Why this person is still able to freely roam the streets without fear. someone betrays people, like this, and still is able to live a normal life. noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable.
There's nothing more pathetic than an Internet bad-ass.
Before the Republican party allied itself with the bible-thumpers...
The lack of awareness of history in that sentence is stunning.
The Republicans were "Bible Thumpers" from their very creation. The biggest motivation in their anti-slavery crusades was religious. Until the Democrats starting turning against the churches in the 1960's, every major American political party... Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans... had a huge, heapin' helping of the Bible in their platforms. Even when parties opposed each other, they often used Biblical citations in their party planks. Both the conservative and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century were largely motivated by religious concerns. The Temperence movement was religiously based. The progressive movement was religiously based.
"Bible Thumping" in politics is part and parcel of American history. It's been deeply intertwined in American politics since the nation came into being.
If you mean "solved" as in a combination of bust-ass costs, a snotty sense of entitlement, and a black hole in your national budgets, fine you solved it. Stay where it's solved, and we'll keep being backwards, thanks.
I personally blame Carly Fiorina for the travails of a once-proud company.
Good Lord, why?
I see people bitch about Fiorina all the time here, and most of it is unwarranted. She was pretty gruff with her underlings, and obviously wasn't much fun to work for (I guy I know that worked with HP at the time told me that there were literally celebrations in the halls when "Aunt Carly" resigned).
But give credit where credit is due. Much of the success Mark Hurd enjoyed while at HP was a direct result of decisions Fiorina made and didn't stick around long enough to take credit for, i.e. the purchase of Compaq. Everybody, including myself hated it when she did it, but after she was gone, suddenly, what a wise decision it was that HP made. Fiorina, who was the driving force behind the idea, gets no credit for her own brainchild. People just pretend it happend sponteneously or something, and that the merged companies just happened to fall in Mark Hurd's lap.
No, she's not pleasant to work for. Neither was Patton. But in hindsight, looking at the results, she got things done, at AT&T, Lucent, Agilent, and yes, HP. HP made money under Fiorina, and Mark Hurd made even more money, and he basically just carried out her business plan (leverage the larger merged PC business, get heavily into the services sector).
There were valid criticisms of the woman, some of them major... hell, I wouldn't want to work for her... but a lot of people spout crap about her when they really have no idea what they're talking about. Blame her for HP's current mess? She's been gone for years and left the company in good shape. How in the hell is HP's current woes her fault? "I blame Carly" has turned into a silly meme, joing the company of Microsoft conspiracy theories and "BSD is dead".
Unfortunately six of the plugins I rely on (yes, those plugins that are supposedly the #1 reason to use Firefox over less customizable browsers) don't yet even support Firefox 5. Everytime that "update Firefox" box comes up, I check, find six plugins outstanding, and back out of it.
Update too fast and you will leave users behind.
I used to encourage Firefox use in my shop... I gave my users the choice of IE and Firefox, and back when IE had that huge list of old unpatched holes, I told my users that I preferred FireFox if they were so inclined.
I've taken FF off of the approved list. The upgrades are coming too fast, and breaking too many things (mostly plugins, as the parent poster noted).
You might want to go read the actual presentation.
It starts out with an exploit called Aurora, which compromises AD.
Whoops.
So the questions is, if it's AD, are Macs using AD somehow more vulnerable than Windows boxes? Or is the threat equal and the article misrepresenting things?
You mean all of the politicians that refused to cut spending and tax the rich....
Why? The problem is not the rich. As others have noted here, you could seize every dime from them and still get nowhere close to solving the problem.
The problem is two things. The military budget is the smaller problem. There's some room to cut there, especially in bloated weapons procurement, pay policies, and having troops stationed where we don't need them.
But by far the biggest budget problem is us. The sainted "middle class". That's where the big spending is. We like to have our tax refunds and our EIC credits too. We cry "get spending under control!" right before we cry "but don't touch MY benefits!" Americans are largely hypocritical about government spending.
