A friend of mine is a finance manager at a car dealership. Two women and a man came in about two months ago with a rather elaborate story. The first woman was married to the man, then fell in love with the second woman. The first woman wanted to buy a car, but had no credit history, although the social security number (and matching drivers license) she had provided was clean. Neither the other woman, or the husband, was willing to cosign. The woman also had all of the appropriate documentation for a credit less customer, addressed bills, paystubs, bank account balances, etc...
That night, the woman left my friend with a hefty down payment check, and the three left in a brand new, $30,000 car. The very next morning, the dealership was faxed the remainder of the information they needed to close out the deal. About two weeks later, when they were verifying the check and logging the deal, the bank let them know that the name on the check didn't match the name on the account. My friend did some digging, left the woman a message, and asked her to get back to him.
At this point, he called me, and told me the story. He hadn't put it together yet, but I couldn't stop laughing. The last thing he said to me, before I broke the news to him, was that the dealership probably wouldn't lose too much since they'd be able to repossess the car before they could put too many miles on it. I explained that they were long gone, and so was the car. It wasn't coming back, it was all a show, none of it was real. He checked out the cell phone, prepaid, checked out the paystub (manager said, "Another one! Have no idea who that is"), checked out the bills, fake account numbers. Everything was fake, the whole deal was a very elaborate hoax.
It's not hard to see why they succeeded. They came in with an elaborate story to distract and disarm. The more you're thinking about lesbians, the less you're thinking about proof. They were able to argue amongst themselves to great effect the entire time to further distract (e.g. "You left me for her, its not my problem, I had all you needed right here"). They also had all the answers and all the right explanations, there was no need to come back, they had all the information they required with them, and as they could see from the credit report, they knew what to bring because they'd already hit many other dealerships in the area.
The con artists also sweetened the deal for the dealership. My friend tried to reject the deal, but when the general manager found out that they were buying the car for sticker price with a maintenance plan, a very high profit deal, he told him to go ahead with it. They also took away the ability to verify the deal, and the incentive to verify the next day. They came in late in the day, when the banks were closed, and her job would have been closed, so they would have to take most of the information presented at face value. In addition, the additional information they requested was faxed over the next day to relieve suspicion.
The last thing they relied on was the most important, and that is the reluctance of those who have been scammed to report it. My dad uncovered a scam several years ago, where 21 people were taken for between $100k and $1M each over the course of a year, by a boat dealer. The dealer was never convicted, not because of the evidence, but because not a single person was willing to testify, publicly admitting their mistake. And before you think it couldn't happen to you, consider that even Al Capone was taken for $5,000 in the 1920s. Viktor Lustig approached Capone and offered to double his investment of $50,000 in 60 days. In 60 days, Lustig returned all $50,000 to Capone, and apologized that it didn't work, although he very much needed the money. Capone decided to give Lustig $5,000. What Capone didn't know, was that this is what Lustig had planned all along, he had never done anything but deposit the money in a bank account. In another case, Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower to
Their FY2008 services revenue was $5.26B, storage revenue was $2.35B, and their computer systems revenue was $6.26B.
While the services revenue is up 3% from FY 2007, storage revenue is only up 1.6%, and computer systems revenue is down about 3%.
Given that 38% of their revenue is derived from services, and that services is their fastest growing growth sector, what makes you believe that services doesn't provide a revenue stream in practice?
If they land men on the moon in two years, they'll be 41 years behind. You seem to assume we haven't accomplished anything since 1969. You're discounting our Mars missions (rovers, landers, satellites), the Hubble, the Space Station, GPS, the Shuttle, the upcoming JWST, not to mention the myriad satellites, probes and impacters. We've truly, repeatedly, gone where no man has gone before, they cannot say the same. It's much easier to follow in the footsteps of another than to blaze your own trail.
Granted, we haven't really made any giant leaps since 69, except for ubiquitous Internet (that's a massive except) and minicomputers, but we have made enough small steps to climb a mountain. Everything we did yesterday, we do better today. We haven't done too much new, just everything old, better. So much advancement has been made in the last 15 years, it's ridiculous. It may not be a space age, but it's certainly the age of improvement and refinement. Everything is smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper, and all around better. Many small steps, in aggregate, can be better than one giant leap.
It's foolish to assume that because people are catching up to our achievements made decades ago, that they are somehow superior to us. It is good for them though, and perhaps it will give us the impetus to move on to bigger and better things.
