American is NOT a true democracy. It doesn't have any room for opposing views. No, democrats and republicans are NOT opposing views. Britain is much the same. ALL parties there now are right wing. You can't have a discussion about how the economy should be run if ALL participants believe in the stock market. If any question that perhaps having speculators control your countries industry MIGHT be a bad idea, becomes impossible with that most horrible insult in the US, socialist. Sooner rape children and kick kittens then question Wall Street.
But it was Wall Street that caused the economic collapse which is hurting America worsed of all. You think Greece got it bad? Not at all, the media won't tell you this, especially US media, but this kinda things happen all the time. It is the way these countries run. France and strikes? The way things are. Only right wing over paid media whores scare up the few people outraged by the strikes and pretend this is how all of France feels about the strikes. For most French, these strikes are the way THEIR democracy with TRUE left and right wing elements works. By clashing and then finally some balance coming in once it has become clear who has the biggest support. Strikes like these are VERY good sign in a democracy. Far better then the US were nobody strikes or protest because they are to worried about their mortage. A nice way to keep the population under control, "do as we say or you will miss your credit card payments and we reposses your house, your car, your flat screen tv". Why do you think right wingers favor home ownership? Renters can just move on, home owners are committed.
Countries like Greece have a different standard of living that makes it far easier to thighten the belt. The family is more important and the kids can just move back in. The grand parents help out. The wife goes to work and parks the kids with the extended family. And nobody depends for their sense of worth on a second car or a huge tv or a house that is far to large. The US? Not so, the worth of an American is his possessions and if the wages go down, then he becomes less of a man. So he lends, but that is breaking down with the banks in turmoil. Greece and France have strikes but in the end, things will adjust, people are just fighting to have the adjustments be fair and not as harsh. In the US, their is rage. Bitter hatred. They have no alternative but switch back and forth between two parties who BOTH favor Wall Street and the banks over real industry and have sold out the American worker for decades.
Look at the Tea Party, how can such a party REALLY claim that the best bet is to go BACK to the republicans who cause the whole economic disaster anyway. And not just the current crash, but the whole reaganomics. Everything from outsourcing to making banks not a servant to the economy but THE economy to the house ownership craze. And their solution in a economic down turn... cut spending.
That is the most foolish thing. Yes it seems a sensible simple reaction but if you CUT spending, you cut spending. Don't get it?
Okay, say the state has 1 million employees who together earn 100 million and spend that on food and housing. Now you are going to CUT spending, so you now have only 100.00 state employees earning 10 million and spending that on food and housing... oh but that ain't the end of it. Those 100.000 now fear for their jobs, so might postpone the purchase of a new tv (made in China) or new car (made in Korea) and keep it... even LESS spending.
BUT you claim, surely the less the state spends, the less taxes it needs to collect so taxes can be lowered and so people have more of their salary to spend? Sure... that works... if any government ever has been able to cut taxes. You see, cutting all those jobs ain't going to be easy. Somebody needs to fire all those people and will want to be paid for it. There are claims to be made and dealt with, the remaining people are going to have to do more work and demand salary increases. If you don't do that, then you migh
My god, you are delusional. LOOK up when the economy in the US crashed. Bush was in power. In fact Obama was elected because people couldn't believe the mess Bush had made of things. And now they get the republicans who created the mess back because Obama can't fix decades of mis-management in two years.
The US economy was fucked over by reagonomics were the intrests of wall street and short term speculators have ruined the American industrial base leading to more and more Americans contributing nothing to the economy. Basically, the US has since WW2 played the "lets pump up economy X and sell them our movies". It worked for the EU, it worked for Japan, ir worked for Korea. Then they tried it with China and forgot that China is far far larger. Sony went from a crap copy maker to a company that beat US companies down. Korean car makers do better then US companies, but they are as nothing to the growing industrial might of China. Once China stops like Japan and Korea to copy US tech and make its own (In Japan, nobody thinks the iPhone is the best, there are far better phones available already) and in China already you can get very decent LOCALLY designed gadgets that start adding their own tech.
Meanwhile Detroit is a ghost town and it ain't the only one. All so wall street could score a quick win by stripping American business for their last penny and fire every American worker and then claim employment is good because families can only survive holding down a double job per person.
And you blame congres... my god. You sure get the wool pulled over your eyes. Wall Street controls the economy.
REMEMBER, choice ALL choice is WRONG. It confuses people. We all want things to be exactly the same so we can go from product to product and never ever encounter anything new, different or better suited to our personal tastes.
That is why Star Bucks only has ONE flavor of coffee and absolutely no tea. That is why there is ONE brand of chocolate, to serve everyones taste. One car, the volkswagen given by our one Fuhrer.
Oh wait... none of that is true and even production lines cater for individual tastes with dells coming in the color you want and McD happily removing the pickle from your hamburger.
But don't worry, when it comes to OS'es people will be very confused by any choice and be totally incapable of choosing between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That is why 1 choice is all they should have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions
Oh and you can still install Vista and XP if you want sold to you by MS (oh okay, maybe they finally stopped selling XP) in all their own variants.
But above all, remember, Linux will fail because it offers its users a choice...
So basically, your approach would be to let your direct competitor AND arch enemy get away with their corruption and greed and walk all over you for fear that they might walk all over you again with their corruption and greed.
Your message: Don't fight the status quo because if you don't things will remain the same...
Really, grow a spine, it is all the rage these days.
Asking for a MS only solution in an open bid is NOT an open bid. If I make an open bid for cars as long as they are made by ford, then it is not open. And governments should NOT do this kind of job unless they want the outraged citizens to march to the capitol and... oooh Idols is on.
How do you STOP a radio signal? These are ordinary chinese towers to which ordinary chinese telephones connect. That they come from the south instead of the north would not be impossible to block but not a standard on how cellphones work. And why would China?
North Korea isn't just a buffer for them between and the US but also a very nice "You think you got it bad Hong Kong? It can be worse." Any Chinese person who wonders if the Chinese communist regime is repressive only has to look south. It is kinda like Jews in England, a very anti-semitic nation, but compared to the main land, not so bad after all.
North Korea is a bad spot for the entire world but the cold war (that the USSR has for now stopped playing doesn't mean the cold war is over, or did you foolishly believe Reagan?) has kept many a regime that shouldn't be in power.
Do you think the US really wants its soldiers on the border of China (if korea was re-united) and deal with Chinese refugees? It is not so much that any country likes or supports North Korea but changing the status quo is VERY risky and the aftermaths of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, Israel, India/Pakistan make the world powers very hesistant to change the borders of the world. So what if millions die, they die all the times. Nobody cares. (And don't think that because you bought/pirated a live aid CD that you did, because nobody needs to starve on this planet if some people didn't hog all the resources. Like me, and I have to admit in my deep dark soul that I don't care if some child dies in Afrika as long as it exports the chocolate and peanuts to feed my fat belly)
But don't think the Chinese government is somehow being nice. They send any refugee they capture back, to certain death without any hesistation. Kinda like the US sending mexicans to a country to a war torn apart by the drugs the same US seems to need.
The original poster is wrong. They do care, and you are wrong, because they care for the wrong reason.
The problem is that advertisers sell ads, not the product they are advertising. Ads themselves are the product advertising companies like the one in this article are selling. Those who buy ads are often as bamboozled as ordinary consumers with statistics made up on the spot being sold as facts.
At the core is a fundemental believe that ads work. This is not suprising since ads themselves often work on certain base believes. That a smell will attract scores of women. That cars are driven on open roads with not another car insight.
In this fantasy world, the idea that people REALLY DO NOT FUCKING WANT TO SEE YOUR GODDAMNED AD doesn't exist. And partly they are right. All those annoying flash ads? They work. They sell the product behind them. So naturally if you can make your ad even more annoying, even more intrusive, surely that would mean even bigger results?
And here the flaw comes in: Human beings operate on the "straw that broke the camels back" principle. They got a high tolerance but when it is broken it is completly gone. If you block ads because of the most annoying flash ad ever, you will block every ad from there on. Even the nicest completly unobstrusive ad.
But then these companies wonder why you ain't watching their nice ad. And want a solution.
Advertising is totally unregulated industry and they are paying the price for it. Ad blockers once installed don't care about relevancy or niceness of an ad. Block it all because some monkey ad broke the users back.
This guy is argueing that math, that he understands, isn't all that needed... this argument has been done before. Someone with a chauffeur driven car cannot judge the need for public transport, so that is why ministers with chauffeur driven cars are in charge of it. People with high income and private healthcare cannot judge the need for free healthcare, so that is who we put in charge. The rich cannot represent the views of the poor, that is why every media star earns more then a million.
You CANNOT say that math doesn't matter all that much if you got a perfect grasp for it. Because you cannot imagine what it is like NOT to have a grasp of it. I was in England once when they still had the old currency system. There I was, reasonably intelligent kid and I had to hold up my hand with the change to have the shop keeper pick out the right coins because I didn't know the math. Suddenly I was an idiot. Well more then usual. If you do not grasp math, then you are helpless against the countless ads that try to sell you stuff cheaply when in fact they are more expensive. How can you deal with supermarkets that don't list the unit price if you can't do the math and see if 1 kilo at 2.50 is better then half a kilo at 1.15 (yes, BBC watchdog showed that british supermarkets do pull this one).
And gosh, the rich who tend to get better education don't have to worry about pennies in the supermarket, but the poor with bad education do... see the problem?
The less likely you are to be good at math, the more likely you are to need it. This isn't about people being able to calculate the height of a tree, it is about understanding numbers, about understanding MONEY.