The fact that anyone still trusts S&P and their ilk is illustrative of the fact that emotion rules this game. They've proven with math that they know no more than anyone else.
"All you need to know about rating agencies is that in May 2010 Moody’s still rated Greece triple-A." - Mark Steyn
See the FAA ATC below that says, yes, they are getting paid.
As for this part:
"the Republican senators who ran out of town on vacation rather than fund the agency"
Strange that this is what's drawing your ire when the Senate... which as been controlled by Democrats since 2007... hasn't submitted a budget in 2 years.
As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.
More than that, on a practical level, the reason Linux won't succeed on a wide scale is the same reason it took off in the first place: an abundance of choice.
The lifeblood of operating system success is in two parts. You need OEM's to install your system, but more important in the long run is that you need third parties writing apps and drivers for you. So the driver aspect is a part of a larger problem. OEM's and third parties want one standard to support. One desktop, one driver model, one update method, on a slow and steady schedule. Red Hat once had a chance to become the de facto Linux desktop standard, but they abandoned the market just as they were beginning to dominate it.
Google is doing what other Linux vendors couldn't do, by customizing Linux to their liking and establishing a single standard for drivers, updates, and writing apps. And now we have Android. We may well have a desktop version of this OS soon.
Just as Apple made BSD a widespread desktop success by imposing its own standards and giving it a completely different branding, so might Linux one day be widespread on the desktop, but under the direction of Google, not Linus Torvalds.
If geological experts are correct, there is likely more oil yet to be discovered than the entire existing stocks. We may well be at "peak oil" in the sense that politics may prevent us from further exploration, but there is almost certainly huge reserves of petroleum both in ocean areas and under the Arctic Circle, not to mention areas of Russian control that have never been explored.
Too much crap, from favoritism to improper relationships, could originate between teachers and students on facebook.
A cardinal rule in any book of leadership is that the leader and the men aren't buddies. They can be friend-ly, but not friends. In the military it's called fraternizing, and is strictly verboten. It's a pretty good, time tested rule. There's a big difference between being one of the guys and being their leader. And teaching is a form of leadership. It's not exactly like other authority/subordinate roles, but there are indeed clear lines that should be drawn. It is undoubtedly harder to be an effective teacher if you're one of the kids. There has to be the requisite respect for superior authority there (and a teacher, by definition, is an authority on on the knowledge being taught).
I don't question the policy so much as how it's being enacted. A state law? Simply making it state education department policy should be sufficient.
Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, et. al. are proven assets.
Crowe maybe, but some people think he's already beyond his sell-by date. And Jackman? I like him, but name one hit he's carried as the leading star? He was the big attraction in the first X-Men movie, so they gave him a Wolverine movie. Didn't do to well? Swordfish? Mediocre sales. Australia? Nobody outside of Australia went to see it. He's been in a number of underperforming romantic flicks. He's yet to carry an action movie all on his own. Ford and Craig have. I like Jackman better than either, but this is the Hollywood calculus.
This is your source? The people that "scooped" the "Karl Rove has been indicted" story? And they never retracted it, even when it became apparent that there wasn't even a scintilla of fact to it?
And from the story you linked:
"That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory."
This is demonstrably false. Bush led in pre-election day polls in Ohio, as other posters have noted here. My link... which actually has verifiable evidence... shows that Bush led Kerry in close to a dozen major polls the week leading up to the election, and that the Ohio results near-exactly matched those poll averages.
You have, whether deliberately or not, I'm not sure, promoted a conspiracy theory.
Truthout? Is Slashdot's credibility worth that little to you?
We would not be having this discussion if things were booming. Back in 2000, you could get a job if you could spell HTML. The reason M is the B is that degrees for many/most jobs serves as a WAY TO CUT DOWN THE PILE FOR HR. Nothing more, nothing less.
In general, bachelor's degree's are now the base certification for getting employed. And I think this was inevitable when we decided that we should send everyone to college. It was a sure thing that a bachelors would be cheapened that way. A bachelors is the new high school diploma, and high school diplomas are now worthless outside of being just another requirement for entry into college.
