I would think that a sizeable nuclear detonation (at the right time and place) would cause a pressure wave powerful enough to disrupt the dynamo that is the low pressure center of a hurricane, and dissipate it. I dunno, any meteorologists in the crowd? Just how sensitive is a hurricane to disruptions of that magnitude? Do we even have a vaguest notion?
Ubuntu is a free, open source operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should "Just Work", TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release.
It's right there in the first sentence... Perhaps you want a large blinking banner at the top of ubuntu.com?
A large number of the Ubuntu devs are (wait for it...) Debian devs, too. Ubuntu regularly contributes back to Debian. I'm sure there are political squabbles, but to say that Ubuntu doesn't give credit to Debian is nonsense.
The tone of your comment indicates you don't have much experience with dealing with the police
Oh, please. You've been playing too much GTA. Sure, there are asshole cops, but the vast majority are just doing their jobs, and they have a shitty job in a lot of ways. They have to deal with entitled and unappreciative citizens, sociopaths, crazy homeless people, roadside-stranded soccer moms, drug dealers, retarded teenagers and twentysomethings who haven't accepted the fact of their mortality when they get behind the wheel, etc. etc.
Think about it. If most of the people you dealt with on a regular basis were sociopathic and/or crazy, you might be just a little harsh too, don't you think? Cops deal with scum so you don't have to.
Not saying that there aren't bad cops, but I don't think it's fair to assume they're all power-tripping jerks.
BTW, the one time I actually did pull to the shoulder to make/take a call because I didn't have a handsfree setup, a cop actually pulled up behind me and approached my car to find out what I was doing - despite the fact that I was obeying the letter of the law! He actually had to ask me, even though he clearly saw the phone pressed to my ear.
The tone of your comment indicates that the cop was stupid or nosy. Did it occur to you that perhaps the cop was just doing his job? As public safety officers, if they see something out of the ordinary (motorist on the side of the road), it's their job to check it out. You could have been broken down, or just had an altercation with another driver and were freaking out, or whatever. It's not as if you had a big sign in the back window that said "Just making a phone call!", so how was he supposed to know what was going on?
Email addresses are effectively public domain - like standing out in public. It's the inbox owner who must decide what they want.
That's stupid and dangerous. You've clearly never run a mail server of any real size. There is a very real and quantifiable cost to spam filtering. For an organization of any significant size (we're talking at least tens of thousands of email addresses), spam and virus filtering needs its own infrastructure. A lot of companies outsource to someone (e.g. Postini). That costs thousands (I know this, I am not talking out of my ass) of dollars every month. Even if the infrastructure is kept in-house, there is a significant up-front investment in hardware, plus the cost of staff to administer the spam/virus filtering infrastructre (if the org is big enough, this could be close to a full-time job). Not to mention the extra bandwidth costs when four spammers do a simultaneous distributed spam run, etc. etc.
It's not enough to allow the "mailbox owner" (a term that dodges the fact that corporate email is owned by the corporation) to decide whether or not they want to use spam filtering. First of all, most end-users have no idea how to make it happen, second, the company has to pay for the disk to store the shit that users never clean out.
Spam is not first-amendment-protected speech. If someone is standing on a soapbox yammering about their religion or hawking viagra or whatever, I can choose not to listen, and it doesn't cost me anything either way. Spam, on the other hand, does cost businesses a lot of money, and it costs the spammer virtually nothing. If spammers had to pay per recipient the way direct (postal) mailing marketers do, spam wouldn't be a problem.
It's 2006. Why are we having this conversation? This was all debated and decided in the late 90s. Did you miss the memo?
I wasn't pointing out the store... Their site was recently redone using RoR. And I wasn't pointing at PA as an example of a particularly complex site, although I'm sure it gets quite a bit of traffic.
The main thrust of my post wasn't to be a RoR fanboy, although I can see why it would come across that way. That will teach me to post pre-caffeine. The reason I bothered to post was because of my annoyance with people like you who pontificate about why they won't bother to "believe the hype" without having done anything to learn about why the hype exists.
Sure, be skeptical. But until you've actually tried Ruby/Rails (notice that I am distinguishing between the language and the platform - I use Ruby outside of Rails), your dismissal of it just sounds like cranky curmudgeonly sour grapes.
Take a look at Ruby someday, you may be pleasantly surprised. I have nearly a decade (as both a sysadmin and webapp programmer) invested in Perl/Python, but I love Ruby and use it whenever I can now. Languages are tools, true, but some tools are better than others.
