Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
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Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 1
Lately I've seen efforts to link pot with terrorism. To go even further, they are trying to link "drugs" with "guns" with "terrorism", part of a conditioning effort to make it seem like they are "the same", I mean, that's an extremely normal advertising & propaganda technique,to use linkage, allusion, and branding. I've seen the ads, they will have a hemp leaf with a gun for instance. It's a clear cut demonization effort.
As to the government making things legal or illegal, I'd say in a lot of matters now the federal government is way more a criminal outlaw organization than any sort of honest representative government. They have literally seized through coordinated large scale bribery, coercion, and fraud huge amounts of power that are not legally theirs. We really are supposed to be a more private person and then states first sort of day to day government, with the federal government having very limited-important, but severly limited-powers. It is so far into criminality I really couldn't even start to address it in a single post, and this is already a wide thread drift from corn and plastics. Here's a few major ones, illegal money,massive theft of property and conversion, maintaining a large standing land army, abrogation of most of our born-with personal rights in a variety of ways, claiming authority over huge areas of land that they have no legitimate claim or title to, and a variety of violations relating to the 10th and 14th in particular. Very long subject, really don't want to go into it, but as a default, no, I don't really think of this government as having any legitimacy any longer except they act as full bore terrorists themselves. Some states and local governments are still valiantly struggling to maintain the proper checks and balances, but it's quite the effort. There's some notable wins, for instance lately both hawaii and alaska have repudiated the throughly bogus and mostly completely illegal from a constitutional standpoint "patriot act", and it was just announced alaska has become the second state to have so called "vermont style" right to carry, which is really just a normal reading and interpretation of our second amendment right, if you can understand normal english.
And yada yada yada, too much thread drift. I know the pro industrial hemp people are having a hard time, but I think along with every other niche political reform effort they would do better to join with other organizations and seek the common ground that almost the entire big mama suckah that is the federal government is so bad that it needs complete replacement with new people and a return to basic constitutional law, scrap all the UCC, and start over. That is my opinion, I know it is not shared by many, but the feds use divide and conquer too effectively, for every personal "win" back to normal freedoms and honest law, we have hundreds of losses. I do not think trying to change all the little tiny things is very effective, I think it would be way more effective to change the entire structure all at once, and because we already have in existence a basic outline that was proven sound as far as human written documents go, I would advocate just a return to that, and really pay more attention to the checks and balances aspect of government more in the future after the change back.
We see this on a small scale with some software, sometimes new versions of software are just so stupid that it's better to take a big step back and put the older version back in. I see the current federzlgovernment as a rather dangerous, stupid and, well, just plain ignorant fork in politics. And I'm not being party-partisan either, I mean the structure itself, I claim it is illegitimate, that it's a junta, and only maintains itself through force, not through the allowance of the electorate. When people all over a more afraid of government, that's the dividing line into what we term as a dictatorship. I would maintain that most people have various fears of government now, and that the combined total clearly indicates it fell into
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
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Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 1
Heck ya, they make a lot more money keeping it illegal. And there's too much evidence that shows at a variety of higher levels they themselves are part of the smuggling efforts, and money laundering. So they get to keep industrial hemp off the market, have an aspect to the growing police state, and also make illicit profits. Sweet deal for them.
And you are correct, most cops I know also favor legalization & decriminalization of hemp/pot.
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
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Corn-Based Plastic
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· Score: 5, Informative
Huge yields per acre without having to use massive amounts of fertiliser. Food, fuel, fabric,other fiber products,and plastics. Large variety of useful products from the same plant. Requires very little care. When I was a kid, there were still a lot of wild patches left over from world war 2, when they did an emergency "grow this stuff now" campaign after the phillipines fell to the japanese. No one thought about smoking it though, but I remember playing in one patch that was several acres, stuff was like 15 feet high or something, big plants.
Farmers could even afford to only harvest half the plant, plow the remainder back under, thereby making your soil every year better, not more depleted, by adding more carbon back into the surface layer.
It scares the monopolists. Places where it's legal have zero problems with it, none.
Nope, government is a 100% complete %^&*&**( about it, too much money to be made keeping it illegal and keeping the drug war hype going, shoot, that was the really big police state push, they got everyone to accept all this gestapo SWAT team crap and whatnot with that artifical "threat". I mean, c'mon now, pothead terrorists? People who sit around and eat and listen to records? (well, that's what I saw in the olden days, maybe it's different now) And all the useful stuff you can get from it besides psychoactive? It's a joke, government is out to lunch on it, but, they dig those billions they make on the side and they get to build prisons and have new agencies and use up all that po-leece equipment they have kicking around the po-leece station.....
My take is, God got all these things, they all got a use, we get to use them, use the planet, plus we are supposed to be neat, sorta take care of things too, there's our ecological balance idea. Makes sense to me.. We may not know WHAT some things are useful for yet-like chiggers, wazzup with them things?- but, everything is useful, and no government should say "no you don't", that's just bogus.
HAHAHAHAH! Al Bundy-->"Hey! who took my copy of Big 'Uns?"
The net is pretty cool. I remember having an almost vision thing, like an intense daydream when I was like 13 or 14, I was staring at the wall, I had a screen in front of me and all kinds of blinkenlights, I could communicate with anyone on the planet, find out anything I wanted to, never really thought I'd see it though, I only thought mainframes would just get bigger. It's just an amazing invention combined with peecees.
Well, I never! I'm upset since you young guys hijacked television..
err...wait
no...you can have it, changed me mind.. keep on hijacking it lads! Used to be we had one fuzzy channel that only ran to 10 or 11 or midnight, then went off the air and showed nifty test patterns, and programs that mostly sucked, now we have hundreds of programs that mostly suck! Now THAT's tech progress!
Not!
Radio! errr... no... wait......
Newspapers!...rats..... hmmmm
Movies!....uhhh... nooo.... hmmmmmm
Girls! There ya go, still exactly the same as the "good old" days! And now with even *less* clothes!
No idea on the piano, but a similar task, typing, from my perspective I've gotten much worse than when younger. The reason is, my fingers just don't work as well, not nearly as flexible and fast in the old finger joint area. My speed and accuracy have dropped by a big factor, typos galore now unless I slow down to reverse "ludicrous speed".
I'd rather make the typos and not blow the train of thought, strange as that is a lot of the times...:p
And it's different for a lot of folks, my youngest sister, just 7 years younger, can still top 120 WPM, and we're both neo-geezers now. Go figger.
Age discrimination, oh well, the cool part of getting older is a much wider age-range of wimmins all look *real nice* to you....
Take this 9-11 link, from 9-11 victims survivors, THEIR questions. Now, here's the challenge, YOU answer their questions adequately, I'll be the first one to say I'm wrong on the conclusions I came up with based on the sum total of the unanswered questions and the government response to date.. All I need is data. Data. I can change my mind,I've done it in the past on various issues, it doesn't bother me at all, just show me the beef. These folks want answers, where are they? You think you can help them, then go for it. Remember, none of these are my questions, I'm just a messenger, they are THEIR questions.
Now, look on the list, number 1 question,SEC section, start with the airline stocks puts, the ones from the brokerage run by a CIA manager. Answer that question first, who-names of the customers- put in those puts? Who profited from prior knowledge? That's a nice smoking gun place to start at. The government obviously has the data,or can get it quickly, kinda funny they won't release it, doncha think? Sorta suspicious such an aberration in the market, directly before the attacks. There's over 50 questions there, go for it, help those victimsms out, you have all the answers, right? And by the way, these aren't ALL the unanswered questions, I can easily find a lot more on some other sites, but this should be enough for you to start with, a lot of these are the easier ones. Should be a piece of cake for you, right? Not being on "meds" and all, you should be able to do it, probably within 5 minutes or so, tops. Let's see it.
