Not meaning to be fussy, but in WW2, Germany *declared* war on the US, and Japan attacked the US. To split hairs, it was European and Asian fascists that got the US into war, not American liberals.
I think this is to some extent a matter of competence:
Bush is seen by the world as having unilaterally invaded Iraq is search of (as it turns out) non-existant weopons of mass destruction. The rest of the world is in no particular hurry to bail the Bush administation out - and some governments that supported the war (i.e. Spain) have been replaced.
There cannot be fair and reasonable elections in Iraq without security, and the belief of the Iraqi people that their view counts. Bush, I believe, is incabable of providing security, and security cannot, in all probability, be provided by the US.
In Bosnia, the UN High Commission has done a good job (relatively) in pulling together that damaged country. Bush has upset too many, both in Iraq and in the (admittedly often un-elected) International Community, to heal the wounds in Iraq and ensure fair elections, and a sustainable transfer of powert.
Whatever Kerry's speeches in the past, he will be favourably recieved in Ankara, Beijing, Paris, and London. Whether he can convince these countries to help with the policing of Iraq is another matter; but Bush - who used reconstruction contracts to thank friends, not build bridges - cannot, an all probability, rescue Iraq without terrible loss of America life.
That is why - for Iraq and for the US - I support Kerry.
I'm British. I would vote for Kerry in a heartbeat. I am no Bush fan, but supported the Iraq war (although the administration's lack of planning for what might happen afterwards has depressed me, and I am increasingly turning against it.)
But.
But.
Cynicism has gone too far. Do people honestly believe George W is so stupid, that he'd sacrifice a few million bucks to be damned by history?
If Bush still has an economic interest in the Carlyle Group, it will come out. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day someone will talk. (As Nixon found out, conspiricies are tough to maintain.) If Bush is solely in the war for the profit of hist friends, then history will judge him poorly.
While I do not consider "W" to be the most intellectual of men (certainly not against his predecessor), I do not believe he is so willing to damn himself for 30 pieces of silver.
The Iraq war was misguided (I belatedly realise). And the Presiden hid (or more likely suffered from cognitive dissonance) evidence that contradicted the view that Iraq had weopons of mass distruction. But I do not believe the "W is smart and evil and dumb" simultaneously. I think - misguidedly - he is trying to do the best for America and the World.
Unfortunately, I think his view is wrong. But that does not make him some evil man who grabbed power, solely to line his own, and his friends pockets.
Did you read any of the links in the story? Is this just a mindless troll?
There are many thousands of software patents in Europe that have been granted despite - largely - being at variance with existing laws. This is mostly an opportunity for anti-software advocates to make a point.
I am a decent amateur player, and I've played a few Vegas tournaments (and once knocked Julian Gardner out), and some cash games, and the real difference between pros and most (decent) amateurs is...
Pros are much, much more consistent. When an amateur is playing wel, he'll win. But if his confidence gets a little knocked (maybe he loses a hand when he had JJ in the hole), he'll get "on tilt". Pros shrug their shoulders and play on. And if they feel they're not playing too good, they'll usually get up and walk away. Too many amateurs try and chase their losses (if I could just win one big pot, I'll be back to flat... hmmm... maybe this T6 suited is OK... if just two Tens hit the board I'm a sure winner...)
They guy should just have gone right out at the start and said "I am in Microsoft's pocket, Bill Gates Rocks." How dare he write a piece about open source, and then make that piece closed source.
Information MUST BE FREE. Open it up. Publish yur article under the GPL. Allow others to edit it, improve it develop it.
Ask yourself, would you rather be the author of one little closed source essay, or would you rather your essay grew (like Linux) to be a Shakespeare of literature? You might have created the next Macbeth.
But no; you chose the shallow, short-sighted route of copyright and closed source.
I'm not sure the levels of reliability issue is true: I run a user-mode Linux server (thank you Bytemark hosting!), which handles three web-sites (mine, my girlfriend's, and my father's implausibly popular blog) and webmail.
I genuinely appreciate the ability to run a proper mail server (exim, Courier-IMAP, Horde IMP), which I can access through my PDA (pocket Outlook), a web broswer or Thunderbird. And - as I treat my box as a production server (Debian stable) - I've achieved well over 99.9%. Which is a damned sight better than Yahoo! Mail.
