Notice lately how gun control doesn't fall from the lips of every Democrat running for public office the way it did in the 1990's? Who do you think has more money, the Million Mom March or the NRA? Guess what, the MMM's do. They get as much dough as they can use from a variety of foundations and super rich types like Paul Allen and the Monster.com guy.
They have easilly twice as much money, and they are losing.
Tax reform is the same idea. It is so obvious and stunningly simple that even a Liberal can grasp it. Eg. reduce the 45 cents per dollar of IRS costs to 40 cents per dollar, and you have an extra nickle to save the whales.
Doesn't have to be a flat tax to work, you could get the same effect by firing the whole IRS and starting the Tax Code over from scratch. Hire Mastercard and VISA to do all the paperwork, you could get the cost down to 10 cents per dollar.
Thousands and thousands. Wouldn't it be GREAT? ~:D
In truth, all those jobs are dragging on the economy. Those people reduce the loss of private funds to government and protect people from fines.
Money spent defending a company from the tax man does not help it grow or prosper. Tax accounting is a cost over and above the tax itself, not an investment. Costs are to be avoided.
Would it not be more beneficial if society didn't requite all those tax jobs to be performed, giving the people doing them a chance to do something else that would create value, as investments do?
If taxes were simpler they would cost the government less to collect and cost us less to pay.
People who used to make a living doing tax forms and tax law would no doubt be resourceful enough to find something else to do. People are smart, they just need the right motivation.
One major reason why the IRS can't update their technology is that the US Tax Code fills more volumes than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. There's more lines of instructions in the friggin law than there is running the Space Shuttle.
Many of those instructions conflict and contradict each other. It is impossible to computerize instructions like that. Can't be done. No way, no hope, no chance.
But why should this be a problem? Perfect opportunity to introduce a FLAT TAX. Everybody pays some percentage of their annual income, like maybe 5%, no exceptions and no deductions. Make the income cutoff at $30,000 or something like that.
SHAZAM, no more problem! The government gets the money it needs, because by reducing the 45 cents on the dollar cost of tax collection to somewhere around 5 cents (do you belive that? 45 fucking cents! And they say the military is expensive!) they more than make up for any reduction in the tax rate.
Plus they can fire half the IRS in one go. That's a goal to work toward! Yeehaw! Problem solved, next up, the INS.
Portability a problem? Wireless dumb terminal communicates with water cooled superbox pluged into the 220 clothes dryer outlet in the basement. Battery no problem. Duh.
We do not need better batteries, we need smarter journalists. Fuck sakes, I wish these people would use the three grey cells they have.
The problem with letting government do things is that after a while they start to get lax. Then a while later the "standard" becomes remarkably flexible for those who have friends in high places.
Note that I'm not talking about the Americans, this is a general organizing principle.
Private standards are as good as the word of those who agree to them. You take a look at the CD-ROM standard or the casette tape standard, their word is good. You can still play 20 year old tapes on brand new machines.
The major difference between Britian and the USA is that American women have the right to defend themselves against cruising muggers, and British ones don't.
Buy the poor woman a pistol AND a phone. When she inevitably breaks down outside the cell phone's range she can safely depend upon the good will of the 99.95% of normal American citizens.
Usualy (90%+) the sight of a dainty revolver is more than enough to dissuade evildoers. Just one of those annoying facts that Her Majesty's Government is hell bent to ignore in its pursuit of citizen disarmament.
The whole idea of trying to censor the Internet is pointless anyway. It CAN'T BE censored. Even the friggin' murderous Chicoms can't censor their part of the web, and they have 100% control over all servers and switches. They can and do shoot people for posting politically incorrect things, but they can't keep a lid on it. Truth is getting out anyway, as is beastie porn.
It -can't- be regulated. That's what makes it wonderful
I'm a Canadian. I lived in the USA for ten glorious years. My annual tax rate was below 30%, I made more money than I ever made in my previous 40 years of life, and five of the ten years were spent going to school.
Which reminds me, I was allowed to go to school! Couldn't meet the requirements in Canada (4.0 gpa or forget it, being black and female and/or gay wouldn't hurt), in the USA I just paid money and they taught me what I wanted to know. I got a licence and everything, and I'm no worse at my profession than any Canadian educated pratitioner.
Now I'm back in Canada. I can't work (yet)in my profession because of licencing regulations which don't recognise my US degree (even though they are screaming for more people in my profession here), the work I do have is taxed at a rate of 35%, and when you add all the other bullshit taxes I'm forking over about half my income. That'd be 50% dude. This cramps my style, as you might imagine.
