"isn't that because the company is just printing up new options for employees instead of issuing them options from the same pool the investors are buying from?"
True, but that is the way most option programs are run - in fact, that is the reason most companies do option programs rather than stock granting programs.
I got out of the stock market quite a while ago when I finally got it through my head that noone in the stock market invests reasonably. It has become one giant lottery. I decided a better use for the money would be to start my own business.
In a real market, stock prices would be driven based on the amount of dividends they were expected to produce, with the exception of brand-new companies who were still in growth mode. However, most of the value of businesses have gone out of them by the time they hit the stock market, and riding price waves as opposed to buying fundamentally sound businesses with expectations of dividends has basically made the market unsound. Perhaps other sectors are more sound, but I try to stick to what I know. And tech stocks are not sound.
You're missing the point. They've NEVER issued a dividend, and after 30 years they have only made, TOTAL, $6 per share.
Let's assume, just for a moment, that Microsoft has the potential in the future to make as much as it has in the past (I doubt this highly, but let's go with it). Let's also say that they spent their first 15 years in "growth mode", so they really made their $6 per share in the last 15 years. That means it will take at least 60 years for it to earn it's share price.
If you think that Microsoft is going to take off again and all-of-a-sudden go back into boom mode, by all means, it would be a great stock. But the fact that after 30 years it has only netted $6 per share for a $27/share stock, I think you're putting your money in the wrong place. Microsoft is way over-diluted, which is one of the ways they made such a large cash position.
This is the point where Microsoft investors figure out just how diluted Microsoft stock has really become. If I read the numbers right, they have 11 Billion shares outstanding. Which means that, after 30 years of doing business, they have only made about $6 per share (which costs $27.89).
This is the problem with companies not giving dividends - it really distorts the amount of money they are making, and distorts the purpose of the company. Microsoft wants to hoard the money so it looks better on paper, rather than give the owners of the company their profits, which will reveal that wild investing in disparate projects which make no money but undermine competitors does not do much to shareholder value.
This is part of the problem with option-granting programs - it dilutes the stock significantly. When companies give dividends this is more obvious (hey! my dividend went down this year!). When they don't, the stock price is a lot less attached to reality.
It's kind of interesting how much of Microsoft's quarterly revenue comes from investments rather than direct earnings.
I'm not saying they aren't a strong company - they are. However, their stock price is WAY over what it should be, and their performance-per-overpriced share isn't what it should be, either. Their large bank account has helped justify their stock price while spending rediculous amounts of money keeping the competition away.
Actually what I'm wanting to do, eventually, is write a book about great programming constructs people have probably never heard of, or don't understand well.
My last book took me 3 years to find the spare time to finish, so I don't suspect I'll have this done anytime soon.
I was originally going to just analyze scheme's features, but then I realized that many languages have features that need to be recognized, too. my original outline was going to be:
* Memory Management
* Symbolic programming - an intro to Scheme
* Functional Programming & Functional Programming Patterns
* Closures and higher-order functions
* Advanced Flow Control w/ Continuations
* Compile-Time programming 1: Macros
* Compile-Time programming 2: Partial Evaluation
* Compile-Time programming 3: C++ templates
* Lazy evaluation
* Lazy data structures
However, if I decide to open it up to other languages, I have no idea how I'm going to organize it or even how I will decide what to include.
Anyway, it was originally posted just to Advogato, but then I remembered that the only threads on Advogato that get any real response are flame-wars, which is sad because Advogato could be a real cool place. Then I thought "you know, this would make a good 'Ask Slashdot' as well. However, I don't expect the quality of responses on Ask Slashdot to be as good, although I expect there to be a LOT more of them.
Not quite. What they were wanting is code that could be displayed in whatever fashion the user wanted. If they liked braces and you liked indentation, YOU could code in indentation, and when I viewed YOUR code, it would have braces instead.
The CLR allows multiple languages on the same runtime, but I can't view your VB code as C#.
This is kind of possible in Scheme/Lisp languages. They are essentially syntax-less, in that what you are actually doing when you code them is building a parse tree. Some people have come up with alternative syntaxes for Scheme that is more "normal", which I think can covert code from/to this syntax. It's not the full thing you want, but Scheme is a good start.
"mathmatica is a truely amazing program/kernel (yes, it does run it's own kernel)"
It doesn't run it's own kernel. The Mathematica kernel is completely different than the "kernel" often used in discussion. The Mathematica kernel is just a "core system", much like the runtime packages of Scheme, Lisp, and other interpretted languages. It's just that the Mathematica runtime is geared towards advanced symbolic manipulation.
