You have it exactly right: Bush wants to use something that might be 50% less effective, but costs about 1/10 of 1% of the other solution.
It's a bad idea, but you make it out to be even worse than it really is.
Well, it dependes on the paper's circulation
on
Weblogs and Local News?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If the circulation of the paper is large enough to have 100-200 people posting replies per day, then a discussion based site like slashdot is almost workable. What percentage of the readership will visit the site (call it 5%) and say 1% of those people will post if there is something to post about.so unless you have a circulation of about 250,000 people, I would abandon the idea. (If these estimates are way off, please enlighten me.) This is basically because unless you have a discussion going, people will not bother to check in on the discussion and post insights.
I would almost say that an incentive program for good karma for the first month would be useful, so that you could get people started posting. Otherwise, it will start slowly and may never take off.
It's SO nice to know I'm not the only person reading classic books on computers. When I tell people I just read The Kreutzer Sonata By Tolstoy last week on my computer, I get strange looks, even from people who are geeks like me.
But seriously, are the screens on Palms decent enough to do this? When I ask most people, I just get strange looks and questions about where online books come from: When a Mommy book and a Daddy book get married...
One tends not to "read" the Talmud. None of the translations do justice to the interplay of commentators on the subjects discussed. There are also 38 seperate books in just the Babylonian Talmud, not including the Jerusalem Talmud, and most Jewish Scholars would agree that studying a page would take at least half an hour (in an english translation) and this would be without any commentaries that explain the reasoning behind the logic, and what the actual law derived from the text is, since is is rarely obvious based on the text of the talmud itself. There are just under 3000 pages of talmud (front and back, otherwise about 600 pages, obviously.) Perhaps you would be better off reading a book written in english about modern Orthodox Judaism, and would like to suggest some authors:
Aryeh Kaplan Akiva Tatz (Especailly "A Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life) And for lighter reading, Hanoch Teller's Books
Why are posts like these not modded off-topic? It bothers me that someone can SPECIFICALLY exclude a subject from discussion in their post, and the discussion immediately goes in that direction just because people (see parent) can't read a post. And we want to know what they are reading!
ObOnTopic: A friend of mine told me about a book club that he and a friend (who I know) started, now containing 3 peopl. I am the fourth, and we just finished reading The Kreutzer Sonata, by Tolstoy.
Standards will never be imposed in this industry
on
Return of the WaSP
·
· Score: 1
Basically, since microsoft controls a HUGE majority of the market, whatever they do becomes a de-facto standard. For once, I would like to thnak them for their good work. They have voluntarily followed standards, and written a reasonably good browser. (not that the code isn't, memory hogging trash)
much of the "research" that "proves" the link between global warming and hmanity is junk. That doesn't mean it is not true. There ARE true statements that cannot be proven.
Basically there is no decent way to prove a connection like this, so any guesses (either way) are just that, guesses.
But Windows doesn't have 0 marginal cost per item, because there are support costs, and in any case, the point is that saying a company should charge 0 dollars per copy of windows, because it did cost them a ton to produce (admittedly more than it's worth) and they need to make their money back.
Actually, nothing has 0 marginal cost in the real world. There is bandwidth, cost of explaining an idea, or cost of making a floopy or cd of a program.
In any case, making no monet from distributing a product disincentifies distribution and makes no sense. This "fact" is simply rubbish. It artificailly limits the number of people who will use it, but only in an ideal market, with perfect knowledge and no need to advertise or actually download or deliver anything.
The fact that there was that "there was little in the way of foreign, or 'bad', influences" is simply not indicative of the importance of ANY outside influence. If no one knew that capitalism existed and that most of the 1st class countries in the world were happy with it, then there would have been no need to implement capitalist measures at all.
A writer (i think it was asimov) talked about how the way decrepit civilizations crumble is by barbarians invading from the outside (and in a galactic civilization there are no barbarian outsiders.) In this case, thoughm the outside pressure is my the more sophisticated form of government. Basically, with no outside influences, and stable, or only mildly unstable form of government will not collapse. Rome might still be the capital of the civilized word if there were no goths and vandals.
I'm truly sorry that people don't understand this as a sarcastic quip that hints at the actual causes of collapse. When it was presented, it was presented as a 2-week lesson in a survey of modern history (as it effected the United States. It was culturally biased, but I already adknowledged that by referencing the title of the course.) I beleive that the history teacher you are belittling is mora a result of your personal expierence than any data given, since you obviously would rather push an agenda (that amercan schools are bad) than discuss the relevance and underlying truth to the quip that was obviously not all the teacher presented on the subject.