Example, my 900 square foot house in Arizona cost $90,000 USD and the interest rate was 5%. It was the first house I ever owned at the age of 44, and it was cheaper than renting.
My house in Canada, which I was able to purchase by means of saving up those US greenbacks and trading them for Canadian dollars at the very best possible exchange rate, cost almost exactly twice as much even though it is the same size as the one in Arizona and was the cheapest thing I could get here.
Had I been working those ten years here in the Land of Regulated Markets, there's no way in hell I'd have been able to buy this house, or any house. None.
So the terrible evil factory owners in Eeeevile Amerika are stealing one fuck of a lot less from me than the morally upright socialists of wonderful Canada.
Put it another way, regulated markets work best for the ones doing the regulating.
And by the way. In the winter in Arizona, most of the young people on Harley Davidsons cruising up and down the mountain passes of Route 66, strutting about in Tombstone wearing biker leathers and big revlovers and enjoying the beautiful freedom are GERMAN TOURISTS. I bet it really pisses them off when they get back to Munich or Dresden and have to give up the bike and the hogleg. I know it pisses me off every day.
Socialists are deluded, man. America rocks. You should check it out.
There's nothing in the world that CAUSES violence. Violent action is a choice made by a single human being every time it happens. Even in a group, each individual chooses to do violence upon their target independent of the other group members.
To assume that some environmental factor such as a video game causes violence is to assume that human beings are stimulus/response automatons. The BBC article grants the possibility without even thinking about it, but goes on to say the data do not support such a conclusion about video games specifically. Wonderful.
This assumption is common among the Left, they seem to think all manner of things will take an ordinary human being and turn him/her into an insane killer. If it isn't guns its video games, or lead poisoning, or not enough sex, or too much, or some such.
The reason why collectivist social experiments consistently fail is that humans are not automatons. They think. They do not behave in predictable ways even when herded like cattle by oppressive regimes.
Violence is a tool humans sometimes use to get things they want. Period. If society is arranged such that it is the only tool available to a section of the populace, perforce more of them will use it that would otherwise be the case. However even in such evil circumstances some will and some still won't, and there is no way to tell ahead of the event which a given individual will choose.
As it happens, the bombing of London began during the Battle of Britain. Hitler wanted some payback for a single small raid that the Brits managed to squeeze into Berlin, so he shifted the Luftwaffe raids away from the airfields of southern England (military targets) to the terror bombing of London (civillian target).
This was stupid for two reasons. First and most important was that it took the pressure off the RAF airfields and lead to them winning the Battle of Britain.
That alone arguably cost Hitler the war, as it was the use of Britain as a base that allowed the destruction of German manufacturing by the combined airforces of the US, Britain and Canada. Including Dresden. (And yes, Canada had a big ass airforce in WWII. Half the Spitfires ever built were made in Canada.)
Second, the prolonged Blitz raids set the moral stage for all bombings of cities later in the war. Dresden was just a "better" version of the London raids.
As were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for that matter. The US actually did more damage to Tokyo with regular bombing than they did with the nukes, but the shock value of that mushroom cloud was what finally broke the Japanese High Command. Two weeks of bomb damage done with one aircraft and one bomb in ten seconds is hard to ignore. Doing it twice in a row...
These days we have it much better, you don't HAVE to blow up a whole city to get at one little factory. You can fly a smart bomb down the chimney instead, which is why Bhagdad still has a downtown. I'm sure Churchill would have preferred doing it that way, but he didn't have F-111s and satellite photography. Bummer for Dresden.
Besides, wars are not about how many people get killed, they are about making the other guy quit fighting. The Dresden bombing got the job done.
After all, would you rather be saluting Hitler's friggin' moron of a grandson?
" Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD provides microprocessors, Flash memory devices, and silicon-based solutions for our customers in the communications and computer industries worldwide."
Because without the middleman the government would miss out on all those tasty political donations, of course. Socialism doesn't work mostly because it allows too many assholes the opportunity to steal.
Remember, cream isn't the only thing that rises to the top. There's also pond scum to consider.
"It is the job of the government, after all, to improve the lot of its people."
Actually, no. In a -free- republic the job of government is to manage the rule of law, provide for the common defence of the nation, and enforce contracts. Other than that they are supposed to stay out of the road and let people get on with their lives.
Anything else is just the forced redistributuion of wealth,otherwise known as stealing. Which is why East Germany is such a basket case in the first place. People are not inspired to work hard when they know the government is just going to take their money.
Well, I might be if there was such a thing as Global Warming. Truth is global warming is a figment of some really speculative computer models, so I think I'll be able to contain my fear.
