Enough with the "evil oil companies" bullshit. They don't make anywhere near the amount of money that oil producing nations themselves make when crude prices are high. Saudi Arabia will make $55 billion dollars more this year than they made last year due to the increased price of crude. 55 billion more than they made last year. That is about 27.5 billion dollars more a quarter than they made last year. Exxon-Mobile's profits this last quarter were only 3.8 billion. Not 3.8 billion more than the same quarter last year. 3.8 billion. That is a pittance compared to what Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations (13 out of the top 15 being dictatorships) make.
Oil companies do not set the price of oil. It's commodity and the market sets the price. There are supply and demand issues that are affecting the price of oil. There is a limited supply and ever increasing demand. China and India now use the same amount of oil that the USA used 10 years ago. The oil companies don't have any control over that. OPEC does. They could increase output if they wanted to. They don't want to. They market will bear these high prices, so there is no real incentive for them to do anything about it.
Oil companies make an average of 9 cents a gallon on gasoline. 9 cents. I'm sure you don't believe that but the wonderful thing about our capitalist system is that these are publicly traded companies and with a little effort you can go look it up. The government, on the other hand, makes more than twice that in taxes. I don't here anyone talking about a windfall profits rebate from the government. Do you know how much more they are taking in gasoline taxes than they were a few years ago? You liberals don't bitch and moan about that.
I don't hear people bitch and moan when countries like Venezuela and Bolivia nationalize their oil fields which results in reduced and inefficient production of oil which drives prices up. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when environmentalists prevent drilling in a small area of ANWR which limits our supply and drives prices up. I hear them cheer it. I don't here people bitch and moan when the government taxes ethanol imports to "protect" our farmers which drives gasoline prices up because the ethanol from corn that we can produce here costs more than the ethanol produced outside the country from sugar cane and other products in places like Brazil. I hear them cheer it. I don't here people bitch and moan when additional drilling isn't allowed to occur in the Gulf of Mexico which further limits our supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when drilling isn't allowed in the Great Lakes which again limits our supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when environmental regulations become so restrictive that oil companies are unable to open new refineries, which limits supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when individual states choose to dictate to the oil companies which mixtures of gasoline are allowed to be sold in the state which results in a more complex distribution network and drives prices up. I hear them cheer it.
Yet you all scream bloody murder at the oil companies when all of the stupid decisions you make over the years finally come back to bite you in the ass in the form of increased oil and gasoline prices. You want to know who is responsible for the current supply crunch my friends? Look in the mirror. If we had made smarter decisions 10 years ago by allowing additional domestic drilling and allowing new gasoline refineries to open we wouldn't be in the position that we are in today. The fact of the matter is that we need today, and will continue to need for the next 10 to 20 years, ever increasing amounts of oil. Demand in China and India will only increase as well. If we do not increase supplies of oil domestically and increase refining capacity then we will continue to be bent over a barrel. By conservative estimates, we are at least 25 years away from transitioning to a primarily alternative energ
That's because the primary purpose of this program, like so many others, is to transfer vast amounts of money from the federal treasury to certain politically cooperative industries. Like Star Wars before it, I doubt that there is anyone in the Bush administration that cares one iota whether it has any real military value or even whether it ever "works" or not. The real (political) value is in the spending itself.
Our current Secretary of Defense, who so many around here love to hate (myself included), would disagree with your assessment. He's cut programs that he deems unnecessary in the past. He didn't make a lot of friends inside or outside the Pentagon by doing it. I'm no Rumsfeld defender after the colossal fuck up that is Iraq, but I will give him some credit where credit is due.
The real culprit, IMHO, is Congress. Where the heck is the oversight? You expect the Pentagon to push forward every weapons program they can dream up. That's what we pay them to do. Congress controls the purse string and has oversight which means ultimately they've got the power to put a stop to these programs if they choose to use it.
Just out of curiosity where is the waste actually disposed of? Are there plants in Belgium that actually do it the right way or is it just shipped off to China and stripped of any usable components then dumped like a lot of the supposed "recyclers" do here in the USA.