In fact, despite the insulting and personal way you phrased your response, I agree with your unstated overall assessment of the american educational system. However, coming from a school that is private, well run, and places a majority of it's students in the top 25 colleges in the states, I feel that your assessment is unfair, based on incomplete information, and ignores the context and overall message that I attempted to impart.
Obviously the fall of soviet russia did not stem from one simplistic cause (culture comparison and envy) and especially not from one restaurant that is a symptom of this cause. The point you seem to miss, however, is that my analysis was not intended to show the causes of the fall of Soviet russia, but rather to apply a small facet of what is already adknowledged as the cause to the situation in china. (I should also point out that the causese you mentioned also apply, included fragmented national identity, corruption, and also many other factors others in this thread pointed out.)
Thank you for your reply, and I will thank you further if your future comments are slightly less dogmatically stated and significantly less personally insulting, less insulting to a teacher I respect, and less insulting the school I attend.
The question isn't which way they are currently headed, but where they were originally headed. Obviously they are no longer communist, I don't see what your point here is at all. My point is, as I referred to in my post, the Orwellian vision that communist leaders were headed towards was foiled by a changing world, one in which global politics forced a modicum of internationalization on China, destroying the insularism that a good totalitarian state needs.
Also, you said "you can't suppress something and spread it throughout the community at the same time" Obviously this was insufficiently clear, but the word Communitization, or a noun based on a badly conjugated verb form of communism (communitize or something like that), obviously does not mean "to spread [something] throughout the community," as you could have inferred from context.
A history teacher I once took some courses from in High School (Military History and US History) subscribed to an interesting theory; The fall of Russian Communism resulted from McDonalds.
The fact that there were McDonalds restaurants in Russia fed the public there the image of how Americans live, and with that as a model, it became increasingly obvious that Communism was failing to fulfill it's mission of Utopia. In 1984, Orwell realized that as long as the government asserted that everything was improving, people would not be too inquisitiveabout the subject. In Russia, this became impossible, and the people lost faith in their government.
In China, it seems as though a similar evolution is occuring; The alter-ego of Soviet Commuism, Chinese Communism, is being exposed to it's antithesis. Russian Communism focused, as I understand, mainly on supression and communitization of materialism, but was then faced with the holy grail of materialism, McDonalds. Chinese Communism, now that they have seen how materialism works, focuses on supression of intellectualism among their masses, and is now faced with intellectualism's holy grail, the internet, which allows the masses to see the intellectual side of Democracy.
Obviously, the Orwellian Prophecy has come partially true in this part of the world.
"Inside an imposing building in Beijing is the Ministry of Information Industry, where a hi-tech police force keeps watch over the internet 24 hours a day. Its job is to keep ordinary Chinese people from accessing unhealthy information. That could be anything from Playboy to the BBC." -BBC News, China Loses Grip on Internet.
"The Misistry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different form any other building in sight. It was an enormous Pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air... [it] concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts, [anything from Playboy to the BBC]" -1984, by George Orwell.
The only difference between Oceania and China is an external one, and it is essential. China has no external enemy to pour material into to prevent it's citizen's rising standard of living. Instead, it has Europe, the United States, and many other regions of the world that have accepted democracy and capitalism.
Depends, I would assume it would either be a modification of an existing format (ie. text stored in.readme or.inf files) and is covered under that file format, or it is a standard (ie. mpg, avi, mp3, wav) and it is patentable.
What this tells me is that the person who is one of the most responsible for trying to protect digital privacy/freedom has decided that the fight just isn't going to win. How sad a day this is!
umm, it's theft if it's taking something that doesn't belong to you.
If I borrow your car without asking, but return it, refill the gas tank, pay you for the milage, and make sure the car is still in the same shape, is it theft?
Speaking of loaded words concerning that particular war...
"The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention.Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."
So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death." I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters."
Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel.
They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course-that's where the real fun is-but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel-or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it-for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on G-d's Earth, and if you've ever been around G-d's Earth, you know that's really saying something. It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.
Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.
My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it.
Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshalling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab state into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting.
No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.
Mr. Bush, G-d bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of supermodels who've just had their drugs taken away. However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've already lost some. After September 11 our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful.
Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint. If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan."
Paragraph 1: What are training costs associated with a new program? if you call it ~$500/person (too low, and some people will simply never get good at using a second office suite) you have lost $200/employee. Then add imperfect interoperability with other companies' software. The non-bloatware ou propose replaceing MS with is laughable. Staroffice is just as bloated as MS office, because it matches features. And how often is a mission critical feature missing from word that would be easy to add?
