1) Companies are giving away computers to their employees for the same reason that some companies give employees company cars: it's a way to pay workers without getting raped by federal taxes. It costs employers $2 to put $1 of cash in employees pockets, thanks to socialist parasites who promote free lunch schemes like universal access. Employer-paid health insurance started as a means of getting around FDR's World War II wage and price controls, y'know.
2) If taxes weren't so damn high employers would just pay us cash and we'd buy whatever we want, without the strings, inefficiency, and paperwork.
3) There are millions of people out there who are too stupid to use computers no matter how much training you give them. You can't exempt humans from the Darwinian evolutionary theory the government education monopoly has been teaching us.
You can have freedom and low taxes, or you can have socialism/statism/fascism/communism, little freedom, little control over your life, and the universal "right" to a "free" PC some bureaucrat picked out for you. Plus Internet service equivalent to AOL run by the IRS.
Are we supposed to trust the same government that promised us that Social Security numbers would not become "national ID cards" to protect our privacy?
Let's keep the FTC (and FCC) far away from the Internet for as long as we possibly can.
"Indeed, there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt or GTK+. There are a number of private programs available, but as far as companies go, this is a no-no because it fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed."
Guaranteed, just like all the "guarantees" you get as a citizen in, say, Cuba, or the "guarantees" we American Gen-X'ers get with the Social Security system. Trust Big Brother, he knows what he's doing.
I'll take freedom and managed risk over illusory "guarantees" any day.
Anyone who says you don't "need" a GeForce card hasn't seen Quake 3 on a P3/GeForce box running 1280x1024 res. To quote my friend who just got one, "Holy F---!"
What disappoints me about nVidia is a) the lack of open source Linux drivers, and b) their chips don't generate as clean a video signal at high res (ie, 1600x1200x32bit @ 85Hz) as Matrox cards do. I sold my 3D Blaster Annihilator in favor of a Matrox G400 Max after upgrading monitors for just this reason. I'll gladly go back to nVidia if they'll fix this problem. Near as I can tell, Matrox is the only company that truly cares about video signal integrity. What's the point of a high-end monitor if your video card generates fuzzy text?
Oh yeah, and I want one of those HDTV receiver cards nVidia talks about in their press release.
I prefer HTML books over their dead trees equivalents, especially when they're done right like O'Reilly's "CD Bookshelf" series. Reading text on my notebook's 1024x768 14.1" screen is easier on my eyes than reading smaller printed type. I've loaded "Perl CD Bookshelf" and several Microsoft books (Windows pays the bills, 'kay?) onto my notebook's HD. Less than 100megs of space has replaced 40-50 pounds of paper. I'll buy HTML over paper any day. Paper is soooo last century.
Find yourself a relatively cheap notebook that has a 14" active matrix 1024x768 screen (or better), a decent enough HD, and can be inexpensively upgraded to 128megs RAM. I sit my Toshiba Satellite 2545XCDT on my kitchen table and do the bulk of my reading there, then move to my desktop machine when I need heavy firepower. The combo works well. Makes a nice front-end for my Linux server, too. (Not that I wouldn't mind a properly equipped Dell Inspiron 7500 with its 15.4" 1280x1024 res screen, but they are a tad expensive...)
Sony's new 53HS10 and 61HS10 sets look appealing, at least on paper (anyone bought one?). 1080i-capable, $3000 and $3500 respectively at Best Buy. My plan is to wait until Best Buy sends out their 10% off "Customer Appreciation" coupons and get another 5% off using my Sony card (normally 3% kickback, but 5% from May 1st thru June 30th). Of course, then I'll get whacked by Michigan's 6% sales tax, but what can y'do. Dish Network is alledged to have integrated HDTV satellite receivers coming out Any Day Now (can't find anything on their site currently, mostly because their search engine is broken). I've been a Dish Network customer for over 3 years so I'm looking forward to upgrading receivers ($500 is the rumored price).