Flame on, you Greenie idiots. Its all make believe.
The Indians actually -do- something NASA has been fiddling with for 15 years? BWAHAHA!!!!
This is rich! How many middle manager weenies in NASA do you think are going to be fired with extreme prejudice when the USA has to lease space planes from India? Or Burt Rutan? Woohoo!
Surface less than 280 km from target, shoot, bug out. India has a few dandy submarines.
The Brahmos doesn't have to fly across all of Europe to get where its going like the Tomahawk was designed to do. Its not going to Moscow, its going to some place in Pakistan.
Look at a map. There's not much in Pakistan worth shooting a million dollar missile at that's farther away from the Indian border than 280km.
Sure, I can pay some guy to hack together something that sort of works, but again, I'm left holding the bag and it is prohibitively expensive. We are back to me building my own car again.
Here's another concept to add to your vocabulary of glibness: Economy of Scale.
There's no developer in the world who's going to write and maintain a billing package -for me and me alone- for $200 a year. No way. Its going to cost me $200 worth of his time just to explain what I want, if he's any good.
The only way the billing software guy can do it is to sell hundreds of units and support packages. The only way he can sell hundreds of packages is to run his software on the monopoly OS, Windows. Why? Because Windows comes with every computer sold whether you like it or not, and because damn near every single doctor's office in the country runs Windows.
Oh, and every secretary in the country knows Windows and MS Word. Little detail there, I get free training via the monopoly if I go with Windows. Everybody I want to hire already knows the software, I have full productivity for my buck from day 1 on the job. What's training worth these days, $50 bucks an hour? More?
Lets take a look at those numbers again. All up software and hardware to replace a $30,000 per anum employee, $2,200 bucks. If Gates and co. stop supporting Windows XP, and I have to spend another $2,200 to buy a Mac or an SGI or a Sun box or whatever do I care? Hell no! I can spend that money every year and still laugh all the way to the bank.
But I won't be stuck with that, will I? Microsoft is supporting Win 98 until next year, 2004. That's 6 years useful work out of something that I paid $150 bucks for. XP still runs the application I used on Win 98, so I'm out another $150 bucks to buy a new OS IF I need the support.
Newsflash to the uninformed, most of the medical billing packages on the market were written to run in DOS on a 286. The vendors just write new front ends to them every 6 years and stick the customers for another update. An absolutely amazing number of medical practices are still running Windows 95. Yeah, that'd be Ninety Five. Upgrade not needed, just keep the billing updates current and that's ok.
So you can see where I might want to disagree with your thesis. Real world runs on proprietary software.
"We are not well served with non-free programs to get jobs done."
Oh, I don't know. Total expenditure for billing software for a doctor's office, plus Mickeysoft XP, plus a computer to run it on, less than $2000.00 CDN.
Yearly cost of updates for the unending idiotic changes in billing codes etc.is $200.00, which the vendor has to keep up with. (He's going to do that for nothing? No way.)
$2200 bucks for automated billing, that's pretty freaking cheap. Close enough to free for me. Particularly considering I'd have to hire a billing clerk at $30k+ per year without it, two clerks for a really busy office.
Should the billing software vendor or Mickeysoft at some point go belly up, what's my cost? Another $2200 bucks to another vendor, plus I have to get my billing files translated over. Another maybe two grand at worst. Less than ten grand even if I have to replace all the hardware.
Or, I could spend endless hours trying to find and maintain an Open Source solution, which would require me to learn programming AND accounting AND update all the code changes myself, plus I'm holding the bag if it blows up.
Let us not forget, if it blows up I can't bill, and if I can't bill I have no income. I'm going to lose one hell of a lot more money than I could ever save by using Open Source software.
Furthermore, if I'm the doctor all the time I spend dicking with the computer I'm not generating income. Doctor time is worth $300+ per hour even in Canada, that's some damn expensive system administration. I'd be further ahead to hire the billing clerk for $30k, right?
With my money for my non-free software, I get a really cheap solution to a problem I can't afford to solve on my own. Plus, I have recourse if it breaks. This is called payment for services rendered, also known as Capitalism.
It is in my best interests that the software vendor makes a ton o'cash, if only because there will be an employee with a clue on the phone when I call them up. Should the vendor stiff me in some way, I can jettison their product and pay somebody else.
If I want a car, do I design and build one or do I pay General Motors or Honda for one of theirs? In what way am I not free if I buy software the same way?
On the other hand, if a beauty solution exists in the Open Source world for something I can afford to have blow up occasionally, like an office suite or a browser, I'm all over it. Free is good too, just depends on the application.