Paragraph 2: How many programmers that are employed at this hypothetical company know enough to modify a piece of code as complex as an office suite?
Paragraph 3: Ummm, are you suggesting that if every large sofware company in the world were to increase profits by 15% they wouldn't hire more people?
Paragraph 4: Resorting to personal attacks... as you said not to in paragraph 6. ARe administration jobs not jobs? same mistake as before... having 10k fewer jobs in the US is not a small thing.
Paragraph 5&6: You command of the art of the insult is a disgusting tribute to your intellectual abilities. You deserve any ridicule that is thrown at you, and it disgusts me that someone who is obviously as loud-mouthed and ignorant as you seem to be cannot even manage a simple insult, something you should have practiced, especially in view of you stupidity and obvious tendency to piss people off.
You can shove you harsh correction.
PS. I do not beleive that this is a troll, or off topic, especially in view of the fact that this is a response to a comment as obvoiusly pigheaded as this one.
if someone said that there was a 5% chance that if you invested you retirement income in a fund, that you would go bankrupt, i would have a resonable doubt about the strategy of putting money in the stock.
At what point is a doubt unreasonable? 5%? 1%? 1/10 or 1/10,000 of 1%?
Absolutely, but bwefore people get involved, the need to have some idea of what they are doing. I did not say people need PHD's before getting involved, but a basic understanding of how government works (do all of people's electives in college really need to be on advanced film viewing?)
Free with a B average in high school, and I don't know about whether a B average in another state's HS system would count, but after the 1st 30 hours, if you have a B, you get refunded for those credits even with a less than 3.0 GPA from HS.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it exactly right: Bush wants to use something that might be 50% less effective, but costs about 1/10 of 1% of the other solution.
It's a bad idea, but you make it out to be even worse than it really is.
If the circulation of the paper is large enough to have 100-200 people posting replies per day, then a discussion based site like slashdot is almost workable. What percentage of the readership will visit the site (call it 5%) and say 1% of those people will post if there is something to post about.so unless you have a circulation of about 250,000 people, I would abandon the idea. (If these estimates are way off, please enlighten me.) This is basically because unless you have a discussion going, people will not bother to check in on the discussion and post insights.
I would almost say that an incentive program for good karma for the first month would be useful, so that you could get people started posting. Otherwise, it will start slowly and may never take off.
It's SO nice to know I'm not the only person reading classic books on computers. When I tell people I just read The Kreutzer Sonata By Tolstoy last week on my computer, I get strange looks, even from people who are geeks like me.
But seriously, are the screens on Palms decent enough to do this? When I ask most people, I just get strange looks and questions about where online books come from: When a Mommy book and a Daddy book get married...
One tends not to "read" the Talmud.
None of the translations do justice to the interplay of commentators on the subjects discussed. There are also 38 seperate books in just the Babylonian Talmud, not including the Jerusalem Talmud, and most Jewish Scholars would agree that studying a page would take at least half an hour (in an english translation) and this would be without any commentaries that explain the reasoning behind the logic, and what the actual law derived from the text is, since is is rarely obvious based on the text of the talmud itself. There are just under 3000 pages of talmud (front and back, otherwise about 600 pages, obviously.) Perhaps you would be better off reading a book written in english about modern Orthodox Judaism, and would like to suggest some authors:
Aryeh Kaplan
Akiva Tatz (Especailly "A Thinking Jewish Teenager's Guide to Life)
And for lighter reading, Hanoch Teller's Books
Why are posts like these not modded off-topic? It bothers me that someone can SPECIFICALLY exclude a subject from discussion in their post, and the discussion immediately goes in that direction just because people (see parent) can't read a post. And we want to know what they are reading!
ObOnTopic:
A friend of mine told me about a book club that he and a friend (who I know) started, now containing 3 peopl. I am the fourth, and we just finished reading The Kreutzer Sonata, by Tolstoy.
Basically, since microsoft controls a HUGE majority of the market, whatever they do becomes a de-facto standard. For once, I would like to thnak them for their good work. They have voluntarily followed standards, and written a reasonably good browser. (not that the code isn't, memory hogging trash)
much of the "research" that "proves" the link between global warming and hmanity is junk. That doesn't mean it is not true. There ARE true statements that cannot be proven.
Basically there is no decent way to prove a connection like this, so any guesses (either way) are just that, guesses.
But Windows doesn't have 0 marginal cost per item, because there are support costs, and in any case, the point is that saying a company should charge 0 dollars per copy of windows, because it did cost them a ton to produce (admittedly more than it's worth) and they need to make their money back.