Then again, if Hauppage would make PC HDTV decoders that displayed full 1080i (only 480p currently), my new Sony G500 21" monitor displays 1920x1440 @ 75Hz quite nicely...
They do "give something back". They pay $billions in taxes. (Which are a large part of the bills we pay, btw. Ever look at those "franchise fees" and what not on your cable/telephone bills?)
If companies unprotected by a government sanctioned monopoly don't play nice, they invite competition. Sometimes even the monopolies get whacked by new technology (minidish vs. cable). Having government bureaucrats dictate prices kills most of the incentive to innovate, and s-l-o-ws down whatever survives to a crawl.
Go buy a Echostar Dish Network satellite dish like I did. They're independent, not owned by any of the cable companies. I've been a customer for over 3 years. Highly recommended. The minidish companies are doing so well because the cable cos gave them an opening with their lousy service. The free market works!
You are one spoiled bastard if you think TV is a right. It's a toy, 'kay?
If AT&T hadn't been a government sanctioned and protected monopoly in the first place, it wouldn't have needed regulations to force it to do things that the free market would have forced it to do.
Open Source licenses (GPL, etc) secure rights for the creators of the source. Lessig wants to trample on the exact same rights if they belong to companies investing $billions in new infrastructure.
Yes, sometimes those companies will do boneheaded things (blocking port 80, etc). But cable vs. DSL vs. wireless vs. (soon) satellite competition is the way to straighten those things out, not by getting Big Brother involved. (And if Big Brother wasn't so greedy with the spectrum auctions and heavy-handed in its regulations we'd have a lot more wireless options...)
The best economic argument for open source: it's frictionless. Just download and go. No having to come up with the cash, or beg the purchasing department, justify it to the Powers That Be, etc. While Open Source writers generally don't get paid cash for their direct efforts, they aren't generating taxes either, nor are taxes (massive friction) generated by the exchange with other OSS folks. Aftertax dollars are precious.
Of course, you'll make good money implimenting the OSS software (web admin, in-house developer, etc), at which point Big Brother will put a gun to your head and confiscate half your labor for having the audacity to flaunt having a brain, but what can y'do. (And most of that money will go towards buying the votes of the morons who clobbered you in school...)
(I was too lazy to read the.pdf doc, so I don't know if econ boy covered this, but I suspect not..)
Intel gets to tax deduct the cost of the PCs as a business expense (probably leased?), whereas employees would have to use precious aftertax $$$. Thus it would literally cost employees twice as much to buy the same PCs. This is a nice way of getting wealth into the hands of workers without getting raped by the IRS.
Remember kids, employer-paid health insurance started as a way of getting around FDR's WWII wage and price controls. Hopefully we won't wind up with the same screwed up political consequences with employer-paid PCs, tho the "Digital Divide" propaganda is disconcerting.
Sure would be a lot easier if Big Brother didn't confiscate 4-6 months per year of our labor in the first place, then we could buy our own toys with our own money.
MIT Technology Review did a Fiber to the Home cover story in their current issue that is very relevant to this thread. Today's announcement that Lucent, Hitachi, and Alcatel have agreed to standardize fiber optic tranceivers looks important, too.
I want a 100Mb/sec fiber pipe to my condo, and I want it now! (grin)
If you wind up with more $$$ (well, marks) than anticipated, have you considered angel investing? In short, investing funds (preferably along with a few other AI's) in a new startup and mentoring them. Ideally, you'll help create new software, more wealth, and have fun doing it. This might not make sense given Germany's rapaciously high taxes (tho I understand they're finally coming down; someone's getting supply-side religion?), but it's increasingly common here in America.
If your interests are more academic, perhaps you could buy a nice computer lab for an interested local high school? A decent Linux-based server networked with diskless Linux workstations would be very cost effective and not overly difficult to administer. You would, of course, be obligated to help get them up and running (grin), but I'm sure lots of student volunteers could be found. With luck, some of those students could go on to startups of their own. (256MByte Athlon workstations, maybe shell out for a VA Research dual-P3 server... Forte for Java would make a *great* learning environment...) They'll probably need help getting a high-speed Internet feed, too.