So let me get this straight. People bitch and moan about Vista because there will be nothing new and they bitch and moan about Office 2007 because too much is new. Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Apple didn't have a choice. You either include DRM or the RIAA won't deal with you. If the RIAA won't deal with you then you don't have an online music store that's going to make any money.
- Apple change the "rules" about how users can use their music (number of CDs a song can be burnt onto was reduced) using the DRM and software updates, even when the songs have ALREADY been purchased by the users.
Apple didn't change the "rules" about how you use your music. You can go to the store, buy a CD and do whatever the heck you want with it just like you always could. Now if you buy DRM'd music from Apple's online store then there are some rules in place, but they are among the must user friendly out there. You can share your music with other PC's on your home network. Granted there is a limit, but the average consumer doesn't have 5 PC's. If you make some kind of mistake and authorize too many PC's and can't deauthorize one or more of them for whatever reason then you do have the ability to reset your authorizations. You can burn the files to CD as many times as you want. There is a limit to the number of times you can burn a play list that contains DRM's music. I believe that limit is 10, but if you need to burn more than that the solution is pretty easy. Use another program to burn additional copies of the CD. Alternatively you could delete the play list and recreate it. DRM is a fact of life forced on Apple by the RIAA. If you don't like the rules, go buy the CD instead. Apple offers a service. You can get only the tracks you want, almost instantly, at $0.99 cents a track and in exchange for that service you agree to some rules. They don't force you to buy their music.
- Apple sue students for posting rumours about their products on the internet.
Apple didn't sue the students for posting rumors. Apple sued the student for knowingly soliciting and publishing trade secrets and profiting from it. Think Secret does sell advertising on it's website and does turn a profit. California is one of approximately 44 or 45 states that have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. That statute makes it wrongful to acquire or to publish without authorization information you know or have a reasonable basis to know is a trade secret. I don't agree with their tactics but to say that Apple simply sued a student for posting rumors is a vast oversimplification made for the purposes of furthering your argument.
- Apple try to talk Samba developers into making Samba non-copyleft so that they can take the code and close Apple's branch of it.
A company acting in it's own self interest so it can turn a profit? Blasphemy! I know, let's do away with all private and public companies and let the central government plan everything to do away with this evil notion known as "profits". Oh wait, that's been tried several times and each and every time it's been tried it's failed, innocent people have died and human rights have been trampled on. Not that pure unregulated capitalism is any better, I'll take regulated capitalism with social safety nets in which companies and people are mostly free to... gasp... act in their own self interest and try and turn a profit and where consumers are free if they don't like a particular company to.... gasp... not buy their products.
Except Apple is the one that dictates what it is you'll be sharing. You're simply donating some disk space on your computer and bandwidth. The traffic will also occur on non-standard bit torrent ports so admins can tell the difference between the Apple feature and standard bit torrent traffic.
RTFA. Traffic would occur on non-standard ports and you wouldn't be able to share anything you wanted. You would donate your bandwidth to share content Apple approved like software updates. It makes perfect sense and I'd certianly donate my bandwith at home when I'm at work in exchange for iTunes credits.
I heard the same shit from you liberals about Reagan in the 80's. We won't even begin to know how Bush stakes up for at least 20 years. Reagan looks pretty good in retrospect. Hardly the "threat to world peace" that you liberals pegged him as when he was calling out the Soviets and presiding over our military build up in the 80's.
If Clinton would have taken care of Osama as he should have in the 90's all of this would be a non issue anyway and George W. Bush would have been a one term president just like his father.
Could it be because Dell sucks and people are sick and tired of calling tech support only to speak with someone they can barely understand from India who claims his name is "Bill".
Shockingly enough, unfettered capitalism and totalitarian communism are not the only choices, except to Ayn Rand.
Shockingly enough, we don't live in an unfettered capitalist society. There are laws and regulations. Try starting and running your own business and you'll find that in many cases there is entirely too much regulation.
