what's amazing to me is the pace that seem to work at. Consider this quote.
""Oh, it shouldn't take more than two weeks to get the code ready for public use, so that should give us plenty of time to get the 2000 new machines we'll need ordered, delivered, and installed""
In my company it takes more then two weeks to get the requision for a $500.00 item approved. Anything that required 2000 machines would have to go to the board and would take almost a year to approve let alone ordered and installed. These guys do it all in two weeks. Impressive.
"The fact is that in PHP the built-in functions do not have similar calls (by name or in their function) between different databases...this is a good thing OR a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. That was the point of my original post."
Apparently you are more dense then I thought. Ok let me try to explain it again. If you were using perl then you'd have to download a library called DBI. This library enables you to write database independent applications. If you were using Visual Basic, C, C++, python etc you'd have to do the exact same thing.
If you are using PHP and wanted to write database independent applications you'd have to do exact same thing. You'd download phplib, PEAR, ADODB, metabase or any database abstraction library and write your application. I am of course presuming that someone of your intelligence level can actually seek, find, download and install libraries for PHP. I am making this presumption because you are so far exhibiting profound ignorance of the existance of these types of libraries. I hope that this post can ease some of that ignorance. If you need the URLs of where you can download these libraries please ask and I will gladly help you out.
" I will look more at PHP, although if most developers are as ire-ridden as you I doubt I'll join that community."
I don't think anybody will cry if you decide to use something else. The PHP community is thriving despite your absence and will continue to do so with or without you. Nine million web sites have decided to use it and I don't think any of us will panic because mborland doesn't like us. In fact it might be better for us if people who are unable to do simple searches on google stay away.
However in the spirit of doing my part to ease your ignorance I would like to present you with this link. Here you will find many database abstraction layers which you can download, install and use.
"you can't port your code to different databases without serious rework because there's no database abstraction."
Well this is mostly a lie. There is no database abstraction layer in PERL either DBI is a library. There is no database abstraction layer in VB or C++ either ODBC and ADO are libraries. Same with python.
So what you meant to say was that as far as PHP is concerned it's no different then VB, PERL, python, or C++ when it comes to database abstraction. You have to download and use some external library.
"Finally, yes, we agree about the smaller site use for PHP"
If you are hack then all you are going to do is small sites anyway (and bad ones at that). The fact remains that there are some HUGE sites that use php. You might want to look at sourceforge or insight.com as examples. PHP provides you with everything you need to build large complex web applicatons that are object oriented and easy to maintain. Maybe you ought to look into some of the more advanced aspects of it.
My point is that the republicans are owned by rich people and the democrats are owned by people who are not as rich. Who has more money? Joe Sixpack union fireman or policeman or Joe CEO. What you have here is the teacher or the collage student against millionaires and they will lose that battle every time. The rich are solidly behind the republicans and that will not change any time soon.
By the way what do Republicans have against union members anyway? Weren't these people heros when New York got attacked?
Anyways it's not the amount of time to raise the money it's who is giving it. As for the rest well if you think the media in this country is liberal you are so far to the right Richard Nixon is a liberal. There is not one Liberal TV station while the republicans have Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, FOXnews AND most radio stations AND most newspapers. Maybe you can argue CBS is biased but then again that's half an hour of news per day VS 24hours per day of non stop republican TV on cable. Hardly a match.
As for the economy well the facts speak for themselves. In recent memory the deficit and the debt always went down during democratic presidents and always went up during republican presidents. Go check for yourself if you don't believe me. G.W sure messed up this one and now we are in the shitter again.
BTW Bush is a moron. If he was a democrat you'd be critising every action he has taken so far. Farm subsidies, steel subsidies, tarrifs on canadian lumber, creating new departments, deficit spending, claiming executive privledge, stonewalling investigations, back room deals, massive fund raising it goes on and on. If you look at his record it does not look like someone who believes in smaller govt, fiscal responsibily, free markets, open and honest govt etc. Like I said if Clinton had done any of this the media would be all over him the fact that nobody is calling him on all this just proves how conservative the media is.
12) When you have the technology to make anything no matter how small or large float, hover and manuever perfectly you will still make devices with wheels, legs, rollers and all kinds of other cumbersome locomotion methods.
At least Clinton had the balls to try and prosecute them (twice). Ashcroft just dropped to his knees and sucking Bill's Cock right away, it was sick to watch.
BTW you seem to think that there are an equal number of pro-democratic and pro-republican organizations. Even if this is true it's irrelevant. The important stat is not the number of entitites it's the amount of money raised and the power of the people influenced. The republicans have already raised almost 100 million in hard money and are probably approaching a billion in hidden/soft money. The democrats are an order of magnitude down from that. Combine that with the fact that the republicans own the supreme court and the richest person in the world owns the republicans and you have an unstoppable force. Sure the democrats may be able to get out the vote but those puny humans will be crushed come the election.
Most business people I know (and I know a ton) know nothing, read nothing, configure nothing, install nothing. They hire people to do that for them. Most businesses with more then two or three employees rely on local consultants to manage their IT work. Bigger ones employ bigger companies.
And you know what manually configuring things is no longer required. With programs like linuxconf and webmin (especially webmin) any body can configure just about anything. Install webmin you won't be sorry.
"If this "independant think tank" was paid for this research, whoever funded them should ask for a refund. "
No what needs to happen is that this think tank should be taken to task. There should be public humuliation of this think tank for their bias and for their stupidity. The gramatical errors make excellant fodder and they should be publicly derided as a stupid lot who can not even put together a decent piece of propaganda.
This will accomplish two things. 1) It will cancel any effect the paper might have. 2) It might discourage MS (or anybody else) from hiring them again.
