I am a pedantic type with an axe to grind, and even I knew that they obviously meant the first thing that would occur to most people's minds when they thought of a pane of glass.
The first thing that occurred to my mind when I read it was simply that they were lying. Another vapor product in an impressive array of vapor products.
Petroleum is really convenient in terms of an energy source, but we have a whole lot of others. That means, when push comes to shove, we can find other ways of doing things. Thus we aren't likely to face a real wide shortage. Nuclear is a good example.
The trouble is that nuclear doesn't replace the niche that petroleum currently fills, it would replace coal. While petroleum is a convenient energy source, especially for vehicles, the much more important use of petroleum is manufacturing for things like cheap plastics. That is where we will really feel the crunch of peak oil. Once we don't have cheap plastics to make stuff with any more, those prices will go up and effect out lives as much as rising gas prices. This will have a major effect in health care as so much of our modern medical procedures are dependent on using lots of cheap plastic sterile disposable equipment. You'll really know that peak oil has hit when packaging starts going from plastic back to glass and paper.
A single $100,000 server? Must be a Sun errrr Oracle machine. You can buy a hell of a lot of Dell's for $100,000.
I would imagine that that would be the amount for the hardware and software setup and configuration. They probably got everything from a vendor, set up and ready to go, and if the money value has any bearing on real life, it's probably the replacement cost of everything ready to go again. It could be the cost of the entire system project, but that would be extremely cheap for server, set up, software, vendor time, training, etc.
Is there really such a language as ebonics, or can any random grouping of black slang be thrown together and be called ebonics?
From my understanding which is limited and probably out of date, ebonics is essentially west African language and grammar spoken with English words. When slaves were brought over, they continued to speak their native languages but with the English words they were expected to use. This is not just a rearrangement of words and use of different tenses, but other nuances also. A question may have different meanings (and thus have different answers) depending on who is the one speaking even though the wording is the same for all speakers, for example.
A machine with a decent power source wouldn't be bothered by a 100 year travel time, while humans would just get the ship all dirty and stuff
That would be a huge advantage in spreading between stellar systems, especially if you want to make a good impression when you arrive
Except, that if you are doing anything more than just sending out probes to report back, they need to be self-repairing and self-replicating machines. Entropy happens. Things break down. To send out machines to spread, you'd also have to send complete factories along with them. Right now, biological creatures not only have machines beat at sentience and learning, but also the ability to repair themselves and create new versions of themselves. Biological creatures are de facto nanotech self replicators and far better than anything we can design in machines and I would bet that once you attempt such with machines, they will end up looking a great deal like biological creatures and probably borrow a great deal from biology to get it done also.
Also, no cameras? So they can't utilize technology, but they're still allowed to stand behind you and watch you work, right? The only difference between the two is the technology behind the first one.
And if you were my manager and constantly behind me all the time watching for no reason, that would be an issue I could take to HR. Not only is it simply bad management, but harassment. Typically, if I'm not up to the job and require special observation, I need to be told why and be given goals to reach to be taken off such, otherwise it opens up the corporation to other issues. In Germany, if my wife's cousin is to be believed, the companies actually care about their workers and have company run unions that actually do look out for them. In the US, bad management is what leads to unions. Managers and companies who think they can do whatever they want because they are the employers and treat their workers like slaves.
I'm old enough to remember when people didn't litter like they do today...
You must mean back when they littered more than they do now. Public trash cans appeared in the early part of the 20th century mainly because of all the banana peels that were getting littered around. With the much sturdier Gross Michael bananas of the time, stepping and slipping on them really was a problem which is why they ended up being displayed in so many cartoons.
...when graffiti was rare-to-unknown...
Graffiti has been found on the great pyramids, put their by the builders, and period reports state that Imperial Rome was covered in it. Even when non-literate, the population would put up pictures. For that matter, the heyday of American graffiti was in the 70's (but at that point one must talk about street art versus graffiti, or rather discussion with anybody who cares enough to know actual knowledge about it through history will trend that way).
when people took their trash out and brought in the empty barrels and containers promptly.