What's funny is that skilled blue collar workers... plumbers, air conditioning repairmen, construction equipment operators, etc... are making more money than the average office drone with a bachelors. Not only are they making more money, they skipped the whole college debt pitfall, so their real purchasing power is even greater than the immediate income disparity.
Here's an idea: why not do that AFTER commercial interests have the technology to do what NASA does now, rather than just having religious faith in corporations to do everything that government institutions have accomplished?
No? Your dogma is showing.
Where do the rockets that USAF and NASA use come from?
Private companies. Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Did you think there was a government factory building these, with government employees using raw materials from government mines?
Oh, except NASA, which is a vitally important public service that can't be replicated in the private sector.
How is NASA "vitally important"? We could close NASA tomorrow, and still could launch all of our rockets at USAF facilities such as Vandenberg AFB. The only thing NASA gave us that the Air Force couldn't do was Space Shuttle facilities, and we've retired that program anyway.
I'm all for retiring NASA... and all of our Cold War military, intelligence, and technology institutions born from it... and starting over with an eye on future needs. We'll need an Army and Navy of some kind (with air capabilities), but everything else should be put to this question: "What do we need, and what's the best way to do it allowable under the Constitution?".
Space launch shouldn't be a monopoly anyway, and for decades, that's essentially what NASA was. Let's put the science part in a "United States Science Institute" that helps coordinate research between universities, foundations, and companies, and then let the military and private sector do rocket launches.
...why I pointed out that if these events were related then this makes it a lot more likely that this is a domestic terrorism incident and not islamic terrorists.
It looks like the "oil and gas" ministry was bombed. The Prime Minister was apparently targeted too. This could be anyone from Al Qaeda to some Earth First type of group. All the speculation is useless until someone actually comes up with some evidence and some suspects, or until there's a credible claim of credit for the attacks.
I'm all for smaller is better, but turning 50 government people to 50 contractors really doesn't make government smaller.
I don't want jobs simply turned over to contractors... I don't want any military duties turned over to contractors at all. My point, more directly would be "why is a Marine doing a job that a sailor should be doing"? Traditionally, the Navy provided whatever support Marines needed. But in today's environment, the Marines get their own programmers, cooks, accountants, etc, simply so they can be more "independent" from the Navy. But they were never supposed to be independent from the Navy. They're Marines, after all.
That kind of "He's got it so I want it too" attitude is a huge reason for that growth in government.
I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps.
Allow me to segue for just a moment, and bitch a little. The fact that you were a programmer in Marines is indicative of the larger problem of mega-growth in government. Why the hell did the Marines have programmers? Why do they still have guys slicing hams in a mess hall, or changing tires on an F/A-18? Why do they HAVE F/A-18's, when you come right down to it? The Marines are supposed to be a small, elite amphibious light infantry force. Marines should have two jobs, period: storming beaches and guarding ships. That's it. The Navy should be doing any other support tasks.
The fact that we have a Marine Corps that's larger than the entire British armed forces illustrates the problem well. All government entities... civilian and military alike... are constantly seeking to grow themselves to the contrary of any real needs, missions, or resources, and at the expense of rivals, if necessary. There's no justification for the Army to have ships (which they do... Air Force does too), or for the Marines to have C-130's and M1 tanks. I'm not just picking on the Marines here, I just think they're an obvious example of my argument: that not only is government too big, it's also crammed full of rivals that are duplicating each other for budget and prestige reasons. This is why we have over a dozen federal law enforcement agencies that are doing much of the same thing.
Look up an excellent essay in Proceedings magazine from 1956, by a man named Lt. Col. Robert Heinl called Special Trust and Confidence". One of his fears was that keeping standing military forces huge was in and of itself a detriment to those forces. I think history has since proven him right. I'd bet that big budget or no, if the government (civilian, military both) wasn't so freaking big, it'd be easier to deal with problems like integrating a unified IT strategy. Heinl was right, bigness really is a problem.