Actually, nothing has 0 marginal cost in the real world. There is bandwidth, cost of explaining an idea, or cost of making a floopy or cd of a program.
In any case, making no monet from distributing a product disincentifies distribution and makes no sense. This "fact" is simply rubbish. It artificailly limits the number of people who will use it, but only in an ideal market, with perfect knowledge and no need to advertise or actually download or deliver anything.
The fact that there was that "there was little in the way of foreign, or 'bad', influences" is simply not indicative of the importance of ANY outside influence. If no one knew that capitalism existed and that most of the 1st class countries in the world were happy with it, then there would have been no need to implement capitalist measures at all.
A writer (i think it was asimov) talked about how the way decrepit civilizations crumble is by barbarians invading from the outside (and in a galactic civilization there are no barbarian outsiders.) In this case, thoughm the outside pressure is my the more sophisticated form of government. Basically, with no outside influences, and stable, or only mildly unstable form of government will not collapse. Rome might still be the capital of the civilized word if there were no goths and vandals.
I'm truly sorry that people don't understand this as a sarcastic quip that hints at the actual causes of collapse. When it was presented, it was presented as a 2-week lesson in a survey of modern history (as it effected the United States. It was culturally biased, but I already adknowledged that by referencing the title of the course.) I beleive that the history teacher you are belittling is mora a result of your personal expierence than any data given, since you obviously would rather push an agenda (that amercan schools are bad) than discuss the relevance and underlying truth to the quip that was obviously not all the teacher presented on the subject.
In fact, despite the insulting and personal way you phrased your response, I agree with your unstated overall assessment of the american educational system. However, coming from a school that is private, well run, and places a majority of it's students in the top 25 colleges in the states, I feel that your assessment is unfair, based on incomplete information, and ignores the context and overall message that I attempted to impart.
Obviously the fall of soviet russia did not stem from one simplistic cause (culture comparison and envy) and especially not from one restaurant that is a symptom of this cause. The point you seem to miss, however, is that my analysis was not intended to show the causes of the fall of Soviet russia, but rather to apply a small facet of what is already adknowledged as the cause to the situation in china. (I should also point out that the causese you mentioned also apply, included fragmented national identity, corruption, and also many other factors others in this thread pointed out.)
Thank you for your reply, and I will thank you further if your future comments are slightly less dogmatically stated and significantly less personally insulting, less insulting to a teacher I respect, and less insulting the school I attend.
It's not niave, it's tounge-in-cheek, and your response shows that McDonalds is a subset of the full reason, proving my point.
The question isn't which way they are currently headed, but where they were originally headed. Obviously they are no longer communist, I don't see what your point here is at all. My point is, as I referred to in my post, the Orwellian vision that communist leaders were headed towards was foiled by a changing world, one in which global politics forced a modicum of internationalization on China, destroying the insularism that a good totalitarian state needs.
Also, you said "you can't suppress something and spread it throughout the community at the same time" Obviously this was insufficiently clear, but the word Communitization, or a noun based on a badly conjugated verb form of communism (communitize or something like that), obviously does not mean "to spread [something] throughout the community," as you could have inferred from context.
/. has become inundated with a white noise volume far exceding any currently extant dampening technology. Why is this news?
Why do I continue to punish myself by reading these stories?
And it would have worked too, if it hadn't been for those kids and their dratted technology, I mean dog.
scooby-dooby doooooooooooo!
A history teacher I once took some courses from in High School (Military History and US History) subscribed to an interesting theory; The fall of Russian Communism resulted from McDonalds.
The fact that there were McDonalds restaurants in Russia fed the public there the image of how Americans live, and with that as a model, it became increasingly obvious that Communism was failing to fulfill it's mission of Utopia. In 1984, Orwell realized that as long as the government asserted that everything was improving, people would not be too inquisitiveabout the subject. In Russia, this became impossible, and the people lost faith in their government.
In China, it seems as though a similar evolution is occuring; The alter-ego of Soviet Commuism, Chinese Communism, is being exposed to it's antithesis. Russian Communism focused, as I understand, mainly on supression and communitization of materialism, but was then faced with the holy grail of materialism, McDonalds. Chinese Communism, now that they have seen how materialism works, focuses on supression of intellectualism among their masses, and is now faced with intellectualism's holy grail, the internet, which allows the masses to see the intellectual side of Democracy.
Obviously, the Orwellian Prophecy has come partially true in this part of the world.
"Inside an imposing building in Beijing is the Ministry of Information Industry, where a hi-tech police force keeps watch over the internet 24 hours a day. Its job is to keep ordinary Chinese people from accessing unhealthy information. That could be anything from Playboy to the BBC." -BBC News, China Loses Grip on Internet.