Re:The article misses a few things as well.
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Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 1
the deal on wine is true, I know here in georgia it is quite illegal to buy wine out of state and have it shipped to you. You can drive someplace and get it, or buy it at a store, but not directly, even with all sorts of age verification etc.
On the cable modem part, I'll bow to the tech expertise, but most places that have cable now have also locked in monopolies, there's no way possible to even contemplate as a start up company to do a cable internet service and to design around that instead of TV one way service. Or anything else wired for the most part, hence all the interest in wireless now, half of that interest from a commercial business perspective is to try and work around carved in stone monopoly laws.
"WE ARE APT TO SHUT OUR EYES AGAINST A PAINFUL TRUTH... FOR MY PART, I AM WILLING TO KNOW THE WHOLE TRUTH; TO KNOW THE WORST; AND TO PROVIDE FOR IT." -Patrick Henry
Nice try, AC fed troll, but too many people are seeing through your lies, obfuscations and coverups now. It's not going away. The clintonistas were crooks and liars, so are the current bushbots, and we know that you criminals cooperate with each other more than you let on in public, and have so for a long, long time.
Mena, Arkansas ring a bell for you?
Tell that to your boss. Now go look up "the nuremberg trials". "Just folloing orders" don't cut it as an excuse any longer, you just wish it would. And all the guys who have quit, because they see saw what was going on, and got themselves out because they couldn't stand being around pukes like you? Guess what? They still have all their skills and contacts. All of them. And there's something else, they value true honesty and true patriotism and take their constitution and oath seriously, and they can see through the normal BS they were fed for years and years from career politician officers, let alone from the CEOs masquerading as "government".
If you are an American, a USian, you are (it appearts anyway) woefully uneducated about our own history. A prime example, probably everyone has heard of it, the boston tea party. That was a significant active protest in the middle of a boycott against the monopoly corporation called the british east indies company, that used the "government" at the time as it's muscle. Of course nowadays the regimists and the apologists would call that "terrorism", even though they claim to be proud of it, if the exact same tactics are used today they somehow become magically wrong, no matter the issue, or the importance of an issue, or the ramifictions of ignoring an issue. Well, yes, yes it was, that's why the entire deal was called the "revolutionary + war", when it finally became necessary to remove ourselves from from being FIRST warred upon "legally" by that feudal/corporate/governmental melded structure known as great britain, an imperial power known for it's blackmail and extortion rackets, simply because they thought they were big enough to always do it by force. And the reason why that happened was because the corporations back then subverted that government, and (re)created what we know call corportism, or fascism. Enough people who were being abused and extorted against finally saw it, and in nation after nation,using various techniques of protest, from extreme pacifism to extreme violence the british got kicked out, and rightly so. Took awhile but it happened, and it took all those techniques to accomplish.
Flash forward a few centuries, it's the same deal all over again, just this time the global corporate extortioners and their mercenary muscle are more sophisticated, have a lot more technology, and use more psychological manipulative efforts to keep people literally brainwashed into being perpetual victims. It's a forced "stockholme syndrome" propaganda effort that is amazingly successful, that I will give them, they suceeded.
No, enron and whatnot are not being "cleaned up" in the bush crime cabal family, all they are doing is recovering from exposure and learning how to keep crimes more covered up. Public servant cheney won't even release the details of his bribery and blackmail sessions with energy industry insiders to congress. Now all that is happening is that anything remotely embarassing gets slapped with a national security sticker, and anyone asking about them is labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathiser. They've raised the ante even above the clinton cartels efforts. They won't even "allow" any sort of *credible* investigations into their piece de resistance, the 9-11 attacks. They are hiding a lot of involvement and foreknowledge there. It was a reichstagg fire event, and millions of us out here can see that, and aren't faked out by political "party" partisan rhetoric or their phony dumbed down press releases or their controlled script infomercials being passed off as press conferences.
Sorry friend, but this is a junta, a dictatorship, and they are global monopolist-leaning corporatists, merging international industry completely with governmental dictatorial powers as fast as they can. As were warned against-in detail, and specifically- by previous rather intelligent and connected personalities, like george washing and dwight eisenhower. Those gents saw the dangers clearly, we were warned to not let it happen, but we did unfortunately, and the bush family crime cartel and his group of gangster semi underlings are exact examples of what we were warned against.
To say they are merely chronic serial liars is an understatement. The clintonistas were clueless and incompetent hedonists,sub section crooks, the bushbots are dangerous gangsters, sub section completely insane megalomaniacs. The only things they are "cleaning up" are bloody footprints and fingerprints, and scurrying around picking up pieces of stolen loot they dropped.
...that I have found is tabbed browsing. I'm one of those on a slow staticy rural dialup, just too far away from the nearest telco switch, and even then, the cost would be prohibitive for what they offer for *dsl. Well, to me anyway. 56k modems just slap don't work, I have three of them, they lose connectivity so quickly that they are useless. Next down I use a 33k modem, and only when the weather is perfect. That's my main modem, fairly robust and reliable, but again, the minute the lines get more static and noise, poof, they dropconnection. Right now, the only way I can even stay online is by using a 14.4 modem, as it is storming out. This might last all summer, just depends on the weather. The workaround is social,there is no actual hardware solution that I think I can do (satellite is out, that's one thousand bucks or something) I just load various tabs with content, then go do something else. It takes minutes sometimes to load pages, even with images turned off,etc. I will say that xmms playing radio mp3 streams is very nice no matter what,it gives me one more cool *thing* to do with the net, I only listen to lower bitrate talk stations, beats the pants off any other streaming tech out there, real, quicktime, windows media, winamp, etc. The old mac classic soundjam does the next best job on slow connections with mp3s. Of course I have a lot of other "real" radios as well,I just like the ability to get exactly what I want off the net, I mean this thing is sitting here turned on anyway, one less hardware device to power up.
I would really like broadband, I'll pay x-amount to me reasonable money for it WHEN it becomes avaialable, but yes, I won't trade my other real life interests and advantages I enjoy about living rural "just" for broadband. I lived heavy urban for years, nothanks, I'll pass now, did my time in crime city, constant loud, stinky (cities literally stink, you don't notice it until you've been away for awhile and go back into one), expensive this or that, etc. There are a lot of advantages, but a lot of disadvantages to urban life. And vice versa, neither is "perfect".
OK, back to connectivity. Whichever company that comes up with an easy to use, reliable and cheap universal wireless "solution" for that last mile WILL get my business, and there's millions of people out there who will buy it as well. Perhaps it's a niche market, but what ain't once you get down to it? Look at what happened with small dish cheap satellite TV when cable wouldn't go there to that last mile and when some mastermind noted that large dishes and hardware were too expensive for a lot of people, there was a niche market for something besides 1.5 fuzzy channels of over the air tv option, rural people jumped on it in droves. They weren't willing to move to the city for a lot of clear TV, that still didn't mean they didn't like to have some TV, a market that went begging for a long time.
It's like cheap downloadable music tracks, a market that went begging for years, literally went begging, people-potential customers- going "here, take our money we want this product". They got told to go &*&&^k themselves by the music monopoly. It was that insulting, hence the popularity of napster and etc and yada yada yada. Half of it was to just insult those bungers right back. Now how many songs has apple sold so far, because all they did was respond to a market going begging??
