Is that contract manufacturers supposedly offer efficiencies because they don't have to listen to Dell's marketing considerations. It would seem to me, then, that Dell's marketing considerations would need to change and all this really is is a low wage subsidy of a fundamentally flawed business.
I'm really sick of MBA's getting American companies out of manufacturing because they lack the engineering knowledge and are too lazy to make it work. If there a company really well led by an MBA? I mean, President Bush has an MBA... look how well he's done.
OH SNAP. (can we still say that)
That is completely accurate - Look closely at our best OEM's - most of the top officers are engineers that came up through the ranks. Lockheed always promotes engineers to the top. Boeing has made a mistake, and in time, it will catch up with them. McNerney doesn't even have a B.S. to go with his MBA. At least 3M managed to get rid of him, and put an engineer at the top. No, I have no idea why General Dynamics has an attorney running their company for the last 11 years; inexplicable that they haven't imploded. But at least he thought it was stupid to keep liquidating their company.
Don't get me wrong, their MBA training and skills have their place. An MBA is fine for a CFO, but never the president, chairman or CEO of a OEM. MBA's can go run a retail chain, or some other company of idiots in the service sector.
When are boards going to get that, an MBA has no business as the head of an OEM? Well maybe if an engineer could tolerate the kind of people (MBA) insitutional investors always pack on boards, we'd have a little diversity in boards.
Best result of oil going up, causing transportation costs to skyrocket: these off-shore contract manufacturers won't be able to compete against a domestic, or near domestic (mexico) factory. The domestic OEM's shedding too much of their manufacturing capacity to Asia are going to be getting caught with their pants down.
And then when the people in China, et al, get sick of the environmental damage being done, and demand Western modeled environmental regulation and enforcement. Proper environmental & pollution control in Asia alone will cause the value equation to flip. It's not if, it's when. The growing middle and upper class in Asia won't tolerate it forever. They've had their jumpstart in development, it won't last. As soon as the Chinese economy can afford to shed the factory polluters, they will. And that central planned economy? Yeah, they are focused on making it happen as soon as possible.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
Well first of all, subtract the 40B in assets from the 160B before you start really comparing P/E and dividends. Also, this industry pays extremely low dividend rates compared to other blue chips. That will probably improve later, but 30 years is still a young enough industry. Eventually, somebody will start doing to buoy their stock price, and others will have to follow.
Still their P/E is large, but remember they spend a lot on R&D, which tends to be worth a lot more than the initial investment in this field over time. Investors recognize that too, which adds huge amounts of confidence to long-term stability and stock re-sale value, making it very attractive to institutional investors. Apparently much more so than Microsoft with something like a 15 P/E. Nice confidence there!, I would think DELL's P/E would be lower than Microsoft but its not. Maybe there is something to this market prediction concept after all...
I own a macbook pro but I'm not happy with the purchase and was more or less forced to buy it since I had paid for the ADC student membership to get it cheaper anyway. But then this edition had the same retarded 128MB of VRAM and they still have shitty screens, not to mention ridiculously overpriced and ran hot as hell.
eh? You were forced to buy it because you bought an ADC membership just so you could get a discount on a mac? Your root cause analysis and thriftiness is worthy of a politician.
So big businesses and media brands can have their own TLD brand, and small and midsize players will be relegated to that "poor untrustworthy".com.
So much for the internet being a level playing field. ICANN is a non-profit, but there would be no prohibition against their directors who vote from being lobbied and bought and paid for.
A parting gift from the Bush Administration's worse than worthless Commerce Department to big business.
Governor Perry is known now as Mr. 39 in Texas. He won the last governor's race, for his third term, in 2006 with only 39% of the popular vote. 61% of Texas Voters don't want him either.
The election is a plurality, so there is no runoff, no second choicing on the ballot. There were four serious candidates.
It's computer science, not applied programming. Those two things are different, but the latter has been sold as the former, more and more.
Yes, YES, HELL YES. Thank you. Abstractions leak.
I suppose programmers are needed too though.
