The goal of venture capitilists (as you say) is to make money. However, it is not nececesarily to take a company public. Every quality VC firm has a stable of private companies that serve as dependable cash producers. Once a company is public, the worth of the company to shareholders is in the stock value. This represents risk to the VC portfolio, as the stock price is not necceasrily a rational measure of business success. As a private company, the value of the company to the share holder is primarily through the dividends the shares pay.. which is much less risky as it solely depends on the performance of the company.
A common financial strategy for VC's to employ is to keep a company like Google (assuming that is particularly profitable)private, as a hedge against volatility in the market.
I've just been hired, at a solid liveable wage. As a matter of fact I had my pick of 3 different offers (here in Dallas)... Hell I don't even hold a bachelors degree, but I do have solid advanced skills in several key areas.
Am I bragging? Not really.. I'm simply pointing out that there ARE jobs out there, and apparently certain skillsets still remain difficult to fill.
For the love of GOD how does this get rated as 'Insightful'.
In order to be illegal under the DMCA the devices PRIMARY USE must be to circumvent copy protection. No one outside of the RIA and MPAA would argue that a quantum machine was anything remotely close to that.
The effect of Quantum machines in terms of military intellligence (and the populaces right to own them) will surely be debated, but there is nothing in the DMCA that can be used to prevent the spread of Quantum machines.
Also, get your terminology straight. You generally create a single model and use some kind of animation system to actually animate the model. So to achieve animation it is not a series of models, but a manipulation of 1 model.
The process of creating cross-platform models is absolutely trivial. After all a model is a model , no matter which platform it runs on. What you MEANT to say was creating a 3d presentation (be it a game or otherwise) to run on multiple platforms is likely to much to ask for a FREE site. That's only partially true (as posters here have all but made perfectly clear). There is nothing trivial about working in 3d, but cross platform 3d really IS by and large a solved problem.
Lets say your run a business cleaning up crime scenes (Such business really do exist). You find out, hours before, that someone is going to walk into a mall and just open fire. Do you A) Tell your friends not to go to the mall, and make sure that you just happen to be around before the massacre occurs? or B) do you call the police?
Go with option A and you are an accessory to the crime and you go to jail. Even IF it was good for business.
The same thing occured here. If in fact symantec KNEW about the transimission of a crime before it occured, then they most likely broke the law by not contacting the proper authorities. Would it have prevented Slammer? Nah.. but it doesn't change the fact that YES they are completely required to share this information. The issue of morality is irrelevant, this is an issue of law.
The federal law says that you must be paid hourly (it makes a distinction between salaried and hourly wages). The $27.63 applies only to employees paid on an hourly basis..
http://www.chicagolegalnet.com/FairLabor.htm
Explains it better than I can. (There is a section on computer professional exemptions).
Don't forget that the economy in India isn't going to be exactlty Stagnate. As their incomes rise (from Western money) their salaries will slowly rise to match their western counterparts. This is nothing like the Blue collar work that was outsourced to other countries. That required no education.. this type of work requires skill and will eventually build a strong economy in India....
No, they should blame Microsoft. Like that article posted earlier about Slammer, the idea of blaming the victim for the crime is a little skewed. Microsoft needs to engineer better products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what your suggesting is that we should blame the people who made the street that the rape occured on as opposed to blaming the rapist (keeping with the analogy)?
Microsoft is not the criminal in this case, Xupiter is.
While it is blatently obvious with hindsight that frames can be used in this manner, some Googling around will show that a huge amount of web design material at the time references a document called "Ameritech Web Page User Interface Standards and Design Guidelines" by Detweiler, M.C. and Omanson, R.C. (1996), on the matter of creating a consistent user interface by using frames. If that doesn't ring a bell, Ameritech was the original holder of the patent, and recently acquired by SBC.
So what your telling me is, this company published a paper ENCOURAGING people to use their patented design scheme, so that a few years later they could go out and enforce the patent on everyone who read their paper? Fascinating... sick, but fascinating.