I'm curious, though, how Mathematica stacks up to Maxima. What I didn't like about Maxima was that it used it's own programming language, instead of just using Lisp, which I thought would have made a much better system (if you have the full power of common lisp available, why not make it available to your users?).
"People worked to create it, and need to be compensated somehow so that they can continue to work on it."
The point you're missing is that people working to create it does not in itself justify the term "property". All ideas are the result of work - some are the result of many long years of work.
The reason that songs, software, and movies are ideas is that their importance is not carried by the medium. A film projector is a product. The film itself is a product. But if I copy a film projector it's not wrong, and if I copy the film itself it isn't wrong, either, and for the reasons stated by Jefferson. If I copy your CD, I have not reduced the supply of Photoshop. It does not reduce the value of Photoshop to other people. If I copy a CD, I have done no direct harm to anyone, and in fact benefitted myself. Such is the nature of ideas.
You seem to want to be limitting ideas to general concepts, when in fact ideas consist of pretty much anything whose existence isn't permanently tied down to physical objects.
You're in good company. Thomas Jefferson made the same arguments. He has a great essay on it, including the following paragraph:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
A fuller examination of this discussion can be found at K5.
I honestly think that this number is drastically underinflated. I think if the true piracy numbers were shown, it would be obvious that perhaps copying software is not the moral equivalent of boarding trade ships, raping all women on board, killing all the passengers, and stealing all the gold.
Almost every Windows user I know of has tons of software that, although they didn't get it from Warez sites, are usually installed from friends' copies. I mean, really, who actually has a legitimate copy of Windows? Even if you own a valid license for your machine, chances are your machine went belly-up, but you lost your "factory" install CD, and had to borrow a neighbor's copy of Windows XP to replace your valid one.
That's why I ditched Windows altogether. You can't be both legal and get work done. You either have to pay more money than you could ever imagine, or you have to copy software, or you have to live without. By "living without" I mean you have to live without Windows when a hardware upgrade causes your OEM "reinstall" to bork out. Or any of another myriad of problems that Microsoft and others just don't seem to have the need to help you out with.
I'm not a mathematician, so I really don't know, but does Maxima compare well to Mathematica and does Octave compare well to Matlab? I'm really curious how a side-by-side comparison of these packages looks like by those who used them.
The problem is not really the costs, its the accounting. When you have a large enough company to have an accounting department, a lot of wierd things start happening. Not all of it is bad, it's just that managing large amounts of money and equipment is a lot different than handling small amounts of money and equipment.
Accounting has to be able to cost-justify purchases, otherwise they would be open to easy abuse. Therefore, you have to show that they need sufficient load on the servers to justify the expenditure. On top of that, the expenditure has to be written off periodically across 3 years for tax purposes. Therefore, it is going to come off the bottom line a little at a time for the next 3 years.
Anyway, dealing with accounting is a funny process, and reason does not always win out.
However, you are preventing your entire infrastructure to being nailed by a single exploit. With a monoculture, a single flaw exploited by a worm can destroy pretty much everything. With a mixed setup, although you have more possible entrances, each one allows a lot less damage.
If I have 1,000 troops, if I keep them all in the same fort, they will be a formidable force, unless I find the right weapon (like a nuke). If I keep them in 10 different forts spready throughout the country, although each one of them is more vulnerable individually, I have eliminated the possibility of everything being wiped out in a single blow.
"Saddam was toppled over a year ago. The U.S. is still there. If this was just about foiling terror plots the job was done long ago."
Yes, and now we're working on setting up a good government in Iraq. They are now sovereign, and, if they wish, can kick us out at any time. They are not because it _does_ take time to rebuild a country after a war. Not doing so would be utter foolishness.
"Is this what you call the new left media or whatever your phrase was? I think it is called democracy."
We're actually a democratic republic. Meaning that the leaders should not blindly follow polls. Instead, we periodically elect people to represent us.
That aside, I believe that the reason the polls are so bad is because of the selective coverage of Iraq. Most people don't know about the good going on there. Most people don't know about the threats we've been able to stop by being there. Lybia giving up its nukes got what, two days of coverage? Compare that with Abu Ghrabe, which still gets coverage.
"If the U.S. is really interested in foiling future terrorist plots, they have done everything to achieve the opposite."
Actually, we've done quite well in that area. We've received quite a bit of good intel that has helped us prevent terrorist plots. In addition, we are fighting the war over there, and not over here.
I think the constant "oil mantra" would be funny if it were not so sad. I think it should be discussed, but this idea that it is the "only remaining reason" for what is happening is just intellectual dishonesty and self-deception.
Because in your parent post you were not making these points, you were implying that we should go ahead and use the uber-PNG features, and then wait for IE to catch up to see them.