And they walked up hill both ways to do it too.
We're trapped in a vicious circle, actually...
You might be beginning to have a point here and in the rest of your post, however, your imaginary nostalgia for the past probably has most people dismissing you by this point. Community spirit and support for such things is all fine and good, but then you have a locally biased upholding so such rules. Metropolitan police only date back to the Victorian era (~1855) in London and then later in NYC. Before then it was all the sheriff and local citizens. While their creation probably did lead to less involvement by local citizens in law enforcement affairs, the general consensus in the histories I have read say that it resulted in a more uniform upholding of those laws. The rich and powerful may have lots of clout now with law enforcement, but they had even more back when the only people who could do anything about it were their employees.
Of course, it sounds like the whole thing was a tragedy of errors.
Airplane crashes like this one always are. It is very rare that any one thing causes an airplane to crash. It's almost always multiple things going wrong all at the same time to cause it to happen. Pilot does something wrong after getting a mistaken order from the control tower and is hit by a freak wind. ANy one of those thing probably wouldn't cause a plane to crash and checking out each one when it happens and correcting them is a reason planes spend so much time on the ground and not taking off on time. This particular computer in TFA isn't the thing that caused the plane to crash, it is something that records the data from all the other systems that are mission critical.
I'm sorry, but if you already have a stalker, who already has your address as well as a detailed knowledge of what your street looks like including the buildings on either side of yours, preventing somebody from posting a picture of your building as seen from the public street is not really going to help you. I'm surprised that even seems like a comforting idea. It much more likely that your stalker would post said photo and you could use that to get a restraining order or press charges for breaking one, than that it would ever aid him in stalking.
You are almost as much of an arsehole as the photographer. You both have no idea why people might not want themselves on Google street view, they might be in fear of their lives from abusive spouses, be asylum seekers afraid of foreign governments tracking them down, who knows?
Not really. If an abusive spouse or a foreign government wants you, and they already have your address, lacking a picture of your address (when they have pictures of the ones on either side of it) is not really an issue. I'm afraid your point seems to be a straw man argument. I would say the previous posters first remark about wanting to avoid attention by not demanding special attention is justified. You also seem to be taking the slippery slope by inferring that the previous poster claimed that they all did want attention and was an asshole for doing so. What he did was say that if they wanted attention, they got it. It was more of a descriptive statement than prescriptive.
Still, if somebody wants to have their house excluded from street view for whatever reason, I'm glad they can request such. However, if somebody else wants to add it in, they should be allowed to do so as it is a public face of a building that can be seen by anybody. We also have no idea of the reason that a person would want to add such a photo record back in and there are just as many justified reasons one could come up with starting with a simple historical record. We all live in this world together and just as two people cannot occupy the same space at the same time, there are allowances that have to be taken into account because of that.
If you really hate both, support Silverlight, if you suspect the loser will disappear. Whatever one wins will require cross platform support, and I just don't think MS will provide that. Once they gain superiority, it will probably be like it was with IE, they'll sit on it, not make any real improvements, stop all Mac development and never even address Linux. By that time, HTML 5 will be finished and ready and since it's the only cross browser and platform choice, it will win.
I don't know why that company would have to keep paying your friend. Once you offer up the fact that you plan to resign, the company is under no obligation to do anything else for you. In fact, they could have just as easily said "no" and fired him right there and then (like most employers will do).
Insurance. Those three months salary may be chump change compared to what might happen if the new guy can't perform the same job as the old guy you just fired. Critical system goes down, some job can't be completed, or there is some obscure but important bit of knowledge that wasn't transfered are all cases where it might pay to keep the guy on salary so you can call him in, as he is still on salary, and get him to tell the new guy how it's done. I used to do technical support for Adobe (Pagemaker and Photoshop), and I would get about one call a week from some manager at a print shop who had a guy who had been fired or laid off. Not only did they not know how to operate the programs needed to finish "this project that MUST be printed TODAY", but they often didn't even know which file it was on the computer they needed to print. My official technical advise to them was the beg the guy they had just fired to come back because he is the only one who could probably help them. The notice is often a courtesy to the company to give them time to hire a new person to fill the position and transfer knowledge. Things often aren't documented and if they are it's usually in a manner only the writer really understands well. Some hiring processes can take months to find the right candidate and bring them up to speed.
can't really understand the loathing most people here display for facebook.