It's not bad to go calling people names. Microsoft calls open source developers communists and un-american, Bush calls North Korea evil etc. If you keep calling people names eventually those names will stick, they know whis and we need to as well. It's time to think of things to call your enemies (make no mistake they see you as their enemies) and to start calling them by that name every chance you get. It will stick sooner or later.
I don't mean to be flip but you sould consider buying a book or two. For example Postgres is a wonderful free database, with the ten thousand dollars you saved you could spend $100.00 on a couple of good books.
Most of these so called think tanks are little more then fund raising arms of the republican party. If you contribute to a think tank then your contributions don't get reported. They occationaly take money to write papers to further republican causes too. In this case Microsoft is a republican cause.
I want to thank you for this conversation. It has confirmed for me that some sort of evil has invaded the soul of the israelis and remains there festering. I don't say this to critisize you but to warn you. Before you claim that I am picking on you, believe me when I say that the soul of the palestenians are also equally infected (I have repeatedly comdemned them as well). I find it ironic that a place so sacred to the three major religions of the world should be so infested with evil and I am sure there is a deeper meaning in all this that I can not grasp.
I have confronted you with the following facts.
1) You are militarily occupying another people. 2) you routinely deny basic human rights to people living under your occupation by denying them food, water and access to medical care. This view is also shared by amnesty international, doctors without borders, pysicians for human rights etc). 3) You routinely kill innocent civilians and do not compensate the families. Hundreds of them have been killed in the past year alone. 4) You torture palestenians and have torture as a stated policy of your govt. 5) You routinely arrest people and hold them without charges or access to lawyers in order to torture them.
None of these facts are deniable and all are not acceptable in a civilized society. These are the acts of a evil nation and there can be no justification of these acts under any circumstances.
You have found a way to excuse all of these acts with an astounding series of rationalizations. You quoted the Talmud, you claimed that they would have been worse off living under somebody elses occupation, you claimed self defense, you claimed that they are liars. Even if all these things are true none of them justify the evil acts you are committing, none of them.
You need to face the evil in your soul. Don't try to justify evil acts of yourselves by trying to find excuses.
BTW self defense is a silly excuse. You are a powerful nation with the full backing of the military might and funding of the united states. You have nuclear weapons, tanks, helicopter, modern jet fighters etc. The palestenians are practically unarmed compared to you. Hardly a fair fight.
This is the last thing I am going to post on this thread because I am convinced that we will keep going around in circles. You are clearly unable to face the reality of what you are doing to the palestenians and are unable to evaluate yourself and your actions in an objective way.
I hope that the efforts of the peace makers in your respective countries will one day be able to lift off this curse and I hope that it will happen before the massacre and the mass dislocation of palestenians I forsee in the not too distant future.
You know just when I think MS has hit the bottom of the slime bucket they do something to show me that there is no bottom of the MS slime pit. I can think of no other company who puts such restrictions on the usage of their IDEs of platforms.
Is it legal to use.NET to write GPLed applicatons? I heard that the license restricts the right of the programmer to choose how they wish the license their code. If this is the case (let me know if it's not) then any benefits the.NET platform may offer are useless.
"They did. Camp David, 1998. for 7 years preceding that 95% of all palastinians, 40% of the west bank, and 97% of the gaza strip were under exclusive PA control. At Camp David Barak (who the arab press still calls a Butcher, though I have no idea why) and Clinton offered all that pluss 100% of gaza and 95% of the west bank, pluss israels only oil wells, natural water springs, land in israel proper, 3/4 of Jeruselam, and internationalization of the TempleMount to make up for the missing 5%. Arafat walked away without any discussion or counter offer. To quote President Bill Clinton, refering to Camp David "Arafat made a fool of me." "
Once again this is the israeli point of view. If you listen to other people they seem to have a different recollection of what happened. They blame Barak for lying to them and then stabbing them in back. I guess it's a matter of who you choose to believe. Since that event Israel has never even come close to making a deal so I tend to think that this deal was not actually on the table. There is nothing preventing israel from lifting the occupation unilatirally or simply saying on the record "on such and such a day there will be a nation called palestine". It's been decades since the israeli army starting occupying the palestenians if they didn't want to they could have ended this at any time. They never have and I submit that that's because they don't want to.
"So I suppose it's also big Jewish conspiracy that Israeli-Arabs have the highest living standards of any Arab group in the entire middle east (baring oil princes, who hoard their money, instead of feeding their starving people). It's probably also a massive plot that Israel kept giving money to the PA untill nearly a year into the war? Oh and my other favorit plot is that it was the jews who kept he palastinians poor during the 20 years they were under Jordainian rule! "
It's not a conspiracy simply a national policy. A healthy palestenian economy will have devestating effects on the israeli position. It will legitimize the palestenian cause, it will lead to a palestenian state, it will give greater incentive to europeans and americans to protect their markets (and therefore the palestenians) and last but not least it will dry up a pool of very cheap labor for israel. As for the standard of living I highly doubt the israeli arabs have a higher standard of living then the people in abu dhabi, kuwait, or even saudi arabia. Besides they are second class citizens anyway no matter how much money they make.
"These are two indigenous peoples (counting back 300 years)."
Now you are repeating what I said. There are two sets of people who bbelieve they have a birthright to the same land. Right now israelis have the military might (and the backing of the US) to kill everybody who lives on that land or at least kick them out of their homes and cities and move them into reservations, refugee camps, or concentration camps. I am fully conviced that this a very real possiblity. A second genocide or a mass dislocation of people from their homes and cities. It's an evil thing to do but evil has sunk into the soul of the israeli people.
"Sharon didn't have anything to do with Sabra and Shlita"
Yes he did and denying it does not make undo what he did. Hopefully the war crimes tribunal will act and hold him responsible.
"And I should also mention, under jewish law your not allowed to kill the palastinians to take their land. "
Oh man that's a funny one. I laughed so hard when I read this. But then again they have a built in excuse to kill the palestenians and take their land they simply claim that god promised that land to the jews ans voila kill with a clear conscience. Nice heh?