AMD's U.S. fabs have completely switched over to 0.18 micron aluminum interconnect for Athlons. Dresden is sampling copper interconnect chips (Thunderbird core, 256K on-die L2 cache running full CPU speed), with volume shipments in June and buyable in July. (They demoed a 1.1GHz Thunderbird a few days ago, no special cooling.)
Who cares about watching a bunch of crappy video feeds of commercials we're going to become thoroughly sick of on broadcast TV over the next several months?
The Internet is made for conveying information in detail. For example, I should be able to go to the site, click a link labeled "Social Security", and read why Al Gore thinks that the overwhelmingly young American Internet audience should support that system that confiscates 1-1/2 months per year of our labor in payroll taxes and, if Gore and his Democrat pals get their way, several weeks of additional labor in federal income taxes (those $trillions of "surplus" dollars). The soundbite crap on the site is useless.
On a more Internet-relavent note, the FEC wants to regulate political speech on the Internet (see th is CNN story). Doesn't this create a hostile environment for non-official candidate web sites? Isn't this a blatent violation of the First Amendment (intended to protect political speech)? What is your view on such web sites?
#1: Steve Forbes looks and acts like a geek. #2: Forbes Magazine put Linus on its cover before any of the other business mags did. (A clear sign of cluefullness.) #3: He's anti-Internet-regulation and taxation and pro-crypto. #4: His Flat Tax plan ($13K personal deduction, $5K dependent deductions, 17% of income above those deductions) would a) stop us from having to buy TurboTax every year, b) eliminate half of what the corrupting lobbyists are buying (tax breaks), c) by replacing the mortgage deduction with the 5-figure personal deduction it ends the massive discrimination against renters, and d) it's overall a massive improvement over the status quo. #5: He favors letting younger workers swich from the Socialist Security system (that confiscates 1.5 months per year of our labor into a doomed system that wouldn't pay squat even if it worked as advertised) into individual-owned accounts (very similar to Chile's system, some restrictions on asset class weighting, guaranteed minimum payouts for the poor). Not the total phaseout I'd like, but probably the best we can do. #6: He favors nuking death taxes and capital gains taxes (lethal to family farms/businesses and discriminatory against geeks, respectively). #7: Very cluefull on foreign policy, in large part because he's met a hefty chunk of the world's leaders. #8: Being able to read his past editorials in his mag is very reassuring. He really has been saying all this stuff all along.
SelectSmart gave me this list: 83 Harry Browne 73 Orrin Hatch 68 George W. Bush 67 Alan Keyes 62 Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr. 59 Howard Phillips 58 Gary L. Bauer 58 Patrick J. (Pat) Buchanan 55 John Hagelin 49 John S. McCain 27 Bill Bradley 26 Donald Trump 20 Albert Gore Jr. 19 David McReynolds 16 Ralph Nader 9 Warren Beatty
Well, okay, they may have a point with the Libertarian candidate, but I disqualified Hatch for his cluelessness on technological issues (watch the debates), and Bush is a moderate of the type that lost the last two elections. Keyes is my #1 choice for Veep, and also very tech-cluefull. You should have heard his very-pro-space-exploration minispeech during one of the presidential debates.
If I go out and mug somebody in a land with no laws against such things, does that make it right? The fact that "the system" allows it does not wash it of immorality. Slavery used to be legal. It still is in some countries.
Patents should protect implementations, not ideas, and in intellectual property (particularly source code), copyrights are usually a more effective means to the same end. The source code to a particular banner ad serving program can be copyrighted (legally protected) if its creator so chooses. The general idea of banner ads should not be. Legally freezing implementations doesn't stop progress; freezing ideas does.
The First Amendment is, first and foremost, designed to protect political speech. Bush's approach, irregardless of being against a twit like Exley, is wrong, trying to get the fascist FEC to smother independent political sites with regulations. A real conservative (hell, even just someone who can think two steps ahead) would have had the good sense to ignore the site and not draw publicity to it.