"A single artillary shell turning up with some gas in it and unintentionaly blown up as a road side bomb does not constitute anything specially different than what their neighbour Iran has."
This isn't about "who has more". The question was, "did they have any", and "if not, where did it go". We know at one point they had some, because we (stupidly) sold it to them. None of their weapons declarations mention what happened to even the stuff we sold them.
"I notice for example that Libya has had some change of heart."
Why do you think that is? Because they found out that the terror game was no longer worth being played.
"The cost of the Iraqi operation is enormous. The only reason for it is that the potential monetary and secure access to oil gain out of it is also enormous. If you deny that you have your head in the neocon clouds."
If we just wanted oil, why didn't we just let Saddam invade Kuwait in exchange for access to the oil. Or why didn't we just participate in the "oil for food" program/scandal along with the rest of the world?
Again, you are completely ignoring the other causes for war, like the fact that Putin gave us specific intelligence about a Saddam terrorist plot in the US, and the fact that Hussain Al-Husseiny (I think that's how it's spelled) - a republican guard member let in the US under the Clintons - has been assisting other terrorists behind-the-scenes in the US (he worked at Logan International airport, after helping out the two white boys blow up OKC - Clinton didn't want to go to war, so he just dropped that part of the investigation).
"there are many moderate citizens in the street that have been interviewed and all of them want the U.S. out ASAP."
But many of those same people are glad we came.
"Ever action like this costs the U.S. the public support of Iraqis, and they have been there long enough to loose lots of it."
Interestingly, Muslim clerics in Iraq have authorized the US to _increase_ the amount of force we use against the insurgents. We did not fire into cemetaries or mosques for a long time, but finally the clerics were tired of these insurgents, and gave the US permission to fire back even if the insurgents were in a mosque or cemetary.
Make no mistake, Iraq was a direct threat to us. Our intelligence obviously overstated some of this, but nevertheless, the evidence is pretty clear.
Check out the book "The Third Terrorist". This was in the making long before 9/11 and documents some of Saddam's actions inside the US that were covered up because the Clintons didn't have the guts to persue open war when it was called for.
"Face it, everyone is biased. Your "information" and views are just as biased as anyone. You don't really know. You believe."
I didn't claim otherwise. I simply claimed that the idea that there were no other possible reasons than the ones stated was completely bogus. There are numerous reasons, many stated by the President himself, many of them confirmed.
"Only a blind believer would cling to the view that you are there for promotion of democracy. There are a hell of a lot of dictators out there that could be deposed with less trouble. Why Iraq? Why stick it out and have so many U.S. solders and civilians die in the war? It isn't just for democracy. If you believe that, you are dilusional."
You're right, it isn't _just_ for democracy. There were four issues I listed, plus I believe the president listed more. The only ones of them that was sufficient by itself were WMD and the fact that we had intelligence that they were going to attack us. In addition, there is evidence that they had attacked us before, the Clintons just covered it up because they didn't want an all-out war.
"Name one other country that has been invaded for the purpose of forming a democracy."
Your insistence that there was a single purpose, and only this purpose, for invading Iraq could be the source of your confusion.
"Americans: please get satellite dishes and watch CBC newsworld or BBC newsworld. You need information that the internal media controls too much."
You're right. Our new media is way too much anti-war and anti-Bush.
I'm not a big fan of the president, but the amount of bashing he gets is just idiotic, especially since most of his criticism is mere idle speculation.
If by "well-debunked" you are referring to the UnUnFarenheit 9/11 article, you are thinkingly-deficient. I just finished reading the whole thing, and it seems to support Hitchins near 100% on a factual basis. Most of the article is in fact hand-waving (no, that's not what the film really is trying to say - nevertheless that is what the film is actually saying) or just name-calling.
What's really funny is the Saudi flights out of the US. Jason actually agrees that Moore was responsible and took responsibility. However, he tried to couch it as he took responsibility for the actions in a general sense, although he had said, specifically, before the 9/11 commission, that the decision went NO HIGHER than him. So, while Jason wants to make him out to be magnanimous, the fact still remains that Moore is fooling you!
Apparently, it is also okay for Moore to mislead people about what Saddam had done leading up to the war. Jason accuses Hitchens of lying. What was the lie? That Hitchens said that Moore said that "Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened any American". The actual quote according to Jason should be "Iraq had never attacked America, never threatened America, and had never murdered an American". Jason considers the difference between those quotes to be LYING. Good Gosh! Then, although he admits that they are factually incorrect, he says it's okay for Moore to do it, because he's playing the same role he believes the GWB is playing in the reasons for going to war. Not that he has actually proven GWB is lying, but the mere suspicion apparently gives Moore adequate backing for lying himself.