"It's possible, just not in any sort of pleasent way. Whether there will be Peace or War it's going to be a bloody one."
I stated my thoughts on how peace can be accomplished. It will be bloody as hell and the mass murder of palestenians by the israelis will forever be compared to the treatment of jews by hitler. That's my prediction.
"Israel does not make it it's intent to kill civilians, if it does it does so accidentialy."
People keep saying this but I don't believe it. I don't think they care very much how many civilians they kill and the number of civilians killed every year bears this point out. I have seen coverage of Israeli fighters launching missiles into crowded citites, helicopter gunships strafing inside citites, and tanks shelling inside of cities. These are not the actions of people wanting to avoid civilian casualties. I don't think the IDF sees palestenians as human beings in the same way that in our history we did not see black people as human beings. To draw an anology from American history "the only good palestenian is a dead palestenian".
"Israel goes in because it has to. Israelie's have NO desire to babysit the Palastinians"
If that is true (and I don't think it is) they can do one of two things. 1) lift the occupation. Pull out all troops to the border, seal it off and let the palestenians be. 2) Agree on a date on which palestine will be an independent state.
Since it is unwilling to do either one I will not believe you when you say they don't want to babysit the palestenians. What they want is the land the palestenians live on and they want to remove the palestenians from that land. Either by killing them or moving them on to other countries (or reservations). They want to do the palestenians what we did to the indians. It's the exact same thing.
"also think they just need one more asasination... (now this is MY oinion)"
First of all it's illegal under international law. You can't try and justify the settlements with international law and then advocate assasination. Secondly killing arafat will accomplish nothing. He is an old useless man. Whoever replaces him will be a younger more violent man. Sharon knows this and that's why he won't kill him.
"The Israeli's at least show more intrest in building up an economy and living confortably, it's leverage and can be used to make them good neighboors. "
Isreal will not allow the palestenians do the same thing. They impede commerce with curfews, store closures, shutting off the food and water supplies, destroying shops and houses and of course killing people. They do this to keep the palestenians poor and destitue which supplies them with a ready stream of cheap labor to clean their toilets and to bus their tables. It's all calculated.
"the Holocost may be history to you, but to Jews it never ended,"
Not too long ago there was a movie on NBC called "uprising" it was about a rag-tag group of jews fighting the mighty Nazi army with home made bombs and rifles. I thoght to my self it's funny how history repeats itself. When the UN created israel I bet it never taught the israelis would act like the nazis.
"My point is that peace may not be possible."
Peace is possible under a couple of different scenarios. 1) Sharon completes his genocide. Kills all the palestenians and removes the ones he does not kill to reservations. If sharon does not live long enough netanyahu would be glad to pick up the torch and continue on with the ethnic cleansing. 2) Sharon and Arafat die and are replaced by sane people who are able to convince their people that peace is better then war. 3) Jesus comes back. 4) United states puts it's foot down and smack down the PA and the Israeli govt. It draws a line on the sand and says "this side is israel and this side is palestine, anybody who disagrees will be attacked by the US govt" and then puts US soldiers on the border will people calm down.
Except that Nader did not call for regulation (please read his article). He simply asked to govt to be a better shopper and to make sure the choices the govt makes when buying software benefits the citizenry as a whole. Nader should not have to remind the govt to look out for the interest of the public but unfortunately he does.
"But where they differ from Nader, and the only real disagreement is whether there should be any mandate on forcing Microsoft to release source, sell source, etc. "
If this is what they were arguing against they were beating a straw man. Nader did not call for that. ALthough his letter was primarily about MS that particular section of his letter dealt with "office software" in general terms. He was suggesting that the govt might be able to buy the source of some "office software" cheaper then buying MS licenses year after year. Personally I think that makes a lot of sense. If let's say open office isn't good enough could the govt buy the source code for wordperfect office or smartsuite for less then what it costs to equip the entire govt with MS office? I bet it would. As a bonus the source code would become public domain. An all around good deal for everybody.
"I've given you facts, dates, UN friggen statistics. I can even back them up with a bibliography if you choose to ask. All you are doing is making some assumed, and emotional, alegations. PROVE IT!! Because the stuff your saying sounds allot more like propoganda from where I'm sitting. Please prove me wrong."
Prove what? What do you need me to prove? let me think of some things I said.
1) The palestenians live under israeli military occupation. You need proof of this? 2) Israel routinely kills palestenian civilians and does not compensate them. 3) Israel reserves the right to invade palestenian towns whenever it wants. 4) Israel assinates palestenian leaders. 5) Israel has a stated policy of torture in place (by the way I heard that from B. Netanyahu on tv). 6) Israel arrests and holds palestenians without trial or charges.
Are you actually disputing any of those statements?
"You for your part are obviosly starting from a heavily biased POV. You keep bringing up israeli torture and shootings. Palistinians do that too. They even get parades in their honor if they do it a whole lot. BTW: do you think the PA will make this kind of restitution too?"
If you go back and read my posts you will see that I am accusing both people of inhuman acts of death and torture. Arafat is a terrorist and Sharon is a war criminal who is responsible for multiple massacres. Both of these people have devolved into such a despicable animal state that they have chosen bloodthirsty leaders who they hope will commit unspeakable horrors on the hated enemy. I have repeatedly stated that both the PA and the Israeli govt are barbaric, sick, disgusting piles of shit intent on killing as many people as they can whether they be innocent, women, children, sick, lame, or whatnot. I do not excuse either party from their actions.
"If they do then so be it."
So be what? It's OK to target civilians? that is what you seem to be saying here.