The last thing we need to do is add to the FEC's power. Restricting them to just making sure that candidates (and parties) list their large cash donations immediately on the Internet, as Steve Forbes would do, and leaving the independents alone is the right way to go. I'm a little less clear on the rest of the Republican candidates stands on campaign regs, but I doubt they'd back Bush on this one either (certainly not Alan Keyes).
The German government has spent hundreds of $millions to subsidize AMDs new, huge Dresden fab. They would of course like to maximize their return on investment (tax revenues). Intel-bashing is a pretty effective way to do this. This is waaaay too big a conflict of interest to be mere coincidence.
Of course, if German taxes weren't so rapaciously high companies wouldn't need subsidies to set up shop there, and we'd avoid such conflicts of interest. But then what would the political fixer class do with themselves?
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 1
#1: Under command economies the ruling dictatorship can shove a huge portion of available resources into whatever projects they deem important. So yes, the Soviet Union was able to get into space before the U.S. The problem is that this requires bleeding the rest of the economy dry (note the 20+ million people murdered/starved by Stalin in order to build Soviet industry; I suspect they'd object to your assertion of an "improved standard of living" if they could), and the growth of the rest of the economy is subpar, if existent at all. Thus Reagan could spend 6% of U.S. GDP on the military (with the majority of that going to soldiers salaries) and drive the Soviet Union spending 20% of their GDP on their military (with poorly paid conscripts) into the ground.
#2, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his means" requires dictatorship, because men of ability will always resist enslavement. Thus why the best and brightest around the world immigrate to the U.S. (I work with a bunch of 'em, Brits, Indians, Chinese, you name it), because we have the least repressive government of all the major countries. Which says more about the rest of the world than us. The federal government confiscates 22% of GDP, state/local governments another 11%, and that's despite military spending being gutted to 3% of GDP. And our incompetent draft-dodger Commander-in-Chief is busy pissing off the rest of the world by sending our military tromping off to more expeditions than Reagan and Bush combined!
Sins committed by America pale in comparison to what the Chinese Communist dictatorship has done (60 million murdered by Mao, millions imprisoned since then, see this article by Harry Wu about the Laogai, the Chinese Gulags). The simple fact that millions try every year to immigrate to America (and over a million per year succeed), many of them fleeing China, says enough as it is.
The main problem with capitalism is that it's rarely followed. Ironic that the nation closest to unadultered capitalism is Hong Kong. The economic freedom and prosperity invading from HK and Taiwan will eventually overrun the ChiCom dictatorship, so long as the PLA doesn't do anything particularly antisocial in the meantime (like invade Taiwan, which in MacArthur's words is "an unsinkable aircraft carrier").
On one hand, I have a Toshiba laptop that qualifies for a nice "rebate". On the other hand, I've been happy with the laptop (Satellite XCDT series), have never had a problem with the floppy drive, and think Shakespeare's quote on lawyers lacks sufficient creativity. OTOOH, Toshiba made a gutless call by settling, rather than taking a chance on a jury trial (even a likely rigged trial) and appealing the case as high as it could go if necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have property rights, you're just a serf.
1) Companies are giving away computers to their employees for the same reason that some companies give employees company cars: it's a way to pay workers without getting raped by federal taxes. It costs employers $2 to put $1 of cash in employees pockets, thanks to socialist parasites who promote free lunch schemes like universal access. Employer-paid health insurance started as a means of getting around FDR's World War II wage and price controls, y'know.
2) If taxes weren't so damn high employers would just pay us cash and we'd buy whatever we want, without the strings, inefficiency, and paperwork.
3) There are millions of people out there who are too stupid to use computers no matter how much training you give them. You can't exempt humans from the Darwinian evolutionary theory the government education monopoly has been teaching us.