Or someone who doesn't like censorship.. Germany is pretty bad with outright censorship on a number of things.. we've seen many of them on Slashdot. I noticed a LOT of them while I lived over there...
Ya, your absolutely right. A simple history lesson confirms it. The end of WWI (probably the worst war in history in terms of pure suffering of its combatants) was greeted with a lot of optimism. People felt like the horrific sights of that war would effectively discourage anyone from ever doing it again. It was, as the world liked to call it 'the war to end all wars' after all.
Certain countries in Europe (primarily) really bought into that concept. While they built some defenses (the Maginot line in France for example), they centered their foreign policy on completely diplomatic solutions. This made it very easy for Hitler to not only come to power, but effectively take over Europe as the governments of that day favored appeasement over any use of force.
That worked out well...
The same applies today. While we should always look for diplomatic solutions to our problems, we should never abandon force at all costs. In some cases it's simply neccesary.
***HOT POLITICAL OPINION***
I feel the need to attach a disclaimer to this. Just because we have the force, doesn't mean we should use it. History also teaches us quite a bit about the folly of that.. Vietnam, Korean War, Waterloo, and beyond. With the war hawk we have for a president right now we are moving into absolutely terribly waters. Bush quite simply has no business commanding the most sophisticated and powerful army in the world... He doesn't understand the human cost, not to mention Americas political standing in the rest of the world. In short, I support a military and recognize the need for it. The thing is, I only support actually USING it for clearly justifiable means. The cynic in me beleives that Bush is simply trying to hedge his political position (distract people from the fact that we haven't actually caught much in the way of actual terror LEADERS) instead of any real belief in Iraqs ability to inflict harm on anyone. That my friends is scary.
It is not a matter of Jurisdiction, but different laws. The constitution states(held up by the first supreme court) that Federal law is primary over all laws passed by the states. The fundamental result of this is that you can have one and only one law governing an action (I forget the fancy latin principle for this).
In practice this means that you can not be tried for the same crime at different levels of jurisdiction, because only one jurisdiction has the guiding law in the first place. What generally happens is that you are tried for DIFFERENT crimes on the two levels.
The Rodney King incident is a great example of this. The first charge against the police officers involved was done at the state level, in a state court. I beleive it was some kind of assault charge, but I really don't remember. When they where aquitted of those charges, the feds got involved and brought SEPERATE charges for DIFFERENT crimes (even though they occured during the same incident). At the federal level, I beleive that it was some kind of civil rights charge.
The point being, you can't be charged in two jurisdictions for the same crime, you either violated one and only one law for that particular crime. Anytime you see someone charged by both the state and the federal levels it is always because different charges are being brought on each level.
Its important to note that the state can do the same thing. They can try you for one crime, and failing that bring up new charges related to the same action (although a lot of legal rules apply to that, and it is pretty rarely done).
Your $2 figure is ridiculous. The type of RAM that goes into your standard PDA is NOT the same as what goes into your PC. While the basic circuitry is the same, the style of RAM in a PDA is graded to run at much lower voltage than your PC.
As a consequence of that it is MUCH mroe expensive.
A better reason for the lower memory amounts is battery life. More RAM requires more drain on the battery.. it's pretty simple if you think about it. RAM requires a near constant flow of electricty, whether the device is powered on or not. The more RAM you have (requiring more electricity) the bigger the drain on the battery.
Java, technically,has had the capibility to serve as the runtime for many different languages since its inception. There are compilers for several different languages that all compile to "Java the Platform" and run just fine on it.
Java applets are in widespread distribution on almost every corporate network I've seen.
AWT is basically deprecated (as the primary GUI system, parts of it are integrated into Swing), and Swing is not 'ugly.' The native look and feel is a bit distateful to a lot of people, but all of my Swing applications look suspiciously like the platform that they run on... So if the default MS Windows look is 'ugly', then yes Swing on Windows is ugly. If the default Aqua look is 'ugly', the same applies.