Well, most/. users simply don't have many friends to communicate with while the ones they do have never invite them to any events and never post on their status updates. Furthermore, their families deny all their attempts to friend them and they are still upset from never hearing back from all the beautiful russian women that friended them on MySpace. The emotional pain associated with Facebook is simply too great for them to deal with.
The cost of (relatively) cheap gasoline? War, war, and more war. That cheap gasoline is only cheap because we're willing to bankrupt ourselves to get it.
I'm sorry, but at what time after the war, war, war did gas prices get cheaper than perviously? If we had wanted cheap gas, we would have simply done what France, Germany, and Russia (the three that opposed the Iraq war BTW) did and cut a sweet deal with Saddam. Since we were the main opponents on the security council keeping them from re-entering the market, we coudl have probably got it for nothing. No, we went to war to control the oil, and make it expensive. More expensive oil means more profits for oil companies. Despite what my Republican father has ever said, at no point was a war in Iraq ever going to make oil or gas cheap.
The study estimates that 1 billion extra gallons of fuel
Less than what the US could save by making sure their tires are properly inflated (1.25 billion). let alone what we could save by cleaning out our trunks, removing our winter bags of sand, or other weight just sitting around in the car. Both are much easier than getting people to lose weight, but I doubt if they are getting done. Good luck on getting people to stop being obese to save an non-detectable part of their gas bill. For that matter, it would probably be easier just to appeal to get them to keep from diving as much (which if they walk or bike would also cut into the obese issue).
Actually, people should be identified by their state--Texan, New Yorker, Floridian, etc. It's not the United State of America, it's the United States of America--indicating that each one has a level of sovereignty, and people should be identified by that smaller area. Similarly, people are Scottish or Welsh, and not United Kingdomian.
This used to be the norm, but I think our civil war put pat to that idea as the nation become more important than the individual states. Even then, which one would it be? My state of birth? The one I grew up and was socialized in. And if more than one, which? The current state of residence? The last one I paid taxes in? I'd bet most people move from state to state at least once in their life and often more due to schooling and work. I suppose mine would be Washingtonian as that's where I live, although I prefer the term Okie as I grew up in Oklahoma and left never to return (where people who still live there are Oklahomans).
From the pig point of view, what is their motivation for doing this?
Shame. Community opinion is or can be a strong motivator. Knowing that if you get caught DUI, not only do you face fines and restrictions on your driving but everybody in your community will know about it, is an added deterance. IIRC, this has been done in local newspapers before and has been shown to cut down on the number of drunk drivers.
They make products which cater for the average consumer, not the hardcore techheads which most other tech companies seem to make products for. This is why they sell so much.
I don't think it's so much that other companies make products for techheads, but that the products are designed by them. I simply don't think companies put enough work into UI and product design so you get things that not only look bad, but work awkwardly. It's like websites and letting your developers design the webpages. Take me for example. I can make a webpage do whatever you want it to, but leave the design up to me and my right brained tendencies will produce a square, blocky, and generally unappealing website with all the features you would want. it will probably also be hard to navigate because I have no idea what features need to be where or are used how much. Get a web designer with some UI and graphics training to give me a design and say "make this" and you'll have all your features along with a nice looking and easy to use webpage.
It will likely happen again. Apple will again hit rock bottom, as they did the first time around. Their business model of selling expensive devices to hipsters (basically the same model they used in the 1970s and 1980s) results in a quick adoption rate among those with money to burn, but soon market forces bring in competitors who appeal to the other 98% of the population. Apple will again be relegated to the 2% marketshare they "enjoyed" in the PC market for so many years.