Now, you're absolutely right about cost; were I to become unemployed, it might suddenly become an unneccesary luxury. (Alternatively, I might demand my father starts paying me for the all sys admin time I devote to his site. Or - come to mention it - I could just start selling advertising space and take the cash myself. Hmmmm....)
I would thoroughly recommend running your own production Linux server. At the very least you'll learn some sysadmin skills. (I certainly have!)
Alternatively: malware causes paedo web-sites to be flooded with non-paying traffic, increasing their bandwidth bills and hopefully driving them out of business. (A new use for the Slashdot effect?)
I suspect - and I have no evidence for this - the nastiest stuff is distributed on IRC and in closed groups. I can only hope the government succesfully arrests and prosecutes those responsible.
According to Datastream, US corporate profits as a % of GDP has ranged from c. 8%-15% over the last 70 years.
There simply aren't enough profits to pay for 50% of government expenditure.
"In the last half-decade, it's shifted almost entirely onto the shoulders of the individual, because corporations have become experts at paying the least amount of taxes possible. Yay corporations!"
All wealth is - ultimately - individual. Companies are not rich. The owners of those companies are rich.
And all the evidence is that stock ownership (through 401ks, etc.) has become MORE widerspread. The chances are that - assuming you aren't a student - you own a piece of the American and global economy.
Now, that doesn't mean your not in financial shit: you could have borrowed too much at a floating interest rate to buy an overvalued propoerty, while thinking your Frontpage skills will drive you to ever higher salaries. But don't forget: corporations don't do stuff; people that own and run corporarions do stuff.
I wasn't being serious. I largely agree with your post: I just think that most Ivy League graduates, with or without friends in high places don't end up CEOs of anything.
I graduated from Cambridge University in '95 (admittedly with a philosophy degree, and a penchant for good wine). None of my friends - even the wekk connected ones - look like they are going to end up CEOs of anything, not even the Local 7-11.
Yet many of the CEOs I know (especially those who started their own company) are self-educated. Many of these entreuprenerial types never saw the attraction of sitting around smoking pot and discussing the existence of God. (Essay question: is Universalisability a Necessary Part of a Moral System? Apply to the Bush White House.)
Anycase, anyone can be a CEO. Start your own company - become employee number one and CEO...
"it seems like an ivy league degree and some friends in high places are what it takes to get to the top."
According to xap.com, about 5,000 students graduate from Yale each year; Harvard has (a surprisingly modest) 2,000; Duke comes in at a little over 3,000; and U Penn (Philadephia)is a smidgen below 4,000. There are probably other Ivy League Universities (I'm a Brit, so I'm not even dead certain all these are Ivy League either...)
Now; lets assume a conservative (before business school and Masters degrees) 15,000 people get Ivy League degrees a year.
Given each of these people probably knows at least one person in a "high place" - heck they're students (or at least only recently ex-students), they're bound to know at least a couple of stoners, that means that there are at least 15,000 of these people coming into existence each year.
Lets assume a conservative 50% think that the job of CEO of a Fortune 500 company is a cool job. (I personally would enjoy a $2m+ package. Ooops. Tell a lie; according to Forbes, it's a little below $5m. My mistake.) So, that means 7,500 grads need to race through the CEO position of 500 companies a year: i.e. a two month tenure.
Seriously: Sun is great; I love the kit, and for a high-end server system I'd highly reccomend it. But you are living in cloud cuckoo land if you think it's cheaper (even using a Microsoft-esque TCO calculation) at the low-end.
Truth is, Moore's law is working relentlessly against Sun. Lintel systems become more powerful by the day, and being commodity, they become cheaper too. Sun's market is slowly, but surely being eaten away. A move (again) to the (even higher) high-end only postpones the inevitable.
Re:Concerns: government wasting money on open sour
on
When Think Tanks Attack
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is sooooo fashionable to believe that tax systems are weighted towards the wealthy, and benefits to the poor. In other words, the down-trodden middle classes are bearing the burden of the rich and the poor.
Unfortunately, it is almost completely untrue. I am British, and most Americans would regard me as so kind of communist or socialist as I support some limited redistributive policies.
But I think you believe far more in rhetoric than facts if you believe that the rich and corporates are sucking up all your wealth.