You can have freedom and low taxes, or you can have socialism/statism/fascism/communism, little freedom, little control over your life, and the universal "right" to a "free" PC some bureaucrat picked out for you. Plus Internet service equivalent to AOL run by the IRS.
Where have all the Libertarians gone?
Are we supposed to trust the same government that promised us that Social Security numbers would not become "national ID cards" to protect our privacy?
Let's keep the FTC (and FCC) far away from the Internet for as long as we possibly can.
"Indeed, there is no commercial GUI builder for Qt or GTK+. There are a number of private programs available, but as far as companies go, this is a no-no because it fails to guarantee any kind of continuance, stability, or development. Compare this with the Open Group's license for maintaining Motif, guaranteed by contract. Continued development is absolutely guaranteed."
Guaranteed, just like all the "guarantees" you get as a citizen in, say, Cuba, or the "guarantees" we American Gen-X'ers get with the Social Security system. Trust Big Brother, he knows what he's doing.
I'll take freedom and managed risk over illusory "guarantees" any day.
Anyone who says you don't "need" a GeForce card hasn't seen Quake 3 on a P3/GeForce box running 1280x1024 res. To quote my friend who just got one, "Holy F---!"
What disappoints me about nVidia is a) the lack of open source Linux drivers, and b) their chips don't generate as clean a video signal at high res (ie, 1600x1200x32bit @ 85Hz) as Matrox cards do. I sold my 3D Blaster Annihilator in favor of a Matrox G400 Max after upgrading monitors for just this reason. I'll gladly go back to nVidia if they'll fix this problem. Near as I can tell, Matrox is the only company that truly cares about video signal integrity. What's the point of a high-end monitor if your video card generates fuzzy text?
Oh yeah, and I want one of those HDTV receiver cards nVidia talks about in their press release.
Find yourself a relatively cheap notebook that has a 14" active matrix 1024x768 screen (or better), a decent enough HD, and can be inexpensively upgraded to 128megs RAM. I sit my Toshiba Satellite 2545XCDT on my kitchen table and do the bulk of my reading there, then move to my desktop machine when I need heavy firepower. The combo works well. Makes a nice front-end for my Linux server, too. (Not that I wouldn't mind a properly equipped Dell Inspiron 7500 with its 15.4" 1280x1024 res screen, but they are a tad expensive...)
Then again, if Hauppage would make PC HDTV decoders that displayed full 1080i (only 480p currently), my new Sony G500 21" monitor displays 1920x1440 @ 75Hz quite nicely...
They do "give something back". They pay $billions in taxes. (Which are a large part of the bills we pay, btw. Ever look at those "franchise fees" and what not on your cable/telephone bills?)
If companies unprotected by a government sanctioned monopoly don't play nice, they invite competition. Sometimes even the monopolies get whacked by new technology (minidish vs. cable). Having government bureaucrats dictate prices kills most of the incentive to innovate, and s-l-o-ws down whatever survives to a crawl.
You are one spoiled bastard if you think TV is a right. It's a toy, 'kay?
Read up on a concept called "property rights".
If AT&T hadn't been a government sanctioned and protected monopoly in the first place, it wouldn't have needed regulations to force it to do things that the free market would have forced it to do.
Open Source licenses (GPL, etc) secure rights for the creators of the source. Lessig wants to trample on the exact same rights if they belong to companies investing $billions in new infrastructure.
Yes, sometimes those companies will do boneheaded things (blocking port 80, etc). But cable vs. DSL vs. wireless vs. (soon) satellite competition is the way to straighten those things out, not by getting Big Brother involved. (And if Big Brother wasn't so greedy with the spectrum auctions and heavy-handed in its regulations we'd have a lot more wireless options...)
The best economic argument for open source: it's frictionless. Just download and go. No having to come up with the cash, or beg the purchasing department, justify it to the Powers That Be, etc. While Open Source writers generally don't get paid cash for their direct efforts, they aren't generating taxes either, nor are taxes (massive friction) generated by the exchange with other OSS folks. Aftertax dollars are precious.