My doctor's office uses Mozilla and Open Office on Irix (SGI boxen are cheap these days) and on XP, Smoothwall firewall/router, Samba and Sharity to communicate between evil proprietary OS's and virtuous Freeware, and Klinix billing software running on aforementioned Wintel monopolistic Microsoft Windows XP. If all the freeware stuff craps out the money is still safe. Nice, functional and cheap in time as well as money.
Bottom line, more doctor hours spent on patients, less on friggin stupid paperwork. Win, win, win.
Don't let ideology clog your colon, dude. ~:D Allow the fiber of practicallity to clean out all that bullshit once in a while.
OSS/FSF software is a freely given gift, the idea behid it is comunitarian. As in, voluntary membership comunity.
The idea that users should be forced to contribute back, now THAT'S Communism.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
The distinction revolves around the word "voluntary". As have several large wars including the one we are fighting now. Certain people seem to have trouble with this concept, they need a good kicking to get the lesson across.
"Corporations want to take before they give. That's the sad truth. If there's no extra profit in it for them, they're less likely to do it."
What on Earth is sad about this? This is like saying "Water flows down hill, that's the sad truth." The truth isn't sad, its just the truth. If a company doesn't make a profit, they don't have any money to spend on their IT department. Why is this hard to understand?
The whole purpose of having a company is to make a buck, don't you think? If you aren't going to make money, it isn't a company. Its a hobby. Hobbies are good, but they don't pay the rent, you know. If my company can save a whack of dough through the generosity of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, I will certainly take advantage of that freely given gift.
Point being,if its free, its free. You have no moral ground to expect gratitude and contributions in return. Human nature being what it is, those things will inevitably come. But not from everyone, and you have no right to whine about those who do not reciprocate.
By the way, my total savings due to Open Source software so far are about $2500.00 Thank you to Smoothwall, Linus, Richard, Mozilla and Open Office.org. Beauty software, don't hold your breath for much more than free advertising in this space. Thanks also to Bill Gates, even though I had to pay money the stuff works. If my billing software becomes available on Linux, maybe I'll buy a copy of Red Hat.
As to the business of getting an income tax rebate if you contribute to open source, think for just a frickin' millisecond about how a thing like that would have to be managed. Imagine the cost to the company and the government as they duke it out over what unique line of code constitutes a contribution, and the exact dollar value thereof. You want to trust the Tax Department with a thing like that?
Don't you people ever get tired of being wrong? First there was the "Brutal Afghan Winter", then the WMD attacks on US troops, then the WMDs dissapeared, then there was "The Iraq Quagmire", and now Saddam's capture will make no difference.
Prediction, hell yes it will.
This is the guy who had multiple prisons for four year olds, made doctors cut off thousands of people's ears, fed men into shredding machines feet first, and etc. If you want to spew bile on somebody, why not this guy?
With any luck they will stick him in a wire cage at Guantanamo and make him eat bacon until he dies of old age and boredom. Like that Nazi prick they kept in Spandau Prison for 40 years.
Listening isn't really the problem I'm referring to. I can easily enough encrypt the packets to make them hash to the listener, in fact you can buy systems that do it themselves. The crime here is not listening, although that is certainly bent enough.
No, the crime is usurping somebody's Internet connection. If I want to be -really sure- nobody is fiddling with my connection, and particularly pretending to be me while doing something immoral or illegal, I have to run cable. The disgusting perv in the parent article was downloading kiddie porn, but he could just as well have been UPloading the next big virus, which will bring the RCMP to MY house, which I for sure don't want.
And why? Because DICKBOY here wants to run around Wardriving and boast about it to his other dickweed friends where actual bad people can read about it. Criminals are for the most part stupid, so they don't invent these kinds of tools for themselves. They let enthusiastic idiots like Wardriver.com do all the work, then pervert the finished product.
Besides all the paranoia, *I* paid for this connection. If I want to let passers by use it I'll put up a sign. The Canadian government's casual attitude toward personal property and an individual's freedoms is what -really- separates us from the Americans. I had more rights and freedoms as an immigrant in the USA than I do as a citizen in Canada.
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Give up now and avoid the rush? Why so defeatist?
Notice lately how gun control doesn't fall from the lips of every Democrat running for public office the way it did in the 1990's? Who do you think has more money, the Million Mom March or the NRA? Guess what, the MMM's do. They get as much dough as they can use from a variety of foundations and super rich types like Paul Allen and the Monster.com guy.
They have easilly twice as much money, and they are losing.