You seem to be caught in a circa '97 approach to Java on the network. Applets are not about animating icons or handling the form work that Javascript does well. They are about delivering complex programs that do complex things above and beyond what Javascript can do. In many ways they are very complimentary technologies. There is a definite place for Java on the web (and on the Desktop for that matter)... For example, we've managed to support many platforms by our choice of going with a Swing Java desktop application as support for our Palm apps... With minimal effort.
You could read up on economics while you work at Burger King, as a matter of fact I would reccomend it. While it sounds cruel, 'developed' nations actually benefit from this kind of displacement in many ways. Experience has shown that 'shipping jobs overseas' actually CREATES more jobs here at home. It allows the developed nations to develop a competitive advantage in areas that require the education and high-skill manpower that a nation like the U.S. has.
Software development isn't an incredibly difficult skill.. in particular the types of software development that is being shipped overseas. I have made it a strong point to become an expert in system architecture and design, and that has kept me very comfortably employed no matter the economic conditions. In economic terms, I have given myself a strong competitive advantage over low-skill programmers by becoming an expert in a high-skill area of software engineering.
It's time that we all realize that programming is not difficult. People are willing to work for $6 an hour to do it simply because a LOT of people have learned how to do it well. Yet their remain certain parts of the development process that are extremely difficult to master. Types of projects that require expertise above and beyond anything the low-skill 'labor programmer' can do. If you have those skills, then you will have no trouble finding gainful employment no matter what the economic conditions are.
When you hear about some poor security guy that hands out his name/password to a fake employee, or a end-user that wilfully installs back-door software onto their machine you generally think 'I hope they can find a new job.' The biggest surprise to me is that very often people who violate these basic security principles are NOT held accountable for what they do.
During my time at one of the nations larger companies I witnessed several different instances of employees serving as giant security holes. It was a big problem for the company. Instead of training and then actually holding employees accountable for their actions, more often than not the employees simply went on after the incident so they could do it again later.
Companies need to invest time and money in training employees (EVERY employee with access to sensitive systems) and then developing systems by which employees can be held accountable for any security holes they create.
Yet all of this is being muttered against the backdrop of the most conservative government we've seen in MANY MANY years... not just at the national level, but at all levels of government. Go figure..
Re:Negative review, but not (intentional) flamebai
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 2
Ok, you just really quit on the movie didn't you?
I think that the Wormtounge/Saruman control thing was played pretty well. It's not terribly beleivable in visual form for the king to be kept in a state of complacency by Wormtongue. The control of Theoden is still channeled through Wormtongue... but Jackson pretty clervely turned the simpel removal of Wormtongue into the chance for Gandalf to confront (And establish dominance over) Saruman. I'm hoping we'll see this plot-line sewn up in the beginning of ROTK.
I do agree with the Faramir thing. I'm not sure what happened there.
Shelob is definitely set-up for the third book, didn't you pay attention to Smeagol at the end of the movie?
I actually like Gimli. He seems to represent what I pictured the dwarfs have. To you it's bumbling comic relief, but really it's an admirable inner sense of confidence. He makes jokes and acts that way because that's exactly how the dwarves act. Tolkein talks at length about how the elves view them as disgusting and ill-mannered, and in reverse how the dwarves feel little need for the outside world. Gimli acts like a truly courageous person who can maintain his sense of humour in the darkest hours. That's one of the things that he really brings to the table. It's brash, it's in your face, but to me it works.
The elven alliance thing I could have done without.
Aragorn falling off a cliff I could have done without
Keeping the women and children in Helms deep was brilliant. It conveyed once and for all what the battle at Helms deep meant. It would make no sense in the book, that kind of raw emotion is difficult to come by in writing. In the movie, if the orcs get by the defenders the people are rohan are literally finished THAT NIGHT. If the orcs sweep through helms deep in the book, they simply finish the women and children off later. That's the magic behind this, by having everyone in Helms Deep it is not simply a battle for some land.. it is a battle for the very existence of these people and their families.