I think you have it wrong on several accounts. They did not sell to hipsters in the 70's and 80's, they sold to professionals. Not all professionals, but rather the graphics and printing professionals (as well as academia) that the Macintosh was built to support. They pretty much did anything with graphics, if you walked into a radiology department in the 90's, everything would probably be Mac. Where they went wrong and started to crash was when they tried to compete with the PCs and Dell in the low margin section of the market to try and gain market share. Between lots of confusing and underpowered models and being undersold by the clones, Apple was not doing well. Sell premium products with decent margins and they may only have a small share of the market, but that's where the majority of the profits are. The top 2% of the market is probably worth the bottom 50% and not a bad place to be.
Yes, like a history of thoughtful design and a slew of devices that work much better than their competitors for normal usage patterns, despite having fewer "and the kitchen sink" features.
Yes, exactly. I don't think many of the people who use the term "marketing" really understand what it means. It's not just making things pretty and paying for a good advertising campaign which I think most people use it to mean. Marketing begins with determining what the market actually wants. Then determining how to sell it in that market. It's all based on customer satisfaction. People use "marketing" like some sort of pejorative, but in reality, there is no secret to marketing but making the customer happy by giving them a product they are happy with and continue to enjoy. Apple has done this. They do this to the point that people wonder why they would ever want their product at first glance ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."), but once they get ahold of it they like it, tell their friends, their friends buy them, and then when they need another product they trust the company to provide a similarly satisfactory product (at which point we are no longer talking about marketing but branding, which is a different rant).
Yes, but when our elected representatives tell us they are waging a just war on our behalf, waging it well, and not killing very many innocent bystanders, we need some knowledge of how truthful they are being so we'll know when to vote them out.
What do you want to bet that we probably aren't killing very many innocent bystanders compared to previous wars? I'd like to see the comparison between the Afghan war and WW2 with regards to civilian casualties due to various causes including bombing, mistaken identities, and other mistakes. I suspect that you'll find that the Afghan war is quite clean comparitively due to increases in technology as well as discipline. It's just that even that level is probably more than the average person is willing to deal with. It's like taking your average family to a slaughterhouse so they can see where their food comes from when they've never been to one before.
Sorry, but how stupid do you think the rest of the world really is?
Well, we are dealing with legalities here. First, it would legally have to be a country to illegally occupy it. Then we'd have to illegally occupy it. Seeing how the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan never actually controlled all of Afghanistan, and had been recognized as a government by three countries in the world, there is a question if it was even a country to begin with. That we came in and helped the Norther Alliance which controlled the other part of Afghanistan also would muddle up the things. Then, or course, war is not illegal. Countries go to war all the time. I'm sort of unsure what actually counts as an illegal war. It was illegal by the US constitution as that went through the courts already and found the if congress ok's it, then it's a war.
As for how stupid the rest of the world is, it's not like anybody actually objected to us going into Afghanistan. 9/11 was certainly a cause for war against another nation, if there was even a nation to go to war against in this case. That only three (other Islamic run nations) even bothered to recognize them as a country speaks for how much they were actually liked. It's much like Iraq. Nobody really objected to us going into Iraq except the countries who were already doing business pumping and distributing their oil. Everybody else seemed to think it was a chance to get rid of the crazy dude on the block that nobody liked that often attacked other people.
Really, if you want to claim it was illegal, you're going to have to come up with some laws to actually back that claim up.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing that occurred to my mind when I read it was simply that they were lying. Another vapor product in an impressive array of vapor products.
The trouble is that nuclear doesn't replace the niche that petroleum currently fills, it would replace coal. While petroleum is a convenient energy source, especially for vehicles, the much more important use of petroleum is manufacturing for things like cheap plastics. That is where we will really feel the crunch of peak oil. Once we don't have cheap plastics to make stuff with any more, those prices will go up and effect out lives as much as rising gas prices. This will have a major effect in health care as so much of our modern medical procedures are dependent on using lots of cheap plastic sterile disposable equipment. You'll really know that peak oil has hit when packaging starts going from plastic back to glass and paper.