Basically, this prof is saying that in this day and age, a solid understanding about money isn't important... gosh, wonder what his angle is. Daddy owns a supermarket? Teaparty supporter?
Your right, this is well known... but not by everybody. Every minute new babies are born... grow up and have the told everything that everyone already knows, because they don't.
So every second, new slashdotters come on and have to learn that yes, you have to be able to trust the hardware you use for security to mean anything. See, you ALREADY left a IMPORTANT part out. You say "you have to trust your hardware", this implies that you just have no choice but to trust it. In reality, you got to ask yourself, who designed the hardware I am relying on and can they and their suppliers/contractors be trusted. Answer: rarely. Reality is that most of us just ain't intresting enough to monitor at high levels.
This always amuses me with people at say Freenet. All of them seem so pampered in our western nations they can't conceive of how a true dictarorship can work. Encrypt? Who sold you that CPU that is doing the encryption? Darknet? When all the traffic flows through a government router. This is naive as saying that when you plug your lights straight into the grid, before the meter, the electricity company (the state) won't know about the 100 watt light streaming out of your windows...
Fact: there are those who would like to spy. Fact: A good method is to get the place you want to spy on to have a device inside, you control and can use to get data out. Fact: Those who wish to spy, make PC's that are brought into the places that they want to spy on and contain the data they wish to get.
If the Chinese AIN'T doing this, they are either afraid the west (and their own people) check all their hardware, ain't all that intrested because there are methods less likely to risk their trade or they are really stupid.
The Chinese ain't stupid and the west doesn't check all the time. Leaves that China doesn't want to risk trade by making their products suspect if just one nerd with a packet sniffer finds something.
It is worth keeping in mind however that the risk is there. Can the US afford to loose more and more of its chip production? We already saw what happens with rare earth materials. This stuff is all over the globe, the US got piles of it, Russia is drowning in it BUT it all seemed so easy to have ONLY the Chinese invest in mining it. Now the rest of the world needs years to get their own production up to scratch.
Say China starts a war (against Russia for resources) today... how long can the US afford to get its war production up to speed without Chinese/Taiwanese goods? Goods that might at the flick of a switch all contain spyware?
Gosh, maybe some generals should play Civ a bit more. See how things can change on a single turn.
Are you seriously suggesting that the VOLUNTEERS working on Firefox 4.0 instead work on making Firefox into an IE6 compatible browser including closed source IE only extensions owned by MS and do all this to help out Microsoft so they can sell Windows 7 with IE8?
Can I have what your smoking?
And just what makes you think that companies who completly locked themselves into a MS setup would be willing to use opensource software?
What you and a lot of others don't get is that this IE6 lockin wasn't an accident. Companies went in with open eyes, believing that MS software was the future and that a web application that only ran on one browser was the sensible choice. These people can't be saved, they want a MS solution sold to them by a MS gold certified partner. That is what they paid for, that is what they got. Moving away from it all is EASY and the costs are NOT that high but these companies don't operate according to normal IT logic. These are companies that put all their finances in an excell sheet on someone's laptop. Stop thinking that people who produced ActiveX/IE6 solutions are capable of sound rational decissions. Everyone in IT knew it was a bad idea at the time but they made a deliberate choice to ignore the warnings.
But really, this is a non-issue. So what if IE6 is still used by some, the world moved on thanks to google. Nobody cares anymore about IE6 support and if that means you at some backwards company can't browse all the web... well thought shit. Find a job where IT is not run by MS fanboys or do not browse the web on your bosses time.
What is problem supposed to be? Employees can't access facebook? Not supposed to. Company at risk of security problems, not the problem of anyone else. Company might loose support on out of date software, again, not anyone elses problem.
Let IE6 keep hanging on, I and most of the rest of the world are done with it. You are not? Your problem. Not mine.
You must be young because ONCE people DID go 100% Apple. Just as once they went 100% IBM. Apple was big in education once.
But the problem here is NOT choosing Microsoft. It is by choosing a very specific set of tools that MS then dropped like the pile of trash it was. MS does this a lot. That is why you should NEVER use the greatest and latest until it has been around for a decade and has been proven to have stable support. Yes.NET developers, I am looking at you. What makes you think MS won't pull an activeX on you?
The mess with IE6 is not just activex, it is a whole shitload of choices, includinging IE only HTML that turn the projects into the crap they are.
But these projects didn't come out of nothing. I am willing to make a bet: Every single IE6 only application is a piece of crap to begin with regardless of its environment produced by a company that is clueless about IT in general. It ain't the clever people who walked into this trap. Just the kind of development environment where knowledge of Excell and Word is a must have to be hired. Run hard, run fast if you EVER see this listed.
These weren't smart people making a dumb choice, these are dumb people who made a dumb choice and now continue to make it. And good luck changing this, because if you say it, then your boss has to admit he has been very stupid.
The old "No-one has ever been fired for choosing IBM" really is "No-one has ever been fired for making the same choice as your boss".
Frankly, let these companies rot. They can force IE6 only browsers but the world isn't going to wait for them any longer. As a web developer I noticed that IE6 has long been dropped as a requirement. No customers use it. If you are still on IE6, you ain't worth catering too. It would be like Harrords having a homeless section. What would be the point.
Gosh, within one line, asking people to join Facebook and then yet the Xth article about how dangerous facebook is for your privacy.
We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.
Facebook is a nudist colony. Fine if you want to air your tonker but then don't complain people can see it. You can't share all your personal details withour your personal details ending up shared.
I wonder how people who use Facebook and complain about privacy go through life in general:
Omg! I bought this phone with a subscription, but now I do the math I actually end up paying much more for the phone! How can this be?
Oh no, I bought this gadget with monthy payments and now the payments are more then the original price, why!
I borrowed money for my house, now the bank thinks it owns it. Why didn't anyone tell me!
I streaked naked down the high street, now people are claiming they saw me! I didn't know that what I do in public can be seen by others!
I gave a full confession to a cop and now they using it against me in a court of law! Won't someone safe me!
If you do NOT want everyone on facebook to see what you do, don't use facebook. It ain't hard. It is not an essential product. Billions life happy lives without it. You can too. And the first person to claim that it allows them to keep in touch with friends they never bothered to keep in touch with before I will beat until they learn the difference between a friend, a distant aquintance and a stranger.
It is NOT about the hours. If you play Solitaire all your life, you won't hear me. Because THAT game doesn't suck the money out of people who can't afford it.
Bejewelled? Harmless. The Sims? Go right ahead. Throwing a coin in the air? Why not.
Throw a coin down the drain... no.
Farmville costs a lot of money to play, that is what I object to because there are people already on a thight income who cannot handle the total costs of endless micro transactions.
Next time, at least READ a post before you respond. It is not about hours wasted, it is about money.
A lot of people argue here that playing PC game X is no different from playing Farmville. Obviously these people either never played a PC game or Farmville.
Farmville is a micro-transaction game were there is NOTHING micro about the amounts involved. WHY do you think this company with a simple game line-up is now bigger then the largest game publisher in the world?
Because people don't just enjoy harmlessly playing a rather boring game for whatever reason, they are forking over TONS of cash, with no end in sight. If I spend 1200 dollars on a new PC, that is it. I got a new PC, it will last me at least 3 months. A farmville player can spend a fortune each and every day with no end. And not all people can handle that.
And don't talk about how you can play for free, because if people played for free Zynga wouldn't be this big. Zynga is a bookie who never pays out. People spend and spend and they never can be finished. That makes it very disturbing that a company with such a simple line-up can rake in so much cash. This might be the ultimate tax on stupid. Move over lottery, a new king has arrived.
And that that is the other loathsesome element. Many of the players who play are not the types with money to burn. I can afford to piss away 1500 euro or so a month, it is pocket money, everything else is payed for plus plenty of savings. But I am not playing Farmville. The people who play are, well those who are not smart enough to have a sense of worth. I sell my old gaming rigs when I buy a new one, getting a fairly decent return on my money. Farmville game? Sell your farm, what do you get? It is money down the drain.
But people watch sports? Indeed they do. For a fixed cable fee on a TV that lasts years. They don't spend 1 buck every minute to watch a soccer game that never ever ends. Yeah, you can go to another continent for a match but then you got something for your money, people who you gave the money did actual work, not just flipped a bit on a server. A farmville shop item has no value, there is no limit to them, no resale value. Yet millions are spend on it.
No, Farmville is not just a game and not just a hobby. It is as insideous as holding a fake raffel that never pays out and people can and do buy an infinite amount of tickets. That would be illegal. We would protect people against such a scam. But because Farmville is just a game, it isn't subject to any regulation, any sense of common decency.
But ask yourself again, if Farmville is harmless, how did Zynga get to be bigger then EA?
Since MS does make hardware, the x-box and keyboards and mice at least, your claim is basically: MS doesn't make a tablet because MS doesn't make tablet hardware...
Well neither did Apple until it did. And Apple makes the tablet, not the hardware that goes in it that it buys from suppliers.
Windows 7 wasn't a huge hit. It just wasn't the steaming pile of crap the Vista was. Water tastes as nectar to a thirsty man, but it remains plain water. Windows 7 sells, as part of new PC's. But many a company and consumer is still on XP. For MS, this is lethal. It NEEDS the continues upgrade revenue to fund its many programs. And those who are still on Windows XP also didn't upgrade their office. A double blow.
The original xbox was a disaster, the 360 slightly less so but remember that MS counts replacements as sales. So how many 360 sales are really replacement units for the countless ring of death failures? Count these out and suddenly the figures look very different AND no matter how you count the Wii outsold it by far. The 360 is a decent performer, but that was NOT MS ambition. Sony and Nintendo are still ticking over for the next round meaning MS has yet another round to fund with its diminishing Office and Windows income.