Tax reform is the same idea. It is so obvious and stunningly simple that even a Liberal can grasp it. Eg. reduce the 45 cents per dollar of IRS costs to 40 cents per dollar, and you have an extra nickle to save the whales.
Doesn't have to be a flat tax to work, you could get the same effect by firing the whole IRS and starting the Tax Code over from scratch. Hire Mastercard and VISA to do all the paperwork, you could get the cost down to 10 cents per dollar.
Whatever works is the name of the game.
Thousands and thousands. Wouldn't it be GREAT? ~:D
In truth, all those jobs are dragging on the economy. Those people reduce the loss of private funds to government and protect people from fines.
Money spent defending a company from the tax man does not help it grow or prosper. Tax accounting is a cost over and above the tax itself, not an investment. Costs are to be avoided.
Would it not be more beneficial if society didn't requite all those tax jobs to be performed, giving the people doing them a chance to do something else that would create value, as investments do?
If taxes were simpler they would cost the government less to collect and cost us less to pay.
People who used to make a living doing tax forms and tax law would no doubt be resourceful enough to find something else to do. People are smart, they just need the right motivation.
One major reason why the IRS can't update their technology is that the US Tax Code fills more volumes than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. There's more lines of instructions in the friggin law than there is running the Space Shuttle.
Many of those instructions conflict and contradict each other. It is impossible to computerize instructions like that. Can't be done. No way, no hope, no chance.
But why should this be a problem? Perfect opportunity to introduce a FLAT TAX. Everybody pays some percentage of their annual income, like maybe 5%, no exceptions and no deductions. Make the income cutoff at $30,000 or something like that.
SHAZAM, no more problem! The government gets the money it needs, because by reducing the 45 cents on the dollar cost of tax collection to somewhere around 5 cents (do you belive that? 45 fucking cents! And they say the military is expensive!) they more than make up for any reduction in the tax rate.
Plus they can fire half the IRS in one go. That's a goal to work toward! Yeehaw! Problem solved, next up, the INS.
Portability a problem? Wireless dumb terminal communicates with water cooled superbox pluged into the 220 clothes dryer outlet in the basement. Battery no problem. Duh.
We do not need better batteries, we need smarter journalists. Fuck sakes, I wish these people would use the three grey cells they have.
The problem with letting government do things is that after a while they start to get lax. Then a while later the "standard" becomes remarkably flexible for those who have friends in high places. Note that I'm not talking about the Americans, this is a general organizing principle. Private standards are as good as the word of those who agree to them. You take a look at the CD-ROM standard or the casette tape standard, their word is good. You can still play 20 year old tapes on brand new machines.
The major difference between Britian and the USA is that American women have the right to defend themselves against cruising muggers, and British ones don't.
Buy the poor woman a pistol AND a phone. When she inevitably breaks down outside the cell phone's range she can safely depend upon the good will of the 99.95% of normal American citizens.
Usualy (90%+) the sight of a dainty revolver is more than enough to dissuade evildoers. Just one of those annoying facts that Her Majesty's Government is hell bent to ignore in its pursuit of citizen disarmament.
God made man and woman. Sam Colt made them equal.
God, I want to cry. I thought slashdot was supposed to be for people who were at least interested in science. Silly me.
Linux servers are cracked most often because they are the most common type, you slack jawed drooling morons.
Next let's add percentages together, won't that be fun?
The whole idea of trying to censor the Internet is pointless anyway. It CAN'T BE censored. Even the friggin' murderous Chicoms can't censor their part of the web, and they have 100% control over all servers and switches. They can and do shoot people for posting politically incorrect things, but they can't keep a lid on it. Truth is getting out anyway, as is beastie porn.
It -can't- be regulated. That's what makes it wonderful
I live in a socialist country in North America called Canada. Your description of Sweden matches Canada right down to the tax rates.
I was fortunate to live in the USA for ten years, which taught me what freedom tastes like. I'll be going back some day, when my children are grown.
They have their problems in the USA, but rampant crushing socialism isn't one of them just yet.
I'm a Canadian. I lived in the USA for ten glorious years. My annual tax rate was below 30%, I made more money than I ever made in my previous 40 years of life, and five of the ten years were spent going to school.
Which reminds me, I was allowed to go to school! Couldn't meet the requirements in Canada (4.0 gpa or forget it, being black and female and/or gay wouldn't hurt), in the USA I just paid money and they taught me what I wanted to know. I got a licence and everything, and I'm no worse at my profession than any Canadian educated pratitioner.