"Have you heard anything about how they will determine who was rongfully hurt in afganistan? And seing as how the average afgani makes less than a dollar a week, what the hell are they going to do with $10,000? that's about a 300 year salary over night. Sounds like a quick way to make a couple people really rich, really fast. "
Apparently there will be some sort a commission set up. I am sure many people will apply and I am sure amny of them will be rejected. I suppose they will take their money and try to rebuild their lives. It's not like they are going to blow it on britney spears CDs.
"Also since you think the US's behavior is so noble, do you realize who they are putting back in power? The same people that the taliban kicked out in the first place! Not because the taliban are religios nuts, they are. But because the former goverment was going on genocidal rampages and killing people. We may not like the taliban, hell the Afgani's and the rest of the world may not like them. But when they took power they were hailed as heros, for liberating that country from opression. Let it be a lesson, it's no good to trade one dictator for another, even if the new one is your own.)"
I don't dispute for one minute that the US is at least partially responsible for the rise of taliban in the first place. The taliban took over after the corrupt govt was thrown out but not right away in the mean time there was a big struggle for control by the various factions. Somehow the taliban got a hold of helicopters and fighters (my guess is that they were supplied by either the US or one of our proxies) and ended up "winning" the war. They drove the opposition north and took over the country. We then supported them by bribing them to stop poppy production and to let us run a oil pipeline. They were our buddies. So I am not excusing the role of US in that regard but I still remain convinced that innocents should be compensated.
" One thing you might consider is that your general point about the input side of the equation is also true about the output side. It's not possible to create something from nothing, but it's also not possible to create nothing from something. Admittedly, it's really easy to convert something useful into something that's not useful."
If you say so I guess. I have no Idea what point you are trying to make here.
" The majority of our artifacts can be recycled. That includes the clothes you wear, your shelter, the vehicle you use for transport, writing materials, most everything else. So the amount of actual consumption of resources can be made to be quite a bit closer to zero than it currently is."
Well it's hard to argue with that isn't it. Of course atrifacts can be recycled but they are not and there are economic mechanisms in place to discourage recycling. As for consumption being "quite a bit closer to zero" I think that's naive considering the amount of people on the planet and the rate of consumption of very slowly regenarating resources like trees, animals, plants, coal, oil etc.
" Just because the creation of wealth ultimately requires an energy input, doesn't mean that there's a real concern that that energy supply will run out. Every single "natural resource" that exists, exists because, against all odds, really complicated stuff was made from simpler stuff. That includes everything biological as a result of life; but it also includes almost every element above helium in the periodic table. A huge amount of energy went into creating this complexity out of simplicity, and it did so long before we came on the stage."
Not just energy also materials.
"that resources aren't really the problem--the real danger is that we'll break the biological machinery that we're dependent upon."
One leads to another. We need to destroy resources in order to generate wealth, destroying resources leads to ecological unstability, which will eventually lead to breakage of biological machinery. It will probably take some time but it's pretty much inevitable.
"we could break our ecology without knowing it, and therefore never be aware of the price we are paying for doing so until it's too late to do anything about it."
I think we will continue to break our ecology with the full knowledge that we are doing it. Just look around you and see how the proponents of "market forces" will fight vehemently any effort at saving the forests, endangered species, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, etc. Market forces demand short term profits and in fact demand that we destroy the planet as fast as possible. Faster the rate of ecological destruction, the faster the rate of economic growth, the faster the rate of capital gains. That's the way the world works.
Businesses can not be expected to act in an ethical manner and by and large they don't. Just like tobacco companies sell products they know will cause misery and suffering the rest of the economy will continue to extract whatever it can from the planet knowing full well their great grandchildren will suffer for it. They can't help it next quarters profits are on the line.
I am not impressed. I give a greater percentage of my salary to charity and I bet most people do too. Bill G handing out a million is like me gving a homeless guy a buck.
Not one thing you said justifies anything Israel does. You seem to think it does but it does not to me. No country should torture period end of sentence. No country should occupy other people it's an evil act. You can call it whatever you want, you can try and justify it a thousand ways but in the end palestenians are denied basic human rights under israeli rule and that is wrong.
I think its very funny some of the things you use to justify the actions of israel. I especially like the one about
"BTW: I chalange you to prove that anything Israel has done to the Palastinians is unique. i.e. is not done by surounding countries with minority arab poplulations. (a hint, this is a violent area of the world, with or without Israel)"
I guess it's ok to kill people if other people are killing them too nice.
As for compensation. The negotiations are not finished yet but US is willing to give every wrongfully injured civilian in afghanistan $10,000.00. This includes people who had their houses accidentally destroyed even if no physical harm came to them. I would like to see israel do the same thing. Every civillian they killed and every house they destroyed they should give 10 thousand dollars to. Everybody who was tortured in prison should get 20 thousand. Every person arrested and held without charges or access to attroneys should get five thousand. On top of that Israel should rebuild rammalah and jenin from teh ground up. It's only fair to compensate the innocent civilians.
It does not count to shoot people and then try and pretend you are doing good by stopping their bleeding. They would not be in your hospitals if you didn't shoot them in the first place. Same with the cigarettes bit. Surround a city, invoke a curfew, kill anybody who dares to roam the streets, cut off the water supply, and then claim you are good guys because you gave them cigarettes? What kind of twisted logic is that?
Like I said. You are willing to rationalize any evil act done by israelis. This is the crux of the problem. Both sides can somehow justify committing inhumanly evil acts. It's sick.
Didn't jesus say greed was bad? I am pretty sure it says someplace in the bible that greed was bad. I bet it says so in the quran too. Maybe even Budha said greed was bad.
Wow they only paid 2 billion in taxes? How much money did they make? How come they pay such puny taxes when almost half my paycheck goes to taxes? We are getting seriously ripped off if all we can manage collect from MS is 2 billion.
Slashdot Mirror
what's amazing to me is the pace that seem to work at. Consider this quote.