Windows Phone 7 SEVEN, SEVEN and it is still crap. So much for the third release being the charm. While Rim, Android, Nokia and Apple are biggering about who is biggest MS is lingering at the bottom. Yet again.
A bit to early for judging Windows Mobile 7? Hardly, it is after all not the first time we handled this beast. We can judge it very easily, has MS learned from mistakes in the past? No? Then it will fail for the same reasons as before.
As for dominate the OS marketshare? Oh boy, you are a fanboy aren't you. OS market share on what? Tablets? No, that is Apple. Mainframes? No IBM. Servers? No that is Linux. Smart Phones? No that is... Apple again (at least not MS) Handheld gaming consoles? MP3 players? Media players? Oh, the desktop... yeah and Apple who does NOT sell Windows is the biggest PC seller right now. Doesn't that give you a bit of a clue?
I know it must hurt for a MS fanboy but their performance of late isn't up to form. MS has a VERY large warchest and can keep the fight going for a long time but they would be smarter to re-examine who and what they are. Their constant shifting position on Windows gaming is just a very obvious clue. Then it is "Everything must be on the console" then combined, then windows gaming alone, then windows live then back to gaming on the PC again. MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND. IE9 shows just how little the company understands about its own products. It claims IE9 can be Windows 7 only because it needs some special shit to run... there are FOUR browser makers who have FASTER browsers AND have it running on XP. But MS itself can't fix the crap IE6. That shows how little MS cares about its customers who might be running OLD software but BUGGY software that MS sold them. And don't come with IE is free because then you are to stupid to talk to.
Recent events like the London stock exchange going to linux after MS putting major money into it AND using it in ads, that shows an MS that is no longer the power it once was. IE has dropped to 50%. This is the browser installed by default as you claim by the company that controls the OS marketshare. Doesn't that TELL you something? Browsing is what most consumers use their computer for and they replaced the default browser with their own choice. It doesn't matter how you measure it, this is LOW.
And how do you measure MY pc in your OS dominance? My work PC? My servers? Running linux all, but either barebones or replaced Windows installs. In my department, the windows guys are in the minority. Granted the Apple guys help with that but still. The days when you would find only Windows machines in a company are gone. This means the days of forced use of the latest office products is gone. The boss with his apple book is a powerfull driver to use an exchange EVERYONE can use.
Bye bye lockin, the prime mover and shaker behind Microsofts success.
No, MS is far from gone, but it can't afford to many more mistakes. In many ways I think MS has become its ancient enemy, IBM. IBM could have owned the PC, it didn't because it made all the wrong choices. IBM is still there, but it no longer controls the industry as it used to. MS might end up the same if it hasn't already.
Fox is right wing, but not all of it is as insane as Beck. With the simpsons, they can show they got a humor but also make Homer into a kinda reverse hero. Left wingers might see him as an idiot and an example of everything that is wrong with people who vote against healthcare until they need it but he ALSO survives all his mistakes. He never dies in the unsafe work environment and has his widow screwed out of compensation. He hasn't undergone forced sterilization and this is NEVER ever mentioned despite this really have happened in nuclear facilities in the US.
Somehow despite all the jokes, the stabs and parodies, the right-wing dumb guy wins through. Same with all the other shows.
"You might be a redneck if..." how many rednecks proudly proclaim to be a redneck? It is not degrading when beat yourself on the chest. Homer is not a pititful figure to many, but a hero. It is a very good bit of propoganda. Remember that Goebels most beloved movie had a Jew as the hero. Propoganda is best when it doesn't label it on.
Perhaps this is impossible to see for an American. You might be so entrenched in the American way of life that you can't see just how much these shows celebrate this. Its battle cry is NOT "We are the best and everything is perfect" but "Things might suck, but we are still the best". It works. It takes the wind out of everyone who might dare to question the status quo.
No, if you think these shows are somehow left-wing, you got a very distorded view of the left. But what do you expect from someone who watches so many cartoons:P
The dutch political system is currently locked. Despite having far more parties then the US, there is a common sentiment among voters that the elite (all the parties) do not represent them. Jan Marrijnissen with the SP (Socialist Party, yes pinkos for american readers, booga booga) played on this with his party early on. But when he stepped back and Agnes Kant took over and started adopting "elite" standpoints (pro-islam, anti-israel, green, arts etc etc) the party nose dived. Pim Fortuyn got a large popular vote, but was killed (by a muslim immigrant). His party quickly nose dived, partly because the elite (CDA) did a very good job of smother to death and partly because when you don't have the ruling elite in your party, you get some very strange people.
Now the resentment against the ruling elite is represented by Geert Wilders. But he seems to have gotten elected by some right wing promises (kick out the muslims) but ALSO (and this is often overlooked) with a LOT (far more) LEFT wing promisises like no extension of pension age, fewer cuts in social spending etc etc. Funnily enough, now he actually as agreed on a deal to support the new government, he seems to be skipping on a LOT of election promises and have gone straight into backroom deals and all the activities people hate in the elite.
So... if neither right nor left can provide a decent alternative. What could be done? What about a party that ISN'T a party. What about a party leader, who is NOT going to be running the country? What about a party that ends the party system?
The US has referendums, they have forced some intresting politics because people could vote for a candidate of party X and then force a series of policies on him that totally disagreed with the party line. California's drug laws for instance.
What if in Holland instead of voting for a party, we got a 100% referendum system. No more prime-minister, no more backroom deals, no whips (they are called that because they keep the party in line, with the new government having a very small majority, they became far more important because if a single person from the 3 parties votes against, the opposition wins. This means elected officials don't vote according to what their voters want but as the party orders them. This is actually highly illegal in dutch law. Every elected official must be able to vote without fear of consequence).
But this would also be very hard. You would need a country run by smart men, not popular men. And people would need to vote smart, not just for the guy that promises the lowest taxes. Because now you can't have secret deals to still fund essential road maintenance. If the people vote NO to spend money on the roads, then that is it. No road maintenance.
We might not like the system, but are we capable of going to a system that DOES work? Is the average voter for ready for REAL democracy? Where if you vote for spending cuts, you don't complain if your kids school is closed? If the police no longer police your neighbourhood?
Personally, I think that the current situation does not work either. But selling the alternative would be a hell of job. And anyone smooth enough, connected enough to start such an anti-party would be part of the system already and hardly want to dismantle the system that gave him power. And the current youth and the internet? Oh, you might get a billion friends on facebook with such a party, and then when it came time to vote, the wave of apathy would knock earth out of orbit.
Yes, your proposal might work... it might work all to well. And then?
The travelling salesman problem is the problem of finding the shortest route between a set of points. It doesn't matter HOW you solve it. You could time all possible journey's, you could do a sorting routine or god knows what. But if you solve it, you solved it.
That is what the bee does. And maybe if we can learn HOW the bee does that, we might learn something from it. It might be a smarter way of solving things. Or maybe Bees have an additional variable from an unknown input that helps solve it.
And as for your brain just GUESSING? Jezus, do you know how FUCKING difficult GUESSING is? Been trying to get computers to make a best guess for ages. It is advanced computer science.
Calculating the path of a ball in flight is actually pretty easy. All I need is a couple of accurate measurements of its position in time and space. Trivial stuff. But GUESSING from in complete and missing data were a ball is going to be AND being right most of the time or at least have moved an appendage in time so that when more accurate data is available I already got the appendage in roughly the right area? THAT is NOT easy. And yet our brain and the brains of many an animal does it. And does it VERY fast indeed. Throw a bouncy ball at a cat and watch it chase it (or in the case of my cat decide in a pico second that "you threw it, you catch it" is the wisest course of action and fall asleep), control a body and CATCH it. Meanwhile we marvel at a robot because it managed to stand upright...
Now if a machine could duplicate the brains method for catching a ball, that would be very handy indeed. Because SOMEHOW our brain does do it. And yes, this DOES include wind velocity correction. We are aware of the wind and we correct for it. Thanks to our brain. It doesn't matter that we don't use a laser ranger finder or dopler radar, that is just details. It is the logic that can use incomplete, unreliable data that results in accurate results that scientists are interested. It would allow for computers to keep functioning even when sensor data goes missing. An essential for computers/robots to come out of the production halls and into our daily lives. If a spell checker could guess as accurately what I meant to write as YOU can read over my mis spellings and lousy grammer, Clippy would be a lot more usefull.
Gosh, that is one hell of a bee if it has the brain of a piece of corn... or is corn not a grass anymore? At least when you take some idiotic comparison, take one that has a non-changing size. Penny is okay because all pennies at least within a country tend to stay the same. But grass seeds?
Next up is "brain the size of a pinhead". Oh okay, so there are many sizes of pin but at least we can assume some kind of standard. And that is FAR smaller then most grasses I know and see seeds of in Holland.
Otherwise intresting stuff but I loathe this "make it easier" by obuscating the facts.
Number of neurons in honey bee brain = 950,000 (from Menzel, R. and Giurfa, M., Cognitive architecture of a mini-brain: the honeybee, Trd. Cog. Sci., 5:62-71, 2001.)
Now THAT is a fact. We? We got 100 billion. So, while a bee has a tiny brain compared to ours, it is HARDLY simple. And because it is far smaller and far more primitive it doesn't need as as much intelligence to deal with things it doesn't need to. Listening and producing speech is complex, but bees don't bother with that. Living for half a century and remembring everything is complex. But bees don't do that.
This why computers can do math so fast despite being so stupid, because they only do math.