You COULD earn a true CSE degree if you want to be recognized for having some chops based on your degree. Too bad so many universities have merged the lesser Computer Science programs into their engineering departments (shouldn't those students be in the business school or something?). What kind of engineers they are graduating in OTHER disciplines...
Application of cosmic pair annihilation discovered?
And for history buffs and paranoid schizophrenics alike, Emoticons have now gone full circle in their coupling with the Fat Man.
17-Sep-82 17:40 Keith Wright at CMU-10A *%&#$ Jokes! No, no, no! Surely everyone will agree that "&" is the funniest character on the keyboard. It looks funny (like a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter). It sounds funny (say it loud and fast three times). I just know if I could get my nose into the vacuum of the CRT it would even smell funny!
--
And Saint Patricks Day shall be The Day After.
I was going to throw a "God Willing" in there, but some things are just too pedantic.
I want my email archive to be a single collection, and if I switch email accounts I want to continue to archive to the same collection. That's not possible with IMAP.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "a collection", or why that's not possible with IMAP.
That's because you are not familiar with the terms of art involved in full-text indexing. cl00f0ne ringing.
In a free society, where the largest powerful organizations are much smaller than the entire country, I can find the corner of it that plays by the rules I like. I have choices. I can be mostly who I want to be. In your "social" society, I have no more choices. I have to be what the majority thinks I should be, act accordingly to their morality and expectations.
It's people like you who don't understand that the gross product of most local economies are small business. Your 'miniature societies' are tangentially part of that economy. Whose political dogma is this anyway? Pure libertarianism?
I find it very sad that an intelligent, educated member of civilization can think that it is better to be governed by pure market forces, profit, and whatever your corporation wants to do in its inbred rampancy. Don't forget when corporations have nothing but profit to guide them, workers rights and standards of living decline. I suppose your position is that corporations will compete in a fair labor market, and labor will be constrained. Is that how you get your choice?
Don't worry, if that were to happen, I'm sure the corporations that make birth control would find themselves better compensated NOT to make it. (Thus leading to population boom, and thus taking care of that pesky worker shortage in the market)
I surmise its a idealized libertarianism, because the complete rejection of regulations you espouse is an extremist viewpoint. Society is complex, y'all seem to believe that it can be simplified with market forces alone! Thinking if we just take away all our government regulations, that market forces will self-regulate... oh maybe you are an anarchist. I guess instead of filing a lawsuit when you get screwed, you'll just hire a hit-man instead?
No thanks! I know my average fellow man too well to think it would be fun to allow him to dictate the terms of my life.
Okay, fine - don't vote or participate in any government yourself.
Part of the standard is to provide a doctype. Let's not fuck it all up by adding some non-standard meta tag to indicate that you have actually followed standards. I realize this is par for Microsoft, because they cannot be seen to have made an error in their engineering by the general public. (By failing to properly switch OFF quirks mode on doctype'd documents) Well f u.
The very idea that they will apply quirks mode to a css box model document with a properly declared doctype (like XHTML) is bonkers. I don't suppose anyone provided more detailed logic in their switch? The TFA seemed to indicate the meta tag is mandatory, no matter the doctype.
If you can't be bothered to give up 10s to assist the store in eliminating theft, then you're free to abort the purchase and exit the store unmolested. If you make the purchase, though, then refuse to show the receipt...you can't say you weren't warned.
How about we change that notice to say that 'you give permission to a search as you exit the store'. 'you can't say you weren't warned' so it must be right? Hogwash.
It may be common practice in the U.S. but every time it stuns me that whenever people make a mistake the very first thought is how to get maximum profit out of it and obliterate someone or something
You have mistaken his desire to take his case to court, for a desire to win a lottery. Usually, civil rights cases are about winning non-financial injunctive relief, and setting or affirming a precedent. Injunctive relief by definition does not benefit the parties financially, although they sometimes, depending on jurisdiction, result in an award for attorneys fees. Okay, now you are thinking, lawyers just trying to get rich. Think of the other side of the coin: with the knowledge that those in the right can recover attorneys fees, they do not have to fear the high cost of litigation, because there can be relief from that expense.