.pdf doc, so I don't know if econ boy covered this, but I suspect not..)
Of course, you'll make good money implimenting the OSS software (web admin, in-house developer, etc), at which point Big Brother will put a gun to your head and confiscate half your labor for having the audacity to flaunt having a brain, but what can y'do. (And most of that money will go towards buying the votes of the morons who clobbered you in school...)
(I was too lazy to read the
Intel gets to tax deduct the cost of the PCs as a business expense (probably leased?), whereas employees would have to use precious aftertax $$$. Thus it would literally cost employees twice as much to buy the same PCs. This is a nice way of getting wealth into the hands of workers without getting raped by the IRS.
Remember kids, employer-paid health insurance started as a way of getting around FDR's WWII wage and price controls. Hopefully we won't wind up with the same screwed up political consequences with employer-paid PCs, tho the "Digital Divide" propaganda is disconcerting.
Sure would be a lot easier if Big Brother didn't confiscate 4-6 months per year of our labor in the first place, then we could buy our own toys with our own money.
I want a 100Mb/sec fiber pipe to my condo, and I want it now! (grin)
If you wind up with more $$$ (well, marks) than anticipated, have you considered angel investing? In short, investing funds (preferably along with a few other AI's) in a new startup and mentoring them. Ideally, you'll help create new software, more wealth, and have fun doing it. This might not make sense given Germany's rapaciously high taxes (tho I understand they're finally coming down; someone's getting supply-side religion?), but it's increasingly common here in America.
If your interests are more academic, perhaps you could buy a nice computer lab for an interested local high school? A decent Linux-based server networked with diskless Linux workstations would be very cost effective and not overly difficult to administer. You would, of course, be obligated to help get them up and running (grin), but I'm sure lots of student volunteers could be found. With luck, some of those students could go on to startups of their own. (256MByte Athlon workstations, maybe shell out for a VA Research dual-P3 server... Forte for Java would make a *great* learning environment...) They'll probably need help getting a high-speed Internet feed, too.
AMD's U.S. fabs have completely switched over to 0.18 micron aluminum interconnect for Athlons. Dresden is sampling copper interconnect chips (Thunderbird core, 256K on-die L2 cache running full CPU speed), with volume shipments in June and buyable in July. (They demoed a 1.1GHz Thunderbird a few days ago, no special cooling.)
Yeah, I want a multiprocessor Athlon box too.
The Internet is made for conveying information in detail. For example, I should be able to go to the site, click a link labeled "Social Security", and read why Al Gore thinks that the overwhelmingly young American Internet audience should support that system that confiscates 1-1/2 months per year of our labor in payroll taxes and, if Gore and his Democrat pals get their way, several weeks of additional labor in federal income taxes (those $trillions of "surplus" dollars). The soundbite crap on the site is useless.
On a more Internet-relavent note, the FEC wants to regulate political speech on the Internet (see th is CNN story). Doesn't this create a hostile environment for non-official candidate web sites? Isn't this a blatent violation of the First Amendment (intended to protect political speech)? What is your view on such web sites?
You just described Steve Forbes. I detail why in this article. Also see the Forbes website.
#1: Steve Forbes looks and acts like a geek.
#2: Forbes Magazine put Linus on its cover before any of the other business mags did. (A clear sign of cluefullness.)
#3: He's anti-Internet-regulation and taxation and pro-crypto.
#4: His Flat Tax plan ($13K personal deduction, $5K dependent deductions, 17% of income above those deductions) would a) stop us from having to buy TurboTax every year, b) eliminate half of what the corrupting lobbyists are buying (tax breaks), c) by replacing the mortgage deduction with the 5-figure personal deduction it ends the massive discrimination against renters, and d) it's overall a massive improvement over the status quo.
#5: He favors letting younger workers swich from the Socialist Security system (that confiscates 1.5 months per year of our labor into a doomed system that wouldn't pay squat even if it worked as advertised) into individual-owned accounts (very similar to Chile's system, some restrictions on asset class weighting, guaranteed minimum payouts for the poor). Not the total phaseout I'd like, but probably the best we can do.