""Oh, it shouldn't take more than two weeks to get the code ready for public use, so that should give us plenty of time to get the 2000 new machines we'll need ordered, delivered, and installed""
In my company it takes more then two weeks to get the requision for a $500.00 item approved. Anything that required 2000 machines would have to go to the board and would take almost a year to approve let alone ordered and installed. These guys do it all in two weeks. Impressive.
"The fact is that in PHP the built-in functions do not have similar calls (by name or in their function) between different databases...this is a good thing OR a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. That was the point of my original post."
Apparently you are more dense then I thought. Ok let me try to explain it again. If you were using perl then you'd have to download a library called DBI. This library enables you to write database independent applications. If you were using Visual Basic, C, C++, python etc you'd have to do the exact same thing.
If you are using PHP and wanted to write database independent applications you'd have to do exact same thing. You'd download phplib, PEAR, ADODB, metabase or any database abstraction library and write your application. I am of course presuming that someone of your intelligence level can actually seek, find, download and install libraries for PHP. I am making this presumption because you are so far exhibiting profound ignorance of the existance of these types of libraries. I hope that this post can ease some of that ignorance. If you need the URLs of where you can download these libraries please ask and I will gladly help you out.
" I will look more at PHP, although if most developers are as ire-ridden as you I doubt I'll join that community."
I don't think anybody will cry if you decide to use something else. The PHP community is thriving despite your absence and will continue to do so with or without you. Nine million web sites have decided to use it and I don't think any of us will panic because mborland doesn't like us. In fact it might be better for us if people who are unable to do simple searches on google stay away.
However in the spirit of doing my part to ease your ignorance I would like to present you with this link. Here you will find many database abstraction layers which you can download, install and use.
"you can't port your code to different databases without serious rework because there's no database abstraction."
Well this is mostly a lie. There is no database abstraction layer in PERL either DBI is a library. There is no database abstraction layer in VB or C++ either ODBC and ADO are libraries. Same with python.
So what you meant to say was that as far as PHP is concerned it's no different then VB, PERL, python, or C++ when it comes to database abstraction. You have to download and use some external library.
"Finally, yes, we agree about the smaller site use for PHP"
If you are hack then all you are going to do is small sites anyway (and bad ones at that). The fact remains that there are some HUGE sites that use php. You might want to look at sourceforge or insight.com as examples. PHP provides you with everything you need to build large complex web applicatons that are object oriented and easy to maintain. Maybe you ought to look into some of the more advanced aspects of it.
My point is that the republicans are owned by rich people and the democrats are owned by people who are not as rich. Who has more money? Joe Sixpack union fireman or policeman or Joe CEO. What you have here is the teacher or the collage student against millionaires and they will lose that battle every time. The rich are solidly behind the republicans and that will not change any time soon.
By the way what do Republicans have against union members anyway? Weren't these people heros when New York got attacked?
Anyways it's not the amount of time to raise the money it's who is giving it. As for the rest well if you think the media in this country is liberal you are so far to the right Richard Nixon is a liberal. There is not one Liberal TV station while the republicans have Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, FOXnews AND most radio stations AND most newspapers. Maybe you can argue CBS is biased but then again that's half an hour of news per day VS 24hours per day of non stop republican TV on cable. Hardly a match.
As for the economy well the facts speak for themselves. In recent memory the deficit and the debt always went down during democratic presidents and always went up during republican presidents. Go check for yourself if you don't believe me. G.W sure messed up this one and now we are in the shitter again.
BTW Bush is a moron. If he was a democrat you'd be critising every action he has taken so far. Farm subsidies, steel subsidies, tarrifs on canadian lumber, creating new departments, deficit spending, claiming executive privledge, stonewalling investigations, back room deals, massive fund raising it goes on and on. If you look at his record it does not look like someone who believes in smaller govt, fiscal responsibily, free markets, open and honest govt etc. Like I said if Clinton had done any of this the media would be all over him the fact that nobody is calling him on all this just proves how conservative the media is.
You forgot the most important one.
12) When you have the technology to make anything no matter how small or large float, hover and manuever perfectly you will still make devices with wheels, legs, rollers and all kinds of other cumbersome locomotion methods.
Once again you contradict nothing I say.
At least Clinton had the balls to try and prosecute them (twice). Ashcroft just dropped to his knees and sucking Bill's Cock right away, it was sick to watch.
BTW you seem to think that there are an equal number of pro-democratic and pro-republican organizations. Even if this is true it's irrelevant. The important stat is not the number of entitites it's the amount of money raised and the power of the people influenced. The republicans have already raised almost 100 million in hard money and are probably approaching a billion in hidden/soft money. The democrats are an order of magnitude down from that. Combine that with the fact that the republicans own the supreme court and the richest person in the world owns the republicans and you have an unstoppable force. Sure the democrats may be able to get out the vote but those puny humans will be crushed come the election.
Most business people I know (and I know a ton) know nothing, read nothing, configure nothing, install nothing. They hire people to do that for them. Most businesses with more then two or three employees rely on local consultants to manage their IT work. Bigger ones employ bigger companies.
And you know what manually configuring things is no longer required. With programs like linuxconf and webmin (especially webmin) any body can configure just about anything. Install webmin you won't be sorry.
In what possible way does anything you say contrict what I say?
No they can use the GPLed stuff if they want.
"If this "independant think tank" was paid for this research, whoever funded them should ask for a refund. "
No what needs to happen is that this think tank should be taken to task. There should be public humuliation of this think tank for their bias and for their stupidity. The gramatical errors make excellant fodder and they should be publicly derided as a stupid lot who can not even put together a decent piece of propaganda.
This will accomplish two things.
1) It will cancel any effect the paper might have.
2) It might discourage MS (or anybody else) from hiring them again.