I would imagine that that would be the amount for the hardware and software setup and configuration. They probably got everything from a vendor, set up and ready to go, and if the money value has any bearing on real life, it's probably the replacement cost of everything ready to go again. It could be the cost of the entire system project, but that would be extremely cheap for server, set up, software, vendor time, training, etc.
From my understanding which is limited and probably out of date, ebonics is essentially west African language and grammar spoken with English words. When slaves were brought over, they continued to speak their native languages but with the English words they were expected to use. This is not just a rearrangement of words and use of different tenses, but other nuances also. A question may have different meanings (and thus have different answers) depending on who is the one speaking even though the wording is the same for all speakers, for example.
Except, that if you are doing anything more than just sending out probes to report back, they need to be self-repairing and self-replicating machines. Entropy happens. Things break down. To send out machines to spread, you'd also have to send complete factories along with them. Right now, biological creatures not only have machines beat at sentience and learning, but also the ability to repair themselves and create new versions of themselves. Biological creatures are de facto nanotech self replicators and far better than anything we can design in machines and I would bet that once you attempt such with machines, they will end up looking a great deal like biological creatures and probably borrow a great deal from biology to get it done also.
And if you were my manager and constantly behind me all the time watching for no reason, that would be an issue I could take to HR. Not only is it simply bad management, but harassment. Typically, if I'm not up to the job and require special observation, I need to be told why and be given goals to reach to be taken off such, otherwise it opens up the corporation to other issues. In Germany, if my wife's cousin is to be believed, the companies actually care about their workers and have company run unions that actually do look out for them. In the US, bad management is what leads to unions. Managers and companies who think they can do whatever they want because they are the employers and treat their workers like slaves.
You must mean back when they littered more than they do now. Public trash cans appeared in the early part of the 20th century mainly because of all the banana peels that were getting littered around. With the much sturdier Gross Michael bananas of the time, stepping and slipping on them really was a problem which is why they ended up being displayed in so many cartoons.
Graffiti has been found on the great pyramids, put their by the builders, and period reports state that Imperial Rome was covered in it. Even when non-literate, the population would put up pictures. For that matter, the heyday of American graffiti was in the 70's (but at that point one must talk about street art versus graffiti, or rather discussion with anybody who cares enough to know actual knowledge about it through history will trend that way).
And they walked up hill both ways to do it too.
You might be beginning to have a point here and in the rest of your post, however, your imaginary nostalgia for the past probably has most people dismissing you by this point. Community spirit and support for such things is all fine and good, but then you have a locally biased upholding so such rules. Metropolitan police only date back to the Victorian era (~1855) in London and then later in NYC. Before then it was all the sheriff and local citizens. While their creation probably did lead to less involvement by local citizens in law enforcement affairs, the general consensus in the histories I have read say that it resulted in a more uniform upholding of those laws. The rich and powerful may have lots of clout now with law enforcement, but they had even more back when the only people who could do anything about it were their employees.
Airplane crashes like this one always are. It is very rare that any one thing causes an airplane to crash. It's almost always multiple things going wrong all at the same time to cause it to happen. Pilot does something wrong after getting a mistaken order from the control tower and is hit by a freak wind. ANy one of those thing probably wouldn't cause a plane to crash and checking out each one when it happens and correcting them is a reason planes spend so much time on the ground and not taking off on time. This particular computer in TFA isn't the thing that caused the plane to crash, it is something that records the data from all the other systems that are mission critical.
I'm sorry, but if you already have a stalker, who already has your address as well as a detailed knowledge of what your street looks like including the buildings on either side of yours, preventing somebody from posting a picture of your building as seen from the public street is not really going to help you. I'm surprised that even seems like a comforting idea. It much more likely that your stalker would post said photo and you could use that to get a restraining order or press charges for breaking one, than that it would ever aid him in stalking.
No, this is more like making a phone book of phone numbers that are listed on publicly displayed signs outside of each house.