Truth be told: the middle classes (who actually vote) and the elderly get almost all the tax breaks. There aren't enough of the rich to matter, and the poor don't vote. Result, budgets like the recent US one, which is so full of special interest and pork, that it's a disgrace. The real benificiaries, the middle classes who administer all this crap.
And another thing: all wealth ultimately goes to people. There is no such thing as a "rich company"; companies are owned by stock holders.
You know these poor middle classes; all these stock bribes and the like were perfectly well documented. And what did you do? You put more money in your Fidelity mutual fund, in the hope that some of the money would come your way too. Did you protest? No, you hoped to benefit too.
Sorry: I'm ranting. But I get so angry with perception when reality is so different.
The middle clases, who have borrowed on their credit cards to buy pets.com stock. Fuck 'em. They deserve to lose their money.
The middle classes, who think that adjustable rate mortgages, 7x income multiples, and $500k for a two bedroom apartment are sensible. Fuck 'em. Why should I pay for their financial naiviety? (Or more accurately, their unwillingness to take responsibility for their actions.)
The middle classes are the problem in the US. Give the money to the rich, at least they spend it on Space Ship One rather than over-priced real estate and ooooh oooh another SUV.
For example, the Open Source, Open Questions piece says - and I paraphrase...
I'm an economist and I worry about the sustainability of a model which depends on people doing things for free. Call me onld and stodgy, but that's my concern. That said, it's for the market place to decide: if people prefer to use open source, it will win.
That's hardly some kind of anti-OSS rant. Rather it's a concern that would be shared by my outside "the community".
Maybe, instead of bashing these people for being Micrsoft's attack dogs (The Small Business Survival Council actually made some interesting submissions re the MSFT settlement), we should listen to what they have to say and give them reasoned responses.
Copyright law governs hows you attribute things, and what mayu legally be derived. So, you can't take a table of somebody else's data and pass it off as your own. However, you can take the table, perform your own analysis, and attibute it to yourself.
An obvious example from the real world would be the AMI bios; it was "derived", "inspired", or even "based on" the IBM bios - yet a judge said it was OK.
The same is clearly true here; SCO will have no luck arguing that Minix looks like Unix, and Linus saw Minix source code. The judge would just throw it out of court.
That was an article from early '00 - when Microsoft made a fortune from its VC investments. The world has changed - now they lose money on many of their start-up investments. (You think they're bad? Check out the recent success, or lack thereof, of Intel or Applied Materials Ventures.)
And having $56bn makes it hard for Microsoft to get "the best rates". It cannot move money quickly. Essentially it has to own US Treasury Bonds (nothing else is liquid enough for them), and we all know what they yield (especially at the short end of the curve. Nada.)
So, Microsoft does not get the best rates, has only limited opportunities, and gets a pretty poor return.
This is simply not true. It's all too easy to think that big corporations run the world, and "the people" have too little power. Actually, (most, Halliburton and a few others) corporations are pretty powerless, and concerted consumer advocacy can either claim the head of the CEO or a change of policy.
Take the British banks in the '80s... many of them invested in aparteid South Africa (and made a lot of money). A few brave souls (such as Peter Hain) made a huge fuss, got petitions, organised marches, and - best of all - got the British people to take their accounts away from those banks that invested in South Africa. The banks saw business disappear, and changed, sharpish.
Or Nike; consumer advocacy forced a fairly major U-turn in their use of forced labour in the Far East.
And don't tell me that big parties with big money cannot be overthrown. It's difficult, but it's certainly not impossible - take Ross Perot (who admittedly had money and politics I despise), he came remarkably close in '92 to becoming President, and shaped the agenda.
In Europe the Green parties, and the nationalist parties have had a similar effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Not meaning to be fussy, but in WW2, Germany *declared* war on the US, and Japan attacked the US. To split hairs, it was European and Asian fascists that got the US into war, not American liberals.
I think this is to some extent a matter of competence:
Bush is seen by the world as having unilaterally invaded Iraq is search of (as it turns out) non-existant weopons of mass destruction. The rest of the world is in no particular hurry to bail the Bush administation out - and some governments that supported the war (i.e. Spain) have been replaced.
There cannot be fair and reasonable elections in Iraq without security, and the belief of the Iraqi people that their view counts. Bush, I believe, is incabable of providing security, and security cannot, in all probability, be provided by the US.