I will guarantee ANY of you companies or developers out there, you offer a wireless last mile that WORKS, that doesn't cost outrageous money, and that provides even a slightly more reliable and faster connection than most-alleged "56Kbps" rural dialup, you'll get rich, you'll get obscenely stinking rich, you have millions and millions of potential customers out there.
Sometimes the bean counters are wrong. A lot of times they are, really, they over estimate one potential profit maker while completely ignoring another one, and usually because the new potential is just that, new, or they aren't aware of it. I sincerely doub
...as long as the mobo was designed with an easy upgradeable CPU slot, it had the *potential* to hold at least 4 gigs of ram, and had a ton of pci and agp slots and usb and firewire. The deal with towers is they MUST be easily upgradeable, and they MUST ship with enough ram to not be stoopid, nowadays that's probably half a gig. Nothing worse than a brand new machine that comes crippled and is hard to upgrade, especially with weirdo ram that is rare or oerly expensive. I've found more ram is a more cost effective performance boost than a newer cpu (within some reason of course), for most stuff I do anyway, and the dealers are in a position to do that the cheapest, they buy in bigtime bulk and can get deals.
I thought they gave away for free the bulk of their stuff. You can go download it. You can also get updates and errata fixes and whatnot merely by registering, or, again, go to their ftp site and just get what you need, I know I for sure have done it a lot. How is that not giving anything back? And the stuff they developed in house, package manager, anaconda, all the goodies? All free. Their core product, the server offering that they are commited to for five years support, and the services that go with it don't come free,but certainly come reasonable compared to brand X,and if you don't want it, you still get the regular give away version of the distro that has apache, all the modules, etc right on the install disks/ISOs, use that. Seems like free equals free. All this looks like is the extra services they charge for they have an exact framework they work under and offer, that's about it for trying to run a business off of open source and free software. If they didn't do that, well, how would they stay in business then, a paper route, or what? If you like and use debian, swell, just don't spread FUD over the distro that got millions started, and is one of the few places that is making a global impact with other big corporations and getting linux being taken seriously.
...social circumstances and parents differ, and it reflects on the kids education and accumulation of skills. For example, there's still a lot of farm kids who can do an amazing amount of skilled tasks, because it's part of their normal environment, they can weld, operate machinery, repair, construct, etc, because they just do it, it's part of their life. Granted, the numbers are very small *today*, but it's entirely possible and normal and used to be way more common. I would imagine it's the same with computers, either the hard or soft side. Programming simply has to be easier to learn when you are younger, it's closer to being bilingual or multi lingual, almost every expert you can read says it's easier to learn multiple languages the earlier you start. Older folks who learn foreign languages can do it,but it's a bear for them to get so good their accents don't suck, whereas kids raised bilingual can pull it off pretty easy.
I would have loved it as a kid, there weren't any home computers to play with. My dad was a mainframe guy going way back, but that's all there was, nothing to play with at home. Didn't have a spare several million and a spare building back then for a learning experience, and no way was it taught in schools under college level that I recall. At best they had electronics shop and mechanical drafting. But I learned a lot of other stuff, had my own tools since geez, maybe 6 years old? So long now can't remember clearly, seems like that though, around first grade was when I started getting them, usually hand me downs he gave me, because he did his own carpentry/home repairs and auto mechanics, etc, as well, that stuff I learned, because it was there. Age doesn't has as much to do with it as exposure.
yes, they are, two changes recently with propane tanks. Look closer at your tanks, there are two threads associated with them. One was by law, they changed them due to government safety regulations, all new tanks sold have those sorts of new internal valves, with the indicator being the triangular handle. the old ones phased out I think last april or so, some where's around that time. Walmart went one step further, the outer part you as a consumer don't use, where the tanks attach to the big bulk tanks for refilling, got changed to a propietary design and thread (at least around where I am, I don't know if it's all the way around the nation), that is only available at walmart. It looks like they picked one specific sub contractor for that, or it might be some daisy chained corporation that walmart uses so they can buy and sell stuff from themselves, a normal corporate razzle dazzle paper work shuffle.
That's two changes for them, only one for everyone else, they just did their's at the same time and it slid through, and theirs costs more than others I've seen, by around 1-2$ an exchange or fill.
--no it doesn't, it's a net loss. We are running hundreds of billions a year trade balance deficit. We are also at a net loss of over 3 million real jobs over just the past 3 years. Our currency is down over 1/4 against the euro when you run the high/low split. Our unemployment rate is so bad they had to adjust how they count the rate by dropping people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits. Some economists estimate the real unemployment might be almost double the official ~ 6% level. They also include people who are only working extremely part time, say a few hours a week, that's classed as fully employed. They dropped food and fuel from the consumer cost of living indices to keep the figures looking good. The recent so called debt figures do not reflect the contractural debt that the government has. They claim we are only at 4.x trillion estimated debt, yet the real figures are closer to 45 trillion, trillion with a T. The fortune 500 companies have almost universally no way to pay for their contractural pension programs, they are busted. Pension insurance last year went into the red from years in the black from only a few companies tapping in to it due to bankruptcy, just a few, with over 38,000 companies still being a part of it and many of which are close to bankruptcy themselves. Most major banks derivatives exposures are so dismal, you'd be hard pressed to see much notice of it in the main broadcast media.
On and on. Walmart is not the sole cause, but it's a wonderful representation of the economic problems over all and what lead to them. If not-manufacturing inside the US was working that great, we would be running a trade surplus, and we aren't. It's a temporary cheap trinket fake out, the bone tossed to keep those still working faked out that their jobs will be safe or something. It's a lie. I KNOW people working at walmart, ALL of them were making more money at their previous jobs, jobs that have poofed in the "new economy", poofed as in not disappeared, but sent elsewhere. The profits aren't going to the people who built these various companies up except at the extreme top levels. It's a universal averaging down.
Sorry, it's sucking in the US and getting worse,well, war factories are doing ok, that's about it.
I can easily remember when a normal even lower middle class blue collar job was more than ample for decent home ownership, supporting a lot of kids, a good car, family vacations and so on. It is NOT that way now. The economy is sliding on the inertia of insane out to lunch credit,outsourcing, selling of assets, it's called in the olden days and warned against "eating your seed corn". It looks like fat city until that seed corn is gone, then you have nothing left to plant. That's a rural reference analogy, I have another I like to use as well. The economy now is akin to a carpenter who on friday night pawns all his tools and his work truck, all weekend long he looks "rich", why look at "that quarters" immense profitability! Comes monday morning he's out of a job. When it's one job like that it's easy to see it's nuts, when a nation does it, with the results being manipulated and shilled from stratospheric levels by the ones who actually profit from it, and the results take a little longer to "trickle down",they call it "good business".
Nutso, there's no proof whatsoever the economy is getting better other than in the snake oil salesmans infomercials. 30 year mortgages for homes and 5 year car notes are no indicator of wealth production and creation, they are the opposite of it in fact, when those same two major asset indicators used to be only 10 years and 18 months respectfully, and not that long ago, and when we were a creditor nation and not a debtor nation, and our trade balances were almost all in our favor. those are indicators of an over all good economy. And even the snake oil salesman have no way to dodge the trade imbalance issue, that's serious folding money you are talking about. If their scheme worked as advertised, we should be seeing an almo
I pity the fool who don't think those guys are funny!
heh heh
Our society needs nutcases like that, at least they aren't politicians, they KNOW they are nuts!