It is a prime purpose of the US court system, and with the legal concept of injunctive relief, to protect the civil rights of its people. When a suspension of liberty is at risk (an arrest), it is fully appropriate. This is the mechanism of the check and balance of the US Judiciary on the US Executive (law enforcement). Yes, we are talking about state and local governments, but this tenet of the government is the same.
What, do you know a single wealthy civil rights attorneys or plantiffs? Let me know when you find one that made a fortune off that practice...
Good on you for getting the idea, but it's a sad commentary on people that you needed a quote from a crappy Tom Clancy film adaptation instead of being able to merely arrive at this position through logic.
Well I'm not going to argue it's 'crappy' or not, but it's still art. Popular artworks are most often THE primary informer of the people. That's why Art is good, necessary, and key part of our civilization. The people get so wrapped up in the details of the day to day life. Art should slap you upside the head, make you think outside your comfort zone, but never, ever, tell you WHAT to think. And that makes it beautiful, when art demonstrates that perfect balance.
At 2,000 gallons per acre (presumably per annum), you would need 73 million acres of land to meet these needs.
According to the CIA Factbook, the USA has an area of 9,826,630 square kilometres, which works out to 2428213150 acres.
It may be more relevant to compare that with our current cropland use, to demonstrate how much of a change that would be. See USDA. We have somewhere around 230Million acres of cropland in use, domestically. So that works out to about 1/3 of our CURRENT harvested cropland use that would need to be diverted to fuel production, assuming all the previous calculations to be somewhat true.
So that is still feasible. Remembers, those figures are just current use. We can support the use of a lot more of US land than we currently do for agriculture
Some more recent data, apparently our government doesn't update this but every 5 years: USDA 2002 Ag Census. Those figures report that we have 938 Million acres currently available in farms. That census also reports we use almost 60 million acres just for grazing livestock. That's awfully close to the 73 million quoted previously. The sky is falling argument of we CANNOT afford the land use or water use fails.
Other than, a huh! it works! moment- what practical value would that have? To free you from buying Apple hardware to execute closed-source run mac apps?
'If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.'
If you add up all the various kinds of corporate fraud (both blatant and specious) perpetrated by multi-national corporations on the American economy, both public and private sector, every year, it costs the country $3 trillion dollars a year. Of course, sending law enforcement after that (instead of violent and personally destructive crimes) would also wreck our GDP, and send the US into a police state and a depression, as opposed to the state that still values liberty over money.
Idiot. Don't these still teach any economics and logic at fine pre-law programs; you know: the kind where you SHOULD find your asshat general counsels? Too bad they don't make sure their graduating attornies don't need remedial a cl00fone. Perhaps he aced his corporate personhood constitutional law.
Congratulations on your successful continuing legal education, and your complete detachment from our common societal values as a modern civilization. Ever wonder why the really great legal minds are heavily involved in civic organizations?
...and it's proven time after time that Information becomes free in the end.
If you have bits that somebody else wants to read, and those DRM'd bits come into possession of the public, given enough attention, they are going to be read.
Amateur Librarians everywhere are always ready for the freed bits with their BitTorrent.
Why haven't they learned that is a foolish, wasted, investment to develop or implement DRM technology?
In the final analysis, it's no less or more difficult to copy anything with DRM than without. It's just a fun and interesting challenge for the motivated and talented research hackers.
I feel sorry for any engineer who spends their time working on DRM. I suppose that some of them might be getting rich by selling this DRM snake oil to the willing buyers. I suppose the unwise among us believe they can create an unhackable DRM system.
A greater commitment to network neutrality, or nondiscrimination involving Internet traffic. AT&T said it would "maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service" for two years.
Two years? Hah. That's so paltry, we should all feel insulted. They probably wouldn't even be able to effect the major technology change on their network to disrupt neutrality for that long anyway. Might as well promise according to plan. That promise should be perpetual and binding.