In Bosnia, the UN High Commission has done a good job (relatively) in pulling together that damaged country. Bush has upset too many, both in Iraq and in the (admittedly often un-elected) International Community, to heal the wounds in Iraq and ensure fair elections, and a sustainable transfer of powert.
Whatever Kerry's speeches in the past, he will be favourably recieved in Ankara, Beijing, Paris, and London. Whether he can convince these countries to help with the policing of Iraq is another matter; but Bush - who used reconstruction contracts to thank friends, not build bridges - cannot, an all probability, rescue Iraq without terrible loss of America life.
That is why - for Iraq and for the US - I support Kerry.
(Even though I'm a Brit!)
Excuse me.
I'm British. I would vote for Kerry in a heartbeat. I am no Bush fan, but supported the Iraq war (although the administration's lack of planning for what might happen afterwards has depressed me, and I am increasingly turning against it.)
But.
But.
Cynicism has gone too far. Do people honestly believe George W is so stupid, that he'd sacrifice a few million bucks to be damned by history?
If Bush still has an economic interest in the Carlyle Group, it will come out. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day someone will talk. (As Nixon found out, conspiricies are tough to maintain.) If Bush is solely in the war for the profit of hist friends, then history will judge him poorly.
While I do not consider "W" to be the most intellectual of men (certainly not against his predecessor), I do not believe he is so willing to damn himself for 30 pieces of silver.
The Iraq war was misguided (I belatedly realise). And the Presiden hid (or more likely suffered from cognitive dissonance) evidence that contradicted the view that Iraq had weopons of mass distruction. But I do not believe the "W is smart and evil and dumb" simultaneously. I think - misguidedly - he is trying to do the best for America and the World.
Unfortunately, I think his view is wrong. But that does not make him some evil man who grabbed power, solely to line his own, and his friends pockets.
Just my 2c (or 2p, as we say in England)
"house cats kill more than a billion birds every year in America alone"
Hmmmm. Source please.
Excuse my scepticism, but it sounds like a wonderful made-up statistic. Although I could be completely wrong...
Did you read any of the links in the story?
Is this just a mindless troll?
There are many thousands of software patents in Europe that have been granted despite - largely - being at variance with existing laws. This is mostly an opportunity for anti-software advocates to make a point.
But I guess that doesn't bother you.
I am a decent amateur player, and I've played a few Vegas tournaments (and once knocked Julian Gardner out), and some cash games, and the real difference between pros and most (decent) amateurs is...
Pros are much, much more consistent. When an amateur is playing wel, he'll win. But if his confidence gets a little knocked (maybe he loses a hand when he had JJ in the hole), he'll get "on tilt". Pros shrug their shoulders and play on. And if they feel they're not playing too good, they'll usually get up and walk away. Too many amateurs try and chase their losses (if I could just win one big pot, I'll be back to flat... hmmm... maybe this T6 suited is OK... if just two Tens hit the board I'm a sure winner...)
Did you notice?
The article, right at the very top, said (c).
They guy should just have gone right out at the start and said "I am in Microsoft's pocket, Bill Gates Rocks." How dare he write a piece about open source, and then make that piece closed source.
Information MUST BE FREE. Open it up. Publish yur article under the GPL. Allow others to edit it, improve it develop it.
Ask yourself, would you rather be the author of one little closed source essay, or would you rather your essay grew (like Linux) to be a Shakespeare of literature? You might have created the next Macbeth.
But no; you chose the shallow, short-sighted route of copyright and closed source.
I despair.
I'm not sure the levels of reliability issue is true: I run a user-mode Linux server (thank you Bytemark hosting!), which handles three web-sites (mine, my girlfriend's, and my father's implausibly popular blog) and webmail.
I genuinely appreciate the ability to run a proper mail server (exim, Courier-IMAP, Horde IMP), which I can access through my PDA (pocket Outlook), a web broswer or Thunderbird. And - as I treat my box as a production server (Debian stable) - I've achieved well over 99.9%. Which is a damned sight better than Yahoo! Mail.
Now, you're absolutely right about cost; were I to become unemployed, it might suddenly become an unneccesary luxury. (Alternatively, I might demand my father starts paying me for the all sys admin time I devote to his site. Or - come to mention it - I could just start selling advertising space and take the cash myself. Hmmmm....)