I'm surprised that the bank didn't step in at the point and not lend her the money. Several times I've gotten a mortgage or line of credit the bank always wants to know why... "Why do you need to mortgage your house again?" should have been the question and the bank, upon hearing her answer (I can't imagine she would lie since she seems pretty gullible) should have been "No ma'am, I'm sorry but we cannot lend you the money for that." I'm sure there are some unscrupulous banks but - come on - the bank is not likely to see its money after she declares bankruptcy!
You're right about that, the bank won't see it's money again. But it will seize her house.
While I have had a 360 die with a RROD, I still think your argument is laughable. If I had a nickel for every time I've upgraded my computer, and had something not work quite right after, I'd have a mountain of nickels by now. I'll take the Xbox 360 failure results (get MS RMA issued over the internet, ship console in, get console back) over the PC results (diagnose problem [i.e. no rings to look at], purchase replacement hardware because old hardware is obsolete or broken, take system apart and replace faulty hardware, spend next 12 hours reinstalling windows and applications, and next 3 months getting everything back to the way it was) any day.
Your right, a political and economic union of member states is so much different than a government. Wait a second, that almost sounds like a federation of independent states got together, and created a ruling body to oversee and coordinate them. We did that here, and we called it the United States Federal Government. If it makes you feel better to not call a spade a spade, go for it, but the fact of the matter is they are still using your money to contract on your behalf without being held accountable by you. That's all right though, because mere mortals should have no say in government anyway. There should only be the ruling class, and everyone else. Congratulations, you are well on your way.
It's so closed that a government website doesn't exist that lists every open non-security related active procurement in the federal government, along with all the related information (i.e. rfp, rfq, amendments, attachments) so that every citizen and business has the opportunity to review what the government is buying, how they are going about buying it, and to bid on selling it to them. I was unfamiliar with Mother Jones, but a quick glance at their front page makes it pretty clear where they stand. But do continue to froth at the mouth regarding the Bush administration, it makes it considerably easier to spot your bias and ignorance.
And by the way, outsourcing with oversight isn't a problem. In fact, Goddard Space Flight Center, the largest NASA space research laboratory, houses only 3,186 actual government employees, whereas the other 7,590 that report there work for the companies that NASA contracts to perform the work.
Here's what NASA has to say about it:
As the forthcoming National Academies panel report will note, industry has the flexibility to move engineers and managers among programs depending on customer needs, a key advantage for NASA in a constrained budget environment. Work contracted to the private sector also offers the agency the benefit of civil-military integration since so many aerospace companies maintain research and production lines in both sectors. Access to the people and technology in the companies that support the Department of Defense and Transportation will deliver significant benefits to NASA. We can summarize the third benefit of NASA contractor work in one word: relevance. Private sector work in the realm of aeronautics will ensure that federal research has relevance to engines and aircraft planned for public use. Research with product and application potential subsequently increases the nation's return-on-investment at several levels, such as job creation, increased tax revenue, new services, and technology spin-offs.
Private industry is also much more efficient than even an open government.
What does IT spending have to do with military targets? Before you go spouting off about how much you Europeans value "openness" and how superior you are, you should understand that this would never fly in the US, unless it was specifically related to national security. For example, I wanted to understand how government makes large software acquisitions, so I contacted my local public university, and asked for details about their Blackboard procurement. I met with the procurement team that bought the software, and we went over why they chose Blackboard, who bid, how much they bid, what options were presented, and how they defined value. That's open.
You're correct, I was oversimplifying to make a point. The point was that most people significantly underestimate what a small business actually is. For example, an Aircraft Services company with 1,450 employees could realistically need multiple SANs, and is indeed a small company.
Most IT-related activities are at the higher end of the spectrum (see p.30 in the PDF) which tops out at $25 million/year ("services") or 150 employees ("value added reseller"), but there are some odd special cases in there. "Technical consulting," for instance, is $7M, and "Engineering services" is only $4.5M, but "Custom Computer Programming Services" is $25M. Makes you wonder who that was gerrymandered for...
The small business size classification is generally based on the average size of companies in a field. I have no problem believing that the average Custom Computer Programming company is larger than the average Tech Consulting company, which is larger than the average Engineering Services company. When Obama was talking about raising the taxes of Small Businesses making over $250k/year, I doubt many people understood how many businesses that actually affects.
Small Businesses are businesses that make under $25M/year by definition. I can imagine small businesses being in the market for inexpensive, high throughput, SANs.
But it is about taxes. The tax break given to married couples isn't free, that money would have to come from somewhere. Further, giving the break to non-nuclear families defeats the original purpose.
SSD drives can usually detect they are part of a cluster of traditional disks, and can request that data to be written to the traditional disks in the cluster be written to them instead, to improve I/O?
Will that $600 box be using 14 146 GB 10k RPM SAS disks?