I don't think Pippin tricked the ents. I think it was really Pippins intention to sneak in and confront Saruman. He had no idea that Saruman was tearing down trees... This scene did a great job of portraying the ents for what they where. They where slow to anger...and it was the SIGHT of those trees that really convinced them that they where not exempt from the trials of the world. Tolkein explained this in his writing, Jackson demonstrated it with this scene. Great stuff.
As for the rest, I'm just not sure if we'll see the confrontation between Saruman and Gandalf.. I sure hope so.
In short, to say that your wife left in tears is dissapointing. I think this book does a good job of turning a difficult piece of middle-story into a compelling movie. The plot-additions/subtractions where mostly very well thought out with the exception of the 2 or 3 noted above. I never once contemplated leaving.. From beginning to end it still felt like Tolkein and still conveyed the same story and emotion as the Two Towers in words.. and that's the ultimate complement. Talking about the plot changes is kind of fun, and debating their worth is even funner. But in the end this was a very powerful movie, and Jackson managed to relay the story very well. I commend him for that... most of these points are very small to the overall story and I'm afraid that you may have missed the forest for the trees (or the ents:)
I don't think that's Anduril in this movie. I think that they are going to give the reforging as a sort of symbol for Aragorn finally accepting his role as a uniter and leader of men.. truly buying into it. I never saw anything in the movie that hinted that it was Anduril at all.
Of course you would be much poorer. Captilism works because it is the only economic system that suceeds at creating and sustaining wealth. You have to manage money because it allows society to choose what it values. Society values education, we throw a lot of money at it. I would argue that the biggest problem with education is that it is TO socialist. I don't school vouchers (I don't want MY tax dollars funding religious indoctrination), but I do like the idea of performance based rewards for administrators in our schools. We need some method of making our schools accountable the same way that a business is accountable to its consumers.
The answer is not more socialism, but less. Socialism is an ineffective, wealth robbing system. While it sure feels good to talk about in principle, in practice it simply can not create the wealth needed to sustain a complex and thriving economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet that 95% of titles have been turned into Warez.
Every project I've ever worked on (including a internal customer data tool) have shown up on Warez sites.. It's insane.
The goal of venture capitilists (as you say) is to make money. However, it is not nececesarily to take a company public. Every quality VC firm has a stable of private companies that serve as dependable cash producers. Once a company is public, the worth of the company to shareholders is in the stock value. This represents risk to the VC portfolio, as the stock price is not necceasrily a rational measure of business success. As a private company, the value of the company to the share holder is primarily through the dividends the shares pay.. which is much less risky as it solely depends on the performance of the company.
A common financial strategy for VC's to employ is to keep a company like Google (assuming that is particularly profitable)private, as a hedge against volatility in the market.
I've just been hired, at a solid liveable wage. As a matter of fact I had my pick of 3 different offers (here in Dallas)... Hell I don't even hold a bachelors degree, but I do have solid advanced skills in several key areas.
Am I bragging? Not really.. I'm simply pointing out that there ARE jobs out there, and apparently certain skillsets still remain difficult to fill.
Not to sound, you know.. anti-Slashdot.. But has anyone ever produced any kind of PROOF that this is the case?
Maybe I'm not paranoid, but I just don't think our government is nearly as concerned about our daily lives as most people seem to think.
For the love of GOD how does this get rated as 'Insightful'.
In order to be illegal under the DMCA the devices PRIMARY USE must be to circumvent copy protection. No one outside of the RIA and MPAA would argue that a quantum machine was anything remotely close to that.
The effect of Quantum machines in terms of military intellligence (and the populaces right to own them) will surely be debated, but there is nothing in the DMCA that can be used to prevent the spread of Quantum machines.
I guess you've never heard of Java...
Also, get your terminology straight. You generally create a single model and use some kind of animation system to actually animate the model. So to achieve animation it is not a series of models, but a manipulation of 1 model.
The process of creating cross-platform models is absolutely trivial. After all a model is a model , no matter which platform it runs on. What you MEANT to say was creating a 3d presentation (be it a game or otherwise) to run on multiple platforms is likely to much to ask for a FREE site. That's only partially true (as posters here have all but made perfectly clear). There is nothing trivial about working in 3d, but cross platform 3d really IS by and large a solved problem.