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Enough with the "evil oil companies" bullshit. They don't make anywhere near the amount of money that oil producing nations themselves make when crude prices are high. Saudi Arabia will make $55 billion dollars more this year than they made last year due to the increased price of crude. 55 billion more than they made last year. That is about 27.5 billion dollars more a quarter than they made last year. Exxon-Mobile's profits this last quarter were only 3.8 billion. Not 3.8 billion more than the same quarter last year. 3.8 billion. That is a pittance compared to what Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations (13 out of the top 15 being dictatorships) make. Oil companies do not set the price of oil. It's commodity and the market sets the price. There are supply and demand issues that are affecting the price of oil. There is a limited supply and ever increasing demand. China and India now use the same amount of oil that the USA used 10 years ago. The oil companies don't have any control over that. OPEC does. They could increase output if they wanted to. They don't want to. They market will bear these high prices, so there is no real incentive for them to do anything about it. Oil companies make an average of 9 cents a gallon on gasoline. 9 cents. I'm sure you don't believe that but the wonderful thing about our capitalist system is that these are publicly traded companies and with a little effort you can go look it up. The government, on the other hand, makes more than twice that in taxes. I don't here anyone talking about a windfall profits rebate from the government. Do you know how much more they are taking in gasoline taxes than they were a few years ago? You liberals don't bitch and moan about that. I don't hear people bitch and moan when countries like Venezuela and Bolivia nationalize their oil fields which results in reduced and inefficient production of oil which drives prices up. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when environmentalists prevent drilling in a small area of ANWR which limits our supply and drives prices up. I hear them cheer it. I don't here people bitch and moan when the government taxes ethanol imports to "protect" our farmers which drives gasoline prices up because the ethanol from corn that we can produce here costs more than the ethanol produced outside the country from sugar cane and other products in places like Brazil. I hear them cheer it. I don't here people bitch and moan when additional drilling isn't allowed to occur in the Gulf of Mexico which further limits our supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when drilling isn't allowed in the Great Lakes which again limits our supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when environmental regulations become so restrictive that oil companies are unable to open new refineries, which limits supply. I hear them cheer it. I don't hear people bitch and moan when individual states choose to dictate to the oil companies which mixtures of gasoline are allowed to be sold in the state which results in a more complex distribution network and drives prices up. I hear them cheer it. Yet you all scream bloody murder at the oil companies when all of the stupid decisions you make over the years finally come back to bite you in the ass in the form of increased oil and gasoline prices. You want to know who is responsible for the current supply crunch my friends? Look in the mirror. If we had made smarter decisions 10 years ago by allowing additional domestic drilling and allowing new gasoline refineries to open we wouldn't be in the position that we are in today. The fact of the matter is that we need today, and will continue to need for the next 10 to 20 years, ever increasing amounts of oil. Demand in China and India will only increase as well. If we do not increase supplies of oil domestically and increase refining capacity then we will continue to be bent over a barrel. By conservative estimates, we are at least 25 years away from transitioning to a primarily alternative energ
One of the best posts I've read on Slashdot in a while! Too bad it will probably get modded as a troll. The lefties run rampant around here.
Let's rename the station to something more appropriate: ICF: International Cluster Fuck
Our current Secretary of Defense, who so many around here love to hate (myself included), would disagree with your assessment. He's cut programs that he deems unnecessary in the past. He didn't make a lot of friends inside or outside the Pentagon by doing it. I'm no Rumsfeld defender after the colossal fuck up that is Iraq, but I will give him some credit where credit is due.
The real culprit, IMHO, is Congress. Where the heck is the oversight? You expect the Pentagon to push forward every weapons program they can dream up. That's what we pay them to do. Congress controls the purse string and has oversight which means ultimately they've got the power to put a stop to these programs if they choose to use it.
Wow! An intelligent post on Slashdot about the US military and what it actually intends to do instead of paranoid ranting. Thank you.
Just out of curiosity where is the waste actually disposed of? Are there plants in Belgium that actually do it the right way or is it just shipped off to China and stripped of any usable components then dumped like a lot of the supposed "recyclers" do here in the USA.
So let me get this straight. People bitch and moan about Vista because there will be nothing new and they bitch and moan about Office 2007 because too much is new. Microsoft is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
The grandparent never mentioned the US. Touchy, are we?