That is a good point that I think most European's don't realize: In Europe, the weather is much more constant than the US. We have hail, tornadoes, wild swings in temperature from winter to summer. The Pilgrims had balls moving here, the weather would suck in the US if not for a good roof and central heat and air.
In much of Europe, there is no need for air conditioning. All you have to do is look at Minnesota today, heat index of 117, to realize they wouldn't like it here without A/C.
The weather is constant, all right. A couple hours north of the Med, it's cold, cloudy, and pissing rain 2/3'rds of the year. You may not need air conditioners, but you do need heaters. They use energy too.
Yeah. XP has been shipping on new machines until very recently due to the fiasco that was Vista.
Your "age calculation" should start at when the product stopped shipping with new machines, not when it was first introduced.
I just put in some new Dell's with XP pro two months ago. There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't play well with Vista and 7 in the business world. I have a lot of machines doing "industrial" stuff... parking lot databases, flight information displays, common use airline terminals, access control stuff, etc. It all runs on either Windows 2000 Pro or XP pro. All of it. I'm pricing some new common use terminal equipment for my airport... stuff to be purchased about 3 months from now. It all runs on XP on brand new equipment. Like I said, the new OS model just doesn't play nice with a lot of stuff. One of our suppliers asked if we had any burning desire to upgrade our new parking lot servers to 7, We told them no, and they said "Good, because we're having a lot of problems trying to port our stuff to it".
I've been thinking that this might be an outstanding opportunity for the big industrial computing companies... SITA, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc, to start moving to a 'nix based OS.
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Why this person is still able to freely roam the streets without fear. someone betrays people, like this, and still is able to live a normal life. noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable.
There's nothing more pathetic than an Internet bad-ass.
Consider this:
Before the Republican party allied itself with the bible-thumpers...
The lack of awareness of history in that sentence is stunning.
The Republicans were "Bible Thumpers" from their very creation. The biggest motivation in their anti-slavery crusades was religious. Until the Democrats starting turning against the churches in the 1960's, every major American political party... Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans... had a huge, heapin' helping of the Bible in their platforms. Even when parties opposed each other, they often used Biblical citations in their party planks. Both the conservative and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century were largely motivated by religious concerns. The Temperence movement was religiously based. The progressive movement was religiously based.
"Bible Thumping" in politics is part and parcel of American history. It's been deeply intertwined in American politics since the nation came into being.
If you mean "solved" as in a combination of bust-ass costs, a snotty sense of entitlement, and a black hole in your national budgets, fine you solved it. Stay where it's solved, and we'll keep being backwards, thanks.
I personally blame Carly Fiorina for the travails of a once-proud company.
Good Lord, why?
I see people bitch about Fiorina all the time here, and most of it is unwarranted. She was pretty gruff with her underlings, and obviously wasn't much fun to work for (I guy I know that worked with HP at the time told me that there were literally celebrations in the halls when "Aunt Carly" resigned).
But give credit where credit is due. Much of the success Mark Hurd enjoyed while at HP was a direct result of decisions Fiorina made and didn't stick around long enough to take credit for, i.e. the purchase of Compaq. Everybody, including myself hated it when she did it, but after she was gone, suddenly, what a wise decision it was that HP made. Fiorina, who was the driving force behind the idea, gets no credit for her own brainchild. People just pretend it happend sponteneously or something, and that the merged companies just happened to fall in Mark Hurd's lap.
No, she's not pleasant to work for. Neither was Patton. But in hindsight, looking at the results, she got things done, at AT&T, Lucent, Agilent, and yes, HP. HP made money under Fiorina, and Mark Hurd made even more money, and he basically just carried out her business plan (leverage the larger merged PC business, get heavily into the services sector).
There were valid criticisms of the woman, some of them major... hell, I wouldn't want to work for her... but a lot of people spout crap about her when they really have no idea what they're talking about. Blame her for HP's current mess? She's been gone for years and left the company in good shape. How in the hell is HP's current woes her fault? "I blame Carly" has turned into a silly meme, joing the company of Microsoft conspiracy theories and "BSD is dead".