"A team" technical note: ever notice the "trained band of crack mercenaries" were the WORST SHOTS in the known and several unknown universes? Bad guys over yonder,real close range, A team opens up with their ruger minis, plenty of bang bang bang, but no one hit! Then, bombs go off, dudes fly through the air, no one's hurt!
I think I watched three episodes, first one I go "has to be a fluke, it's their first one, it'll get better". Then the seond, nope, the third, ahh gee, good idea, nice concept for an action show, then they blew it bigtime, it was really grade d comedy designed as action. It was truly a lousy show. Howling Mad Murdoch was Ok as a character though.
"Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property."
SWELL! Let's do it! Right now, it's not, it's treated COMPLETELY different fronm any other product out there. With music, movies, software. Completely different.
If it's a product, where's the guarantee, where's the liability, where's the waranty? If someone buys a CD for the emotional experience of anticipation of joy from how fine it is-how it is claimed in advance- the just wonderful mooozak, and it sucks donkey nuts when you listen to it, can you SUE for false advertising, for damages? Where's the responsibility on the profiteers part? Oh, it's in the ear of the beholder? How are you supposed to know that in advance? How do you actually legally calibrate that, where's the "standard"? Go to the movies, you sit through the whole thing, you honestly really didn't like it. Where's your cash back, a pittance for your lost precious time? Rent a DVD,it turns out to be a waste of electrons, can you get your money back, plus damages?
They want it both ways, same as closed source propietary software. Maximum profits, every protection the law allows, with absolutely no warranty for fitness of service.
nuts to them
I don't copy, but I don't "buy" their non-product "products" either. They are "worth" what they are able to get selling cheap digitised copies now,a few cents max, not many dollars. Olden days,the real olden days, hard to reproduce and distribute, fine, higher fees maybe, now, they want to artifically hold back and limit technology to insure they always make the same as they always did. Screw that noise, that's instituionalised ludditism.
If they had done this 4 or 5 years ago, realised they needed to fast switch to selling online for wicked cheap, they would have double prospered over what they are claiming is lost now, they chose NOT to, they chose to not listen to what the customers wanted, they sought to monopolise technology and the ability of people to get a good deal, and they conspired with each other to keep it that way. Industry collusion to maintain a shared monopoly to the best of their ability, it lead to massive civil disobedience because it's so obvious they are nutso and crooks. They even co operate to monopolise the public airwaves, and have constantly been busted for paying bribes to on air personalities to only feature such and such music, yet they are allowed to stay in business. They get allowed-licensed-to offer programming to the public that has to first and foremost be of the public benefit and interest, the public airwaves are NOT primarily so something called whatever inc can make a buck, that is secondary, it's the price they are supposed to pay when GRANTED their FCC broadcast license. They monopolise the radio and TV spectrums with their canned top 40 crap and formula entertainment "shows". Same guys. They want top dollar for that stuff, and even want people to not copy, when they should be forced to pay you to listen to most of that stuff.
Why people copy all their stuff is beyond me, but they do, so be it. I think it's mostly a waste of disk space, but each to their own I guess.
And so that's what happens to nutso laws,and to nutso companies, they finally get so absurd that everyone ignores them and does what they want to.
"Why yes, we have ernokssony 794i 2,,3,4G's of levels of service! You can pick from syncing to your PDAS, with blue,red, and green teeth, wifi, low fi, midfi, 8023.11a,b,c,d,e,f,AND g! You can get the family plan with 1700 minutes of some of the time service or the single parent with two kids service wituh 1700 some of the time minutesdexcept on friday when you can get text messages that only go to iceland but with out alternate lifestyle family plan menu you can get service that works underwater in bombay in several cool new colors like mud,ice,blood, and lice, but then you can get the single moms with two kids plans that has four pagers and six mailboxes with the synced video to use as a baby monitor except at wortk when it's a garbage disposal and vacuums, but those minutes are only with the service plan that you have to lease, with this other phone, the soneekisoni2k that has green red but no blue teeth with the wiiest fi we offer, until next october when if you are a preferred customer we offer a time share in new jersy over by the race track, but it's illegal to use the phone in the locker rooms there, so you have to take the bus to philly where you can beam it off the satellite service and that is only 98$ a year extra with the prepaid option that is void in most countries but I'm sure your's is ok, and that also has at least 15 minutes of actual voice phone calls per annum, two years minimum contract, that will be a free phone but we have a small 80$ a month service and configuration fee and if you want caller id forwarding and blocking in text measure mode you need to download the software that is windows only sorry we are announicing support for other platforms soon, so if you are ready here's your new phone, just sign here, k thanks, and BTW the ringtones are soo cool!"
just doing ad lib stand up he's a lot funnier, I'll agree, mork and mindy was sorta dismal, but it was the quickest funny I could think of. Proly shoulda dumped it AC at zero on reflection... oh well
That "walmart only, propietary" deal happend to me with a couple of my small refillable propane tanks. I got two from walmart, turns out they put a "walmart_only_ thread on the filler valve, you are forced to get filler-ups/exchanges only at walmart then, unlike my other ones that I can take anyplace handy.
I didn't mind walmart when sam walton was still kicking, it seemed like they at least made an effort to have "made in USA" stuff in abundance, and didn't have weird polices like this propane deal (and what they will probably do with DVDs-good call there), but now,since he's died and who knows who is running it as an economic division of the chinese peoples liberation army, I've about almost completely removed them from sucking on my wallet. Once in a great while I get stuck, and have no recourse but to go in there, and every time I see aisle after aisle of lost homes, lost jobs, lost equity, lost cars, basically a lot of lost hopes and dreams disgusied as cheap trinkets, like what were used to purchase manhattan island. Trinkets, ohhh shiny and cheap.
They are that-cheap. Cheap as in price, cheap as in quality, but very expensive with a bigger look at when once those dollars leave the shores of the US and cease acting as an economic force multiplier.
..on the Quark xpress thread. IF all the people/customers who were forced by their company products needs to use closed source, overly expensive and long in coming propietary software, if they would just start a fund, all the customers donate to it some significant cash,and offer it to the best open source and free effort out there, they could get way better products, and probably faster, too. The reverse-leeching concept. It's completely logical, has little downside to it, costs a pittance compared to the endless stream of frustration dealing with those large clueless shops. 10% of a normal "license" for some closed source stuff, going instead to developers of open and free, would most likely work quite well in most instances. It certainly ups the enthusiasm for coding I would bet! And it would put well deserved and tremendous pressure on those closed source places to get real on profits,and to get real on quality. It's just another form of competition that isn't in wide use yet, because it requires actually slapping down some cash in advance, rather than the coders slaving away for free then relying on the begware after the fact model.
Slashdot Mirror
Lately I've seen efforts to link pot with terrorism. To go even further, they are trying to link "drugs" with "guns" with "terrorism", part of a conditioning effort to make it seem like they are "the same", I mean, that's an extremely normal advertising & propaganda technique,to use linkage, allusion, and branding. I've seen the ads, they will have a hemp leaf with a gun for instance. It's a clear cut demonization effort.