On a bang-for-buck analysis, it's better to lace together OSCommerce, phpBB2, and one of the random CMSes in order to produce an actual workable Web site that, you know, does something.
That must be some good crack you've got there. Have you ever heard of a little company called 37 Signals? No? Go check them out and tell me that their applications aren't useful. Ever heard of a site called Penny Arcade? No? Well, then I guess you're from another planet then, or something. Those are just some quick examples from memory of sites done in Ruby/Rails.
You stick to your *snicker* PHP... I'll be having more fun and getting more done with less code.
Put another way, RoR seems to do things that are simple very simply, and it seems to do things that have already been done quite simply. But for new, radically different applications, you're still back to straight programming and hand-writing SQL.
Opinions are like assholes... Everyone's got one, and often they stink. It's always amusing to watch people (here and elsewhere) spout off about something without even having learned about it.
If you had said "I've tried Rails, and here are xyz reasons why I don't feel compelled to move to it", I might be more interested in what you have to say. As it is, your post is about as useful as tits on a bull.:P
You'd have a point if we had a draft, but we don't so you don't.
And I am proud of the men and women who volunteer to serve in our military. I don't fault them. It's not their place to question the wisdom of their orders, as long as they are lawful. That's not my point.
My point is that too often the politicians of this country play chess with real lives. If military service were a prerequisite for higher public office, you could be damn sure that we wouldn't send the military into situations unless we had to. And we'd let them do their job. The military is designed to serve a single purpose: To cause death and mayhem in a controlled fashion, when it's deemed necessary. Any other use of the military is wasteful, and in my opinion, criminal.
Because your government chose to bomb and invade Irak, killing tens of thousands of people, reducing the country's infrastructures to a state which is worse than during Saddam reign ?
Frankly, I don't think that Americans are in any position to complain.
Where in the fuck did you get the idea that I was happy about that? I am mad as hell that we went there to begin with, dummy. It's not my government. I didn't vote for them. I held my nose and voted for the other guys. So did most of the people in my state and my part of the country.
The Iraqi people don't want us there, no matter how many right-wing cheerleaders post pictures of smiling children. If they did, they'd police themselves and settle the fuck down. After the shrine was blown up the other week, there were Iraqi police running around killing Sunnis. There are Shiite death squads (mostly police and army) who've been operating pretty much out in the open for at least a year.
This is not a civilized place, and the people are not ready for democracy. They don't want it. We can't force it on them. We fucked up. We've wasted money and lives. If the islamic world cared about anything besides hating the West, they'd step in and help Iraq help itself.
The US military does not train peacekeepers! They're trained to bring as much death and destruction to an area as they have to in order to achieve a strategic goal. When the military gets involved, people die. I wish our fucking cowboy-in-chief understood that, or cared. Maybe if most of our government officials hadn't gotten deferments in the last big war (oh, sorry, "police action"), they'd understand that.
For the record, lefties annoy me as much as right-wingers. They're two sides of the same (stupid) coin. People don't fucking think for themselves anymore.
Meanwhile in many sections of Iraq, people have their first clean water, their first reliable electricity, their first real sewer system, ever. Hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals exist where no service was available for at least 20 years.
That's great. Why should I have to pay for it? Why should my friends and relatives have to go die for it? I don't give a flying fuck about the Iraqi people, frankly. There are kids here in the US who aren't getting a decent education or nourishment. I have relatives who can't afford good health care, in the most wealthy society on the planet.
Where are all the islamic countries and their aid? Why is it the job of the US to police the world and free the oppressed people (as long as there is some supposed long-term strategic value to doing so)? Look at what's happening in Sudan. Why aren't we sending in the troops? Oh, right... No strategic interests in that part of the world.
People like you make me crazy. Either you're insulting my intelligence by trying to divert my attention with emotional rhetoric, or you're just stupid. I wish the Bush Administration would just have the balls (hear that Rummy?) to just fucking say what they're doing, and why. "We believe that having a friendly country in the middle east will be in our long-term interests. So we took out an unfriendly despot in a country that wasn't particularly liked by its neighbors (a bunch of slightly more friendly despots). But we didn't do the homework on what would happen, and now we're kinda stuck. Oops! Live and learn!"
No, they have to pull out this stupid "Think of the happy Iraqi children!" bullshit.
I see what you are saying but it seems to me that international corporations mostly make their profits by producing goods in a cheap labour market and selling them in expensive ones.