Unfortunately six of the plugins I rely on (yes, those plugins that are supposedly the #1 reason to use Firefox over less customizable browsers) don't yet even support Firefox 5. Everytime that "update Firefox" box comes up, I check, find six plugins outstanding, and back out of it.
Update too fast and you will leave users behind.
I used to encourage Firefox use in my shop... I gave my users the choice of IE and Firefox, and back when IE had that huge list of old unpatched holes, I told my users that I preferred FireFox if they were so inclined.
I've taken FF off of the approved list. The upgrades are coming too fast, and breaking too many things (mostly plugins, as the parent poster noted).
I hope so. Dark matter is the ugliest kludge to the standard model ever.
It's worse than the Plus upgrade for Windows 98.
I've long thought that the concept of dark matter was a manifestation of the inability of some scientists to admit "Hell, I don't know".
C) God created Man by throwing rocks at the Earth.
Well, we do call them "the Heavens". What if He did?
You might want to go read the actual presentation.
It starts out with an exploit called Aurora, which compromises AD.
Whoops.
So the questions is, if it's AD, are Macs using AD somehow more vulnerable than Windows boxes? Or is the threat equal and the article misrepresenting things?
Either way, is AD the real problem?
You mean all of the politicians that refused to cut spending and tax the rich....
Why? The problem is not the rich. As others have noted here, you could seize every dime from them and still get nowhere close to solving the problem.
The problem is two things. The military budget is the smaller problem. There's some room to cut there, especially in bloated weapons procurement, pay policies, and having troops stationed where we don't need them.
But by far the biggest budget problem is us. The sainted "middle class". That's where the big spending is. We like to have our tax refunds and our EIC credits too. We cry "get spending under control!" right before we cry "but don't touch MY benefits!" Americans are largely hypocritical about government spending.
The fact that anyone still trusts S&P and their ilk is illustrative of the fact that emotion rules this game. They've proven with math that they know no more than anyone else.
"All you need to know about rating agencies is that in May 2010 Moody’s still rated Greece triple-A." - Mark Steyn
See the FAA ATC below that says, yes, they are getting paid.
As for this part:
"the Republican senators who ran out of town on vacation rather than fund the agency"
Strange that this is what's drawing your ire when the Senate... which as been controlled by Democrats since 2007... hasn't submitted a budget in 2 years.
As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.
More than that, on a practical level, the reason Linux won't succeed on a wide scale is the same reason it took off in the first place: an abundance of choice.
The lifeblood of operating system success is in two parts. You need OEM's to install your system, but more important in the long run is that you need third parties writing apps and drivers for you. So the driver aspect is a part of a larger problem. OEM's and third parties want one standard to support. One desktop, one driver model, one update method, on a slow and steady schedule. Red Hat once had a chance to become the de facto Linux desktop standard, but they abandoned the market just as they were beginning to dominate it.
Google is doing what other Linux vendors couldn't do, by customizing Linux to their liking and establishing a single standard for drivers, updates, and writing apps. And now we have Android. We may well have a desktop version of this OS soon.
Just as Apple made BSD a widespread desktop success by imposing its own standards and giving it a completely different branding, so might Linux one day be widespread on the desktop, but under the direction of Google, not Linus Torvalds.
and most exploration is already done....
If geological experts are correct, there is likely more oil yet to be discovered than the entire existing stocks. We may well be at "peak oil" in the sense that politics may prevent us from further exploration, but there is almost certainly huge reserves of petroleum both in ocean areas and under the Arctic Circle, not to mention areas of Russian control that have never been explored.
Too much crap, from favoritism to improper relationships, could originate between teachers and students on facebook.