Not really. If an abusive spouse or a foreign government wants you, and they already have your address, lacking a picture of your address (when they have pictures of the ones on either side of it) is not really an issue. I'm afraid your point seems to be a straw man argument. I would say the previous posters first remark about wanting to avoid attention by not demanding special attention is justified. You also seem to be taking the slippery slope by inferring that the previous poster claimed that they all did want attention and was an asshole for doing so. What he did was say that if they wanted attention, they got it. It was more of a descriptive statement than prescriptive.
Still, if somebody wants to have their house excluded from street view for whatever reason, I'm glad they can request such. However, if somebody else wants to add it in, they should be allowed to do so as it is a public face of a building that can be seen by anybody. We also have no idea of the reason that a person would want to add such a photo record back in and there are just as many justified reasons one could come up with starting with a simple historical record. We all live in this world together and just as two people cannot occupy the same space at the same time, there are allowances that have to be taken into account because of that.
If you really hate both, support Silverlight, if you suspect the loser will disappear. Whatever one wins will require cross platform support, and I just don't think MS will provide that. Once they gain superiority, it will probably be like it was with IE, they'll sit on it, not make any real improvements, stop all Mac development and never even address Linux. By that time, HTML 5 will be finished and ready and since it's the only cross browser and platform choice, it will win.
Insurance. Those three months salary may be chump change compared to what might happen if the new guy can't perform the same job as the old guy you just fired. Critical system goes down, some job can't be completed, or there is some obscure but important bit of knowledge that wasn't transfered are all cases where it might pay to keep the guy on salary so you can call him in, as he is still on salary, and get him to tell the new guy how it's done. I used to do technical support for Adobe (Pagemaker and Photoshop), and I would get about one call a week from some manager at a print shop who had a guy who had been fired or laid off. Not only did they not know how to operate the programs needed to finish "this project that MUST be printed TODAY", but they often didn't even know which file it was on the computer they needed to print. My official technical advise to them was the beg the guy they had just fired to come back because he is the only one who could probably help them. The notice is often a courtesy to the company to give them time to hire a new person to fill the position and transfer knowledge. Things often aren't documented and if they are it's usually in a manner only the writer really understands well. Some hiring processes can take months to find the right candidate and bring them up to speed.
Well, most /. users simply don't have many friends to communicate with while the ones they do have never invite them to any events and never post on their status updates. Furthermore, their families deny all their attempts to friend them and they are still upset from never hearing back from all the beautiful russian women that friended them on MySpace. The emotional pain associated with Facebook is simply too great for them to deal with.
You must be new here.
Welcome to /.
I'm sorry, but at what time after the war, war, war did gas prices get cheaper than perviously? If we had wanted cheap gas, we would have simply done what France, Germany, and Russia (the three that opposed the Iraq war BTW) did and cut a sweet deal with Saddam. Since we were the main opponents on the security council keeping them from re-entering the market, we coudl have probably got it for nothing. No, we went to war to control the oil, and make it expensive. More expensive oil means more profits for oil companies. Despite what my Republican father has ever said, at no point was a war in Iraq ever going to make oil or gas cheap.
Less than what the US could save by making sure their tires are properly inflated (1.25 billion). let alone what we could save by cleaning out our trunks, removing our winter bags of sand, or other weight just sitting around in the car. Both are much easier than getting people to lose weight, but I doubt if they are getting done. Good luck on getting people to stop being obese to save an non-detectable part of their gas bill. For that matter, it would probably be easier just to appeal to get them to keep from diving as much (which if they walk or bike would also cut into the obese issue).
This used to be the norm, but I think our civil war put pat to that idea as the nation become more important than the individual states. Even then, which one would it be? My state of birth? The one I grew up and was socialized in. And if more than one, which? The current state of residence? The last one I paid taxes in? I'd bet most people move from state to state at least once in their life and often more due to schooling and work. I suppose mine would be Washingtonian as that's where I live, although I prefer the term Okie as I grew up in Oklahoma and left never to return (where people who still live there are Oklahomans).