As to the government making things legal or illegal, I'd say in a lot of matters now the federal government is way more a criminal outlaw organization than any sort of honest representative government. They have literally seized through coordinated large scale bribery, coercion, and fraud huge amounts of power that are not legally theirs. We really are supposed to be a more private person and then states first sort of day to day government, with the federal government having very limited-important, but severly limited-powers. It is so far into criminality I really couldn't even start to address it in a single post, and this is already a wide thread drift from corn and plastics. Here's a few major ones, illegal money,massive theft of property and conversion, maintaining a large standing land army, abrogation of most of our born-with personal rights in a variety of ways, claiming authority over huge areas of land that they have no legitimate claim or title to, and a variety of violations relating to the 10th and 14th in particular. Very long subject, really don't want to go into it, but as a default, no, I don't really think of this government as having any legitimacy any longer except they act as full bore terrorists themselves. Some states and local governments are still valiantly struggling to maintain the proper checks and balances, but it's quite the effort. There's some notable wins, for instance lately both hawaii and alaska have repudiated the throughly bogus and mostly completely illegal from a constitutional standpoint "patriot act", and it was just announced alaska has become the second state to have so called "vermont style" right to carry, which is really just a normal reading and interpretation of our second amendment right, if you can understand normal english.
And yada yada yada, too much thread drift. I know the pro industrial hemp people are having a hard time, but I think along with every other niche political reform effort they would do better to join with other organizations and seek the common ground that almost the entire big mama suckah that is the federal government is so bad that it needs complete replacement with new people and a return to basic constitutional law, scrap all the UCC, and start over. That is my opinion, I know it is not shared by many, but the feds use divide and conquer too effectively, for every personal "win" back to normal freedoms and honest law, we have hundreds of losses. I do not think trying to change all the little tiny things is very effective, I think it would be way more effective to change the entire structure all at once, and because we already have in existence a basic outline that was proven sound as far as human written documents go, I would advocate just a return to that, and really pay more attention to the checks and balances aspect of government more in the future after the change back.
We see this on a small scale with some software, sometimes new versions of software are just so stupid that it's better to take a big step back and put the older version back in. I see the current federzlgovernment as a rather dangerous, stupid and, well, just plain ignorant fork in politics. And I'm not being party-partisan either, I mean the structure itself, I claim it is illegitimate, that it's a junta, and only maintains itself through force, not through the allowance of the electorate. When people all over a more afraid of government, that's the dividing line into what we term as a dictatorship. I would maintain that most people have various fears of government now, and that the combined total clearly indicates it fell into
Heck ya, they make a lot more money keeping it illegal. And there's too much evidence that shows at a variety of higher levels they themselves are part of the smuggling efforts, and money laundering. So they get to keep industrial hemp off the market, have an aspect to the growing police state, and also make illicit profits. Sweet deal for them.
And you are correct, most cops I know also favor legalization & decriminalization of hemp/pot.
Huge yields per acre without having to use massive amounts of fertiliser. Food, fuel, fabric,other fiber products,and plastics. Large variety of useful products from the same plant. Requires very little care. When I was a kid, there were still a lot of wild patches left over from world war 2, when they did an emergency "grow this stuff now" campaign after the phillipines fell to the japanese. No one thought about smoking it though, but I remember playing in one patch that was several acres, stuff was like 15 feet high or something, big plants.
Farmers could even afford to only harvest half the plant, plow the remainder back under, thereby making your soil every year better, not more depleted, by adding more carbon back into the surface layer.
It scares the monopolists. Places where it's legal have zero problems with it, none.
Nope, government is a 100% complete %^&*&**( about it, too much money to be made keeping it illegal and keeping the drug war hype going, shoot, that was the really big police state push, they got everyone to accept all this gestapo SWAT team crap and whatnot with that artifical "threat". I mean, c'mon now, pothead terrorists? People who sit around and eat and listen to records? (well, that's what I saw in the olden days, maybe it's different now) And all the useful stuff you can get from it besides psychoactive? It's a joke, government is out to lunch on it, but, they dig those billions they make on the side and they get to build prisons and have new agencies and use up all that po-leece equipment they have kicking around the po-leece station.....
My take is, God got all these things, they all got a use, we get to use them, use the planet, plus we are supposed to be neat, sorta take care of things too, there's our ecological balance idea. Makes sense to me.. We may not know WHAT some things are useful for yet-like chiggers, wazzup with them things?- but, everything is useful, and no government should say "no you don't", that's just bogus.
HAHAHAHAH! Al Bundy-->"Hey! who took my copy of Big 'Uns?"
The net is pretty cool. I remember having an almost vision thing, like an intense daydream when I was like 13 or 14, I was staring at the wall, I had a screen in front of me and all kinds of blinkenlights, I could communicate with anyone on the planet, find out anything I wanted to, never really thought I'd see it though, I only thought mainframes would just get bigger. It's just an amazing invention combined with peecees.
Well, I never! I'm upset since you young guys hijacked television..
...rats..... hmmmm
err...wait
no...you can have it, changed me mind.. keep on hijacking it lads! Used to be we had one fuzzy channel that only ran to 10 or 11 or midnight, then went off the air and showed nifty test patterns, and programs that mostly sucked, now we have hundreds of programs that mostly suck! Now THAT's tech progress!
Not!
Radio! errr... no... wait......
Newspapers!
Movies!....uhhh... nooo.... hmmmmmm
Girls! There ya go, still exactly the same as the "good old" days! And now with even *less* clothes!
No idea on the piano, but a similar task, typing, from my perspective I've gotten much worse than when younger. The reason is, my fingers just don't work as well, not nearly as flexible and fast in the old finger joint area. My speed and accuracy have dropped by a big factor, typos galore now unless I slow down to reverse "ludicrous speed".
:p
I'd rather make the typos and not blow the train of thought, strange as that is a lot of the times...
And it's different for a lot of folks, my youngest sister, just 7 years younger, can still top 120 WPM, and we're both neo-geezers now. Go figger.
Age discrimination, oh well, the cool part of getting older is a much wider age-range of wimmins all look *real nice* to you....
Take this 9-11 link, from 9-11 victims survivors, THEIR questions. Now, here's the challenge, YOU answer their questions adequately, I'll be the first one to say I'm wrong on the conclusions I came up with based on the sum total of the unanswered questions and the government response to date.. All I need is data. Data. I can change my mind,I've done it in the past on various issues, it doesn't bother me at all, just show me the beef. These folks want answers, where are they? You think you can help them, then go for it. Remember, none of these are my questions, I'm just a messenger, they are THEIR questions.
Now, look on the list, number 1 question,SEC section, start with the airline stocks puts, the ones from the brokerage run by a CIA manager. Answer that question first, who-names of the customers- put in those puts? Who profited from prior knowledge? That's a nice smoking gun place to start at. The government obviously has the data,or can get it quickly, kinda funny they won't release it, doncha think? Sorta suspicious such an aberration in the market, directly before the attacks. There's over 50 questions there, go for it, help those victimsms out, you have all the answers, right? And by the way, these aren't ALL the unanswered questions, I can easily find a lot more on some other sites, but this should be enough for you to start with, a lot of these are the easier ones. Should be a piece of cake for you, right? Not being on "meds" and all, you should be able to do it, probably within 5 minutes or so, tops. Let's see it.
