-x ispell-buffer do the trick quite nicely, thank you:-)
To paraphrase Homer Simpson, `Emacs: is there anything it can't do?'
Engineers aren't na&ïve; scientists are. The difference between theory and practice & all that. The engineers of my acquaintance have been fairly realistic about this sort of thing; the physicists, astronomers, chemists & suchlike have tended to be rather more starry-eyed. There have been some notable exceptions, of course.
If Sun, Apple, MS and Red Hat all agreed on a common UI, you'd get something like the result when the Unix vendors agreeing to implement a standard UI. We got CDE--the Common Desktop Environment--which is ugly as sin, not very usable and inelegant to boot. It has the advantage that migrating configurations from one vendor to another will almost-but-not-quite work.
I'd rather have many vendors, each attempting to create the most useful interface. From competition spring features and improvements. A single uniform UI standard would be like CDE and the US Post Office: boring and just barely acceptable.
The CEO makes what he makes because the shareholders have decided to give him that much money in return for what he does. The job of CEO is different from that of, say, factory worker or system administrator. And, I believe, it merits quite a bit more pay than most positions.
Ken Lay was an employee whose actions appear to have destroyed the company--thereby causing massive pain to the shareholders. He was also a shareholder--but apparently used his knowledge as an employee to cheat his fellow shareholders.
The people out there that should be able to get in on companies can?t really get in on a really meaningful level as easily as you would have us to believe.
Wrong again. You can buy shares of most companies for under $200. Voila--you're now in on a company, on a meaningful level (e.g. you'll be paid dividends, you'll receive the annual report, and hopefully your investment will appreciate). Granted--it would take decades to build up any sort of significant share. But nowadays it's quite common for there to be no--or very few--significant shareholders.
It does take quite a long time to turn $100 into $1,000,000. TANSTAAFL. But anyone can put his capital to work for him. That is, essentially, what work is: putting your labour capital to work. It is also what investment is: putting your money to work.
You are so ignorant that I am afraid the English language has no words for fools such as you. I shudder even at quoting your foul lie. Owners do not `soak up profit'; they provide the means without which there would be no product, no profit, no jobs and no workers. Here's how it works: you have $1,000; I need $1,000 to finance my idea. You give me the money, and in return I give you a stake in my idea.
You do realise that ownership is within the reach of all, don't you? That's the whole purpose of stock splits: keeping the price low enough that the individual investor can get into the action. If you want to own a share in your company, go out and buy one. It's not that expensive--and a few thousand now, invested wisely, can mean a comfortable retirement later on life.
Someone mod the above down as far as possible. It demonstrates an appalling failure to understand the principles of libertarianism--e.g. the non-aggression principle--and contributes absolutely nothing to the argument.
You've got be kidding. Wal-Mart is great. It brings decent quality goods at great prices to rural towns. The local retailers can't compete: that's their problem. The populace chooses Wal-Mart. They'd be fools not to. In the town of Sherman, Tx. (where I went to college), the Wal-Mart was a 24 grocery, toy store, gun & ammo shop and furniture store. They had lobsters, for Pete's sake! Only some big-city high-income-bracket sort would begrudge those in the boonies the joy of a Wal-Mart.
Money may not buy happiness, but happiness definitely doesn't buy food for the table.
Am I the only one who feels a but funny about taking business advice from someone who a) is named Fnkmaster and b) links to a Flash site in his comment header?
First of all, there's simple biology. Guys and gals are different, as we all started noticing in grade school. Guys tend more towards sciences; girls more towards the humanities. Certainly, there are a number who do just the opposite. But think of the twin stereotypes of the high-school social outcast: the poetry club and the computer club. Which is going to be predominantly male? Which predominantly female? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
It's tough for girls to break into the geek clique, because we guys, having been deprived of female company, have a certain degree of trouble viewing the female members as other than date material. Think back to when you were in high school and college: the few girls who were into computers and technology were probably constantly being pestered and/or fawned over. Some gals can put up with that; some even enjoy the attention. But for others it makes them quite uncomfortable. So a group which is predominantly male becomes even more so, as females are driven away by testosterone poisoning.
Lastly, I figure that women are not nearly as idealistic as men. Think about it: we guys are not exactly down-to-earth. We philosophise; we blather on about the big picture; we act very silly indeed. Women are, I believe, rather more practical. And--let's face it--Free Software is not exactly the most practical course to follow. It appeals to the idealistic adolescent male mindset, the sort which dreams of dying for some girl, of fighting the good fight, of generally being a bloody nuisance &c. Heck, it's why I'm writing !
What's amusing is that BB is a size of shot. So getting hit with a dozen BBs is the same as catching part of a shotgun blast. And, in fact, a dozen BBs could cause a much nastier wound than, say, a single .40 round. So it's not quite so cut-and-dry.