All of their promises, excepting the 2.5ghz auction are without substance, and that is suspect. They had already announced repatriating those jobs. Naked DSL for a whopping 30 months. Whew whee! So they'll get more people accusomted to broadband phone and tv services, and then take away the network neutral, unbundled option, forcing them on to their bundle after 30 months. At least we know their marketing strategy! I don't really understand why they are willing to cede the 2.5ghz... best guess is they intend to acquire that 'unrelated' entity after they build out sites on that 2.5ghz wimax. That goodwill asset booked on mystery carrier X will underwrite a lot of financing of cell sites!
IP ownership issues and the fascinating arguments that can be made aside...
(On the other hand, Madison was afraid that an encoded Bill of Rights would be primarily used to interpret a restriction of rights. Score one for Madison)
I assume you were joking about 'primarily' turning out to be true, as the instances of restriction interpretation are rare, compared to the instances of favorable interpretations. Of course, whenever its read as a restriction, its damaging to liberty. That may be absolutist, etc, but so be it.
My point is, the Bill of Rights has served far more good than not in the history of american liberty. So while Madison had a point in that it could be used to the detriment of the society, it has certainly done much more good than bad in protecting the rights of the people from the government. I think he just liked to argue with Jefferson! Excellent engineering tactic. Madison being appreciated; I wouldn't score one for either yet on that argument. But hey, he did get "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" in there on #9. It took nearly 40 years for the 10th amendment to be remembered by the courts.
If these users are the ones that the Linux community are trying to get to migrate to Linux, there's a long road ahead of them. These "commoners" aren't going to know about installing libraries, or making symbolic links because "the system" expects the files in one locations but that particular distro "like them" somewhere else. Here's the real kicker; they don't CARE about these things. They want to read and send e-mail. They want to look at Web pages. They want to look at the pictures taken with their digital cameras. They know "click the setup.exe" files and the installation takes care of the rest, including installing other library files that may be needed. Click the desktop icon, and your program starts.
I'm one of those "commoners" who doesn't want to spend time searching out libraries to install and making symlinks to get apps to work following installation.
These are all good points. These are the reasons that the masses would end up with ubuntu, redhat, suse, linspire, or the like. Debian is hardly a grandma's linux distro. It's not like we should expect gentoo or bleeding edge fedora to end up on your girl's toshiba $799 laptop as-is!
So let's at least make comparisons and expectations of polished linux distro that has bothered to make ease-of-use for a neophyte a priority. The Debian guys just aren't there for that sort of user, and there's nothing really wrong with that, at the moment. Now, if the user-friendly company boys make inroads and achieve real market acceptance: Then a truly, through and through libre project like Debian can bother with all that extra engineering that would be required.
Or if you don't care too much about having a 100% pure libre OS, you can have the Apple flavor of BSD UNIX for the masses...
If even banks are outsourcing their service economy jobs en masse, where exactly does ol' George think the jobs in our service economy will be in 10 years? Bootlicking the fat cats?
Fucking assholes (BofA)! Are the completely ignorant of basic macroeconomics? How can you claim to have the wherewithal to run a bank of such size and be so completely fucking irresponsible to our economy.
bah i went offline for a while and i dont even remember what uid i had, it was under 1000. I just keep remembering how lame as @#$# I thought web based forums were at the time;-)
Clip my bastard license a point for panning it. Other solutions sucked, but none of those will ever scale like slashdot has/does.
Slashdot Mirror
That's usually called being Manic. See a psychiatrist. You might have a bipolar disorder too.
OH SNAP. (can we still say that)
That is completely accurate - Look closely at our best OEM's - most of the top officers are engineers that came up through the ranks. Lockheed always promotes engineers to the top. Boeing has made a mistake, and in time, it will catch up with them. McNerney doesn't even have a B.S. to go with his MBA. At least 3M managed to get rid of him, and put an engineer at the top. No, I have no idea why General Dynamics has an attorney running their company for the last 11 years; inexplicable that they haven't imploded. But at least he thought it was stupid to keep liquidating their company.