Now my favorite pet question,out of many, and I've listened to him twice live and read the transcripts twice, answer why someone with the credentials of a David Schippers, hardly a nobody or any sort of anti-bush liberal or conspiracy theorist, who had details and a warning of an imminent attack,and the ties way back to shrubs dad and when he let in a lot of republican guard from Iraq around OKC (surprise) which happened like he outlined, was refused any contact with Ashcroft, despite repeated tries? Why was he dodged? Answer that and those other questions, adequately,provide proof, or very good empirical evidence in support, and I'll copy & post your reply around the internet,I'll say case solved, give you all the attaboys I can,admit I was wrong, heck, I can probably get you on a few radio shows if you can do that. Probably at least 5 shows I can think of right off the bat, and from there, even more. The victims will put you in for the peace prize maybe, who knows, you might have book offers, you'll certainly be praised all around if you can do it. Give it your best shot. Put it up, let's see what ya got. Good luck.
the deal on wine is true, I know here in georgia it is quite illegal to buy wine out of state and have it shipped to you. You can drive someplace and get it, or buy it at a store, but not directly, even with all sorts of age verification etc.
On the cable modem part, I'll bow to the tech expertise, but most places that have cable now have also locked in monopolies, there's no way possible to even contemplate as a start up company to do a cable internet service and to design around that instead of TV one way service. Or anything else wired for the most part, hence all the interest in wireless now, half of that interest from a commercial business perspective is to try and work around carved in stone monopoly laws.
vice fuehrer cheney dodges GAO investigations regarding his energy task force
"WE ARE APT TO SHUT OUR EYES AGAINST A PAINFUL TRUTH...
FOR MY PART, I AM WILLING TO KNOW THE WHOLE TRUTH;
TO KNOW THE WORST; AND TO PROVIDE FOR IT."
-Patrick Henry
Nice try, AC fed troll, but too many people are seeing through your lies, obfuscations and coverups now. It's not going away. The clintonistas were crooks and liars, so are the current bushbots, and we know that you criminals cooperate with each other more than you let on in public, and have so for a long, long time.
Mena, Arkansas ring a bell for you?
Tell that to your boss. Now go look up "the nuremberg trials". "Just folloing orders" don't cut it as an excuse any longer, you just wish it would. And all the guys who have quit, because they see saw what was going on, and got themselves out because they couldn't stand being around pukes like you? Guess what? They still have all their skills and contacts. All of them. And there's something else, they value true honesty and true patriotism and take their constitution and oath seriously, and they can see through the normal BS they were fed for years and years from career politician officers, let alone from the CEOs masquerading as "government".
If you are an American, a USian, you are (it appearts anyway) woefully uneducated about our own history. A prime example, probably everyone has heard of it, the boston tea party. That was a significant active protest in the middle of a boycott against the monopoly corporation called the british east indies company, that used the "government" at the time as it's muscle. Of course nowadays the regimists and the apologists would call that "terrorism", even though they claim to be proud of it, if the exact same tactics are used today they somehow become magically wrong, no matter the issue, or the importance of an issue, or the ramifictions of ignoring an issue. Well, yes, yes it was, that's why the entire deal was called the "revolutionary + war", when it finally became necessary to remove ourselves from from being FIRST warred upon "legally" by that feudal/corporate/governmental melded structure known as great britain, an imperial power known for it's blackmail and extortion rackets, simply because they thought they were big enough to always do it by force. And the reason why that happened was because the corporations back then subverted that government, and (re)created what we know call corportism, or fascism. Enough people who were being abused and extorted against finally saw it, and in nation after nation,using various techniques of protest, from extreme pacifism to extreme violence the british got kicked out, and rightly so. Took awhile but it happened, and it took all those techniques to accomplish.
Flash forward a few centuries, it's the same deal all over again, just this time the global corporate extortioners and their mercenary muscle are more sophisticated, have a lot more technology, and use more psychological manipulative efforts to keep people literally brainwashed into being perpetual victims. It's a forced "stockholme syndrome" propaganda effort that is amazingly successful, that I will give them, they suceeded.
No, enron and whatnot are not being "cleaned up" in the bush crime cabal family, all they are doing is recovering from exposure and learning how to keep crimes more covered up. Public servant cheney won't even release the details of his bribery and blackmail sessions with energy industry insiders to congress. Now all that is happening is that anything remotely embarassing gets slapped with a national security sticker, and anyone asking about them is labeled a terrorist or terrorist sympathiser. They've raised the ante even above the clinton cartels efforts. They won't even "allow" any sort of *credible* investigations into their piece de resistance, the 9-11 attacks. They are hiding a lot of involvement and foreknowledge there. It was a reichstagg fire event, and millions of us out here can see that, and aren't faked out by political "party" partisan rhetoric or their phony dumbed down press releases or their controlled script infomercials being passed off as press conferences.
Sorry friend, but this is a junta, a dictatorship, and they are global monopolist-leaning corporatists, merging international industry completely with governmental dictatorial powers as fast as they can. As were warned against-in detail, and specifically- by previous rather intelligent and connected personalities, like george washing and dwight eisenhower. Those gents saw the dangers clearly, we were warned to not let it happen, but we did unfortunately, and the bush family crime cartel and his group of gangster semi underlings are exact examples of what we were warned against.
To say they are merely chronic serial liars is an understatement. The clintonistas were clueless and incompetent hedonists,sub section crooks, the bushbots are dangerous gangsters, sub section completely insane megalomaniacs. The only things they are "cleaning up" are bloody footprints and fingerprints, and scurrying around picking up pieces of stolen loot they dropped.
--zogger
...that I have found is tabbed browsing. I'm one of those on a slow staticy rural dialup, just too far away from the nearest telco switch, and even then, the cost would be prohibitive for what they offer for *dsl. Well, to me anyway. 56k modems just slap don't work, I have three of them, they lose connectivity so quickly that they are useless. Next down I use a 33k modem, and only when the weather is perfect. That's my main modem, fairly robust and reliable, but again, the minute the lines get more static and noise, poof, they dropconnection. Right now, the only way I can even stay online is by using a 14.4 modem, as it is storming out. This might last all summer, just depends on the weather. The workaround is social,there is no actual hardware solution that I think I can do (satellite is out, that's one thousand bucks or something) I just load various tabs with content, then go do something else. It takes minutes sometimes to load pages, even with images turned off,etc. I will say that xmms playing radio mp3 streams is very nice no matter what,it gives me one more cool *thing* to do with the net, I only listen to lower bitrate talk stations, beats the pants off any other streaming tech out there, real, quicktime, windows media, winamp, etc. The old mac classic soundjam does the next best job on slow connections with mp3s. Of course I have a lot of other "real" radios as well,I just like the ability to get exactly what I want off the net, I mean this thing is sitting here turned on anyway, one less hardware device to power up.
I would really like broadband, I'll pay x-amount to me reasonable money for it WHEN it becomes avaialable, but yes, I won't trade my other real life interests and advantages I enjoy about living rural "just" for broadband. I lived heavy urban for years, nothanks, I'll pass now, did my time in crime city, constant loud, stinky (cities literally stink, you don't notice it until you've been away for awhile and go back into one), expensive this or that, etc. There are a lot of advantages, but a lot of disadvantages to urban life. And vice versa, neither is "perfect".
OK, back to connectivity. Whichever company that comes up with an easy to use, reliable and cheap universal wireless "solution" for that last mile WILL get my business, and there's millions of people out there who will buy it as well. Perhaps it's a niche market, but what ain't once you get down to it? Look at what happened with small dish cheap satellite TV when cable wouldn't go there to that last mile and when some mastermind noted that large dishes and hardware were too expensive for a lot of people, there was a niche market for something besides 1.5 fuzzy channels of over the air tv option, rural people jumped on it in droves. They weren't willing to move to the city for a lot of clear TV, that still didn't mean they didn't like to have some TV, a market that went begging for a long time.