Now I'm back in Canada. I can't work (yet)in my profession because of licencing regulations which don't recognise my US degree (even though they are screaming for more people in my profession here), the work I do have is taxed at a rate of 35%, and when you add all the other bullshit taxes I'm forking over about half my income. That'd be 50% dude. This cramps my style, as you might imagine.
Example, my 900 square foot house in Arizona cost $90,000 USD and the interest rate was 5%. It was the first house I ever owned at the age of 44, and it was cheaper than renting.
My house in Canada, which I was able to purchase by means of saving up those US greenbacks and trading them for Canadian dollars at the very best possible exchange rate, cost almost exactly twice as much even though it is the same size as the one in Arizona and was the cheapest thing I could get here.
Had I been working those ten years here in the Land of Regulated Markets, there's no way in hell I'd have been able to buy this house, or any house. None.
So the terrible evil factory owners in Eeeevile Amerika are stealing one fuck of a lot less from me than the morally upright socialists of wonderful Canada.
Put it another way, regulated markets work best for the ones doing the regulating.
And by the way. In the winter in Arizona, most of the young people on Harley Davidsons cruising up and down the mountain passes of Route 66, strutting about in Tombstone wearing biker leathers and big revlovers and enjoying the beautiful freedom are GERMAN TOURISTS. I bet it really pisses them off when they get back to Munich or Dresden and have to give up the bike and the hogleg. I know it pisses me off every day.
Socialists are deluded, man. America rocks. You should check it out.
There's nothing in the world that CAUSES violence. Violent action is a choice made by a single human being every time it happens. Even in a group, each individual chooses to do violence upon their target independent of the other group members.
To assume that some environmental factor such as a video game causes violence is to assume that human beings are stimulus/response automatons. The BBC article grants the possibility without even thinking about it, but goes on to say the data do not support such a conclusion about video games specifically. Wonderful.
This assumption is common among the Left, they seem to think all manner of things will take an ordinary human being and turn him/her into an insane killer. If it isn't guns its video games, or lead poisoning, or not enough sex, or too much, or some such.
The reason why collectivist social experiments consistently fail is that humans are not automatons. They think. They do not behave in predictable ways even when herded like cattle by oppressive regimes.
Violence is a tool humans sometimes use to get things they want. Period. If society is arranged such that it is the only tool available to a section of the populace, perforce more of them will use it that would otherwise be the case. However even in such evil circumstances some will and some still won't, and there is no way to tell ahead of the event which a given individual will choose.
As it happens, the bombing of London began during the Battle of Britain. Hitler wanted some payback for a single small raid that the Brits managed to squeeze into Berlin, so he shifted the Luftwaffe raids away from the airfields of southern England (military targets) to the terror bombing of London (civillian target).
This was stupid for two reasons. First and most important was that it took the pressure off the RAF airfields and lead to them winning the Battle of Britain.
That alone arguably cost Hitler the war, as it was the use of Britain as a base that allowed the destruction of German manufacturing by the combined airforces of the US, Britain and Canada. Including Dresden. (And yes, Canada had a big ass airforce in WWII. Half the Spitfires ever built were made in Canada.)
Second, the prolonged Blitz raids set the moral stage for all bombings of cities later in the war. Dresden was just a "better" version of the London raids.
As were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for that matter. The US actually did more damage to Tokyo with regular bombing than they did with the nukes, but the shock value of that mushroom cloud was what finally broke the Japanese High Command. Two weeks of bomb damage done with one aircraft and one bomb in ten seconds is hard to ignore. Doing it twice in a row...
These days we have it much better, you don't HAVE to blow up a whole city to get at one little factory. You can fly a smart bomb down the chimney instead, which is why Bhagdad still has a downtown. I'm sure Churchill would have preferred doing it that way, but he didn't have F-111s and satellite photography. Bummer for Dresden.
Besides, wars are not about how many people get killed, they are about making the other guy quit fighting. The Dresden bombing got the job done.
After all, would you rather be saluting Hitler's friggin' moron of a grandson?
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/AboutAMD/0,,51_ 52,00.html
" Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD provides microprocessors, Flash memory devices, and silicon-based solutions for our customers in the communications and computer industries worldwide."
Please get a clue.
Because without the middleman the government would miss out on all those tasty political donations, of course. Socialism doesn't work mostly because it allows too many assholes the opportunity to steal.
Remember, cream isn't the only thing that rises to the top. There's also pond scum to consider.
"It is the job of the government, after all, to improve the lot of its people."
Actually, no. In a -free- republic the job of government is to manage the rule of law, provide for the common defence of the nation, and enforce contracts. Other than that they are supposed to stay out of the road and let people get on with their lives.