"The Misistry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different form any other building in sight. It was an enormous Pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air... [it] concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts, [anything from Playboy to the BBC]" -1984, by George Orwell.
The only difference between Oceania and China is an external one, and it is essential. China has no external enemy to pour material into to prevent it's citizen's rising standard of living. Instead, it has Europe, the United States, and many other regions of the world that have accepted democracy and capitalism.
Depends, I would assume it would either be a modification of an existing format (ie. text stored in .readme or .inf files) and is covered under that file format, or it is a standard (ie. mpg, avi, mp3, wav) and it is patentable.
What this tells me is that the person who is one of the most responsible for trying to protect digital privacy/freedom has decided that the fight just isn't going to win. How sad a day this is!
umm, it's theft if it's taking something that doesn't belong to you.
If I borrow your car without asking, but return it, refill the gas tank, pay you for the milage, and make sure the car is still in the same shape, is it theft?
Speaking of loaded words concerning that particular war...
"The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that:
There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word.
Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan,"
"Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention.Before the
Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no
"Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were
no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing
oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the
"Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and
"nation."
So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to
describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at deaths until
someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they
are: "Other Arabs Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap
Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death." I know
that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then:
"Adjacent Jew-Haters."
Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more
thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the
last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have
your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and
Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way
to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters
in the region want: Israel.
They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course-that's where the real fun
is-but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy
Israel-or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it-for the last fifty
years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of
their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most
illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on G-d's Earth, and if you've
ever been around G-d's Earth, you know that's really saying something. It
makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the
great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing
something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and,
by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.
Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million
Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a
pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear
that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be
pals. Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars
to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to
drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.
My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the
numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was
stunned at the simple brilliance of it.
Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to
themselves? Of course not.
Or marshalling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to
drive a tiny Arab state into the sea? Nonsense.
Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible.
Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread
with the blood of children? Disgusting.
No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews
would ever do to people is debate them to death.
Mr. Bush, G-d bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with
vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as
Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and,
after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of
supermodels who've just had their drugs taken away. However, in any
big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've
already lost some. After September 11 our president told us and the world he
was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them.
Beautiful.
Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an
Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we
did, and we tell them to show restraint. If America were being attacked with
an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the
administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the
Mediterranean and east of the Jordan."
-Dennis Miller
Paragraph 1:
What are training costs associated with a new program? if you call it ~$500/person (too low, and some people will simply never get good at using a second office suite) you have lost $200/employee. Then add imperfect interoperability with other companies' software. The non-bloatware ou propose replaceing MS with is laughable. Staroffice is just as bloated as MS office, because it matches features. And how often is a mission critical feature missing from word that would be easy to add?
Paragraph 2:
How many programmers that are employed at this hypothetical company know enough to modify a piece of code as complex as an office suite?
Paragraph 3:
Ummm, are you suggesting that if every large sofware company in the world were to increase profits by 15% they wouldn't hire more people?
Paragraph 4:
Resorting to personal attacks... as you said not to in paragraph 6. ARe administration jobs not jobs? same mistake as before... having 10k fewer jobs in the US is not a small thing.
Paragraph 5&6:
You command of the art of the insult is a disgusting tribute to your intellectual abilities. You deserve any ridicule that is thrown at you, and it disgusts me that someone who is obviously as loud-mouthed and ignorant as you seem to be cannot even manage a simple insult, something you should have practiced, especially in view of you stupidity and obvious tendency to piss people off.
You can shove you harsh correction.
PS. I do not beleive that this is a troll, or off topic, especially in view of the fact that this is a response to a comment as obvoiusly pigheaded as this one.
If i get nailed on a charge ike the case being discussed, i would fightit in a quarter second, because i have nothing better to do.
Some people will say that anyone who represents themselves has a fool for a client. I am that fool!
if someone said that there was a 5% chance that if you invested you retirement income in a fund, that you would go bankrupt, i would have a resonable doubt about the strategy of putting money in the stock.
At what point is a doubt unreasonable? 5%? 1%? 1/10 or 1/10,000 of 1%?
Absolutely, but bwefore people get involved, the need to have some idea of what they are doing. I did not say people need PHD's before getting involved, but a basic understanding of how government works (do all of people's electives in college really need to be on advanced film viewing?)
PS. kudos for the jury nullification shot
Free with a B average in high school, and I don't know about whether a B average in another state's HS system would count, but after the 1st 30 hours, if you have a B, you get refunded for those credits even with a less than 3.0 GPA from HS.
It's an incredible deal.