It's like cheap downloadable music tracks, a market that went begging for years, literally went begging, people-potential customers- going "here, take our money we want this product". They got told to go &*&&^k themselves by the music monopoly. It was that insulting, hence the popularity of napster and etc and yada yada yada. Half of it was to just insult those bungers right back. Now how many songs has apple sold so far, because all they did was respond to a market going begging??
I will guarantee ANY of you companies or developers out there, you offer a wireless last mile that WORKS, that doesn't cost outrageous money, and that provides even a slightly more reliable and faster connection than most-alleged "56Kbps" rural dialup, you'll get rich, you'll get obscenely stinking rich, you have millions and millions of potential customers out there.
Sometimes the bean counters are wrong. A lot of times they are, really, they over estimate one potential profit maker while completely ignoring another one, and usually because the new potential is just that, new, or they aren't aware of it. I sincerely doub
...as long as the mobo was designed with an easy upgradeable CPU slot, it had the *potential* to hold at least 4 gigs of ram, and had a ton of pci and agp slots and usb and firewire. The deal with towers is they MUST be easily upgradeable, and they MUST ship with enough ram to not be stoopid, nowadays that's probably half a gig. Nothing worse than a brand new machine that comes crippled and is hard to upgrade, especially with weirdo ram that is rare or oerly expensive. I've found more ram is a more cost effective performance boost than a newer cpu (within some reason of course), for most stuff I do anyway, and the dealers are in a position to do that the cheapest, they buy in bigtime bulk and can get deals.
I thought they gave away for free the bulk of their stuff. You can go download it. You can also get updates and errata fixes and whatnot merely by registering, or, again, go to their ftp site and just get what you need, I know I for sure have done it a lot. How is that not giving anything back? And the stuff they developed in house, package manager, anaconda, all the goodies? All free. Their core product, the server offering that they are commited to for five years support, and the services that go with it don't come free,but certainly come reasonable compared to brand X,and if you don't want it, you still get the regular give away version of the distro that has apache, all the modules, etc right on the install disks/ISOs, use that. Seems like free equals free. All this looks like is the extra services they charge for they have an exact framework they work under and offer, that's about it for trying to run a business off of open source and free software. If they didn't do that, well, how would they stay in business then, a paper route, or what? If you like and use debian, swell, just don't spread FUD over the distro that got millions started, and is one of the few places that is making a global impact with other big corporations and getting linux being taken seriously.
...social circumstances and parents differ, and it reflects on the kids education and accumulation of skills. For example, there's still a lot of farm kids who can do an amazing amount of skilled tasks, because it's part of their normal environment, they can weld, operate machinery, repair, construct, etc, because they just do it, it's part of their life. Granted, the numbers are very small *today*, but it's entirely possible and normal and used to be way more common. I would imagine it's the same with computers, either the hard or soft side. Programming simply has to be easier to learn when you are younger, it's closer to being bilingual or multi lingual, almost every expert you can read says it's easier to learn multiple languages the earlier you start. Older folks who learn foreign languages can do it,but it's a bear for them to get so good their accents don't suck, whereas kids raised bilingual can pull it off pretty easy.
I would have loved it as a kid, there weren't any home computers to play with. My dad was a mainframe guy going way back, but that's all there was, nothing to play with at home. Didn't have a spare several million and a spare building back then for a learning experience, and no way was it taught in schools under college level that I recall. At best they had electronics shop and mechanical drafting. But I learned a lot of other stuff, had my own tools since geez, maybe 6 years old? So long now can't remember clearly, seems like that though, around first grade was when I started getting them, usually hand me downs he gave me, because he did his own carpentry/home repairs and auto mechanics, etc, as well, that stuff I learned, because it was there. Age doesn't has as much to do with it as exposure.
yes, they are, two changes recently with propane tanks. Look closer at your tanks, there are two threads associated with them. One was by law, they changed them due to government safety regulations, all new tanks sold have those sorts of new internal valves, with the indicator being the triangular handle. the old ones phased out I think last april or so, some where's around that time. Walmart went one step further, the outer part you as a consumer don't use, where the tanks attach to the big bulk tanks for refilling, got changed to a propietary design and thread (at least around where I am, I don't know if it's all the way around the nation), that is only available at walmart. It looks like they picked one specific sub contractor for that, or it might be some daisy chained corporation that walmart uses so they can buy and sell stuff from themselves, a normal corporate razzle dazzle paper work shuffle.
That's two changes for them, only one for everyone else, they just did their's at the same time and it slid through, and theirs costs more than others I've seen, by around 1-2$ an exchange or fill.
--no it doesn't, it's a net loss. We are running hundreds of billions a year trade balance deficit. We are also at a net loss of over 3 million real jobs over just the past 3 years. Our currency is down over 1/4 against the euro when you run the high/low split. Our unemployment rate is so bad they had to adjust how they count the rate by dropping people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits. Some economists estimate the real unemployment might be almost double the official ~ 6% level. They also include people who are only working extremely part time, say a few hours a week, that's classed as fully employed. They dropped food and fuel from the consumer cost of living indices to keep the figures looking good. The recent so called debt figures do not reflect the contractural debt that the government has. They claim we are only at 4.x trillion estimated debt, yet the real figures are closer to 45 trillion, trillion with a T. The fortune 500 companies have almost universally no way to pay for their contractural pension programs, they are busted. Pension insurance last year went into the red from years in the black from only a few companies tapping in to it due to bankruptcy, just a few, with over 38,000 companies still being a part of it and many of which are close to bankruptcy themselves. Most major banks derivatives exposures are so dismal, you'd be hard pressed to see much notice of it in the main broadcast media.
On and on. Walmart is not the sole cause, but it's a wonderful representation of the economic problems over all and what lead to them. If not-manufacturing inside the US was working that great, we would be running a trade surplus, and we aren't. It's a temporary cheap trinket fake out, the bone tossed to keep those still working faked out that their jobs will be safe or something. It's a lie. I KNOW people working at walmart, ALL of them were making more money at their previous jobs, jobs that have poofed in the "new economy", poofed as in not disappeared, but sent elsewhere. The profits aren't going to the people who built these various companies up except at the extreme top levels. It's a universal averaging down.
Sorry, it's sucking in the US and getting worse,well, war factories are doing ok, that's about it.
I can easily remember when a normal even lower middle class blue collar job was more than ample for decent home ownership, supporting a lot of kids, a good car, family vacations and so on. It is NOT that way now. The economy is sliding on the inertia of insane out to lunch credit,outsourcing, selling of assets, it's called in the olden days and warned against "eating your seed corn". It looks like fat city until that seed corn is gone, then you have nothing left to plant. That's a rural reference analogy, I have another I like to use as well. The economy now is akin to a carpenter who on friday night pawns all his tools and his work truck, all weekend long he looks "rich", why look at "that quarters" immense profitability! Comes monday morning he's out of a job. When it's one job like that it's easy to see it's nuts, when a nation does it, with the results being manipulated and shilled from stratospheric levels by the ones who actually profit from it, and the results take a little longer to "trickle down",they call it "good business".
Nutso, there's no proof whatsoever the economy is getting better other than in the snake oil salesmans infomercials. 30 year mortgages for homes and 5 year car notes are no indicator of wealth production and creation, they are the opposite of it in fact, when those same two major asset indicators used to be only 10 years and 18 months respectfully, and not that long ago, and when we were a creditor nation and not a debtor nation, and our trade balances were almost all in our favor. those are indicators of an over all good economy. And even the snake oil salesman have no way to dodge the trade imbalance issue, that's serious folding money you are talking about. If their scheme worked as advertised, we should be seeing an almo
I pity the fool who don't think those guys are funny!
heh heh
Our society needs nutcases like that, at least they aren't politicians, they KNOW they are nuts!