Anything else is just the forced redistributuion of wealth,otherwise known as stealing. Which is why East Germany is such a basket case in the first place. People are not inspired to work hard when they know the government is just going to take their money.
Well, I might be if there was such a thing as Global Warming. Truth is global warming is a figment of some really speculative computer models, so I think I'll be able to contain my fear.
Flame on, you Greenie idiots. Its all make believe.
Jeasus, don't you liberal wankers ever get tired of being wrong?
The Indians actually -do- something NASA has been fiddling with for 15 years? BWAHAHA!!!!
This is rich! How many middle manager weenies in NASA do you think are going to be fired with extreme prejudice when the USA has to lease space planes from India? Or Burt Rutan? Woohoo!
Surface less than 280 km from target, shoot, bug out. India has a few dandy submarines.
The Brahmos doesn't have to fly across all of Europe to get where its going like the Tomahawk was designed to do. Its not going to Moscow, its going to some place in Pakistan.
Look at a map. There's not much in Pakistan worth shooting a million dollar missile at that's farther away from the Indian border than 280km.
Sure, I can pay some guy to hack together something that sort of works, but again, I'm left holding the bag and it is prohibitively expensive. We are back to me building my own car again.
Here's another concept to add to your vocabulary of glibness: Economy of Scale.
There's no developer in the world who's going to write and maintain a billing package -for me and me alone- for $200 a year. No way. Its going to cost me $200 worth of his time just to explain what I want, if he's any good.
The only way the billing software guy can do it is to sell hundreds of units and support packages. The only way he can sell hundreds of packages is to run his software on the monopoly OS, Windows. Why? Because Windows comes with every computer sold whether you like it or not, and because damn near every single doctor's office in the country runs Windows.
Oh, and every secretary in the country knows Windows and MS Word. Little detail there, I get free training via the monopoly if I go with Windows. Everybody I want to hire already knows the software, I have full productivity for my buck from day 1 on the job. What's training worth these days, $50 bucks an hour? More?
Lets take a look at those numbers again. All up software and hardware to replace a $30,000 per anum employee, $2,200 bucks. If Gates and co. stop supporting Windows XP, and I have to spend another $2,200 to buy a Mac or an SGI or a Sun box or whatever do I care? Hell no! I can spend that money every year and still laugh all the way to the bank.
But I won't be stuck with that, will I? Microsoft is supporting Win 98 until next year, 2004. That's 6 years useful work out of something that I paid $150 bucks for. XP still runs the application I used on Win 98, so I'm out another $150 bucks to buy a new OS IF I need the support.
Newsflash to the uninformed, most of the medical billing packages on the market were written to run in DOS on a 286. The vendors just write new front ends to them every 6 years and stick the customers for another update. An absolutely amazing number of medical practices are still running Windows 95. Yeah, that'd be Ninety Five. Upgrade not needed, just keep the billing updates current and that's ok.
So you can see where I might want to disagree with your thesis. Real world runs on proprietary software.
"We are not well served with non-free programs to get jobs done."
Oh, I don't know. Total expenditure for billing software for a doctor's office, plus Mickeysoft XP, plus a computer to run it on, less than $2000.00 CDN.
Yearly cost of updates for the unending idiotic changes in billing codes etc.is $200.00, which the vendor has to keep up with. (He's going to do that for nothing? No way.)
$2200 bucks for automated billing, that's pretty freaking cheap. Close enough to free for me. Particularly considering I'd have to hire a billing clerk at $30k+ per year without it, two clerks for a really busy office.
Should the billing software vendor or Mickeysoft at some point go belly up, what's my cost? Another $2200 bucks to another vendor, plus I have to get my billing files translated over. Another maybe two grand at worst. Less than ten grand even if I have to replace all the hardware.
Or, I could spend endless hours trying to find and maintain an Open Source solution, which would require me to learn programming AND accounting AND update all the code changes myself, plus I'm holding the bag if it blows up.
Let us not forget, if it blows up I can't bill, and if I can't bill I have no income. I'm going to lose one hell of a lot more money than I could ever save by using Open Source software.
Furthermore, if I'm the doctor all the time I spend dicking with the computer I'm not generating income. Doctor time is worth $300+ per hour even in Canada, that's some damn expensive system administration. I'd be further ahead to hire the billing clerk for $30k, right?
With my money for my non-free software, I get a really cheap solution to a problem I can't afford to solve on my own. Plus, I have recourse if it breaks. This is called payment for services rendered, also known as Capitalism.
It is in my best interests that the software vendor makes a ton o'cash, if only because there will be an employee with a clue on the phone when I call them up. Should the vendor stiff me in some way, I can jettison their product and pay somebody else.