Let me us an extreme example..
Lets say your run a business cleaning up crime scenes (Such business really do exist). You find out, hours before, that someone is going to walk into a mall and just open fire. Do you A) Tell your friends not to go to the mall, and make sure that you just happen to be around before the massacre occurs? or B) do you call the police?
Go with option A and you are an accessory to the crime and you go to jail. Even IF it was good for business.
The same thing occured here. If in fact symantec KNEW about the transimission of a crime before it occured, then they most likely broke the law by not contacting the proper authorities. Would it have prevented Slammer? Nah.. but it doesn't change the fact that YES they are completely required to share this information. The issue of morality is irrelevant, this is an issue of law.
Your wrong...
The federal law says that you must be paid hourly (it makes a distinction between salaried and hourly wages). The $27.63 applies only to employees paid on an hourly basis..
http://www.chicagolegalnet.com/FairLabor.htm
Explains it better than I can. (There is a section on computer professional exemptions).
Don't forget that the economy in India isn't going to be exactlty Stagnate. As their incomes rise (from Western money) their salaries will slowly rise to match their western counterparts. This is nothing like the Blue collar work that was outsourced to other countries. That required no education.. this type of work requires skill and will eventually build a strong economy in India....
Your statement just isn't very well thought out.
No, they should blame Microsoft. Like that article posted earlier about Slammer, the idea of blaming the victim for the crime is a little skewed. Microsoft needs to engineer better products.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what your suggesting is that we should blame the people who made the street that the rape occured on as opposed to blaming the rapist (keeping with the analogy)?
Microsoft is not the criminal in this case, Xupiter is.
So what your telling me is, this company published a paper ENCOURAGING people to use their patented design scheme, so that a few years later they could go out and enforce the patent on everyone who read their paper? Fascinating... sick, but fascinating.
Or someone who doesn't like censorship.. Germany is pretty bad with outright censorship on a number of things.. we've seen many of them on Slashdot. I noticed a LOT of them while I lived over there...
Everyone has their shortcomings...
Ya, your absolutely right. A simple history lesson confirms it. The end of WWI (probably the worst war in history in terms of pure suffering of its combatants) was greeted with a lot of optimism. People felt like the horrific sights of that war would effectively discourage anyone from ever doing it again. It was, as the world liked to call it 'the war to end all wars' after all.
Certain countries in Europe (primarily) really bought into that concept. While they built some defenses (the Maginot line in France for example), they centered their foreign policy on completely diplomatic solutions. This made it very easy for Hitler to not only come to power, but effectively take over Europe as the governments of that day favored appeasement over any use of force.
That worked out well...
The same applies today. While we should always look for diplomatic solutions to our problems, we should never abandon force at all costs. In some cases it's simply neccesary.
***HOT POLITICAL OPINION***
I feel the need to attach a disclaimer to this. Just because we have the force, doesn't mean we should use it. History also teaches us quite a bit about the folly of that.. Vietnam, Korean War, Waterloo, and beyond. With the war hawk we have for a president right now we are moving into absolutely terribly waters. Bush quite simply has no business commanding the most sophisticated and powerful army in the world... He doesn't understand the human cost, not to mention Americas political standing in the rest of the world. In short, I support a military and recognize the need for it. The thing is, I only support actually USING it for clearly justifiable means. The cynic in me beleives that Bush is simply trying to hedge his political position (distract people from the fact that we haven't actually caught much in the way of actual terror LEADERS) instead of any real belief in Iraqs ability to inflict harm on anyone. That my friends is scary.
One word : Adoption.
Think about it.
Your result is correct, but your cause isn't.
It is not a matter of Jurisdiction, but different laws. The constitution states(held up by the first supreme court) that Federal law is primary over all laws passed by the states. The fundamental result of this is that you can have one and only one law governing an action (I forget the fancy latin principle for this).