Keep it away from future Dick Cheney hunting parties. He already shoots at people he can see, imagine the damage something like this could cause.
Send it to me at stevejobslittlebitch@yahoo.com :-)
Apple didn't have a choice. You either include DRM or the RIAA won't deal with you. If the RIAA won't deal with you then you don't have an online music store that's going to make any money.
Apple didn't change the "rules" about how you use your music. You can go to the store, buy a CD and do whatever the heck you want with it just like you always could. Now if you buy DRM'd music from Apple's online store then there are some rules in place, but they are among the must user friendly out there. You can share your music with other PC's on your home network. Granted there is a limit, but the average consumer doesn't have 5 PC's. If you make some kind of mistake and authorize too many PC's and can't deauthorize one or more of them for whatever reason then you do have the ability to reset your authorizations. You can burn the files to CD as many times as you want. There is a limit to the number of times you can burn a play list that contains DRM's music. I believe that limit is 10, but if you need to burn more than that the solution is pretty easy. Use another program to burn additional copies of the CD. Alternatively you could delete the play list and recreate it. DRM is a fact of life forced on Apple by the RIAA. If you don't like the rules, go buy the CD instead. Apple offers a service. You can get only the tracks you want, almost instantly, at $0.99 cents a track and in exchange for that service you agree to some rules. They don't force you to buy their music.
Apple didn't sue the students for posting rumors. Apple sued the student for knowingly soliciting and publishing trade secrets and profiting from it. Think Secret does sell advertising on it's website and does turn a profit. California is one of approximately 44 or 45 states that have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. That statute makes it wrongful to acquire or to publish without authorization information you know or have a reasonable basis to know is a trade secret. I don't agree with their tactics but to say that Apple simply sued a student for posting rumors is a vast oversimplification made for the purposes of furthering your argument.
A company acting in it's own self interest so it can turn a profit? Blasphemy! I know, let's do away with all private and public companies and let the central government plan everything to do away with this evil notion known as "profits". Oh wait, that's been tried several times and each and every time it's been tried it's failed, innocent people have died and human rights have been trampled on. Not that pure unregulated capitalism is any better, I'll take regulated capitalism with social safety nets in which companies and people are mostly free to ... gasp ... act in their own self interest and try and turn a profit and where consumers are free if they don't like a particular company to .... gasp ... not buy their products.
Except Apple is the one that dictates what it is you'll be sharing. You're simply donating some disk space on your computer and bandwidth. The traffic will also occur on non-standard bit torrent ports so admins can tell the difference between the Apple feature and standard bit torrent traffic.
RTFA. Traffic would occur on non-standard ports and you wouldn't be able to share anything you wanted. You would donate your bandwidth to share content Apple approved like software updates. It makes perfect sense and I'd certianly donate my bandwith at home when I'm at work in exchange for iTunes credits.
I heard the same shit from you liberals about Reagan in the 80's. We won't even begin to know how Bush stakes up for at least 20 years. Reagan looks pretty good in retrospect. Hardly the "threat to world peace" that you liberals pegged him as when he was calling out the Soviets and presiding over our military build up in the 80's. If Clinton would have taken care of Osama as he should have in the 90's all of this would be a non issue anyway and George W. Bush would have been a one term president just like his father.
Your comment is irrelevant. Users can change the default search engine if they so choose. Microsoft doesn't prevent it.
Anyone who refers to Richard Stallman as RMS enjoys cock.
Liberal tool ....
Here, here. Can you imagine the backlash if a pro-Windows story posted here was based off of a Microsoft press release?
Um, I think you mean "liberated" unless, of course, you'd like to join the Vice President on his next hunting trip.
Fact: The United States of America has never spent more money on education that it is now spending.
A Slashdot article critical of Vista? Color me surprised ....
Could it be because Dell sucks and people are sick and tired of calling tech support only to speak with someone they can barely understand from India who claims his name is "Bill".
Shockingly enough, we don't live in an unfettered capitalist society. There are laws and regulations. Try starting and running your own business and you'll find that in many cases there is entirely too much regulation.
Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians...
Yeah, because in communist countries human rights are so well respected. Give me a break.