How can the bee do route calculation with close to a million neurons? I have no idea but didn't research show that far fewer rat neurons could fly a plane? I think some people fastly underestimate the complexity of the brain even small ones. We already know that a neuron is far more then a simple transistor so 1 million super transistors would make for a hell of a complex computer. Suddenly it doesn't seem to odd that a bee can do computations far more complex because THAT is what it is designed to do. You could just as easily marvle at the fact that the bee with its tiny brain can fly, while I with my large brain can't. And no I don't just mean I don't have wings, I mean that if you put me in a helicopter you would have a horrible crash in seconds and that is in the passenger seat.
Marvle at nature, learn from it but don't belittle it. It takes us year to program a robot to walk very very slowly. A deer learns it in minutes and this includes learning to control legs locked up in a womb for months. We can either accept that nature is amazing or we are very very poor programmers... as a developer, I choose to believe that nature is amazing.
Windows 1-3. Complete changes. 3.1 to 95. Complete change. 95-98 the look didn't change, just where everything was. 98 to 2000... don't get me started. 2K to XP, lots of changes again. Vista so many changes many did not bother. W7, must have been a big change because people don't hate it as much as Vista.
Every single version of Windows has changed the layout and organization of basic configurations until the point where messing with your disks is so many layers deep I need a mining canary to find it.
Compared with that both OSX and Ubuntu have been solid rock.
Which probably is what sits in your head... MS and consistent interface...
I think the parent is talking about why MS is trying to get us to buy an upgrade as if it is a new release with all the problems of switching.
Win95 and Win95SE was its upgrade. Windows 98 and Windows 98SE was its upgrade. NOT ME. That was a new release and it showed because it totally changed things.
But should we pay the price of a new release. Even with upgrade discount it is high. Far higher then OSX's point upgrades and of course far more expensive then Ubuntu releases. About a gazillion times more.
And yes, this matters because there are people, younger slashdotters might want to skip over the next bit less they will be unable to sleep tonight from sheer terror, who do NOT upgrade their computer every quarter... some even keep their computer running for half a DECADE or MORE!!!
Why should these people spend a lot of money to upgrade Windows for essentially point fixes? And it is MS itself that is making the situation worse. IE6 goes with XP like urine goes with shit and they are to inept to get rid of it. Despite Google and Firefox and Apple and Opera being able to code fast and up-to-date browsers for XP, MS can't code IE9 to work on XP, because they are to lazy/inept (some MS fanboy will no doubt insist that IE9 depends on some fancy thing that no other browser needs to run fast, this is kinda like saying you need a 3D card to run a MS text adventure when text adventures have run on text only machines for decades).
But this means as long as the upgrade path is so expensive MS is always going to have hopelessly outdated software out there and all the hassle that comes with it.
And oddly enough, MS itself doesn't benefit either because more and more companies simply ain't upgrading. Or downgrading. That is hard revenue MS is missing out on. Worse, its own latest software like office won't run on them, so that is another revenue stream drying up.
MS has learned to squeeze water from stones, but when the stone has become squeezed out, nothing will give anymore.
What exactly is NEEDED in Windows 8.0 that I should buy a license for? Until MS can answer that, they won't be making many sales from people who aren't buying their PC in the shop or must have the latest shiny. That is a LOT of people, but MS has always been a company that burned through cash. They NEED more sales. Vista hurt them bad. Windows 7 was better but not back to old form. I see no reason 8 should change this.
There is a major difference between owning a physical book and owning a digital COPY. Yes libraries exist but to those who can afford it, a library of your own, with your favorite books is something nice. Something that finishes a house. To sit in your library however modest and read, that is a delight that you just don't have with a digital copy.
It is why libraries didn't destroy book publishing. But when the act of owning a physical book is gone, when the difference between owning a digital copy (as far as they can even be truly owned) and renting or borrowing one is gone, then why spend extra money?
There is a risk here. Of course, with the internet we also got free vanity publishing (like this post) and getting your written word out is far cheaper. Maybe the industry will change or evolve. But it will never be the same.
By making the horrors of war itself unacceptable, the pentagon feels forced to hide them but WITH that hiding they can hide far more. Area 51. If you even dare ask what is dare, you are quickly put with the alien nutters who think marsians are everywhere. A very effective cover.
If you scream when you see some blood in a butchersshop, they will sanitize the meat production until meat is something that comes in little containers with tissue to soak up the blood. But that makes it very hard to question food production practices if you somehow expect your daily meat but don't want any blood. That allows real cruelty, unneeded cruelty to animals, to be hidden. If you want beef, a cow has to die. Once you accept that you can ask how the cow should be killed. It doesn't have to made to suffer endlessly or be transported hundred of miles to do so. BUT those who want their meat AND not see blood allow a curtain to be raised behind which darkness can reign unchecked.
The Iraq war is often claimed to be for resources. Fine, lets assume it is. Then do YOU not claim those resources? Anyone who drives a car about a single metric ton, is in need of the Iraq oil to do so. The US needs oil because its people want oil, but they don't want the nasty truth that wars have always been fought for resources.
The real horror of this story is that for all the outrage, when the prices of petrol goes up, resistance against the US protection its supply lines will go down. It is a whole sordid deal that begins with YOU wanting to drive a 3 ton SUV goes through a president who doesn't want high fuel prices and ends up with some country being invaded or the CIA supporting yet another dictator. Just see the mess the US is causing in Mexico right now. All because the US can't deal with its drug issue. Iraq happened because the US can't deal with its oil needs. It would be far simpler if it didn't have to appease the Arabs to keep oil while also wanting to support Israel for the sake of freedom. No oil dependence it could simply tell the Arabs to go to hell and this would never have seen Sadam in power or supported in the war against Iran. Iran would have no money to cause a fuzz. No oil, the arabs would be the backward nations their faithful wish to be. Sucks for all the other Arabs but hey, at least our hands are clean.
World politics are not nice. There are so many intrests fueled by a public that wants it fuel.
And then we send rednecks who couldn't get a job anywhere else to deal with johny foreigner in a fair and even handed manner after they just been shot at...
Sadly, I am to cynical to be outraged because I can see how the outrage at the "simple" crimes allows the extreme right, the powers that be, to hide behind the wall of the middle who might be outraged if only they didn't worry about fuel prices more. The teabaggers defend the indefensible because they feel forced into a corner. And the fact the teabaggers are here already shows how deeply divided the US is. Left and right, pro and anti-iraq war are so deeply divided that both sides feel compelled to side with their own, even if they are inside deeply against it. Got to support the troops, is a battle cry behind which covering up mass rape and murder are allowed to happen. Out of Iraq is a battle cry that allows an attitude that you got to tolerate everything in the world no matter what because someone might get hurt.
I am old enough to remember all the lefties in Holland demanding the world interfere in Iraq to stop the gassing ot the koerds. When finally the world did interfere, that was bad... but with the same breath they also demanded the world went into Darfur... can't have it both ways.
I have no solution for all of this. The US powers that be have allowed themselves to get once again dragged into a war, have its string pulled by people banned from Iraq to support them, believes that these people could hold power, believes that democracy can be enforced, demands for low petrol prices, etc etc. And in all that, countless forces make their own struggle for power. Hard to see how to get out of it.
If you speed through a checkpoint, you are going to be shot. Bringing your wife to hospital? Did you grow up in a movie? In reality, there is no emergency. Labour lasts hours even with mothers who had babies before. There is no need to break the rules of traffic and speeding or trying to run through an armed checkpoint in a war zone... well, it is a darwin award. Or can you only say that when white people foolishly get themselves killed.
The sniper? It is war. Always been part of war, always will be. Read up on Monte Casino. Countless europeans were killed by the liberating american forces. War is hell. Get used to it.
The REAL problem is that because the left is so outraged that war ain't nice, they scream at the wrong things and then allow the really bad things to be hidden instead. It is the old "do aliens exist" problem. The nutcases who scream that Aliens are controlling the UN make it very hard for any serious study to be done into UFO's and other things because if you do, you get labelled with the nutcases.
War is hell, accept that. Civilians are going to be killed especially in wars were the enemy has no qualms about hiding among them.
THEN you can go and question why so many died, why it needs to be kept hidden. Remove the left fringe and you can then force a real discussion and demand that REAL figures are always shown because then the pentagon wouldn't claim they need to hide them to keep the radical left from using the horrors of war against them. We ask the pentagon to go to war, then we have to accept the results. But we can then also demand to know the full results and ask, if there was no other way.
Brutally honest answer: Sniper? No. Checkpoint killings of people speeding etc. No. Hiding rape and torture. Yes. Rape and torture are not valid military tactics. But you, skipped them. Instead you focussed on acts or war, not acts or terror. See the problem? By claiming the president is an alien pod from mars, you make it impossible to ask exactly what some radar blips were. In a way, those that wanted this war are thankful for you. All you do is drive a wedge, between you and the lunatic left and the right. The more outraged you are that a war ain't nice, the more people fall to the right of you.
And right now, the right is on the rise. All your outrage is doing nothing to stop them. Because you went to far, focused on the wrong things.
But hey, everyone does it. it seems to be human nature andbefore long we got two camps so opposed to each other, there is no way they can ever agree on anything. Cue Iraq. Groups of muslims killing more of each other then the so called hated invader. Human nature is hell.
Did you pay for it with iDeal, the dutch banking payment system? No, because amazon does not accept this. It only accepts credit cards. Why should I need a credit card when such things are hugely expensive and not the norm in holland.
And I want to buy my stuff in a brick and mortar store. But I suppose that is not allowed anymore.