Do you think that all Asian economies will always remain sources of cheap labor? It's still somewhat alarmist hand-waving to predict that China/India will suddenly become economic superpowers on a par with the US/Europe, but that does seem to be the trend. They are cranking out huge numbers of PhDs over there, and China especially is pouring TONS of government money into research. The way the US used to pour money into research when it was trying to win the space race and cold war. Now the US is distracted by "The War on Terror", and "The War on Drugs", and "The War on Teen Sex." US Congresscritters live and die by how much pork they bring home for their constituents (who aren't necessarily their electorate), which makes them pretty short-sighted.
Sure, there will always be someone lower down on the ladder to provide the cheap labor (think Africa), but it's a mistake to think that the US will always be at the top of the consumer pile. Check out "The World Is Flat", by Thomas Friedman sometime.
It's even worse on Unix; due to my perpetual inability to figure out the "find" syntax (and I'd really like to slap the guy who wrote that MAN page) - so I usually just ls -alrtR | grep . It works. Is it wrong? Am I perverse?
Wrong? No. Somewhat inefficient? Yes. With just one extra fork/exec, it's not too bad. But if you don't force yourself to learn find, you may wind up stringing together an unnecessarily long pipeline to do something that you could do with just one command. I suppose that may be the time to force yourself to learn, when you need something more efficient, but I like to try to be efficient by default.
As others have said "locate" is pretty handy too, but only if the file(s) in question were put down on disk before the last updatedb ran. If you're sifting through a huge source tree that you just checked out or whatever, find is pretty damned handy. find + xargs is even handy-er.
Nice Tricky lyric, btw. Was just listening to that the other day.
...and as they steam faster and faster into 'streamlining' and 'outsourcing' they will find that the consumers who are on the bottom end of their supply chain have no money to spend on their products or the products of their customers. Not to worry though, the current CEO's will probably have retired by that point!
Here's the thing that people don't get... Most big corporations are multinationals. They may give the appearance of being US-based, because that's what they were historically. Not anymore. As the US consumer base dries up and the middle-class hollows out, these corporations will simply move on to greener pastures. So, if you want to avoid being left behind, better start brushing up on your Cantonese or Hindi!
The CEO of DuPont was quoted in the latest Time (proxy):
"If the U.S. doesn't get its act together, Du Pont is going to go to the countries that do, and so are IBM and Intel. We'd much rather be here, but we have an obligation to our employees and shareholders to bring value where we can."
The context of the quote is in an article about how the US has been slowly losing its edge in Math and Science. Take a look at the rest of the article, it's pretty interesting (if depressing).
Do I really need to make a list of innovations that originated outside of the military and then adopted by the military?
It would certainly help your argument more than posturing without presenting any facts. Face it, he's right. No, not everything is invented because of a military need, but the world would be pretty freakin' different without military spending. Do you really and truly believe that ARPANET would have been developed by private enterprise? What would the justification have been, assuming it even occurred to them? The Internet was around for nearly two decades before private enterprise even had a clue about what they could do with it.
Don't let idealism blind you to reality. You don't have to like reality to accept it. The alternative is to waste time and energy on quixotic crusades when you could be working within the system to change it.
Dude, bashing AMD for heat/power issues is sooo 1999... Or do you suppose that Cray (among others) now builds supercomputers with AMD Opterons just for the fuck of it?
Why the ISP and not the people who got the spam...
While I'm sure it's annoying and possibly inconvenient for the individual recipients to receive spam, there is relatively little economic impact (don't blather at me about the time spent cleaning inboxes...) for them. For the ISP, on the other hand, there is a huge economic impact as a result of dealing with spam. Think of all the extra bandwidth, disk space, CPU cycles, and man-hours spent just on dealing with your normal, every-day spam. Then think about what happens when spammers decide to do a spam run against your servers... Or when spammers joe-job your domain... etc. etc.
Fighting spam isn't just about keeping v1gr4 ads out of the inboxes of kids, it's about punishing the jackasses who ruin the Commons (the public Internet), and waste resources.
I'm glad to know I'm not alone in this sentiment. I tried migrating from Quicken 2005 for Windows (running in VMWare) to Quicken for Mac 2006 and it was a disaster. Migration issues aside, when I managed to get enough imported to start using it, it crashed left and right. Intuit's "support" consisted of a painful java-based chat with some ESL monkey who was totally unhelpful...
Now I'm working on getting my money back and figuring out some other way to get my wife involved with the finances.