In practice this means that you can not be tried for the same crime at different levels of jurisdiction, because only one jurisdiction has the guiding law in the first place. What generally happens is that you are tried for DIFFERENT crimes on the two levels.
The Rodney King incident is a great example of this. The first charge against the police officers involved was done at the state level, in a state court. I beleive it was some kind of assault charge, but I really don't remember. When they where aquitted of those charges, the feds got involved and brought SEPERATE charges for DIFFERENT crimes (even though they occured during the same incident). At the federal level, I beleive that it was some kind of civil rights charge.
The point being, you can't be charged in two jurisdictions for the same crime, you either violated one and only one law for that particular crime. Anytime you see someone charged by both the state and the federal levels it is always because different charges are being brought on each level.
Its important to note that the state can do the same thing. They can try you for one crime, and failing that bring up new charges related to the same action (although a lot of legal rules apply to that, and it is pretty rarely done).
Ok troll, I'll bite.
Your $2 figure is ridiculous. The type of RAM that goes into your standard PDA is NOT the same as what goes into your PC. While the basic circuitry is the same, the style of RAM in a PDA is graded to run at much lower voltage than your PC.
As a consequence of that it is MUCH mroe expensive.
A better reason for the lower memory amounts is battery life. More RAM requires more drain on the battery.. it's pretty simple if you think about it. RAM requires a near constant flow of electricty, whether the device is powered on or not. The more RAM you have (requiring more electricity) the bigger the drain on the battery.
Java, technically,has had the capibility to serve as the runtime for many different languages since its inception. There are compilers for several different languages that all compile to "Java the Platform" and run just fine on it.
Java applets are in widespread distribution on almost every corporate network I've seen.
AWT is basically deprecated (as the primary GUI system, parts of it are integrated into Swing), and Swing is not 'ugly.' The native look and feel is a bit distateful to a lot of people, but all of my Swing applications look suspiciously like the platform that they run on... So if the default MS Windows look is 'ugly', then yes Swing on Windows is ugly. If the default Aqua look is 'ugly', the same applies.
You seem to be caught in a circa '97 approach to Java on the network. Applets are not about animating icons or handling the form work that Javascript does well. They are about delivering complex programs that do complex things above and beyond what Javascript can do. In many ways they are very complimentary technologies. There is a definite place for Java on the web (and on the Desktop for that matter)... For example, we've managed to support many platforms by our choice of going with a Swing Java desktop application as support for our Palm apps... With minimal effort.
Touching... really.
You could read up on economics while you work at Burger King, as a matter of fact I would reccomend it. While it sounds cruel, 'developed' nations actually benefit from this kind of displacement in many ways. Experience has shown that 'shipping jobs overseas' actually CREATES more jobs here at home. It allows the developed nations to develop a competitive advantage in areas that require the education and high-skill manpower that a nation like the U.S. has.
Software development isn't an incredibly difficult skill.. in particular the types of software development that is being shipped overseas. I have made it a strong point to become an expert in system architecture and design, and that has kept me very comfortably employed no matter the economic conditions. In economic terms, I have given myself a strong competitive advantage over low-skill programmers by becoming an expert in a high-skill area of software engineering.
It's time that we all realize that programming is not difficult. People are willing to work for $6 an hour to do it simply because a LOT of people have learned how to do it well. Yet their remain certain parts of the development process that are extremely difficult to master. Types of projects that require expertise above and beyond anything the low-skill 'labor programmer' can do. If you have those skills, then you will have no trouble finding gainful employment no matter what the economic conditions are.
When you hear about some poor security guy that hands out his name/password to a fake employee, or a end-user that wilfully installs back-door software onto their machine you generally think 'I hope they can find a new job.' The biggest surprise to me is that very often people who violate these basic security principles are NOT held accountable for what they do.
During my time at one of the nations larger companies I witnessed several different instances of employees serving as giant security holes. It was a big problem for the company. Instead of training and then actually holding employees accountable for their actions, more often than not the employees simply went on after the incident so they could do it again later.