The rest is basically Jason defending the movie by saying that "it only raises questions - it doesn't give answers" which is a complete load of BS. It only raises questions on one side, which is the same as giving answers. The fact that it does so deceptively is even worse.
Anyway, the article was really sad, and actually venerated Hitchens because it agreed with him on pretty much every factual point.
If you want to read the article yourself, it's here:
http://anthropik.net/ununfahrenheit911
If you were referring to another debunking, please provide the link.
I think he's referring to http://anthropik.net/ununfahrenheit911
I haven't had time to read all of it, but most of it is complaining that Hitchens doesn't like Moore. I've printed it out so I'll read it later, and respond to it if I have the time.
I can't believe that you think your three points are undenyable. If anything _that_ shows you how skewed the media is.
"Bush and friends earn more in their Saudi business connections than they do in working at their government jobs."
I'll give you this one.
"The world was lied too about the weapons of mass destruction, in order to create a false sense of urgency to act in Iraq."
Excuse me? Every administration in the last 25 years has known that Iraq has WMD and is working on building up their arsenal. Clinton bombed a Vx gas factory in Sudan that was jointly funded by Al Qaeda and Saddam. Israel had to bomb Iraq in order to destroy their nuclear weapons program. In addition, we know they had WMD because in the 80s we sold them some. Nowhere in any of their reports submitted to the UN did they say where those weapons went. So, why haven't we found them? The reason for the urgency for going to war was that Saddam was busy trucking their WMD over to Syria and giving it to other organizations.
The interesting thing is that we have found some remnants of Saddam's arsenal. One of the roadside bombs that went off had gas (I can't remember if it was Vx or mustard gas). In addition, a "perfume factory" we went into was heavily booby-trapped so that going into it brought down the whole structure, and with it any evidence we might gather.
The only thing that we found that was a complete lie were the roaming bio-terror labs. And it wasn't the administration who lied, it was our informants.
"The only remaining reason for the U.S. interest in Iraq is oil. Invading a country to access its resources is not justified."
If we invaded for access to its resources, why are gas prices still so high? Also, did you miss the President's state of the union address where he listed 7 reasons for going into Iraq? He even left out the big one, because it was too technical for most people - that we had a cease-fire with Iraq under certain terms, which they are now and have been for a while in violation of.
Another reason for going to war, which was not mentioned in the state of the union address (and for some reason is never mentioned in the media), was that we had intelligence given to us directly from Russia that Saddam was planning a terrorist attack on US soil. This is quite in line with his history, as he had also attempted the assassination of GB senior, and was providing safe haven and money to the 1993 WTC bomber who escaped from the US.
The reasons GWB lists are:
1) WMD including attempting to build a nuclear arsenal.
2) Links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, which it helps to fund, and protect their terrorists (which the 9/11 commission determined DID occur)
3) Promotion of democracy in the middle east. It is the belief of the administration that setting up a democracy in the middle east will help transform the state of the middle east. This is not a short term goal but a long-term one (probably 10+ years). Saddam is an enemy that we have legitimate reason to war with (due to the previous cease-fire agreements which he is violating), so we fought them to establish a democratic government. The future will tell if this was wise or foolish, just remember that this is a long-term, not a short-term goal.
4) Humanitarian reasons - free people from Saddam Hussein. This one was accomplished. Some people look at the acts of a few aberrants in the military and think everyone is like that (like at Abu Ghrabe). However, the stories that aren't reported are numerous, including a military man who saw a little Iraqi girl playing with unexploded ordinance, and jumped on top of it. It exploded under him. He gave his life for a little Iraqi girl, leaving his own children without a father. This has been one of the most humane wars ever fought. Sure, war is never pretty or clean, but I can't think of another war that has gone to such great lengths to preserve the lives of non-combatants. Why do you think Sa
Old Michael Moore is actually pretty good. His recent stuff, however, is nothing short of propoganda. The number of lies and half-truths he's been telling in his recent movies is just staggering.
I can't believe that people call this a documentary. Documentaries are supposed to be at least aiming for the truth. You should read this - http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
One of the more interesting points is that, while Richard Clarke is viewed as the hero in Moore's movie, it was him, and him alone who authorized the Saudi flights out of the US.
Of course, absolutely noone in the media ever mentions Gore's close ties with big oil, or the fact that he sold our Navy's national reserves to the company his Dad worked for, leaving us even more dependent on foreign oil than ever.
I don't know about other places, but here in Oklahoma the Democratic party is fighting like mad to keep people from having to produce ID in order to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
"isn't that because the company is just printing up new options for employees instead of issuing them options from the same pool the investors are buying from?"