If I want a car, do I design and build one or do I pay General Motors or Honda for one of theirs? In what way am I not free if I buy software the same way?
On the other hand, if a beauty solution exists in the Open Source world for something I can afford to have blow up occasionally, like an office suite or a browser, I'm all over it. Free is good too, just depends on the application.
My doctor's office uses Mozilla and Open Office on Irix (SGI boxen are cheap these days) and on XP, Smoothwall firewall/router, Samba and Sharity to communicate between evil proprietary OS's and virtuous Freeware, and Klinix billing software running on aforementioned Wintel monopolistic Microsoft Windows XP. If all the freeware stuff craps out the money is still safe. Nice, functional and cheap in time as well as money.
Bottom line, more doctor hours spent on patients, less on friggin stupid paperwork. Win, win, win.
Don't let ideology clog your colon, dude. ~:D Allow the fiber of practicallity to clean out all that bullshit once in a while.
OSS/FSF software is a freely given gift, the idea behid it is comunitarian. As in, voluntary membership comunity. The idea that users should be forced to contribute back, now THAT'S Communism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" The distinction revolves around the word "voluntary". As have several large wars including the one we are fighting now. Certain people seem to have trouble with this concept, they need a good kicking to get the lesson across.
"Corporations want to take before they give. That's the sad truth. If there's no extra profit in it for them, they're less likely to do it."
What on Earth is sad about this? This is like saying "Water flows down hill, that's the sad truth." The truth isn't sad, its just the truth. If a company doesn't make a profit, they don't have any money to spend on their IT department. Why is this hard to understand?
The whole purpose of having a company is to make a buck, don't you think? If you aren't going to make money, it isn't a company. Its a hobby. Hobbies are good, but they don't pay the rent, you know. If my company can save a whack of dough through the generosity of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, I will certainly take advantage of that freely given gift.
Point being,if its free, its free. You have no moral ground to expect gratitude and contributions in return. Human nature being what it is, those things will inevitably come. But not from everyone, and you have no right to whine about those who do not reciprocate.
By the way, my total savings due to Open Source software so far are about $2500.00 Thank you to Smoothwall, Linus, Richard, Mozilla and Open Office.org. Beauty software, don't hold your breath for much more than free advertising in this space. Thanks also to Bill Gates, even though I had to pay money the stuff works. If my billing software becomes available on Linux, maybe I'll buy a copy of Red Hat.
As to the business of getting an income tax rebate if you contribute to open source, think for just a frickin' millisecond about how a thing like that would have to be managed. Imagine the cost to the company and the government as they duke it out over what unique line of code constitutes a contribution, and the exact dollar value thereof. You want to trust the Tax Department with a thing like that?
What a nightmare.
Don't you people ever get tired of being wrong? First there was the "Brutal Afghan Winter", then the WMD attacks on US troops, then the WMDs dissapeared, then there was "The Iraq Quagmire", and now Saddam's capture will make no difference.
Prediction, hell yes it will.
This is the guy who had multiple prisons for four year olds, made doctors cut off thousands of people's ears, fed men into shredding machines feet first, and etc. If you want to spew bile on somebody, why not this guy?
With any luck they will stick him in a wire cage at Guantanamo and make him eat bacon until he dies of old age and boredom. Like that Nazi prick they kept in Spandau Prison for 40 years.
Ding dong the wicked witch is dead! Be happy.
P.S. By the way, nice troll dickweed.
Listening isn't really the problem I'm referring to. I can easily enough encrypt the packets to make them hash to the listener, in fact you can buy systems that do it themselves. The crime here is not listening, although that is certainly bent enough.
No, the crime is usurping somebody's Internet connection. If I want to be -really sure- nobody is fiddling with my connection, and particularly pretending to be me while doing something immoral or illegal, I have to run cable. The disgusting perv in the parent article was downloading kiddie porn, but he could just as well have been UPloading the next big virus, which will bring the RCMP to MY house, which I for sure don't want.
And why? Because DICKBOY here wants to run around Wardriving and boast about it to his other dickweed friends where actual bad people can read about it. Criminals are for the most part stupid, so they don't invent these kinds of tools for themselves. They let enthusiastic idiots like Wardriver.com do all the work, then pervert the finished product.
Besides all the paranoia, *I* paid for this connection. If I want to let passers by use it I'll put up a sign. The Canadian government's casual attitude toward personal property and an individual's freedoms is what -really- separates us from the Americans. I had more rights and freedoms as an immigrant in the USA than I do as a citizen in Canada.