It's not bad to go calling people names. Microsoft calls open source developers communists and un-american, Bush calls North Korea evil etc. If you keep calling people names eventually those names will stick, they know whis and we need to as well. It's time to think of things to call your enemies (make no mistake they see you as their enemies) and to start calling them by that name every chance you get. It will stick sooner or later.
I don't mean to be flip but you sould consider buying a book or two. For example Postgres is a wonderful free database, with the ten thousand dollars you saved you could spend $100.00 on a couple of good books.
Most of these so called think tanks are little more then fund raising arms of the republican party. If you contribute to a think tank then your contributions don't get reported. They occationaly take money to write papers to further republican causes too. In this case Microsoft is a republican cause.
I want to thank you for this conversation. It has confirmed for me that some sort of evil has invaded the soul of the israelis and remains there festering. I don't say this to critisize you but to warn you. Before you claim that I am picking on you, believe me when I say that the soul of the palestenians are also equally infected (I have repeatedly comdemned them as well). I find it ironic that a place so sacred to the three major religions of the world should be so infested with evil and I am sure there is a deeper meaning in all this that I can not grasp.
I have confronted you with the following facts.
1) You are militarily occupying another people.
2) you routinely deny basic human rights to people living under your occupation by denying them food, water and access to medical care. This view is also shared by amnesty international, doctors without borders, pysicians for human rights etc).
3) You routinely kill innocent civilians and do not compensate the families. Hundreds of them have been killed in the past year alone.
4) You torture palestenians and have torture as a stated policy of your govt.
5) You routinely arrest people and hold them without charges or access to lawyers in order to torture them.
None of these facts are deniable and all are not acceptable in a civilized society. These are the acts of a evil nation and there can be no justification of these acts under any circumstances.
You have found a way to excuse all of these acts with an astounding series of rationalizations. You quoted the Talmud, you claimed that they would have been worse off living under somebody elses occupation, you claimed self defense, you claimed that they are liars. Even if all these things are true none of them justify the evil acts you are committing, none of them.
You need to face the evil in your soul. Don't try to justify evil acts of yourselves by trying to find excuses.
BTW self defense is a silly excuse. You are a powerful nation with the full backing of the military might and funding of the united states. You have nuclear weapons, tanks, helicopter, modern jet fighters etc. The palestenians are practically unarmed compared to you. Hardly a fair fight.
This is the last thing I am going to post on this thread because I am convinced that we will keep going around in circles. You are clearly unable to face the reality of what you are doing to the palestenians and are unable to evaluate yourself and your actions in an objective way.
I hope that the efforts of the peace makers in your respective countries will one day be able to lift off this curse and I hope that it will happen before the massacre and the mass dislocation of palestenians I forsee in the not too distant future.
You know just when I think MS has hit the bottom of the slime bucket they do something to show me that there is no bottom of the MS slime pit. I can think of no other company who puts such restrictions on the usage of their IDEs of platforms.
Is it legal to use .NET to write GPLed applicatons? I heard that the license restricts the right of the programmer to choose how they wish the license their code. If this is the case (let me know if it's not) then any benefits the .NET platform may offer are useless.
"They did. Camp David, 1998. for 7 years preceding that 95% of all palastinians, 40% of the west bank, and 97% of the gaza strip were under exclusive PA control. At Camp David Barak (who the arab press still calls a Butcher, though I have no idea why) and Clinton offered all that pluss 100% of gaza and 95% of the west bank, pluss israels only oil wells, natural water springs, land in israel proper, 3/4 of Jeruselam, and internationalization of the TempleMount to make up for the missing 5%. Arafat walked away without any discussion or counter offer. To quote President Bill Clinton, refering to Camp David "Arafat made a fool of me." "
Once again this is the israeli point of view. If you listen to other people they seem to have a different recollection of what happened. They blame Barak for lying to them and then stabbing them in back. I guess it's a matter of who you choose to believe. Since that event Israel has never even come close to making a deal so I tend to think that this deal was not actually on the table. There is nothing preventing israel from lifting the occupation unilatirally or simply saying on the record "on such and such a day there will be a nation called palestine". It's been decades since the israeli army starting occupying the palestenians if they didn't want to they could have ended this at any time. They never have and I submit that that's because they don't want to.
"So I suppose it's also big Jewish conspiracy that Israeli-Arabs have the highest living standards of any Arab group in the entire middle east (baring oil princes, who hoard their money, instead of feeding their starving people). It's probably also a massive plot that Israel kept giving money to the PA untill nearly a year into the war? Oh and my other favorit plot is that it was the jews who kept he palastinians poor during the 20 years they were under Jordainian rule! "
It's not a conspiracy simply a national policy. A healthy palestenian economy will have devestating effects on the israeli position. It will legitimize the palestenian cause, it will lead to a palestenian state, it will give greater incentive to europeans and americans to protect their markets (and therefore the palestenians) and last but not least it will dry up a pool of very cheap labor for israel. As for the standard of living I highly doubt the israeli arabs have a higher standard of living then the people in abu dhabi, kuwait, or even saudi arabia. Besides they are second class citizens anyway no matter how much money they make.
"These are two indigenous peoples (counting back 300 years)."
Now you are repeating what I said. There are two sets of people who bbelieve they have a birthright to the same land. Right now israelis have the military might (and the backing of the US) to kill everybody who lives on that land or at least kick them out of their homes and cities and move them into reservations, refugee camps, or concentration camps. I am fully conviced that this a very real possiblity. A second genocide or a mass dislocation of people from their homes and cities. It's an evil thing to do but evil has sunk into the soul of the israeli people.
"Sharon didn't have anything to do with Sabra and Shlita"
Yes he did and denying it does not make undo what he did. Hopefully the war crimes tribunal will act and hold him responsible.