Shame. Community opinion is or can be a strong motivator. Knowing that if you get caught DUI, not only do you face fines and restrictions on your driving but everybody in your community will know about it, is an added deterance. IIRC, this has been done in local newspapers before and has been shown to cut down on the number of drunk drivers.
I don't think it's so much that other companies make products for techheads, but that the products are designed by them. I simply don't think companies put enough work into UI and product design so you get things that not only look bad, but work awkwardly. It's like websites and letting your developers design the webpages. Take me for example. I can make a webpage do whatever you want it to, but leave the design up to me and my right brained tendencies will produce a square, blocky, and generally unappealing website with all the features you would want. it will probably also be hard to navigate because I have no idea what features need to be where or are used how much. Get a web designer with some UI and graphics training to give me a design and say "make this" and you'll have all your features along with a nice looking and easy to use webpage.
I think you have it wrong on several accounts. They did not sell to hipsters in the 70's and 80's, they sold to professionals. Not all professionals, but rather the graphics and printing professionals (as well as academia) that the Macintosh was built to support. They pretty much did anything with graphics, if you walked into a radiology department in the 90's, everything would probably be Mac. Where they went wrong and started to crash was when they tried to compete with the PCs and Dell in the low margin section of the market to try and gain market share. Between lots of confusing and underpowered models and being undersold by the clones, Apple was not doing well. Sell premium products with decent margins and they may only have a small share of the market, but that's where the majority of the profits are. The top 2% of the market is probably worth the bottom 50% and not a bad place to be.
Yes, exactly. I don't think many of the people who use the term "marketing" really understand what it means. It's not just making things pretty and paying for a good advertising campaign which I think most people use it to mean. Marketing begins with determining what the market actually wants. Then determining how to sell it in that market. It's all based on customer satisfaction. People use "marketing" like some sort of pejorative, but in reality, there is no secret to marketing but making the customer happy by giving them a product they are happy with and continue to enjoy. Apple has done this. They do this to the point that people wonder why they would ever want their product at first glance ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."), but once they get ahold of it they like it, tell their friends, their friends buy them, and then when they need another product they trust the company to provide a similarly satisfactory product (at which point we are no longer talking about marketing but branding, which is a different rant).
Get hungry enough, and you'll figure it out. You may not be good at it, but you'll get better or die.
What do you want to bet that we probably aren't killing very many innocent bystanders compared to previous wars? I'd like to see the comparison between the Afghan war and WW2 with regards to civilian casualties due to various causes including bombing, mistaken identities, and other mistakes. I suspect that you'll find that the Afghan war is quite clean comparitively due to increases in technology as well as discipline. It's just that even that level is probably more than the average person is willing to deal with. It's like taking your average family to a slaughterhouse so they can see where their food comes from when they've never been to one before.
Well, we are dealing with legalities here. First, it would legally have to be a country to illegally occupy it. Then we'd have to illegally occupy it. Seeing how the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan never actually controlled all of Afghanistan, and had been recognized as a government by three countries in the world, there is a question if it was even a country to begin with. That we came in and helped the Norther Alliance which controlled the other part of Afghanistan also would muddle up the things. Then, or course, war is not illegal. Countries go to war all the time. I'm sort of unsure what actually counts as an illegal war. It was illegal by the US constitution as that went through the courts already and found the if congress ok's it, then it's a war.
As for how stupid the rest of the world is, it's not like anybody actually objected to us going into Afghanistan. 9/11 was certainly a cause for war against another nation, if there was even a nation to go to war against in this case. That only three (other Islamic run nations) even bothered to recognize them as a country speaks for how much they were actually liked. It's much like Iraq. Nobody really objected to us going into Iraq except the countries who were already doing business pumping and distributing their oil. Everybody else seemed to think it was a chance to get rid of the crazy dude on the block that nobody liked that often attacked other people.
Really, if you want to claim it was illegal, you're going to have to come up with some laws to actually back that claim up.