A cardinal rule in any book of leadership is that the leader and the men aren't buddies. They can be friend-ly, but not friends. In the military it's called fraternizing, and is strictly verboten. It's a pretty good, time tested rule. There's a big difference between being one of the guys and being their leader. And teaching is a form of leadership. It's not exactly like other authority/subordinate roles, but there are indeed clear lines that should be drawn. It is undoubtedly harder to be an effective teacher if you're one of the kids. There has to be the requisite respect for superior authority there (and a teacher, by definition, is an authority on on the knowledge being taught).
I don't question the policy so much as how it's being enacted. A state law? Simply making it state education department policy should be sufficient.
Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, et. al. are proven assets.
Crowe maybe, but some people think he's already beyond his sell-by date. And Jackman? I like him, but name one hit he's carried as the leading star? He was the big attraction in the first X-Men movie, so they gave him a Wolverine movie. Didn't do to well? Swordfish? Mediocre sales. Australia? Nobody outside of Australia went to see it. He's been in a number of underperforming romantic flicks. He's yet to carry an action movie all on his own. Ford and Craig have. I like Jackman better than either, but this is the Hollywood calculus.
CmdrTaco: Truthout.org? Seriously?
This is your source? The people that "scooped" the "Karl Rove has been indicted" story? And they never retracted it, even when it became apparent that there wasn't even a scintilla of fact to it?
And from the story you linked:
"That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory."
This is demonstrably false. Bush led in pre-election day polls in Ohio, as other posters have noted here. My link... which actually has verifiable evidence... shows that Bush led Kerry in close to a dozen major polls the week leading up to the election, and that the Ohio results near-exactly matched those poll averages.
You have, whether deliberately or not, I'm not sure, promoted a conspiracy theory.
Truthout? Is Slashdot's credibility worth that little to you?
We would not be having this discussion if things were booming. Back in 2000, you could get a job if you could spell HTML. The reason M is the B is that degrees for many/most jobs serves as a WAY TO CUT DOWN THE PILE FOR HR. Nothing more, nothing less.
In general, bachelor's degree's are now the base certification for getting employed. And I think this was inevitable when we decided that we should send everyone to college. It was a sure thing that a bachelors would be cheapened that way. A bachelors is the new high school diploma, and high school diplomas are now worthless outside of being just another requirement for entry into college.
What's funny is that skilled blue collar workers... plumbers, air conditioning repairmen, construction equipment operators, etc... are making more money than the average office drone with a bachelors. Not only are they making more money, they skipped the whole college debt pitfall, so their real purchasing power is even greater than the immediate income disparity.
Here's an idea: why not do that AFTER commercial interests have the technology to do what NASA does now, rather than just having religious faith in corporations to do everything that government institutions have accomplished?
No? Your dogma is showing.
Where do the rockets that USAF and NASA use come from?
Private companies. Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Did you think there was a government factory building these, with government employees using raw materials from government mines?
Launch technology comes from the private sector.
So... your dogma is showing.
Oh, except NASA, which is a vitally important public service that can't be replicated in the private sector.
How is NASA "vitally important"? We could close NASA tomorrow, and still could launch all of our rockets at USAF facilities such as Vandenberg AFB. The only thing NASA gave us that the Air Force couldn't do was Space Shuttle facilities, and we've retired that program anyway.
I'm all for retiring NASA... and all of our Cold War military, intelligence, and technology institutions born from it... and starting over with an eye on future needs. We'll need an Army and Navy of some kind (with air capabilities), but everything else should be put to this question: "What do we need, and what's the best way to do it allowable under the Constitution?".
Space launch shouldn't be a monopoly anyway, and for decades, that's essentially what NASA was. Let's put the science part in a "United States Science Institute" that helps coordinate research between universities, foundations, and companies, and then let the military and private sector do rocket launches.
At the time of this positing no one has claimed responsibility for the attack. It could just as easily be another Timothy McVeigh.
It's irresponsible to label the bombing with "terror" or "attack" until the purpose is known
Uh, if it's a car bomb... and that's been confirmed... then yeah, it's a terrorist attack of some kind.