True, but that is the way most option programs are run - in fact, that is the reason most companies do option programs rather than stock granting programs.
I got out of the stock market quite a while ago when I finally got it through my head that noone in the stock market invests reasonably. It has become one giant lottery. I decided a better use for the money would be to start my own business.
In a real market, stock prices would be driven based on the amount of dividends they were expected to produce, with the exception of brand-new companies who were still in growth mode. However, most of the value of businesses have gone out of them by the time they hit the stock market, and riding price waves as opposed to buying fundamentally sound businesses with expectations of dividends has basically made the market unsound. Perhaps other sectors are more sound, but I try to stick to what I know. And tech stocks are not sound.
You're missing the point. They've NEVER issued a dividend, and after 30 years they have only made, TOTAL, $6 per share.
Let's assume, just for a moment, that Microsoft has the potential in the future to make as much as it has in the past (I doubt this highly, but let's go with it). Let's also say that they spent their first 15 years in "growth mode", so they really made their $6 per share in the last 15 years. That means it will take at least 60 years for it to earn it's share price.
If you think that Microsoft is going to take off again and all-of-a-sudden go back into boom mode, by all means, it would be a great stock. But the fact that after 30 years it has only netted $6 per share for a $27/share stock, I think you're putting your money in the wrong place. Microsoft is way over-diluted, which is one of the ways they made such a large cash position.
Except that when compiling, all of your labels are gone (like local variable names, for example), making this not as useful as it might seem.
This is the point where Microsoft investors figure out just how diluted Microsoft stock has really become. If I read the numbers right, they have 11 Billion shares outstanding. Which means that, after 30 years of doing business, they have only made about $6 per share (which costs $27.89).
This is the problem with companies not giving dividends - it really distorts the amount of money they are making, and distorts the purpose of the company. Microsoft wants to hoard the money so it looks better on paper, rather than give the owners of the company their profits, which will reveal that wild investing in disparate projects which make no money but undermine competitors does not do much to shareholder value.
This is part of the problem with option-granting programs - it dilutes the stock significantly. When companies give dividends this is more obvious (hey! my dividend went down this year!). When they don't, the stock price is a lot less attached to reality.
It's kind of interesting how much of Microsoft's quarterly revenue comes from investments rather than direct earnings.
I'm not saying they aren't a strong company - they are. However, their stock price is WAY over what it should be, and their performance-per-overpriced share isn't what it should be, either. Their large bank account has helped justify their stock price while spending rediculous amounts of money keeping the competition away.
Actually what I'm wanting to do, eventually, is write a book about great programming constructs people have probably never heard of, or don't understand well.
My last book took me 3 years to find the spare time to finish, so I don't suspect I'll have this done anytime soon.
I was originally going to just analyze scheme's features, but then I realized that many languages have features that need to be recognized, too. my original outline was going to be:
* Memory Management
* Symbolic programming - an intro to Scheme
* Functional Programming & Functional Programming Patterns
* Closures and higher-order functions
* Advanced Flow Control w/ Continuations
* Compile-Time programming 1: Macros
* Compile-Time programming 2: Partial Evaluation
* Compile-Time programming 3: C++ templates
* Lazy evaluation
* Lazy data structures
However, if I decide to open it up to other languages, I have no idea how I'm going to organize it or even how I will decide what to include.
Anyway, it was originally posted just to Advogato, but then I remembered that the only threads on Advogato that get any real response are flame-wars, which is sad because Advogato could be a real cool place. Then I thought "you know, this would make a good 'Ask Slashdot' as well. However, I don't expect the quality of responses on Ask Slashdot to be as good, although I expect there to be a LOT more of them.
Not quite. What they were wanting is code that could be displayed in whatever fashion the user wanted. If they liked braces and you liked indentation, YOU could code in indentation, and when I viewed YOUR code, it would have braces instead.
The CLR allows multiple languages on the same runtime, but I can't view your VB code as C#.
This is kind of possible in Scheme/Lisp languages. They are essentially syntax-less, in that what you are actually doing when you code them is building a parse tree. Some people have come up with alternative syntaxes for Scheme that is more "normal", which I think can covert code from/to this syntax. It's not the full thing you want, but Scheme is a good start.
"mathmatica is a truely amazing program/kernel (yes, it does run it's own kernel)"
It doesn't run it's own kernel. The Mathematica kernel is completely different than the "kernel" often used in discussion. The Mathematica kernel is just a "core system", much like the runtime packages of Scheme, Lisp, and other interpretted languages. It's just that the Mathematica runtime is geared towards advanced symbolic manipulation.