#6: He favors nuking death taxes and capital gains taxes (lethal to family farms/businesses and discriminatory against geeks, respectively).
#7: Very cluefull on foreign policy, in large part because he's met a hefty chunk of the world's leaders.
#8: Being able to read his past editorials in his mag is very reassuring. He really has been saying all this stuff all along.
SelectSmart gave me this list:
83 Harry Browne
73 Orrin Hatch
68 George W. Bush
67 Alan Keyes
62 Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr.
59 Howard Phillips
58 Gary L. Bauer
58 Patrick J. (Pat) Buchanan
55 John Hagelin
49 John S. McCain
27 Bill Bradley
26 Donald Trump
20 Albert Gore Jr.
19 David McReynolds
16 Ralph Nader
9 Warren Beatty
Well, okay, they may have a point with the Libertarian candidate, but I disqualified Hatch for his cluelessness on technological issues (watch the debates), and Bush is a moderate of the type that lost the last two elections. Keyes is my #1 choice for Veep, and also very tech-cluefull. You should have heard his very-pro-space-exploration minispeech during one of the presidential debates.
If I go out and mug somebody in a land with no laws against such things, does that make it right? The fact that "the system" allows it does not wash it of immorality. Slavery used to be legal. It still is in some countries.
Patents should protect implementations, not ideas, and in intellectual property (particularly source code), copyrights are usually a more effective means to the same end. The source code to a particular banner ad serving program can be copyrighted (legally protected) if its creator so chooses. The general idea of banner ads should not be. Legally freezing implementations doesn't stop progress; freezing ideas does.
I'd try the anti-anxiety drugs, but the listed side effects make me nervous...
Where's my Soma...
The last thing we need to do is add to the FEC's power. Restricting them to just making sure that candidates (and parties) list their large cash donations immediately on the Internet, as Steve Forbes would do, and leaving the independents alone is the right way to go. I'm a little less clear on the rest of the Republican candidates stands on campaign regs, but I doubt they'd back Bush on this one either (certainly not Alan Keyes).
The German government has spent hundreds of $millions to subsidize AMDs new, huge Dresden fab. They would of course like to maximize their return on investment (tax revenues). Intel-bashing is a pretty effective way to do this. This is waaaay too big a conflict of interest to be mere coincidence.
Of course, if German taxes weren't so rapaciously high companies wouldn't need subsidies to set up shop there, and we'd avoid such conflicts of interest. But then what would the political fixer class do with themselves?
#2, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his means" requires dictatorship, because men of ability will always resist enslavement. Thus why the best and brightest around the world immigrate to the U.S. (I work with a bunch of 'em, Brits, Indians, Chinese, you name it), because we have the least repressive government of all the major countries. Which says more about the rest of the world than us. The federal government confiscates 22% of GDP, state/local governments another 11%, and that's despite military spending being gutted to 3% of GDP. And our incompetent draft-dodger Commander-in-Chief is busy pissing off the rest of the world by sending our military tromping off to more expeditions than Reagan and Bush combined!
The main problem with capitalism is that it's rarely followed. Ironic that the nation closest to unadultered capitalism is Hong Kong. The economic freedom and prosperity invading from HK and Taiwan will eventually overrun the ChiCom dictatorship, so long as the PLA doesn't do anything particularly antisocial in the meantime (like invade Taiwan, which in MacArthur's words is "an unsinkable aircraft carrier").
On one hand, I have a Toshiba laptop that qualifies for a nice "rebate". On the other hand, I've been happy with the laptop (Satellite XCDT series), have never had a problem with the floppy drive, and think Shakespeare's quote on lawyers lacks sufficient creativity. OTOOH, Toshiba made a gutless call by settling, rather than taking a chance on a jury trial (even a likely rigged trial) and appealing the case as high as it could go if necessary.