These boxes aren't about providing stupid storage, their about providing massive I/O throughput. The larger boxes scale to 44TB and 576TB respectively. This also automatically moves frequently accessed data to flash drives (and RAM) for even faster I/O.
These are absolutely monstrous compared to anything you could build for $600. There seems to be quite a bit of custom hardware to power this setup.
This system will intelligently move the data around to put frequently accessed bits on the SSDs. This is a lot more than a 2u server with a few TB drives in a raid 10.
And second, Republicans don't seem as whiny to me as Democrats, possibly because Democrats rely on others (usually the government) to solve problems, and Republicans (used to, at least) rely on individual initiative. Of course, that last observation might be slightly controversial...;-)
Controversial, but true. Look at the 2008 Prop. 8 demonstrations that are ongoing. While this is arguably one of the only things the Democrats lost, they can't accept it, even though it was a landslide. When Democrats lose, they throw a pity party, file lawsuits, and protest. When Republicans lose they generally blame their party, others in their party, and themselves. There are plenty of things the Republicans could be screaming about, including Obama's campaign financing (foreign money, lax security and name checking, etc..) but that's largely not happening. Before the close of polling, the Democrats were already talking about suing Virginia if they lost. It's pretty pathetic, really.
I think, more than anything, it's endemic of their supporters. As a Republican, when I see someone more successful than myself, I ask myself, what can I do to rise up to their level, and compete. I think that Democrats, instead ask, what can I do to reduce them to my level, and make them bring me up to theirs.
So you believe that the media should be able to effectively decide elections via one-sided reporting and an uneducated (politically) populace? Would you feel the same way if the bias went the other way?
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They're not all stupid...
A friend of mine is a finance manager at a car dealership. Two women and a man came in about two months ago with a rather elaborate story. The first woman was married to the man, then fell in love with the second woman. The first woman wanted to buy a car, but had no credit history, although the social security number (and matching drivers license) she had provided was clean. Neither the other woman, or the husband, was willing to cosign. The woman also had all of the appropriate documentation for a credit less customer, addressed bills, paystubs, bank account balances, etc...
That night, the woman left my friend with a hefty down payment check, and the three left in a brand new, $30,000 car. The very next morning, the dealership was faxed the remainder of the information they needed to close out the deal. About two weeks later, when they were verifying the check and logging the deal, the bank let them know that the name on the check didn't match the name on the account. My friend did some digging, left the woman a message, and asked her to get back to him.
At this point, he called me, and told me the story. He hadn't put it together yet, but I couldn't stop laughing. The last thing he said to me, before I broke the news to him, was that the dealership probably wouldn't lose too much since they'd be able to repossess the car before they could put too many miles on it. I explained that they were long gone, and so was the car. It wasn't coming back, it was all a show, none of it was real. He checked out the cell phone, prepaid, checked out the paystub (manager said, "Another one! Have no idea who that is"), checked out the bills, fake account numbers. Everything was fake, the whole deal was a very elaborate hoax.
It's not hard to see why they succeeded. They came in with an elaborate story to distract and disarm. The more you're thinking about lesbians, the less you're thinking about proof. They were able to argue amongst themselves to great effect the entire time to further distract (e.g. "You left me for her, its not my problem, I had all you needed right here"). They also had all the answers and all the right explanations, there was no need to come back, they had all the information they required with them, and as they could see from the credit report, they knew what to bring because they'd already hit many other dealerships in the area.
The con artists also sweetened the deal for the dealership. My friend tried to reject the deal, but when the general manager found out that they were buying the car for sticker price with a maintenance plan, a very high profit deal, he told him to go ahead with it. They also took away the ability to verify the deal, and the incentive to verify the next day. They came in late in the day, when the banks were closed, and her job would have been closed, so they would have to take most of the information presented at face value. In addition, the additional information they requested was faxed over the next day to relieve suspicion.
The last thing they relied on was the most important, and that is the reluctance of those who have been scammed to report it. My dad uncovered a scam several years ago, where 21 people were taken for between $100k and $1M each over the course of a year, by a boat dealer. The dealer was never convicted, not because of the evidence, but because not a single person was willing to testify, publicly admitting their mistake. And before you think it couldn't happen to you, consider that even Al Capone was taken for $5,000 in the 1920s. Viktor Lustig approached Capone and offered to double his investment of $50,000 in 60 days. In 60 days, Lustig returned all $50,000 to Capone, and apologized that it didn't work, although he very much needed the money. Capone decided to give Lustig $5,000. What Capone didn't know, was that this is what Lustig had planned all along, he had never done anything but deposit the money in a bank account. In another case, Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower to
EndWar is controlled via voice recognition, and for the most part it works pretty well. Plus it's fun to shout orders at your units.