I'm curious, though, how Mathematica stacks up to Maxima. What I didn't like about Maxima was that it used it's own programming language, instead of just using Lisp, which I thought would have made a much better system (if you have the full power of common lisp available, why not make it available to your users?).
"People worked to create it, and need to be compensated somehow so that they can continue to work on it."
The point you're missing is that people working to create it does not in itself justify the term "property". All ideas are the result of work - some are the result of many long years of work.
The reason that songs, software, and movies are ideas is that their importance is not carried by the medium. A film projector is a product. The film itself is a product. But if I copy a film projector it's not wrong, and if I copy the film itself it isn't wrong, either, and for the reasons stated by Jefferson. If I copy your CD, I have not reduced the supply of Photoshop. It does not reduce the value of Photoshop to other people. If I copy a CD, I have done no direct harm to anyone, and in fact benefitted myself. Such is the nature of ideas.
You seem to want to be limitting ideas to general concepts, when in fact ideas consist of pretty much anything whose existence isn't permanently tied down to physical objects.
You're in good company. Thomas Jefferson made the same arguments. He has a great essay on it, including the following paragraph:
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
A fuller examination of this discussion can be found at K5.
I honestly think that this number is drastically underinflated. I think if the true piracy numbers were shown, it would be obvious that perhaps copying software is not the moral equivalent of boarding trade ships, raping all women on board, killing all the passengers, and stealing all the gold.
Almost every Windows user I know of has tons of software that, although they didn't get it from Warez sites, are usually installed from friends' copies. I mean, really, who actually has a legitimate copy of Windows? Even if you own a valid license for your machine, chances are your machine went belly-up, but you lost your "factory" install CD, and had to borrow a neighbor's copy of Windows XP to replace your valid one.
That's why I ditched Windows altogether. You can't be both legal and get work done. You either have to pay more money than you could ever imagine, or you have to copy software, or you have to live without. By "living without" I mean you have to live without Windows when a hardware upgrade causes your OEM "reinstall" to bork out. Or any of another myriad of problems that Microsoft and others just don't seem to have the need to help you out with.
I'm not a mathematician, so I really don't know, but does Maxima compare well to Mathematica and does Octave compare well to Matlab? I'm really curious how a side-by-side comparison of these packages looks like by those who used them.
The problem is not really the costs, its the accounting. When you have a large enough company to have an accounting department, a lot of wierd things start happening. Not all of it is bad, it's just that managing large amounts of money and equipment is a lot different than handling small amounts of money and equipment.
Accounting has to be able to cost-justify purchases, otherwise they would be open to easy abuse. Therefore, you have to show that they need sufficient load on the servers to justify the expenditure. On top of that, the expenditure has to be written off periodically across 3 years for tax purposes. Therefore, it is going to come off the bottom line a little at a time for the next 3 years.
Anyway, dealing with accounting is a funny process, and reason does not always win out.
However, you are preventing your entire infrastructure to being nailed by a single exploit. With a monoculture, a single flaw exploited by a worm can destroy pretty much everything. With a mixed setup, although you have more possible entrances, each one allows a lot less damage.
If I have 1,000 troops, if I keep them all in the same fort, they will be a formidable force, unless I find the right weapon (like a nuke). If I keep them in 10 different forts spready throughout the country, although each one of them is more vulnerable individually, I have eliminated the possibility of everything being wiped out in a single blow.
"Saddam was toppled over a year ago. The U.S. is still there. If this was just about foiling terror plots the job was done long ago."
Yes, and now we're working on setting up a good government in Iraq. They are now sovereign, and, if they wish, can kick us out at any time. They are not because it _does_ take time to rebuild a country after a war. Not doing so would be utter foolishness.
"Is this what you call the new left media or whatever your phrase was? I think it is called democracy."
We're actually a democratic republic. Meaning that the leaders should not blindly follow polls. Instead, we periodically elect people to represent us.
That aside, I believe that the reason the polls are so bad is because of the selective coverage of Iraq. Most people don't know about the good going on there. Most people don't know about the threats we've been able to stop by being there. Lybia giving up its nukes got what, two days of coverage? Compare that with Abu Ghrabe, which still gets coverage.
"If the U.S. is really interested in foiling future terrorist plots, they have done everything to achieve the opposite."
Actually, we've done quite well in that area. We've received quite a bit of good intel that has helped us prevent terrorist plots. In addition, we are fighting the war over there, and not over here.
I think the constant "oil mantra" would be funny if it were not so sad. I think it should be discussed, but this idea that it is the "only remaining reason" for what is happening is just intellectual dishonesty and self-deception.
Because in your parent post you were not making these points, you were implying that we should go ahead and use the uber-PNG features, and then wait for IE to catch up to see them.