Don't get me wrong, their MBA training and skills have their place. An MBA is fine for a CFO, but never the president, chairman or CEO of a OEM. MBA's can go run a retail chain, or some other company of idiots in the service sector.
When are boards going to get that, an MBA has no business as the head of an OEM? Well maybe if an engineer could tolerate the kind of people (MBA) insitutional investors always pack on boards, we'd have a little diversity in boards.
Best result of oil going up, causing transportation costs to skyrocket: these off-shore contract manufacturers won't be able to compete against a domestic, or near domestic (mexico) factory. The domestic OEM's shedding too much of their manufacturing capacity to Asia are going to be getting caught with their pants down.
And then when the people in China, et al, get sick of the environmental damage being done, and demand Western modeled environmental regulation and enforcement. Proper environmental & pollution control in Asia alone will cause the value equation to flip. It's not if, it's when. The growing middle and upper class in Asia won't tolerate it forever. They've had their jumpstart in development, it won't last. As soon as the Chinese economy can afford to shed the factory polluters, they will. And that central planned economy? Yeah, they are focused on making it happen as soon as possible.
Well first of all, subtract the 40B in assets from the 160B before you start really comparing P/E and dividends. Also, this industry pays extremely low dividend rates compared to other blue chips. That will probably improve later, but 30 years is still a young enough industry. Eventually, somebody will start doing to buoy their stock price, and others will have to follow.
Still their P/E is large, but remember they spend a lot on R&D, which tends to be worth a lot more than the initial investment in this field over time. Investors recognize that too, which adds huge amounts of confidence to long-term stability and stock re-sale value, making it very attractive to institutional investors. Apparently much more so than Microsoft with something like a 15 P/E. Nice confidence there!, I would think DELL's P/E would be lower than Microsoft but its not. Maybe there is something to this market prediction concept after all...
eh? You were forced to buy it because you bought an ADC membership just so you could get a discount on a mac? Your root cause analysis and thriftiness is worthy of a politician.
It's completely subject to change if .com is marketed as the old, untrustworthy, dirty, etc. internet by companies who want to establish their TLD.
I think if we give it 20 years, .com could be relegated to .biz importance.
So big businesses and media brands can have their own TLD brand, and small and midsize players will be relegated to that "poor untrustworthy" .com.
So much for the internet being a level playing field. ICANN is a non-profit, but there would be no prohibition against their directors who vote from being lobbied and bought and paid for.
A parting gift from the Bush Administration's worse than worthless Commerce Department to big business.
Governor Perry is known now as Mr. 39 in Texas. He won the last governor's race, for his third term, in 2006 with only 39% of the popular vote. 61% of Texas Voters don't want him either.
The election is a plurality, so there is no runoff, no second choicing on the ballot. There were four serious candidates.
Yes, YES, HELL YES. Thank you. Abstractions leak.
I suppose programmers are needed too though.
You COULD earn a true CSE degree if you want to be recognized for having some chops based on your degree. Too bad so many universities have merged the lesser Computer Science programs into their engineering departments (shouldn't those students be in the business school or something?). What kind of engineers they are graduating in OTHER disciplines...
May this finally be the death of the emoticon.
Application of cosmic pair annihilation discovered?
And for history buffs and paranoid schizophrenics alike, Emoticons have now gone full circle in their coupling with the Fat Man.
--And Saint Patricks Day shall be The Day After.
I was going to throw a "God Willing" in there, but some things are just too pedantic.
It's people like you who don't understand that the gross product of most local economies are small business. Your 'miniature societies' are tangentially part of that economy. Whose political dogma is this anyway? Pure libertarianism?
I find it very sad that an intelligent, educated member of civilization can think that it is better to be governed by pure market forces, profit, and whatever your corporation wants to do in its inbred rampancy. Don't forget when corporations have nothing but profit to guide them, workers rights and standards of living decline. I suppose your position is that corporations will compete in a fair labor market, and labor will be constrained. Is that how you get your choice?