Go here and read the comments. This is why it would be unwise to allow everyone to vote on the issues.
Apples to oranges isn't it. If 38% of your revenue is derived from services, you are most definitely in the service business.
Their FY2008 services revenue was $5.26B, storage revenue was $2.35B, and their computer systems revenue was $6.26B.
While the services revenue is up 3% from FY 2007, storage revenue is only up 1.6%, and computer systems revenue is down about 3%.
Given that 38% of their revenue is derived from services, and that services is their fastest growing growth sector, what makes you believe that services doesn't provide a revenue stream in practice?
But they do make money from Java. In FY2008, Sun made $220M from Java, $208M from MySQL, and $216M from Solaris and Virtualization.
In addition to that, they made a little over $4B from hardware and software support.
There software business is up 27% from FY2008 Q1 to FY2009 Q1. Compare that to their systems business that is down 17% over the same time frame.
If they land men on the moon in two years, they'll be 41 years behind. You seem to assume we haven't accomplished anything since 1969. You're discounting our Mars missions (rovers, landers, satellites), the Hubble, the Space Station, GPS, the Shuttle, the upcoming JWST, not to mention the myriad satellites, probes and impacters. We've truly, repeatedly, gone where no man has gone before, they cannot say the same. It's much easier to follow in the footsteps of another than to blaze your own trail.
Granted, we haven't really made any giant leaps since 69, except for ubiquitous Internet (that's a massive except) and minicomputers, but we have made enough small steps to climb a mountain. Everything we did yesterday, we do better today. We haven't done too much new, just everything old, better. So much advancement has been made in the last 15 years, it's ridiculous. It may not be a space age, but it's certainly the age of improvement and refinement. Everything is smaller, faster, smarter, cheaper, and all around better. Many small steps, in aggregate, can be better than one giant leap.
It's foolish to assume that because people are catching up to our achievements made decades ago, that they are somehow superior to us. It is good for them though, and perhaps it will give us the impetus to move on to bigger and better things.
I'm surprised that the bank didn't step in at the point and not lend her the money. Several times I've gotten a mortgage or line of credit the bank always wants to know why... "Why do you need to mortgage your house again?" should have been the question and the bank, upon hearing her answer (I can't imagine she would lie since she seems pretty gullible) should have been "No ma'am, I'm sorry but we cannot lend you the money for that." I'm sure there are some unscrupulous banks but - come on - the bank is not likely to see its money after she declares bankruptcy!
You're right about that, the bank won't see it's money again. But it will seize her house.
While I have had a 360 die with a RROD, I still think your argument is laughable. If I had a nickel for every time I've upgraded my computer, and had something not work quite right after, I'd have a mountain of nickels by now. I'll take the Xbox 360 failure results (get MS RMA issued over the internet, ship console in, get console back) over the PC results (diagnose problem [i.e. no rings to look at], purchase replacement hardware because old hardware is obsolete or broken, take system apart and replace faulty hardware, spend next 12 hours reinstalling windows and applications, and next 3 months getting everything back to the way it was) any day.
My god this was difficult to find. Your argument amounts to nothing more than liberal pontificating.
EU isn't a government
Your right, a political and economic union of member states is so much different than a government. Wait a second, that almost sounds like a federation of independent states got together, and created a ruling body to oversee and coordinate them. We did that here, and we called it the United States Federal Government. If it makes you feel better to not call a spade a spade, go for it, but the fact of the matter is they are still using your money to contract on your behalf without being held accountable by you. That's all right though, because mere mortals should have no say in government anyway. There should only be the ruling class, and everyone else. Congratulations, you are well on your way.
It's so closed that a government website doesn't exist that lists every open non-security related active procurement in the federal government, along with all the related information (i.e. rfp, rfq, amendments, attachments) so that every citizen and business has the opportunity to review what the government is buying, how they are going about buying it, and to bid on selling it to them. I was unfamiliar with Mother Jones, but a quick glance at their front page makes it pretty clear where they stand. But do continue to froth at the mouth regarding the Bush administration, it makes it considerably easier to spot your bias and ignorance.
And by the way, outsourcing with oversight isn't a problem. In fact, Goddard Space Flight Center, the largest NASA space research laboratory, houses only 3,186 actual government employees, whereas the other 7,590 that report there work for the companies that NASA contracts to perform the work.