"A single artillary shell turning up with some gas in it and unintentionaly blown up as a road side bomb does not constitute anything specially different than what their neighbour Iran has."
This isn't about "who has more". The question was, "did they have any", and "if not, where did it go". We know at one point they had some, because we (stupidly) sold it to them. None of their weapons declarations mention what happened to even the stuff we sold them.
"I notice for example that Libya has had some change of heart."
Why do you think that is? Because they found out that the terror game was no longer worth being played.
"The cost of the Iraqi operation is enormous. The only reason for it is that the potential monetary and secure access to oil gain out of it is also enormous. If you deny that you have your head in the neocon clouds."
If we just wanted oil, why didn't we just let Saddam invade Kuwait in exchange for access to the oil. Or why didn't we just participate in the "oil for food" program/scandal along with the rest of the world?
Again, you are completely ignoring the other causes for war, like the fact that Putin gave us specific intelligence about a Saddam terrorist plot in the US, and the fact that Hussain Al-Husseiny (I think that's how it's spelled) - a republican guard member let in the US under the Clintons - has been assisting other terrorists behind-the-scenes in the US (he worked at Logan International airport, after helping out the two white boys blow up OKC - Clinton didn't want to go to war, so he just dropped that part of the investigation).
"there are many moderate citizens in the street that have been interviewed and all of them want the U.S. out ASAP."
But many of those same people are glad we came.
"Ever action like this costs the U.S. the public support of Iraqis, and they have been there long enough to loose lots of it."
Interestingly, Muslim clerics in Iraq have authorized the US to _increase_ the amount of force we use against the insurgents. We did not fire into cemetaries or mosques for a long time, but finally the clerics were tired of these insurgents, and gave the US permission to fire back even if the insurgents were in a mosque or cemetary.
Make no mistake, Iraq was a direct threat to us. Our intelligence obviously overstated some of this, but nevertheless, the evidence is pretty clear.
Check out the book "The Third Terrorist". This was in the making long before 9/11 and documents some of Saddam's actions inside the US that were covered up because the Clintons didn't have the guts to persue open war when it was called for.
"Face it, everyone is biased. Your "information" and views are just as biased as anyone. You don't really know. You believe."
I didn't claim otherwise. I simply claimed that the idea that there were no other possible reasons than the ones stated was completely bogus. There are numerous reasons, many stated by the President himself, many of them confirmed.
"Only a blind believer would cling to the view that you are there for promotion of democracy. There are a hell of a lot of dictators out there that could be deposed with less trouble. Why Iraq? Why stick it out and have so many U.S. solders and civilians die in the war? It isn't just for democracy. If you believe that, you are dilusional."
You're right, it isn't _just_ for democracy. There were four issues I listed, plus I believe the president listed more. The only ones of them that was sufficient by itself were WMD and the fact that we had intelligence that they were going to attack us. In addition, there is evidence that they had attacked us before, the Clintons just covered it up because they didn't want an all-out war.
"Name one other country that has been invaded for the purpose of forming a democracy."
Your insistence that there was a single purpose, and only this purpose, for invading Iraq could be the source of your confusion.
"Americans: please get satellite dishes and watch CBC newsworld or BBC newsworld. You need information that the internal media controls too much."
You're right. Our new media is way too much anti-war and anti-Bush.
I'm not a big fan of the president, but the amount of bashing he gets is just idiotic, especially since most of his criticism is mere idle speculation.
If by "well-debunked" you are referring to the UnUnFarenheit 9/11 article, you are thinkingly-deficient. I just finished reading the whole thing, and it seems to support Hitchins near 100% on a factual basis. Most of the article is in fact hand-waving (no, that's not what the film really is trying to say - nevertheless that is what the film is actually saying) or just name-calling.
What's really funny is the Saudi flights out of the US. Jason actually agrees that Moore was responsible and took responsibility. However, he tried to couch it as he took responsibility for the actions in a general sense, although he had said, specifically, before the 9/11 commission, that the decision went NO HIGHER than him. So, while Jason wants to make him out to be magnanimous, the fact still remains that Moore is fooling you!
Apparently, it is also okay for Moore to mislead people about what Saddam had done leading up to the war. Jason accuses Hitchens of lying. What was the lie? That Hitchens said that Moore said that "Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened any American". The actual quote according to Jason should be "Iraq had never attacked America, never threatened America, and had never murdered an American". Jason considers the difference between those quotes to be LYING. Good Gosh! Then, although he admits that they are factually incorrect, he says it's okay for Moore to do it, because he's playing the same role he believes the GWB is playing in the reasons for going to war. Not that he has actually proven GWB is lying, but the mere suspicion apparently gives Moore adequate backing for lying himself.