"And I should also mention, under jewish law your not allowed to kill the palastinians to take their land. "
Oh man that's a funny one. I laughed so hard when I read this. But then again they have a built in excuse to kill the palestenians and take their land they simply claim that god promised that land to the jews ans voila kill with a clear conscience. Nice heh?
"It's possible, just not in any sort of pleasent way. Whether there will be Peace or War it's going to be a bloody one."
I stated my thoughts on how peace can be accomplished. It will be bloody as hell and the mass murder of palestenians by the israelis will forever be compared to the treatment of jews by hitler. That's my prediction.
"Israel does not make it it's intent to kill civilians, if it does it does so accidentialy."
People keep saying this but I don't believe it. I don't think they care very much how many civilians they kill and the number of civilians killed every year bears this point out. I have seen coverage of Israeli fighters launching missiles into crowded citites, helicopter gunships strafing inside citites, and tanks shelling inside of cities. These are not the actions of people wanting to avoid civilian casualties. I don't think the IDF sees palestenians as human beings in the same way that in our history we did not see black people as human beings. To draw an anology from American history "the only good palestenian is a dead palestenian".
"Israel goes in because it has to. Israelie's have NO desire to babysit the Palastinians"
If that is true (and I don't think it is) they can do one of two things. 1) lift the occupation. Pull out all troops to the border, seal it off and let the palestenians be. 2) Agree on a date on which palestine will be an independent state.
Since it is unwilling to do either one I will not believe you when you say they don't want to babysit the palestenians. What they want is the land the palestenians live on and they want to remove the palestenians from that land. Either by killing them or moving them on to other countries (or reservations). They want to do the palestenians what we did to the indians. It's the exact same thing.
"also think they just need one more asasination... (now this is MY oinion)"
First of all it's illegal under international law. You can't try and justify the settlements with international law and then advocate assasination. Secondly killing arafat will accomplish nothing. He is an old useless man. Whoever replaces him will be a younger more violent man. Sharon knows this and that's why he won't kill him.
"The Israeli's at least show more intrest in building up an economy and living confortably, it's leverage and can be used to make them good neighboors. "
Isreal will not allow the palestenians do the same thing. They impede commerce with curfews, store closures, shutting off the food and water supplies, destroying shops and houses and of course killing people. They do this to keep the palestenians poor and destitue which supplies them with a ready stream of cheap labor to clean their toilets and to bus their tables. It's all calculated.
"the Holocost may be history to you, but to Jews it never ended,"
Not too long ago there was a movie on NBC called "uprising" it was about a rag-tag group of jews fighting the mighty Nazi army with home made bombs and rifles. I thoght to my self it's funny how history repeats itself. When the UN created israel I bet it never taught the israelis would act like the nazis.
"My point is that peace may not be possible."
Peace is possible under a couple of different scenarios.
1) Sharon completes his genocide. Kills all the palestenians and removes the ones he does not kill to reservations. If sharon does not live long enough netanyahu would be glad to pick up the torch and continue on with the ethnic cleansing.
2) Sharon and Arafat die and are replaced by sane people who are able to convince their people that peace is better then war.
3) Jesus comes back.
4) United states puts it's foot down and smack down the PA and the Israeli govt. It draws a line on the sand and says "this side is israel and this side is palestine, anybody who disagrees will be attacked by the US govt" and then puts US soldiers on the border will people calm down.
Like you said peace is not possible.
Except that Nader did not call for regulation (please read his article). He simply asked to govt to be a better shopper and to make sure the choices the govt makes when buying software benefits the citizenry as a whole. Nader should not have to remind the govt to look out for the interest of the public but unfortunately he does.
"But where they differ from Nader, and the only real disagreement is whether there should be any mandate on forcing Microsoft to release source, sell source, etc. "
If this is what they were arguing against they were beating a straw man. Nader did not call for that. ALthough his letter was primarily about MS that particular section of his letter dealt with "office software" in general terms. He was suggesting that the govt might be able to buy the source of some "office software" cheaper then buying MS licenses year after year. Personally I think that makes a lot of sense. If let's say open office isn't good enough could the govt buy the source code for wordperfect office or smartsuite for less then what it costs to equip the entire govt with MS office? I bet it would. As a bonus the source code would become public domain. An all around good deal for everybody.
"I've given you facts, dates, UN friggen statistics. I can even back them up with a bibliography if you choose to ask. All you are doing is making some assumed, and emotional, alegations. PROVE IT!! Because the stuff your saying sounds allot more like propoganda from where I'm sitting. Please prove me wrong."
Prove what? What do you need me to prove? let me think of some things I said.
1) The palestenians live under israeli military occupation. You need proof of this?
2) Israel routinely kills palestenian civilians and does not compensate them.
3) Israel reserves the right to invade palestenian towns whenever it wants.
4) Israel assinates palestenian leaders.
5) Israel has a stated policy of torture in place (by the way I heard that from B. Netanyahu on tv).
6) Israel arrests and holds palestenians without trial or charges.
Are you actually disputing any of those statements?
"You for your part are obviosly starting from a heavily biased POV. You keep bringing up israeli torture and shootings. Palistinians do that too. They even get parades in their honor if they do it a whole lot. BTW: do you think the PA will make this kind of restitution too?"
If you go back and read my posts you will see that I am accusing both people of inhuman acts of death and torture. Arafat is a terrorist and Sharon is a war criminal who is responsible for multiple massacres. Both of these people have devolved into such a despicable animal state that they have chosen bloodthirsty leaders who they hope will commit unspeakable horrors on the hated enemy. I have repeatedly stated that both the PA and the Israeli govt are barbaric, sick, disgusting piles of shit intent on killing as many people as they can whether they be innocent, women, children, sick, lame, or whatnot. I do not excuse either party from their actions.
"If they do then so be it."
So be what? It's OK to target civilians? that is what you seem to be saying here.