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American is NOT a true democracy. It doesn't have any room for opposing views. No, democrats and republicans are NOT opposing views. Britain is much the same. ALL parties there now are right wing. You can't have a discussion about how the economy should be run if ALL participants believe in the stock market. If any question that perhaps having speculators control your countries industry MIGHT be a bad idea, becomes impossible with that most horrible insult in the US, socialist. Sooner rape children and kick kittens then question Wall Street.
But it was Wall Street that caused the economic collapse which is hurting America worsed of all. You think Greece got it bad? Not at all, the media won't tell you this, especially US media, but this kinda things happen all the time. It is the way these countries run. France and strikes? The way things are. Only right wing over paid media whores scare up the few people outraged by the strikes and pretend this is how all of France feels about the strikes. For most French, these strikes are the way THEIR democracy with TRUE left and right wing elements works. By clashing and then finally some balance coming in once it has become clear who has the biggest support. Strikes like these are VERY good sign in a democracy. Far better then the US were nobody strikes or protest because they are to worried about their mortage. A nice way to keep the population under control, "do as we say or you will miss your credit card payments and we reposses your house, your car, your flat screen tv". Why do you think right wingers favor home ownership? Renters can just move on, home owners are committed.
Countries like Greece have a different standard of living that makes it far easier to thighten the belt. The family is more important and the kids can just move back in. The grand parents help out. The wife goes to work and parks the kids with the extended family. And nobody depends for their sense of worth on a second car or a huge tv or a house that is far to large. The US? Not so, the worth of an American is his possessions and if the wages go down, then he becomes less of a man. So he lends, but that is breaking down with the banks in turmoil. Greece and France have strikes but in the end, things will adjust, people are just fighting to have the adjustments be fair and not as harsh. In the US, their is rage. Bitter hatred. They have no alternative but switch back and forth between two parties who BOTH favor Wall Street and the banks over real industry and have sold out the American worker for decades.
Look at the Tea Party, how can such a party REALLY claim that the best bet is to go BACK to the republicans who cause the whole economic disaster anyway. And not just the current crash, but the whole reaganomics. Everything from outsourcing to making banks not a servant to the economy but THE economy to the house ownership craze. And their solution in a economic down turn... cut spending.
That is the most foolish thing. Yes it seems a sensible simple reaction but if you CUT spending, you cut spending. Don't get it?
Okay, say the state has 1 million employees who together earn 100 million and spend that on food and housing. Now you are going to CUT spending, so you now have only 100.00 state employees earning 10 million and spending that on food and housing... oh but that ain't the end of it. Those 100.000 now fear for their jobs, so might postpone the purchase of a new tv (made in China) or new car (made in Korea) and keep it... even LESS spending.
BUT you claim, surely the less the state spends, the less taxes it needs to collect so taxes can be lowered and so people have more of their salary to spend? Sure... that works... if any government ever has been able to cut taxes. You see, cutting all those jobs ain't going to be easy. Somebody needs to fire all those people and will want to be paid for it. There are claims to be made and dealt with, the remaining people are going to have to do more work and demand salary increases. If you don't do that, then you migh
My god, you are delusional. LOOK up when the economy in the US crashed. Bush was in power. In fact Obama was elected because people couldn't believe the mess Bush had made of things. And now they get the republicans who created the mess back because Obama can't fix decades of mis-management in two years.
The US economy was fucked over by reagonomics were the intrests of wall street and short term speculators have ruined the American industrial base leading to more and more Americans contributing nothing to the economy. Basically, the US has since WW2 played the "lets pump up economy X and sell them our movies". It worked for the EU, it worked for Japan, ir worked for Korea. Then they tried it with China and forgot that China is far far larger. Sony went from a crap copy maker to a company that beat US companies down. Korean car makers do better then US companies, but they are as nothing to the growing industrial might of China. Once China stops like Japan and Korea to copy US tech and make its own (In Japan, nobody thinks the iPhone is the best, there are far better phones available already) and in China already you can get very decent LOCALLY designed gadgets that start adding their own tech.
Meanwhile Detroit is a ghost town and it ain't the only one. All so wall street could score a quick win by stripping American business for their last penny and fire every American worker and then claim employment is good because families can only survive holding down a double job per person.
And you blame congres... my god. You sure get the wool pulled over your eyes. Wall Street controls the economy.
REMEMBER, choice ALL choice is WRONG. It confuses people. We all want things to be exactly the same so we can go from product to product and never ever encounter anything new, different or better suited to our personal tastes.
That is why Star Bucks only has ONE flavor of coffee and absolutely no tea. That is why there is ONE brand of chocolate, to serve everyones taste. One car, the volkswagen given by our one Fuhrer.
Oh wait... none of that is true and even production lines cater for individual tastes with dells coming in the color you want and McD happily removing the pickle from your hamburger.
But don't worry, when it comes to OS'es people will be very confused by any choice and be totally incapable of choosing between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That is why 1 choice is all they should have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions
Oh and you can still install Vista and XP if you want sold to you by MS (oh okay, maybe they finally stopped selling XP) in all their own variants.
But above all, remember, Linux will fail because it offers its users a choice...
So basically, your approach would be to let your direct competitor AND arch enemy get away with their corruption and greed and walk all over you for fear that they might walk all over you again with their corruption and greed.
Your message: Don't fight the status quo because if you don't things will remain the same...
Really, grow a spine, it is all the rage these days.
Asking for a MS only solution in an open bid is NOT an open bid. If I make an open bid for cars as long as they are made by ford, then it is not open. And governments should NOT do this kind of job unless they want the outraged citizens to march to the capitol and... oooh Idols is on.
How do you STOP a radio signal? These are ordinary chinese towers to which ordinary chinese telephones connect. That they come from the south instead of the north would not be impossible to block but not a standard on how cellphones work. And why would China?
North Korea isn't just a buffer for them between and the US but also a very nice "You think you got it bad Hong Kong? It can be worse." Any Chinese person who wonders if the Chinese communist regime is repressive only has to look south. It is kinda like Jews in England, a very anti-semitic nation, but compared to the main land, not so bad after all.
North Korea is a bad spot for the entire world but the cold war (that the USSR has for now stopped playing doesn't mean the cold war is over, or did you foolishly believe Reagan?) has kept many a regime that shouldn't be in power.
Do you think the US really wants its soldiers on the border of China (if korea was re-united) and deal with Chinese refugees? It is not so much that any country likes or supports North Korea but changing the status quo is VERY risky and the aftermaths of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the collapse of the USSR, Israel, India/Pakistan make the world powers very hesistant to change the borders of the world. So what if millions die, they die all the times. Nobody cares. (And don't think that because you bought/pirated a live aid CD that you did, because nobody needs to starve on this planet if some people didn't hog all the resources. Like me, and I have to admit in my deep dark soul that I don't care if some child dies in Afrika as long as it exports the chocolate and peanuts to feed my fat belly)
But don't think the Chinese government is somehow being nice. They send any refugee they capture back, to certain death without any hesistation. Kinda like the US sending mexicans to a country to a war torn apart by the drugs the same US seems to need.
World politics, very depressing.
The original poster is wrong. They do care, and you are wrong, because they care for the wrong reason.
The problem is that advertisers sell ads, not the product they are advertising. Ads themselves are the product advertising companies like the one in this article are selling. Those who buy ads are often as bamboozled as ordinary consumers with statistics made up on the spot being sold as facts.
At the core is a fundemental believe that ads work. This is not suprising since ads themselves often work on certain base believes. That a smell will attract scores of women. That cars are driven on open roads with not another car insight.
In this fantasy world, the idea that people REALLY DO NOT FUCKING WANT TO SEE YOUR GODDAMNED AD doesn't exist. And partly they are right. All those annoying flash ads? They work. They sell the product behind them. So naturally if you can make your ad even more annoying, even more intrusive, surely that would mean even bigger results?
And here the flaw comes in: Human beings operate on the "straw that broke the camels back" principle. They got a high tolerance but when it is broken it is completly gone. If you block ads because of the most annoying flash ad ever, you will block every ad from there on. Even the nicest completly unobstrusive ad.
But then these companies wonder why you ain't watching their nice ad. And want a solution.
Advertising is totally unregulated industry and they are paying the price for it. Ad blockers once installed don't care about relevancy or niceness of an ad. Block it all because some monkey ad broke the users back.
This guy is argueing that math, that he understands, isn't all that needed... this argument has been done before. Someone with a chauffeur driven car cannot judge the need for public transport, so that is why ministers with chauffeur driven cars are in charge of it. People with high income and private healthcare cannot judge the need for free healthcare, so that is who we put in charge. The rich cannot represent the views of the poor, that is why every media star earns more then a million.
You CANNOT say that math doesn't matter all that much if you got a perfect grasp for it. Because you cannot imagine what it is like NOT to have a grasp of it. I was in England once when they still had the old currency system. There I was, reasonably intelligent kid and I had to hold up my hand with the change to have the shop keeper pick out the right coins because I didn't know the math. Suddenly I was an idiot. Well more then usual. If you do not grasp math, then you are helpless against the countless ads that try to sell you stuff cheaply when in fact they are more expensive. How can you deal with supermarkets that don't list the unit price if you can't do the math and see if 1 kilo at 2.50 is better then half a kilo at 1.15 (yes, BBC watchdog showed that british supermarkets do pull this one).
And gosh, the rich who tend to get better education don't have to worry about pennies in the supermarket, but the poor with bad education do... see the problem?
The less likely you are to be good at math, the more likely you are to need it. This isn't about people being able to calculate the height of a tree, it is about understanding numbers, about understanding MONEY.