Don't worry, if that were to happen, I'm sure the corporations that make birth control would find themselves better compensated NOT to make it. (Thus leading to population boom, and thus taking care of that pesky worker shortage in the market)
I surmise its a idealized libertarianism, because the complete rejection of regulations you espouse is an extremist viewpoint. Society is complex, y'all seem to believe that it can be simplified with market forces alone! Thinking if we just take away all our government regulations, that market forces will self-regulate... oh maybe you are an anarchist. I guess instead of filing a lawsuit when you get screwed, you'll just hire a hit-man instead?
Okay, fine - don't vote or participate in any government yourself.Part of the standard is to provide a doctype. Let's not fuck it all up by adding some non-standard meta tag to indicate that you have actually followed standards. I realize this is par for Microsoft, because they cannot be seen to have made an error in their engineering by the general public. (By failing to properly switch OFF quirks mode on doctype'd documents) Well f u. The very idea that they will apply quirks mode to a css box model document with a properly declared doctype (like XHTML) is bonkers. I don't suppose anyone provided more detailed logic in their switch? The TFA seemed to indicate the meta tag is mandatory, no matter the doctype.
How about we change that notice to say that 'you give permission to a search as you exit the store'. 'you can't say you weren't warned' so it must be right? Hogwash.
You have mistaken his desire to take his case to court, for a desire to win a lottery. Usually, civil rights cases are about winning non-financial injunctive relief, and setting or affirming a precedent. Injunctive relief by definition does not benefit the parties financially, although they sometimes, depending on jurisdiction, result in an award for attorneys fees. Okay, now you are thinking, lawyers just trying to get rich. Think of the other side of the coin: with the knowledge that those in the right can recover attorneys fees, they do not have to fear the high cost of litigation, because there can be relief from that expense.
It is a prime purpose of the US court system, and with the legal concept of injunctive relief, to protect the civil rights of its people. When a suspension of liberty is at risk (an arrest), it is fully appropriate. This is the mechanism of the check and balance of the US Judiciary on the US Executive (law enforcement). Yes, we are talking about state and local governments, but this tenet of the government is the same.
What, do you know a single wealthy civil rights attorneys or plantiffs? Let me know when you find one that made a fortune off that practice...
Well I'm not going to argue it's 'crappy' or not, but it's still art. Popular artworks are most often THE primary informer of the people. That's why Art is good, necessary, and key part of our civilization. The people get so wrapped up in the details of the day to day life. Art should slap you upside the head, make you think outside your comfort zone, but never, ever, tell you WHAT to think. And that makes it beautiful, when art demonstrates that perfect balance.
It may be more relevant to compare that with our current cropland use, to demonstrate how much of a change that would be. See USDA. We have somewhere around 230Million acres of cropland in use, domestically. So that works out to about 1/3 of our CURRENT harvested cropland use that would need to be diverted to fuel production, assuming all the previous calculations to be somewhat true.
So that is still feasible. Remembers, those figures are just current use. We can support the use of a lot more of US land than we currently do for agriculture
Some more recent data, apparently our government doesn't update this but every 5 years: USDA 2002 Ag Census. Those figures report that we have 938 Million acres currently available in farms. That census also reports we use almost 60 million acres just for grazing livestock. That's awfully close to the 73 million quoted previously. The sky is falling argument of we CANNOT afford the land use or water use fails.
Other than, a huh! it works! moment- what practical value would that have? To free you from buying Apple hardware to execute closed-source run mac apps?
If you add up all the various kinds of corporate fraud (both blatant and specious) perpetrated by multi-national corporations on the American economy, both public and private sector, every year, it costs the country $3 trillion dollars a year. Of course, sending law enforcement after that (instead of violent and personally destructive crimes) would also wreck our GDP, and send the US into a police state and a depression, as opposed to the state that still values liberty over money.