I would thoroughly recommend running your own production Linux server. At the very least you'll learn some sysadmin skills. (I certainly have!)
Alternatively: malware causes paedo web-sites to be flooded with non-paying traffic, increasing their bandwidth bills and hopefully driving them out of business. (A new use for the Slashdot effect?)
I suspect - and I have no evidence for this - the nastiest stuff is distributed on IRC and in closed groups. I can only hope the government succesfully arrests and prosecutes those responsible.
It was never 50%.
Source please?
According to Datastream, US corporate profits as a % of GDP has ranged from c. 8%-15% over the last 70 years.
There simply aren't enough profits to pay for 50% of government expenditure.
"In the last half-decade, it's shifted almost entirely onto the shoulders of the individual, because corporations have become experts at paying the least amount of taxes possible. Yay corporations!"
All wealth is - ultimately - individual. Companies are not rich. The owners of those companies are rich.
And all the evidence is that stock ownership (through 401ks, etc.) has become MORE widerspread. The chances are that - assuming you aren't a student - you own a piece of the American and global economy.
Now, that doesn't mean your not in financial shit: you could have borrowed too much at a floating interest rate to buy an overvalued propoerty, while thinking your Frontpage skills will drive you to ever higher salaries. But don't forget: corporations don't do stuff; people that own and run corporarions do stuff.
I wasn't being serious. I largely agree with your post: I just think that most Ivy League graduates, with or without friends in high places don't end up CEOs of anything.
I graduated from Cambridge University in '95 (admittedly with a philosophy degree, and a penchant for good wine). None of my friends - even the wekk connected ones - look like they are going to end up CEOs of anything, not even the Local 7-11.
Yet many of the CEOs I know (especially those who started their own company) are self-educated. Many of these entreuprenerial types never saw the attraction of sitting around smoking pot and discussing the existence of God. (Essay question: is Universalisability a Necessary Part of a Moral System? Apply to the Bush White House.)
Anycase, anyone can be a CEO. Start your own company - become employee number one and CEO...
"it seems like an ivy league degree and some friends in high places are what it takes to get to the top."
According to xap.com, about 5,000 students graduate from Yale each year; Harvard has (a surprisingly modest) 2,000; Duke comes in at a little over 3,000; and U Penn (Philadephia)is a smidgen below 4,000. There are probably other Ivy League Universities (I'm a Brit, so I'm not even dead certain all these are Ivy League either...)
Now; lets assume a conservative (before business school and Masters degrees) 15,000 people get Ivy League degrees a year.
Given each of these people probably knows at least one person in a "high place" - heck they're students (or at least only recently ex-students), they're bound to know at least a couple of stoners, that means that there are at least 15,000 of these people coming into existence each year.
Lets assume a conservative 50% think that the job of CEO of a Fortune 500 company is a cool job. (I personally would enjoy a $2m+ package. Ooops. Tell a lie; according to Forbes, it's a little below $5m. My mistake.) So, that means 7,500 grads need to race through the CEO position of 500 companies a year: i.e. a two month tenure.
Where do I sign up?
You work for Sun, don't you?
Seriously: Sun is great; I love the kit, and for a high-end server system I'd highly reccomend it. But you are living in cloud cuckoo land if you think it's cheaper (even using a Microsoft-esque TCO calculation) at the low-end.
Truth is, Moore's law is working relentlessly against Sun. Lintel systems become more powerful by the day, and being commodity, they become cheaper too. Sun's market is slowly, but surely being eaten away. A move (again) to the (even higher) high-end only postpones the inevitable.
OK. It's only one; but TextPad is an outstanding shareware application, and quite the best text editor for Windows.
I have paid for about three copies...
Actually, no it wasn't. What was I thinking. Please feel free to ignore me.
Ummm. That was what I was saying.
Why are you disagreeing with me?
It is sooooo fashionable to believe that tax systems are weighted towards the wealthy, and benefits to the poor. In other words, the down-trodden middle classes are bearing the burden of the rich and the poor.
Unfortunately, it is almost completely untrue. I am British, and most Americans would regard me as so kind of communist or socialist as I support some limited redistributive policies.