Basically, this prof is saying that in this day and age, a solid understanding about money isn't important... gosh, wonder what his angle is. Daddy owns a supermarket? Teaparty supporter?
Your right, this is well known... but not by everybody. Every minute new babies are born... grow up and have the told everything that everyone already knows, because they don't.
So every second, new slashdotters come on and have to learn that yes, you have to be able to trust the hardware you use for security to mean anything. See, you ALREADY left a IMPORTANT part out. You say "you have to trust your hardware", this implies that you just have no choice but to trust it. In reality, you got to ask yourself, who designed the hardware I am relying on and can they and their suppliers/contractors be trusted. Answer: rarely. Reality is that most of us just ain't intresting enough to monitor at high levels.
This always amuses me with people at say Freenet. All of them seem so pampered in our western nations they can't conceive of how a true dictarorship can work. Encrypt? Who sold you that CPU that is doing the encryption? Darknet? When all the traffic flows through a government router. This is naive as saying that when you plug your lights straight into the grid, before the meter, the electricity company (the state) won't know about the 100 watt light streaming out of your windows...
Fact: there are those who would like to spy. Fact: A good method is to get the place you want to spy on to have a device inside, you control and can use to get data out. Fact: Those who wish to spy, make PC's that are brought into the places that they want to spy on and contain the data they wish to get.
If the Chinese AIN'T doing this, they are either afraid the west (and their own people) check all their hardware, ain't all that intrested because there are methods less likely to risk their trade or they are really stupid.
The Chinese ain't stupid and the west doesn't check all the time. Leaves that China doesn't want to risk trade by making their products suspect if just one nerd with a packet sniffer finds something.
It is worth keeping in mind however that the risk is there. Can the US afford to loose more and more of its chip production? We already saw what happens with rare earth materials. This stuff is all over the globe, the US got piles of it, Russia is drowning in it BUT it all seemed so easy to have ONLY the Chinese invest in mining it. Now the rest of the world needs years to get their own production up to scratch.
Say China starts a war (against Russia for resources) today... how long can the US afford to get its war production up to speed without Chinese/Taiwanese goods? Goods that might at the flick of a switch all contain spyware?
Gosh, maybe some generals should play Civ a bit more. See how things can change on a single turn.
Are you seriously suggesting that the VOLUNTEERS working on Firefox 4.0 instead work on making Firefox into an IE6 compatible browser including closed source IE only extensions owned by MS and do all this to help out Microsoft so they can sell Windows 7 with IE8?
Can I have what your smoking?
And just what makes you think that companies who completly locked themselves into a MS setup would be willing to use opensource software?
What you and a lot of others don't get is that this IE6 lockin wasn't an accident. Companies went in with open eyes, believing that MS software was the future and that a web application that only ran on one browser was the sensible choice. These people can't be saved, they want a MS solution sold to them by a MS gold certified partner. That is what they paid for, that is what they got. Moving away from it all is EASY and the costs are NOT that high but these companies don't operate according to normal IT logic. These are companies that put all their finances in an excell sheet on someone's laptop. Stop thinking that people who produced ActiveX/IE6 solutions are capable of sound rational decissions. Everyone in IT knew it was a bad idea at the time but they made a deliberate choice to ignore the warnings.
But really, this is a non-issue. So what if IE6 is still used by some, the world moved on thanks to google. Nobody cares anymore about IE6 support and if that means you at some backwards company can't browse all the web... well thought shit. Find a job where IT is not run by MS fanboys or do not browse the web on your bosses time.
What is problem supposed to be? Employees can't access facebook? Not supposed to. Company at risk of security problems, not the problem of anyone else. Company might loose support on out of date software, again, not anyone elses problem.
Let IE6 keep hanging on, I and most of the rest of the world are done with it. You are not? Your problem. Not mine.
You must be young because ONCE people DID go 100% Apple. Just as once they went 100% IBM. Apple was big in education once.
But the problem here is NOT choosing Microsoft. It is by choosing a very specific set of tools that MS then dropped like the pile of trash it was. MS does this a lot. That is why you should NEVER use the greatest and latest until it has been around for a decade and has been proven to have stable support. Yes .NET developers, I am looking at you. What makes you think MS won't pull an activeX on you?
The mess with IE6 is not just activex, it is a whole shitload of choices, includinging IE only HTML that turn the projects into the crap they are.
But these projects didn't come out of nothing. I am willing to make a bet: Every single IE6 only application is a piece of crap to begin with regardless of its environment produced by a company that is clueless about IT in general. It ain't the clever people who walked into this trap. Just the kind of development environment where knowledge of Excell and Word is a must have to be hired. Run hard, run fast if you EVER see this listed.
These weren't smart people making a dumb choice, these are dumb people who made a dumb choice and now continue to make it. And good luck changing this, because if you say it, then your boss has to admit he has been very stupid.
The old "No-one has ever been fired for choosing IBM" really is "No-one has ever been fired for making the same choice as your boss".
Frankly, let these companies rot. They can force IE6 only browsers but the world isn't going to wait for them any longer. As a web developer I noticed that IE6 has long been dropped as a requirement. No customers use it. If you are still on IE6, you ain't worth catering too. It would be like Harrords having a homeless section. What would be the point.
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ws: Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool
Gosh, within one line, asking people to join Facebook and then yet the Xth article about how dangerous facebook is for your privacy.
We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.
Facebook is a nudist colony. Fine if you want to air your tonker but then don't complain people can see it. You can't share all your personal details withour your personal details ending up shared.
I wonder how people who use Facebook and complain about privacy go through life in general:
Omg! I bought this phone with a subscription, but now I do the math I actually end up paying much more for the phone! How can this be?
Oh no, I bought this gadget with monthy payments and now the payments are more then the original price, why!
I borrowed money for my house, now the bank thinks it owns it. Why didn't anyone tell me!
I streaked naked down the high street, now people are claiming they saw me! I didn't know that what I do in public can be seen by others!
I gave a full confession to a cop and now they using it against me in a court of law! Won't someone safe me!
If you do NOT want everyone on facebook to see what you do, don't use facebook. It ain't hard. It is not an essential product. Billions life happy lives without it. You can too. And the first person to claim that it allows them to keep in touch with friends they never bothered to keep in touch with before I will beat until they learn the difference between a friend, a distant aquintance and a stranger.
It is NOT about the hours. If you play Solitaire all your life, you won't hear me. Because THAT game doesn't suck the money out of people who can't afford it.
Bejewelled? Harmless. The Sims? Go right ahead. Throwing a coin in the air? Why not.
Throw a coin down the drain... no.
Farmville costs a lot of money to play, that is what I object to because there are people already on a thight income who cannot handle the total costs of endless micro transactions.
Next time, at least READ a post before you respond. It is not about hours wasted, it is about money.
A lot of people argue here that playing PC game X is no different from playing Farmville. Obviously these people either never played a PC game or Farmville.
Farmville is a micro-transaction game were there is NOTHING micro about the amounts involved. WHY do you think this company with a simple game line-up is now bigger then the largest game publisher in the world?
Because people don't just enjoy harmlessly playing a rather boring game for whatever reason, they are forking over TONS of cash, with no end in sight. If I spend 1200 dollars on a new PC, that is it. I got a new PC, it will last me at least 3 months. A farmville player can spend a fortune each and every day with no end. And not all people can handle that.
And don't talk about how you can play for free, because if people played for free Zynga wouldn't be this big. Zynga is a bookie who never pays out. People spend and spend and they never can be finished. That makes it very disturbing that a company with such a simple line-up can rake in so much cash. This might be the ultimate tax on stupid. Move over lottery, a new king has arrived.
And that that is the other loathsesome element. Many of the players who play are not the types with money to burn. I can afford to piss away 1500 euro or so a month, it is pocket money, everything else is payed for plus plenty of savings. But I am not playing Farmville. The people who play are, well those who are not smart enough to have a sense of worth. I sell my old gaming rigs when I buy a new one, getting a fairly decent return on my money. Farmville game? Sell your farm, what do you get? It is money down the drain.
But people watch sports? Indeed they do. For a fixed cable fee on a TV that lasts years. They don't spend 1 buck every minute to watch a soccer game that never ever ends. Yeah, you can go to another continent for a match but then you got something for your money, people who you gave the money did actual work, not just flipped a bit on a server. A farmville shop item has no value, there is no limit to them, no resale value. Yet millions are spend on it.
No, Farmville is not just a game and not just a hobby. It is as insideous as holding a fake raffel that never pays out and people can and do buy an infinite amount of tickets. That would be illegal. We would protect people against such a scam. But because Farmville is just a game, it isn't subject to any regulation, any sense of common decency.
But ask yourself again, if Farmville is harmless, how did Zynga get to be bigger then EA?
Since MS does make hardware, the x-box and keyboards and mice at least, your claim is basically: MS doesn't make a tablet because MS doesn't make tablet hardware...
Well neither did Apple until it did. And Apple makes the tablet, not the hardware that goes in it that it buys from suppliers.
So what is your argument again?
Windows 7 wasn't a huge hit. It just wasn't the steaming pile of crap the Vista was. Water tastes as nectar to a thirsty man, but it remains plain water. Windows 7 sells, as part of new PC's. But many a company and consumer is still on XP. For MS, this is lethal. It NEEDS the continues upgrade revenue to fund its many programs. And those who are still on Windows XP also didn't upgrade their office. A double blow.