Idiot. Don't these still teach any economics and logic at fine pre-law programs; you know: the kind where you SHOULD find your asshat general counsels? Too bad they don't make sure their graduating attornies don't need remedial a cl00fone. Perhaps he aced his corporate personhood constitutional law.
Congratulations on your successful continuing legal education, and your complete detachment from our common societal values as a modern civilization. Ever wonder why the really great legal minds are heavily involved in civic organizations?
Given That Information Wants to Be Free...
...and it's proven time after time that Information becomes free in the end.
If you have bits that somebody else wants to read, and those DRM'd bits come into possession of the public, given enough attention, they are going to be read.
Amateur Librarians everywhere are always ready for the freed bits with their BitTorrent.
Why haven't they learned that is a foolish, wasted, investment to develop or implement DRM technology?
In the final analysis, it's no less or more difficult to copy anything with DRM than without. It's just a fun and interesting challenge for the motivated and talented research hackers.
I feel sorry for any engineer who spends their time working on DRM. I suppose that some of them might be getting rich by selling this DRM snake oil to the willing buyers. I suppose the unwise among us believe they can create an unhackable DRM system.
Two years? Hah. That's so paltry, we should all feel insulted. They probably wouldn't even be able to effect the major technology change on their network to disrupt neutrality for that long anyway. Might as well promise according to plan. That promise should be perpetual and binding.
All of their promises, excepting the 2.5ghz auction are without substance, and that is suspect. They had already announced repatriating those jobs. Naked DSL for a whopping 30 months. Whew whee! So they'll get more people accusomted to broadband phone and tv services, and then take away the network neutral, unbundled option, forcing them on to their bundle after 30 months. At least we know their marketing strategy! I don't really understand why they are willing to cede the 2.5ghz... best guess is they intend to acquire that 'unrelated' entity after they build out sites on that 2.5ghz wimax. That goodwill asset booked on mystery carrier X will underwrite a lot of financing of cell sites!
Slimeball business monopolists. (eat me)
IP ownership issues and the fascinating arguments that can be made aside...
I assume you were joking about 'primarily' turning out to be true, as the instances of restriction interpretation are rare, compared to the instances of favorable interpretations. Of course, whenever its read as a restriction, its damaging to liberty. That may be absolutist, etc, but so be it.
My point is, the Bill of Rights has served far more good than not in the history of american liberty. So while Madison had a point in that it could be used to the detriment of the society, it has certainly done much more good than bad in protecting the rights of the people from the government. I think he just liked to argue with Jefferson! Excellent engineering tactic. Madison being appreciated; I wouldn't score one for either yet on that argument. But hey, he did get "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" in there on #9. It took nearly 40 years for the 10th amendment to be remembered by the courts.
I realize of course that this is your signature, but I'm at a loss - who coined this?
These are all good points. These are the reasons that the masses would end up with ubuntu, redhat, suse, linspire, or the like. Debian is hardly a grandma's linux distro. It's not like we should expect gentoo or bleeding edge fedora to end up on your girl's toshiba $799 laptop as-is!
So let's at least make comparisons and expectations of polished linux distro that has bothered to make ease-of-use for a neophyte a priority. The Debian guys just aren't there for that sort of user, and there's nothing really wrong with that, at the moment. Now, if the user-friendly company boys make inroads and achieve real market acceptance: Then a truly, through and through libre project like Debian can bother with all that extra engineering that would be required.
Or if you don't care too much about having a 100% pure libre OS, you can have the Apple flavor of BSD UNIX for the masses...
If even banks are outsourcing their service economy jobs en masse, where exactly does ol' George think the jobs in our service economy will be in 10 years? Bootlicking the fat cats?
Fucking assholes (BofA)! Are the completely ignorant of basic macroeconomics? How can you claim to have the wherewithal to run a bank of such size and be so completely fucking irresponsible to our economy.
bah i went offline for a while and i dont even remember what uid i had, it was under 1000. I just keep remembering how lame as @#$# I thought web based forums were at the time ;-)
Clip my bastard license a point for panning it. Other solutions sucked, but none of those will ever scale like slashdot has/does.