The rest is basically Jason defending the movie by saying that "it only raises questions - it doesn't give answers" which is a complete load of BS. It only raises questions on one side, which is the same as giving answers. The fact that it does so deceptively is even worse.
Anyway, the article was really sad, and actually venerated Hitchens because it agreed with him on pretty much every factual point.
If you want to read the article yourself, it's here:
http://anthropik.net/ununfahrenheit911
If you were referring to another debunking, please provide the link.
I think he's referring to http://anthropik.net/ununfahrenheit911
I haven't had time to read all of it, but most of it is complaining that Hitchens doesn't like Moore. I've printed it out so I'll read it later, and respond to it if I have the time.
I can't believe that you think your three points are undenyable. If anything _that_ shows you how skewed the media is.
"Bush and friends earn more in their Saudi business connections than they do in working at their government jobs."
I'll give you this one.
"The world was lied too about the weapons of mass destruction, in order to create a false sense of urgency to act in Iraq."
Excuse me? Every administration in the last 25 years has known that Iraq has WMD and is working on building up their arsenal. Clinton bombed a Vx gas factory in Sudan that was jointly funded by Al Qaeda and Saddam. Israel had to bomb Iraq in order to destroy their nuclear weapons program. In addition, we know they had WMD because in the 80s we sold them some. Nowhere in any of their reports submitted to the UN did they say where those weapons went. So, why haven't we found them? The reason for the urgency for going to war was that Saddam was busy trucking their WMD over to Syria and giving it to other organizations.
The interesting thing is that we have found some remnants of Saddam's arsenal. One of the roadside bombs that went off had gas (I can't remember if it was Vx or mustard gas). In addition, a "perfume factory" we went into was heavily booby-trapped so that going into it brought down the whole structure, and with it any evidence we might gather.
The only thing that we found that was a complete lie were the roaming bio-terror labs. And it wasn't the administration who lied, it was our informants.
"The only remaining reason for the U.S. interest in Iraq is oil. Invading a country to access its resources is not justified."
If we invaded for access to its resources, why are gas prices still so high? Also, did you miss the President's state of the union address where he listed 7 reasons for going into Iraq? He even left out the big one, because it was too technical for most people - that we had a cease-fire with Iraq under certain terms, which they are now and have been for a while in violation of.
Another reason for going to war, which was not mentioned in the state of the union address (and for some reason is never mentioned in the media), was that we had intelligence given to us directly from Russia that Saddam was planning a terrorist attack on US soil. This is quite in line with his history, as he had also attempted the assassination of GB senior, and was providing safe haven and money to the 1993 WTC bomber who escaped from the US.
The reasons GWB lists are:
1) WMD including attempting to build a nuclear arsenal.
2) Links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, which it helps to fund, and protect their terrorists (which the 9/11 commission determined DID occur)
3) Promotion of democracy in the middle east. It is the belief of the administration that setting up a democracy in the middle east will help transform the state of the middle east. This is not a short term goal but a long-term one (probably 10+ years). Saddam is an enemy that we have legitimate reason to war with (due to the previous cease-fire agreements which he is violating), so we fought them to establish a democratic government. The future will tell if this was wise or foolish, just remember that this is a long-term, not a short-term goal.
4) Humanitarian reasons - free people from Saddam Hussein. This one was accomplished. Some people look at the acts of a few aberrants in the military and think everyone is like that (like at Abu Ghrabe). However, the stories that aren't reported are numerous, including a military man who saw a little Iraqi girl playing with unexploded ordinance, and jumped on top of it. It exploded under him. He gave his life for a little Iraqi girl, leaving his own children without a father. This has been one of the most humane wars ever fought. Sure, war is never pretty or clean, but I can't think of another war that has gone to such great lengths to preserve the lives of non-combatants. Why do you think Sa
Old Michael Moore is actually pretty good. His recent stuff, however, is nothing short of propoganda. The number of lies and half-truths he's been telling in his recent movies is just staggering.
I can't believe that people call this a documentary. Documentaries are supposed to be at least aiming for the truth. You should read this - http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/
One of the more interesting points is that, while Richard Clarke is viewed as the hero in Moore's movie, it was him, and him alone who authorized the Saudi flights out of the US.
Of course, absolutely noone in the media ever mentions Gore's close ties with big oil, or the fact that he sold our Navy's national reserves to the company his Dad worked for, leaving us even more dependent on foreign oil than ever.
Conservatives rigging elections?
I don't know about other places, but here in Oklahoma the Democratic party is fighting like mad to keep people from having to produce ID in order to vote.
"And it's extremely clear to me that our auditory senses were not developed to appreciate music"
What makes this clear?