Companies need to invest time and money in training employees (EVERY employee with access to sensitive systems) and then developing systems by which employees can be held accountable for any security holes they create.
Yet all of this is being muttered against the backdrop of the most conservative government we've seen in MANY MANY years... not just at the national level, but at all levels of government. Go figure..
Ok, you just really quit on the movie didn't you?
I think that the Wormtounge/Saruman control thing was played pretty well. It's not terribly beleivable in visual form for the king to be kept in a state of complacency by Wormtongue. The control of Theoden is still channeled through Wormtongue... but Jackson pretty clervely turned the simpel removal of Wormtongue into the chance for Gandalf to confront (And establish dominance over) Saruman. I'm hoping we'll see this plot-line sewn up in the beginning of ROTK.
I do agree with the Faramir thing. I'm not sure what happened there.
Shelob is definitely set-up for the third book, didn't you pay attention to Smeagol at the end of the movie?
I actually like Gimli. He seems to represent what I pictured the dwarfs have. To you it's bumbling comic relief, but really it's an admirable inner sense of confidence. He makes jokes and acts that way because that's exactly how the dwarves act. Tolkein talks at length about how the elves view them as disgusting and ill-mannered, and in reverse how the dwarves feel little need for the outside world. Gimli acts like a truly courageous person who can maintain his sense of humour in the darkest hours. That's one of the things that he really brings to the table. It's brash, it's in your face, but to me it works.
The elven alliance thing I could have done without.
Aragorn falling off a cliff I could have done without
Keeping the women and children in Helms deep was brilliant. It conveyed once and for all what the battle at Helms deep meant. It would make no sense in the book, that kind of raw emotion is difficult to come by in writing. In the movie, if the orcs get by the defenders the people are rohan are literally finished THAT NIGHT. If the orcs sweep through helms deep in the book, they simply finish the women and children off later. That's the magic behind this, by having everyone in Helms Deep it is not simply a battle for some land.. it is a battle for the very existence of these people and their families.
I don't think Pippin tricked the ents. I think it was really Pippins intention to sneak in and confront Saruman. He had no idea that Saruman was tearing down trees... This scene did a great job of portraying the ents for what they where. They where slow to anger...and it was the SIGHT of those trees that really convinced them that they where not exempt from the trials of the world. Tolkein explained this in his writing, Jackson demonstrated it with this scene. Great stuff.
As for the rest, I'm just not sure if we'll see the confrontation between Saruman and Gandalf.. I sure hope so.
In short, to say that your wife left in tears is dissapointing. I think this book does a good job of turning a difficult piece of middle-story into a compelling movie. The plot-additions/subtractions where mostly very well thought out with the exception of the 2 or 3 noted above. I never once contemplated leaving.. From beginning to end it still felt like Tolkein and still conveyed the same story and emotion as the Two Towers in words.. and that's the ultimate complement. Talking about the plot changes is kind of fun, and debating their worth is even funner. But in the end this was a very powerful movie, and Jackson managed to relay the story very well. I commend him for that... most of these points are very small to the overall story and I'm afraid that you may have missed the forest for the trees (or the ents:)
I don't think that's Anduril in this movie. I think that they are going to give the reforging as a sort of symbol for Aragorn finally accepting his role as a uniter and leader of men.. truly buying into it. I never saw anything in the movie that hinted that it was Anduril at all.
Of course you would be much poorer. Captilism works because it is the only economic system that suceeds at creating and sustaining wealth. You have to manage money because it allows society to choose what it values. Society values education, we throw a lot of money at it. I would argue that the biggest problem with education is that it is TO socialist. I don't school vouchers (I don't want MY tax dollars funding religious indoctrination), but I do like the idea of performance based rewards for administrators in our schools. We need some method of making our schools accountable the same way that a business is accountable to its consumers.
The answer is not more socialism, but less. Socialism is an ineffective, wealth robbing system. While it sure feels good to talk about in principle, in practice it simply can not create the wealth needed to sustain a complex and thriving economy.
He doesn't have a degree, but he certainly has an education. 15 years worth. Don't confuse the two.