But I think you believe far more in rhetoric than facts if you believe that the rich and corporates are sucking up all your wealth.
Truth be told: the middle classes (who actually vote) and the elderly get almost all the tax breaks. There aren't enough of the rich to matter, and the poor don't vote. Result, budgets like the recent US one, which is so full of special interest and pork, that it's a disgrace. The real benificiaries, the middle classes who administer all this crap.
And another thing: all wealth ultimately goes to people. There is no such thing as a "rich company"; companies are owned by stock holders.
You know these poor middle classes; all these stock bribes and the like were perfectly well documented. And what did you do? You put more money in your Fidelity mutual fund, in the hope that some of the money would come your way too. Did you protest? No, you hoped to benefit too.
Sorry: I'm ranting. But I get so angry with perception when reality is so different.
The middle clases, who have borrowed on their credit cards to buy pets.com stock. Fuck 'em. They deserve to lose their money.
The middle classes, who think that adjustable rate mortgages, 7x income multiples, and $500k for a two bedroom apartment are sensible. Fuck 'em. Why should I pay for their financial naiviety? (Or more accurately, their unwillingness to take responsibility for their actions.)
The middle classes are the problem in the US. Give the money to the rich, at least they spend it on Space Ship One rather than over-priced real estate and ooooh oooh another SUV.
Sorry. Rant over.
One word: nice
For example, the Open Source, Open Questions piece says - and I paraphrase...
I'm an economist and I worry about the sustainability of a model which depends on people doing things for free. Call me onld and stodgy, but that's my concern. That said, it's for the market place to decide: if people prefer to use open source, it will win.
That's hardly some kind of anti-OSS rant. Rather it's a concern that would be shared by my outside "the community".
Maybe, instead of bashing these people for being Micrsoft's attack dogs (The Small Business Survival Council actually made some interesting submissions re the MSFT settlement), we should listen to what they have to say and give them reasoned responses.
Did you know, you can ask Google some realy stupid things. I just tried "100 light years in microns".
It's quite a big number, you know.
Actually, they will tell the judge that.
Copyright law governs hows you attribute things, and what mayu legally be derived. So, you can't take a table of somebody else's data and pass it off as your own. However, you can take the table, perform your own analysis, and attibute it to yourself.
An obvious example from the real world would be the AMI bios; it was "derived", "inspired", or even "based on" the IBM bios - yet a judge said it was OK.
The same is clearly true here; SCO will have no luck arguing that Minix looks like Unix, and Linus saw Minix source code. The judge would just throw it out of court.
Wonderful, wonderful hoax. Mod +1, Funny. But don't mod insightful.
How could 10.x.x.x addresses cost more given they are private and therefore unnasigned?
LOL!
I've memorised Slashdot's IP address, just in case Akamai goes down again.
(ps - it's 66.35.250.150)
That was an article from early '00 - when Microsoft made a fortune from its VC investments. The world has changed - now they lose money on many of their start-up investments. (You think they're bad? Check out the recent success, or lack thereof, of Intel or Applied Materials Ventures.)
And having $56bn makes it hard for Microsoft to get "the best rates". It cannot move money quickly. Essentially it has to own US Treasury Bonds (nothing else is liquid enough for them), and we all know what they yield (especially at the short end of the curve. Nada.)
So, Microsoft does not get the best rates, has only limited opportunities, and gets a pretty poor return.
This is simply not true. It's all too easy to think that big corporations run the world, and "the people" have too little power. Actually, (most, Halliburton and a few others) corporations are pretty powerless, and concerted consumer advocacy can either claim the head of the CEO or a change of policy.
Take the British banks in the '80s... many of them invested in aparteid South Africa (and made a lot of money). A few brave souls (such as Peter Hain) made a huge fuss, got petitions, organised marches, and - best of all - got the British people to take their accounts away from those banks that invested in South Africa. The banks saw business disappear, and changed, sharpish.
Or Nike; consumer advocacy forced a fairly major U-turn in their use of forced labour in the Far East.
And don't tell me that big parties with big money cannot be overthrown. It's difficult, but it's certainly not impossible - take Ross Perot (who admittedly had money and politics I despise), he came remarkably close in '92 to becoming President, and shaped the agenda.
In Europe the Green parties, and the nationalist parties have had a similar effect.