It looks like the "oil and gas" ministry was bombed. The Prime Minister was apparently targeted too. This could be anyone from Al Qaeda to some Earth First type of group. All the speculation is useless until someone actually comes up with some evidence and some suspects, or until there's a credible claim of credit for the attacks.
I'm all for smaller is better, but turning 50 government people to 50 contractors really doesn't make government smaller.
I don't want jobs simply turned over to contractors... I don't want any military duties turned over to contractors at all. My point, more directly would be "why is a Marine doing a job that a sailor should be doing"? Traditionally, the Navy provided whatever support Marines needed. But in today's environment, the Marines get their own programmers, cooks, accountants, etc, simply so they can be more "independent" from the Navy. But they were never supposed to be independent from the Navy. They're Marines, after all.
That kind of "He's got it so I want it too" attitude is a huge reason for that growth in government.
I spent my time under Clinton and Bush Jr as a 4067. That's a Computer Programmer in the Marine Corps.
Allow me to segue for just a moment, and bitch a little. The fact that you were a programmer in Marines is indicative of the larger problem of mega-growth in government. Why the hell did the Marines have programmers? Why do they still have guys slicing hams in a mess hall, or changing tires on an F/A-18? Why do they HAVE F/A-18's, when you come right down to it? The Marines are supposed to be a small, elite amphibious light infantry force. Marines should have two jobs, period: storming beaches and guarding ships. That's it. The Navy should be doing any other support tasks.
The fact that we have a Marine Corps that's larger than the entire British armed forces illustrates the problem well. All government entities... civilian and military alike... are constantly seeking to grow themselves to the contrary of any real needs, missions, or resources, and at the expense of rivals, if necessary. There's no justification for the Army to have ships (which they do... Air Force does too), or for the Marines to have C-130's and M1 tanks. I'm not just picking on the Marines here, I just think they're an obvious example of my argument: that not only is government too big, it's also crammed full of rivals that are duplicating each other for budget and prestige reasons. This is why we have over a dozen federal law enforcement agencies that are doing much of the same thing.
Look up an excellent essay in Proceedings magazine from 1956, by a man named Lt. Col. Robert Heinl called Special Trust and Confidence". One of his fears was that keeping standing military forces huge was in and of itself a detriment to those forces. I think history has since proven him right. I'd bet that big budget or no, if the government (civilian, military both) wasn't so freaking big, it'd be easier to deal with problems like integrating a unified IT strategy. Heinl was right, bigness really is a problem.
That is a good point that I think most European's don't realize: In Europe, the weather is much more constant than the US. We have hail, tornadoes, wild swings in temperature from winter to summer. The Pilgrims had balls moving here, the weather would suck in the US if not for a good roof and central heat and air.
In much of Europe, there is no need for air conditioning. All you have to do is look at Minnesota today, heat index of 117, to realize they wouldn't like it here without A/C.
The weather is constant, all right. A couple hours north of the Med, it's cold, cloudy, and pissing rain 2/3'rds of the year. You may not need air conditioners, but you do need heaters. They use energy too.
It's not 10 years old if it was sold last year.
Yeah. XP has been shipping on new machines until very recently due to the fiasco that was Vista.
Your "age calculation" should start at when the product stopped shipping with new machines, not when it was first introduced.
I just put in some new Dell's with XP pro two months ago. There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't play well with Vista and 7 in the business world. I have a lot of machines doing "industrial" stuff... parking lot databases, flight information displays, common use airline terminals, access control stuff, etc. It all runs on either Windows 2000 Pro or XP pro. All of it. I'm pricing some new common use terminal equipment for my airport... stuff to be purchased about 3 months from now. It all runs on XP on brand new equipment. Like I said, the new OS model just doesn't play nice with a lot of stuff. One of our suppliers asked if we had any burning desire to upgrade our new parking lot servers to 7, We told them no, and they said "Good, because we're having a lot of problems trying to port our stuff to it".
I've been thinking that this might be an outstanding opportunity for the big industrial computing companies... SITA, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc, to start moving to a 'nix based OS.