The original xbox was a disaster, the 360 slightly less so but remember that MS counts replacements as sales. So how many 360 sales are really replacement units for the countless ring of death failures? Count these out and suddenly the figures look very different AND no matter how you count the Wii outsold it by far. The 360 is a decent performer, but that was NOT MS ambition. Sony and Nintendo are still ticking over for the next round meaning MS has yet another round to fund with its diminishing Office and Windows income.
Windows Phone 7 SEVEN, SEVEN and it is still crap. So much for the third release being the charm. While Rim, Android, Nokia and Apple are biggering about who is biggest MS is lingering at the bottom. Yet again.
A bit to early for judging Windows Mobile 7? Hardly, it is after all not the first time we handled this beast. We can judge it very easily, has MS learned from mistakes in the past? No? Then it will fail for the same reasons as before.
As for dominate the OS marketshare? Oh boy, you are a fanboy aren't you. OS market share on what? Tablets? No, that is Apple. Mainframes? No IBM. Servers? No that is Linux. Smart Phones? No that is... Apple again (at least not MS) Handheld gaming consoles? MP3 players? Media players? Oh, the desktop... yeah and Apple who does NOT sell Windows is the biggest PC seller right now. Doesn't that give you a bit of a clue?
I know it must hurt for a MS fanboy but their performance of late isn't up to form. MS has a VERY large warchest and can keep the fight going for a long time but they would be smarter to re-examine who and what they are. Their constant shifting position on Windows gaming is just a very obvious clue. Then it is "Everything must be on the console" then combined, then windows gaming alone, then windows live then back to gaming on the PC again. MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND. IE9 shows just how little the company understands about its own products. It claims IE9 can be Windows 7 only because it needs some special shit to run... there are FOUR browser makers who have FASTER browsers AND have it running on XP. But MS itself can't fix the crap IE6. That shows how little MS cares about its customers who might be running OLD software but BUGGY software that MS sold them. And don't come with IE is free because then you are to stupid to talk to.
Recent events like the London stock exchange going to linux after MS putting major money into it AND using it in ads, that shows an MS that is no longer the power it once was. IE has dropped to 50%. This is the browser installed by default as you claim by the company that controls the OS marketshare. Doesn't that TELL you something? Browsing is what most consumers use their computer for and they replaced the default browser with their own choice. It doesn't matter how you measure it, this is LOW.
And how do you measure MY pc in your OS dominance? My work PC? My servers? Running linux all, but either barebones or replaced Windows installs. In my department, the windows guys are in the minority. Granted the Apple guys help with that but still. The days when you would find only Windows machines in a company are gone. This means the days of forced use of the latest office products is gone. The boss with his apple book is a powerfull driver to use an exchange EVERYONE can use.
Bye bye lockin, the prime mover and shaker behind Microsofts success.
No, MS is far from gone, but it can't afford to many more mistakes. In many ways I think MS has become its ancient enemy, IBM. IBM could have owned the PC, it didn't because it made all the wrong choices. IBM is still there, but it no longer controls the industry as it used to. MS might end up the same if it hasn't already.
Fox is right wing, but not all of it is as insane as Beck. With the simpsons, they can show they got a humor but also make Homer into a kinda reverse hero. Left wingers might see him as an idiot and an example of everything that is wrong with people who vote against healthcare until they need it but he ALSO survives all his mistakes. He never dies in the unsafe work environment and has his widow screwed out of compensation. He hasn't undergone forced sterilization and this is NEVER ever mentioned despite this really have happened in nuclear facilities in the US.
Somehow despite all the jokes, the stabs and parodies, the right-wing dumb guy wins through. Same with all the other shows.
"You might be a redneck if..." how many rednecks proudly proclaim to be a redneck? It is not degrading when beat yourself on the chest. Homer is not a pititful figure to many, but a hero. It is a very good bit of propoganda. Remember that Goebels most beloved movie had a Jew as the hero. Propoganda is best when it doesn't label it on.
Perhaps this is impossible to see for an American. You might be so entrenched in the American way of life that you can't see just how much these shows celebrate this. Its battle cry is NOT "We are the best and everything is perfect" but "Things might suck, but we are still the best". It works. It takes the wind out of everyone who might dare to question the status quo.
No, if you think these shows are somehow left-wing, you got a very distorded view of the left. But what do you expect from someone who watches so many cartoons :P
The dutch political system is currently locked. Despite having far more parties then the US, there is a common sentiment among voters that the elite (all the parties) do not represent them. Jan Marrijnissen with the SP (Socialist Party, yes pinkos for american readers, booga booga) played on this with his party early on. But when he stepped back and Agnes Kant took over and started adopting "elite" standpoints (pro-islam, anti-israel, green, arts etc etc) the party nose dived. Pim Fortuyn got a large popular vote, but was killed (by a muslim immigrant). His party quickly nose dived, partly because the elite (CDA) did a very good job of smother to death and partly because when you don't have the ruling elite in your party, you get some very strange people.
Now the resentment against the ruling elite is represented by Geert Wilders. But he seems to have gotten elected by some right wing promises (kick out the muslims) but ALSO (and this is often overlooked) with a LOT (far more) LEFT wing promisises like no extension of pension age, fewer cuts in social spending etc etc. Funnily enough, now he actually as agreed on a deal to support the new government, he seems to be skipping on a LOT of election promises and have gone straight into backroom deals and all the activities people hate in the elite.
So... if neither right nor left can provide a decent alternative. What could be done? What about a party that ISN'T a party. What about a party leader, who is NOT going to be running the country? What about a party that ends the party system?
The US has referendums, they have forced some intresting politics because people could vote for a candidate of party X and then force a series of policies on him that totally disagreed with the party line. California's drug laws for instance.
What if in Holland instead of voting for a party, we got a 100% referendum system. No more prime-minister, no more backroom deals, no whips (they are called that because they keep the party in line, with the new government having a very small majority, they became far more important because if a single person from the 3 parties votes against, the opposition wins. This means elected officials don't vote according to what their voters want but as the party orders them. This is actually highly illegal in dutch law. Every elected official must be able to vote without fear of consequence).
But this would also be very hard. You would need a country run by smart men, not popular men. And people would need to vote smart, not just for the guy that promises the lowest taxes. Because now you can't have secret deals to still fund essential road maintenance. If the people vote NO to spend money on the roads, then that is it. No road maintenance.
We might not like the system, but are we capable of going to a system that DOES work? Is the average voter for ready for REAL democracy? Where if you vote for spending cuts, you don't complain if your kids school is closed? If the police no longer police your neighbourhood?
Personally, I think that the current situation does not work either. But selling the alternative would be a hell of job. And anyone smooth enough, connected enough to start such an anti-party would be part of the system already and hardly want to dismantle the system that gave him power. And the current youth and the internet? Oh, you might get a billion friends on facebook with such a party, and then when it came time to vote, the wave of apathy would knock earth out of orbit.
Yes, your proposal might work... it might work all to well. And then?
The travelling salesman problem is the problem of finding the shortest route between a set of points. It doesn't matter HOW you solve it. You could time all possible journey's, you could do a sorting routine or god knows what. But if you solve it, you solved it.
That is what the bee does. And maybe if we can learn HOW the bee does that, we might learn something from it. It might be a smarter way of solving things. Or maybe Bees have an additional variable from an unknown input that helps solve it.
And as for your brain just GUESSING? Jezus, do you know how FUCKING difficult GUESSING is? Been trying to get computers to make a best guess for ages. It is advanced computer science.
Calculating the path of a ball in flight is actually pretty easy. All I need is a couple of accurate measurements of its position in time and space. Trivial stuff. But GUESSING from in complete and missing data were a ball is going to be AND being right most of the time or at least have moved an appendage in time so that when more accurate data is available I already got the appendage in roughly the right area? THAT is NOT easy. And yet our brain and the brains of many an animal does it. And does it VERY fast indeed. Throw a bouncy ball at a cat and watch it chase it (or in the case of my cat decide in a pico second that "you threw it, you catch it" is the wisest course of action and fall asleep), control a body and CATCH it. Meanwhile we marvel at a robot because it managed to stand upright...
Now if a machine could duplicate the brains method for catching a ball, that would be very handy indeed. Because SOMEHOW our brain does do it. And yes, this DOES include wind velocity correction. We are aware of the wind and we correct for it. Thanks to our brain. It doesn't matter that we don't use a laser ranger finder or dopler radar, that is just details. It is the logic that can use incomplete, unreliable data that results in accurate results that scientists are interested. It would allow for computers to keep functioning even when sensor data goes missing. An essential for computers/robots to come out of the production halls and into our daily lives. If a spell checker could guess as accurately what I meant to write as YOU can read over my mis spellings and lousy grammer, Clippy would be a lot more usefull.
Gosh, that is one hell of a bee if it has the brain of a piece of corn... or is corn not a grass anymore? At least when you take some idiotic comparison, take one that has a non-changing size. Penny is okay because all pennies at least within a country tend to stay the same. But grass seeds?
Next up is "brain the size of a pinhead". Oh okay, so there are many sizes of pin but at least we can assume some kind of standard. And that is FAR smaller then most grasses I know and see seeds of in Holland.
Otherwise intresting stuff but I loathe this "make it easier" by obuscating the facts.
Number of neurons in honey bee brain = 950,000 (from Menzel, R. and Giurfa, M., Cognitive architecture of a mini-brain: the honeybee, Trd. Cog. Sci., 5:62-71, 2001.)
Now THAT is a fact. We? We got 100 billion. So, while a bee has a tiny brain compared to ours, it is HARDLY simple. And because it is far smaller and far more primitive it doesn't need as as much intelligence to deal with things it doesn't need to. Listening and producing speech is complex, but bees don't bother with that. Living for half a century and remembring everything is complex. But bees don't do that.