"A team" technical note: ever notice the "trained band of crack mercenaries" were the WORST SHOTS in the known and several unknown universes? Bad guys over yonder,real close range, A team opens up with their ruger minis, plenty of bang bang bang, but no one hit! Then, bombs go off, dudes fly through the air, no one's hurt!
I think I watched three episodes, first one I go "has to be a fluke, it's their first one, it'll get better". Then the seond, nope, the third, ahh gee, good idea, nice concept for an action show, then they blew it bigtime, it was really grade d comedy designed as action. It was truly a lousy show. Howling Mad Murdoch was Ok as a character though.
direct quote from the RIAA guy:
"Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property."
SWELL! Let's do it! Right now, it's not, it's treated COMPLETELY different fronm any other product out there. With music, movies, software. Completely different.
If it's a product, where's the guarantee, where's the liability, where's the waranty? If someone buys a CD for the emotional experience of anticipation of joy from how fine it is-how it is claimed in advance- the just wonderful mooozak, and it sucks donkey nuts when you listen to it, can you SUE for false advertising, for damages? Where's the responsibility on the profiteers part? Oh, it's in the ear of the beholder? How are you supposed to know that in advance? How do you actually legally calibrate that, where's the "standard"? Go to the movies, you sit through the whole thing, you honestly really didn't like it. Where's your cash back, a pittance for your lost precious time? Rent a DVD,it turns out to be a waste of electrons, can you get your money back, plus damages?
They want it both ways, same as closed source propietary software. Maximum profits, every protection the law allows, with absolutely no warranty for fitness of service.
nuts to them
I don't copy, but I don't "buy" their non-product "products" either. They are "worth" what they are able to get selling cheap digitised copies now,a few cents max, not many dollars. Olden days,the real olden days, hard to reproduce and distribute, fine, higher fees maybe, now, they want to artifically hold back and limit technology to insure they always make the same as they always did. Screw that noise, that's instituionalised ludditism.
If they had done this 4 or 5 years ago, realised they needed to fast switch to selling online for wicked cheap, they would have double prospered over what they are claiming is lost now, they chose NOT to, they chose to not listen to what the customers wanted, they sought to monopolise technology and the ability of people to get a good deal, and they conspired with each other to keep it that way. Industry collusion to maintain a shared monopoly to the best of their ability, it lead to massive civil disobedience because it's so obvious they are nutso and crooks. They even co operate to monopolise the public airwaves, and have constantly been busted for paying bribes to on air personalities to only feature such and such music, yet they are allowed to stay in business. They get allowed-licensed-to offer programming to the public that has to first and foremost be of the public benefit and interest, the public airwaves are NOT primarily so something called whatever inc can make a buck, that is secondary, it's the price they are supposed to pay when GRANTED their FCC broadcast license. They monopolise the radio and TV spectrums with their canned top 40 crap and formula entertainment "shows". Same guys. They want top dollar for that stuff, and even want people to not copy, when they should be forced to pay you to listen to most of that stuff.
Why people copy all their stuff is beyond me, but they do, so be it. I think it's mostly a waste of disk space, but each to their own I guess.
And so that's what happens to nutso laws,and to nutso companies, they finally get so absurd that everyone ignores them and does what they want to.
/me walks into cellphone store:
"Hiyas! Like to get a cell phone please?"
perky little sellerette:
"Why yes, we have ernokssony 794i 2,,3,4G's of levels of service! You can pick from syncing to your PDAS, with blue,red, and green teeth, wifi, low fi, midfi, 8023.11a,b,c,d,e,f,AND g! You can get the family plan with 1700 minutes of some of the time service or the single parent with two kids service wituh 1700 some of the time minutesdexcept on friday when you can get text messages that only go to iceland but with out alternate lifestyle family plan menu you can get service that works underwater in bombay in several cool new colors like mud,ice,blood, and lice, but then you can get the single moms with two kids plans that has four pagers and six mailboxes with the synced video to use as a baby monitor except at wortk when it's a garbage disposal and vacuums, but those minutes are only with the service plan that you have to lease, with this other phone, the soneekisoni2k that has green red but no blue teeth with the wiiest fi we offer, until next october when if you are a preferred customer we offer a time share in new jersy over by the race track, but it's illegal to use the phone in the locker rooms there, so you have to take the bus to philly where you can beam it off the satellite service and that is only 98$ a year extra with the prepaid option that is void in most countries but I'm sure your's is ok, and that also has at least 15 minutes of actual voice phone calls per annum, two years minimum contract, that will be a free phone but we have a small 80$ a month service and configuration fee and if you want caller id forwarding and blocking in text measure mode you need to download the software that is windows only sorry we are announicing support for other platforms soon, so if you are ready here's your new phone, just sign here, k thanks, and BTW the ringtones are soo cool!"
"hiyas, I'd like to get a cell phone?"
..yes I do,. IBMs response has been thusly:
"say whut? whut you talking bout, willis?"
then it got to:
"neener, neener"
then:
"you want some of this? Let's rock!"
to now it's:
"``````"
just doing ad lib stand up he's a lot funnier, I'll agree, mork and mindy was sorta dismal, but it was the quickest funny I could think of. Proly shoulda dumped it AC at zero on reflection... oh well
With that said, I still krak up at mrs doubtfire.
isn't that the operating system robin williams uses??
That "walmart only, propietary" deal happend to me with a couple of my small refillable propane tanks. I got two from walmart, turns out they put a "walmart_only_ thread on the filler valve, you are forced to get filler-ups/exchanges only at walmart then, unlike my other ones that I can take anyplace handy.
I didn't mind walmart when sam walton was still kicking, it seemed like they at least made an effort to have "made in USA" stuff in abundance, and didn't have weird polices like this propane deal (and what they will probably do with DVDs-good call there), but now,since he's died and who knows who is running it as an economic division of the chinese peoples liberation army, I've about almost completely removed them from sucking on my wallet. Once in a great while I get stuck, and have no recourse but to go in there, and every time I see aisle after aisle of lost homes, lost jobs, lost equity, lost cars, basically a lot of lost hopes and dreams disgusied as cheap trinkets, like what were used to purchase manhattan island. Trinkets, ohhh shiny and cheap.
They are that-cheap. Cheap as in price, cheap as in quality, but very expensive with a bigger look at when once those dollars leave the shores of the US and cease acting as an economic force multiplier.
..on the Quark xpress thread. IF all the people/customers who were forced by their company products needs to use closed source, overly expensive and long in coming propietary software, if they would just start a fund, all the customers donate to it some significant cash,and offer it to the best open source and free effort out there, they could get way better products, and probably faster, too. The reverse-leeching concept. It's completely logical, has little downside to it, costs a pittance compared to the endless stream of frustration dealing with those large clueless shops. 10% of a normal "license" for some closed source stuff, going instead to developers of open and free, would most likely work quite well in most instances. It certainly ups the enthusiasm for coding I would bet! And it would put well deserved and tremendous pressure on those closed source places to get real on profits,and to get real on quality. It's just another form of competition that isn't in wide use yet, because it requires actually slapping down some cash in advance, rather than the coders slaving away for free then relying on the begware after the fact model.