"Have you heard anything about how they will determine who was rongfully hurt in afganistan? And seing as how the average afgani makes less than a dollar a week, what the hell are they going to do with $10,000? that's about a 300 year salary over night. Sounds like a quick way to make a couple people really rich, really fast. "
Apparently there will be some sort a commission set up. I am sure many people will apply and I am sure amny of them will be rejected. I suppose they will take their money and try to rebuild their lives. It's not like they are going to blow it on britney spears CDs.
"Also since you think the US's behavior is so noble, do you realize who they are putting back in power? The same people that the taliban kicked out in the first place! Not because the taliban are religios nuts, they are. But because the former goverment was going on genocidal rampages and killing people. We may not like the taliban, hell the Afgani's and the rest of the world may not like them. But when they took power they were hailed as heros, for liberating that country from opression. Let it be a lesson, it's no good to trade one dictator for another, even if the new one is your own.)"
I don't dispute for one minute that the US is at least partially responsible for the rise of taliban in the first place. The taliban took over after the corrupt govt was thrown out but not right away in the mean time there was a big struggle for control by the various factions. Somehow the taliban got a hold of helicopters and fighters (my guess is that they were supplied by either the US or one of our proxies) and ended up "winning" the war. They drove the opposition north and took over the country. We then supported them by bribing them to stop poppy production and to let us run a oil pipeline. They were our buddies. So I am not excusing the role of US in that regard but I still remain convinced that innocents should be compensated.
" One thing you might consider is that your general point about the input side of the equation is also true about the output side. It's not possible to create something from nothing, but it's also not possible to create nothing from something. Admittedly, it's really easy to convert something useful into something that's not useful."
If you say so I guess. I have no Idea what point you are trying to make here.
" The majority of our artifacts can be recycled. That includes the clothes you wear, your shelter, the vehicle you use for transport, writing materials, most everything else. So the amount of actual consumption of resources can be made to be quite a bit closer to zero than it currently is."
Well it's hard to argue with that isn't it. Of course atrifacts can be recycled but they are not and there are economic mechanisms in place to discourage recycling. As for consumption being "quite a bit closer to zero" I think that's naive considering the amount of people on the planet and the rate of consumption of very slowly regenarating resources like trees, animals, plants, coal, oil etc.
" Just because the creation of wealth ultimately requires an energy input, doesn't mean that there's a real concern that that energy supply will run out. Every single "natural resource" that exists, exists because, against all odds, really complicated stuff was made from simpler stuff. That includes everything biological as a result of life; but it also includes almost every element above helium in the periodic table. A huge amount of energy went into creating this complexity out of simplicity, and it did so long before we came on the stage."
Not just energy also materials.
"that resources aren't really the problem--the real danger is that we'll break the biological machinery that we're dependent upon."
One leads to another. We need to destroy resources in order to generate wealth, destroying resources leads to ecological unstability, which will eventually lead to breakage of biological machinery. It will probably take some time but it's pretty much inevitable.
"we could break our ecology without knowing it, and therefore never be aware of the price we are paying for doing so until it's too late to do anything about it."
I think we will continue to break our ecology with the full knowledge that we are doing it. Just look around you and see how the proponents of "market forces" will fight vehemently any effort at saving the forests, endangered species, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, etc. Market forces demand short term profits and in fact demand that we destroy the planet as fast as possible. Faster the rate of ecological destruction, the faster the rate of economic growth, the faster the rate of capital gains. That's the way the world works.
Businesses can not be expected to act in an ethical manner and by and large they don't. Just like tobacco companies sell products they know will cause misery and suffering the rest of the economy will continue to extract whatever it can from the planet knowing full well their great grandchildren will suffer for it. They can't help it next quarters profits are on the line.
I am not impressed. I give a greater percentage of my salary to charity and I bet most people do too. Bill G handing out a million is like me gving a homeless guy a buck.
Not one thing you said justifies anything Israel does. You seem to think it does but it does not to me.
No country should torture period end of sentence. No country should occupy other people it's an evil act. You can call it whatever you want, you can try and justify it a thousand ways but in the end palestenians are denied basic human rights under israeli rule and that is wrong.
I think its very funny some of the things you use to justify the actions of israel. I especially like the one about
"BTW: I chalange you to prove that anything Israel has done to the Palastinians is unique. i.e. is not done by surounding countries with minority arab poplulations. (a hint, this is a violent area of the world, with or without Israel)"
I guess it's ok to kill people if other people are killing them too nice.
As for compensation. The negotiations are not finished yet but US is willing to give every wrongfully injured civilian in afghanistan $10,000.00. This includes people who had their houses accidentally destroyed even if no physical harm came to them. I would like to see israel do the same thing. Every civillian they killed and every house they destroyed they should give 10 thousand dollars to. Everybody who was tortured in prison should get 20 thousand. Every person arrested and held without charges or access to attroneys should get five thousand. On top of that Israel should rebuild rammalah and jenin from teh ground up. It's only fair to compensate the innocent civilians.
It does not count to shoot people and then try and pretend you are doing good by stopping their bleeding. They would not be in your hospitals if you didn't shoot them in the first place. Same with the cigarettes bit. Surround a city, invoke a curfew, kill anybody who dares to roam the streets, cut off the water supply, and then claim you are good guys because you gave them cigarettes? What kind of twisted logic is that?
Like I said. You are willing to rationalize any evil act done by israelis. This is the crux of the problem. Both sides can somehow justify committing inhumanly evil acts. It's sick.
Didn't jesus say greed was bad? I am pretty sure it says someplace in the bible that greed was bad. I bet it says so in the quran too. Maybe even Budha said greed was bad.
Wow they only paid 2 billion in taxes? How much money did they make? How come they pay such puny taxes when almost half my paycheck goes to taxes? We are getting seriously ripped off if all we can manage collect from MS is 2 billion.