This why computers can do math so fast despite being so stupid, because they only do math.
How can the bee do route calculation with close to a million neurons? I have no idea but didn't research show that far fewer rat neurons could fly a plane? I think some people fastly underestimate the complexity of the brain even small ones. We already know that a neuron is far more then a simple transistor so 1 million super transistors would make for a hell of a complex computer. Suddenly it doesn't seem to odd that a bee can do computations far more complex because THAT is what it is designed to do. You could just as easily marvle at the fact that the bee with its tiny brain can fly, while I with my large brain can't. And no I don't just mean I don't have wings, I mean that if you put me in a helicopter you would have a horrible crash in seconds and that is in the passenger seat.
Marvle at nature, learn from it but don't belittle it. It takes us year to program a robot to walk very very slowly. A deer learns it in minutes and this includes learning to control legs locked up in a womb for months. We can either accept that nature is amazing or we are very very poor programmers... as a developer, I choose to believe that nature is amazing.
Good one. Either you are very young or sarcastic.
Windows 1-3. Complete changes. 3.1 to 95. Complete change. 95-98 the look didn't change, just where everything was. 98 to 2000... don't get me started. 2K to XP, lots of changes again. Vista so many changes many did not bother. W7, must have been a big change because people don't hate it as much as Vista.
Every single version of Windows has changed the layout and organization of basic configurations until the point where messing with your disks is so many layers deep I need a mining canary to find it.
Compared with that both OSX and Ubuntu have been solid rock.
Which probably is what sits in your head... MS and consistent interface...
I think the parent is talking about why MS is trying to get us to buy an upgrade as if it is a new release with all the problems of switching.
Win95 and Win95SE was its upgrade. Windows 98 and Windows 98SE was its upgrade. NOT ME. That was a new release and it showed because it totally changed things.
But should we pay the price of a new release. Even with upgrade discount it is high. Far higher then OSX's point upgrades and of course far more expensive then Ubuntu releases. About a gazillion times more.
And yes, this matters because there are people, younger slashdotters might want to skip over the next bit less they will be unable to sleep tonight from sheer terror, who do NOT upgrade their computer every quarter... some even keep their computer running for half a DECADE or MORE!!!
Why should these people spend a lot of money to upgrade Windows for essentially point fixes? And it is MS itself that is making the situation worse. IE6 goes with XP like urine goes with shit and they are to inept to get rid of it. Despite Google and Firefox and Apple and Opera being able to code fast and up-to-date browsers for XP, MS can't code IE9 to work on XP, because they are to lazy/inept (some MS fanboy will no doubt insist that IE9 depends on some fancy thing that no other browser needs to run fast, this is kinda like saying you need a 3D card to run a MS text adventure when text adventures have run on text only machines for decades).
But this means as long as the upgrade path is so expensive MS is always going to have hopelessly outdated software out there and all the hassle that comes with it.
And oddly enough, MS itself doesn't benefit either because more and more companies simply ain't upgrading. Or downgrading. That is hard revenue MS is missing out on. Worse, its own latest software like office won't run on them, so that is another revenue stream drying up.
MS has learned to squeeze water from stones, but when the stone has become squeezed out, nothing will give anymore.
What exactly is NEEDED in Windows 8.0 that I should buy a license for? Until MS can answer that, they won't be making many sales from people who aren't buying their PC in the shop or must have the latest shiny. That is a LOT of people, but MS has always been a company that burned through cash. They NEED more sales. Vista hurt them bad. Windows 7 was better but not back to old form. I see no reason 8 should change this.
There is a major difference between owning a physical book and owning a digital COPY. Yes libraries exist but to those who can afford it, a library of your own, with your favorite books is something nice. Something that finishes a house. To sit in your library however modest and read, that is a delight that you just don't have with a digital copy.
It is why libraries didn't destroy book publishing. But when the act of owning a physical book is gone, when the difference between owning a digital copy (as far as they can even be truly owned) and renting or borrowing one is gone, then why spend extra money?
There is a risk here. Of course, with the internet we also got free vanity publishing (like this post) and getting your written word out is far cheaper. Maybe the industry will change or evolve. But it will never be the same.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1835400&cid=33995054
By making the horrors of war itself unacceptable, the pentagon feels forced to hide them but WITH that hiding they can hide far more. Area 51. If you even dare ask what is dare, you are quickly put with the alien nutters who think marsians are everywhere. A very effective cover.
If you scream when you see some blood in a butchersshop, they will sanitize the meat production until meat is something that comes in little containers with tissue to soak up the blood. But that makes it very hard to question food production practices if you somehow expect your daily meat but don't want any blood. That allows real cruelty, unneeded cruelty to animals, to be hidden. If you want beef, a cow has to die. Once you accept that you can ask how the cow should be killed. It doesn't have to made to suffer endlessly or be transported hundred of miles to do so. BUT those who want their meat AND not see blood allow a curtain to be raised behind which darkness can reign unchecked.
The Iraq war is often claimed to be for resources. Fine, lets assume it is. Then do YOU not claim those resources? Anyone who drives a car about a single metric ton, is in need of the Iraq oil to do so. The US needs oil because its people want oil, but they don't want the nasty truth that wars have always been fought for resources.
The real horror of this story is that for all the outrage, when the prices of petrol goes up, resistance against the US protection its supply lines will go down. It is a whole sordid deal that begins with YOU wanting to drive a 3 ton SUV goes through a president who doesn't want high fuel prices and ends up with some country being invaded or the CIA supporting yet another dictator. Just see the mess the US is causing in Mexico right now. All because the US can't deal with its drug issue. Iraq happened because the US can't deal with its oil needs. It would be far simpler if it didn't have to appease the Arabs to keep oil while also wanting to support Israel for the sake of freedom. No oil dependence it could simply tell the Arabs to go to hell and this would never have seen Sadam in power or supported in the war against Iran. Iran would have no money to cause a fuzz. No oil, the arabs would be the backward nations their faithful wish to be. Sucks for all the other Arabs but hey, at least our hands are clean.
World politics are not nice. There are so many intrests fueled by a public that wants it fuel.
And then we send rednecks who couldn't get a job anywhere else to deal with johny foreigner in a fair and even handed manner after they just been shot at...
Sadly, I am to cynical to be outraged because I can see how the outrage at the "simple" crimes allows the extreme right, the powers that be, to hide behind the wall of the middle who might be outraged if only they didn't worry about fuel prices more. The teabaggers defend the indefensible because they feel forced into a corner. And the fact the teabaggers are here already shows how deeply divided the US is. Left and right, pro and anti-iraq war are so deeply divided that both sides feel compelled to side with their own, even if they are inside deeply against it. Got to support the troops, is a battle cry behind which covering up mass rape and murder are allowed to happen. Out of Iraq is a battle cry that allows an attitude that you got to tolerate everything in the world no matter what because someone might get hurt.
I am old enough to remember all the lefties in Holland demanding the world interfere in Iraq to stop the gassing ot the koerds. When finally the world did interfere, that was bad... but with the same breath they also demanded the world went into Darfur... can't have it both ways.
I have no solution for all of this. The US powers that be have allowed themselves to get once again dragged into a war, have its string pulled by people banned from Iraq to support them, believes that these people could hold power, believes that democracy can be enforced, demands for low petrol prices, etc etc. And in all that, countless forces make their own struggle for power. Hard to see how to get out of it.
Your arguments only help them get away with it.
If you speed through a checkpoint, you are going to be shot. Bringing your wife to hospital? Did you grow up in a movie? In reality, there is no emergency. Labour lasts hours even with mothers who had babies before. There is no need to break the rules of traffic and speeding or trying to run through an armed checkpoint in a war zone... well, it is a darwin award. Or can you only say that when white people foolishly get themselves killed.
The sniper? It is war. Always been part of war, always will be. Read up on Monte Casino. Countless europeans were killed by the liberating american forces. War is hell. Get used to it.
The REAL problem is that because the left is so outraged that war ain't nice, they scream at the wrong things and then allow the really bad things to be hidden instead. It is the old "do aliens exist" problem. The nutcases who scream that Aliens are controlling the UN make it very hard for any serious study to be done into UFO's and other things because if you do, you get labelled with the nutcases.
War is hell, accept that. Civilians are going to be killed especially in wars were the enemy has no qualms about hiding among them.
THEN you can go and question why so many died, why it needs to be kept hidden. Remove the left fringe and you can then force a real discussion and demand that REAL figures are always shown because then the pentagon wouldn't claim they need to hide them to keep the radical left from using the horrors of war against them. We ask the pentagon to go to war, then we have to accept the results. But we can then also demand to know the full results and ask, if there was no other way.
Brutally honest answer: Sniper? No. Checkpoint killings of people speeding etc. No. Hiding rape and torture. Yes. Rape and torture are not valid military tactics. But you, skipped them. Instead you focussed on acts or war, not acts or terror. See the problem? By claiming the president is an alien pod from mars, you make it impossible to ask exactly what some radar blips were. In a way, those that wanted this war are thankful for you. All you do is drive a wedge, between you and the lunatic left and the right. The more outraged you are that a war ain't nice, the more people fall to the right of you.
And right now, the right is on the rise. All your outrage is doing nothing to stop them. Because you went to far, focused on the wrong things.
But hey, everyone does it. it seems to be human nature andbefore long we got two camps so opposed to each other, there is no way they can ever agree on anything. Cue Iraq. Groups of muslims killing more of each other then the so called hated invader. Human nature is hell.
And I want to buy my stuff in a brick and mortar store. But I suppose that is not allowed anymore.