Here's what NASA has to say about it:
As the forthcoming National Academies panel report will note, industry has the flexibility to move engineers and managers among programs depending on customer needs, a key advantage for NASA in a constrained budget environment. Work contracted to the private sector also offers the agency the benefit of civil-military integration since so many aerospace companies maintain research and production lines in both sectors. Access to the people and technology in the companies that support the Department of Defense and Transportation will deliver significant benefits to NASA. We can summarize the third benefit of NASA contractor work in one word: relevance. Private sector work in the realm of aeronautics will ensure that federal research has relevance to engines and aircraft planned for public use. Research with product and application potential subsequently increases the nation's return-on-investment at several levels, such as job creation, increased tax revenue, new services, and technology spin-offs.
Private industry is also much more efficient than even an open government.
What does IT spending have to do with military targets? Before you go spouting off about how much you Europeans value "openness" and how superior you are, you should understand that this would never fly in the US, unless it was specifically related to national security. For example, I wanted to understand how government makes large software acquisitions, so I contacted my local public university, and asked for details about their Blackboard procurement. I met with the procurement team that bought the software, and we went over why they chose Blackboard, who bid, how much they bid, what options were presented, and how they defined value. That's open.
And for my American friends remember that we have a different view on things like this, usually European governments are MORE open than the US.
I wonder how this "discussion" will develop..
Hooray for the increased openness of socialism. It's so effective people actually believe it's the governments "right" to decide what to make public.
You're correct, I was oversimplifying to make a point. The point was that most people significantly underestimate what a small business actually is. For example, an Aircraft Services company with 1,450 employees could realistically need multiple SANs, and is indeed a small company.
Most IT-related activities are at the higher end of the spectrum (see p.30 in the PDF) which tops out at $25 million/year ("services") or 150 employees ("value added reseller"), but there are some odd special cases in there. "Technical consulting," for instance, is $7M, and "Engineering services" is only $4.5M, but "Custom Computer Programming Services" is $25M. Makes you wonder who that was gerrymandered for...
The small business size classification is generally based on the average size of companies in a field. I have no problem believing that the average Custom Computer Programming company is larger than the average Tech Consulting company, which is larger than the average Engineering Services company. When Obama was talking about raising the taxes of Small Businesses making over $250k/year, I doubt many people understood how many businesses that actually affects.
Small Businesses are businesses that make under $25M/year by definition. I can imagine small businesses being in the market for inexpensive, high throughput, SANs.
But it is about taxes. The tax break given to married couples isn't free, that money would have to come from somewhere. Further, giving the break to non-nuclear families defeats the original purpose.
SSD drives can usually detect they are part of a cluster of traditional disks, and can request that data to be written to the traditional disks in the cluster be written to them instead, to improve I/O?
Will that $600 box be using 14 146 GB 10k RPM SAS disks?
These boxes aren't about providing stupid storage, their about providing massive I/O throughput. The larger boxes scale to 44TB and 576TB respectively. This also automatically moves frequently accessed data to flash drives (and RAM) for even faster I/O.
These are absolutely monstrous compared to anything you could build for $600. There seems to be quite a bit of custom hardware to power this setup.
This system will intelligently move the data around to put frequently accessed bits on the SSDs. This is a lot more than a 2u server with a few TB drives in a raid 10.
No rational individual make a voting selection based on the criteria from a single publication. Bias will always be a component of what's reported.
Who said anything about rational? We're talking about the voters here.
And second, Republicans don't seem as whiny to me as Democrats, possibly because Democrats rely on others (usually the government) to solve problems, and Republicans (used to, at least) rely on individual initiative. Of course, that last observation might be slightly controversial... ;-)
Controversial, but true. Look at the 2008 Prop. 8 demonstrations that are ongoing. While this is arguably one of the only things the Democrats lost, they can't accept it, even though it was a landslide. When Democrats lose, they throw a pity party, file lawsuits, and protest. When Republicans lose they generally blame their party, others in their party, and themselves. There are plenty of things the Republicans could be screaming about, including Obama's campaign financing (foreign money, lax security and name checking, etc..) but that's largely not happening. Before the close of polling, the Democrats were already talking about suing Virginia if they lost. It's pretty pathetic, really.
I think, more than anything, it's endemic of their supporters. As a Republican, when I see someone more successful than myself, I ask myself, what can I do to rise up to their level, and compete. I think that Democrats, instead ask, what can I do to reduce them to my level, and make them bring me up to theirs.
So you believe that the media should be able to effectively decide elections via one-sided reporting and an uneducated (politically) populace? Would you feel the same way if the bias went the other way?
Second, so?
Obama won by about 6% of the vote. How much did liberal media bias sway the election results? And your experience is wrong, obviously.
People shouldn't be able to express their views on private property? You really are a freedom loving fascist aren't you.