Slashdot Mirror
I installed Dapper Drake last month. It set my monitor to 1024x768@60Hz. I wanted it to display 1280x1024@85Hz.
/etc/issue
Tell me how I could have done that in the menus without editing X86Config.
System->Preferences->Screen Resolution
@ganymede:~$ cat
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS \n \l
I would think that a sizeable nuclear detonation (at the right time and place) would cause a pressure wave powerful enough to disrupt the dynamo that is the low pressure center of a hurricane, and dissipate it. I dunno, any meteorologists in the crowd? Just how sensitive is a hurricane to disruptions of that magnitude? Do we even have a vaguest notion?
The NOAA might.
On top of not working, it'd just spew nuclear fallout everywhere. That's silly.
How?
From About Ubuntu:
It's right there in the first sentence... Perhaps you want a large blinking banner at the top of ubuntu.com?
A large number of the Ubuntu devs are (wait for it...) Debian devs, too. Ubuntu regularly contributes back to Debian. I'm sure there are political squabbles, but to say that Ubuntu doesn't give credit to Debian is nonsense.
Bleh.
The tone of your comment indicates you don't have much experience with dealing with the police
Oh, please. You've been playing too much GTA. Sure, there are asshole cops, but the vast majority are just doing their jobs, and they have a shitty job in a lot of ways. They have to deal with entitled and unappreciative citizens, sociopaths, crazy homeless people, roadside-stranded soccer moms, drug dealers, retarded teenagers and twentysomethings who haven't accepted the fact of their mortality when they get behind the wheel, etc. etc.
Think about it. If most of the people you dealt with on a regular basis were sociopathic and/or crazy, you might be just a little harsh too, don't you think? Cops deal with scum so you don't have to.
Not saying that there aren't bad cops, but I don't think it's fair to assume they're all power-tripping jerks.
BTW, the one time I actually did pull to the shoulder to make/take a call because I didn't have a handsfree setup, a cop actually pulled up behind me and approached my car to find out what I was doing - despite the fact that I was obeying the letter of the law! He actually had to ask me, even though he clearly saw the phone pressed to my ear.
The tone of your comment indicates that the cop was stupid or nosy. Did it occur to you that perhaps the cop was just doing his job? As public safety officers, if they see something out of the ordinary (motorist on the side of the road), it's their job to check it out. You could have been broken down, or just had an altercation with another driver and were freaking out, or whatever. It's not as if you had a big sign in the back window that said "Just making a phone call!", so how was he supposed to know what was going on?
Just a thought.
postini costs about 40 cents a user, a month.
20,000 * $0.40 = $8000
What's your point? fwiw, when I dealt with them, we had a contract for ~$0.32/user/mo. That's $6400/mo, or $76,800/year.
Fortunately, that job is Not My Problem anymore.
Email addresses are effectively public domain - like standing out in public. It's the inbox owner who must decide what they want.
That's stupid and dangerous. You've clearly never run a mail server of any real size. There is a very real and quantifiable cost to spam filtering. For an organization of any significant size (we're talking at least tens of thousands of email addresses), spam and virus filtering needs its own infrastructure. A lot of companies outsource to someone (e.g. Postini). That costs thousands (I know this, I am not talking out of my ass) of dollars every month. Even if the infrastructure is kept in-house, there is a significant up-front investment in hardware, plus the cost of staff to administer the spam/virus filtering infrastructre (if the org is big enough, this could be close to a full-time job). Not to mention the extra bandwidth costs when four spammers do a simultaneous distributed spam run, etc. etc.
It's not enough to allow the "mailbox owner" (a term that dodges the fact that corporate email is owned by the corporation) to decide whether or not they want to use spam filtering. First of all, most end-users have no idea how to make it happen, second, the company has to pay for the disk to store the shit that users never clean out.
Spam is not first-amendment-protected speech. If someone is standing on a soapbox yammering about their religion or hawking viagra or whatever, I can choose not to listen, and it doesn't cost me anything either way. Spam, on the other hand, does cost businesses a lot of money, and it costs the spammer virtually nothing. If spammers had to pay per recipient the way direct (postal) mailing marketers do, spam wouldn't be a problem.
It's 2006. Why are we having this conversation? This was all debated and decided in the late 90s. Did you miss the memo?
I wasn't pointing out the store... Their site was recently redone using RoR. And I wasn't pointing at PA as an example of a particularly complex site, although I'm sure it gets quite a bit of traffic.
/me shrugs
The main thrust of my post wasn't to be a RoR fanboy, although I can see why it would come across that way. That will teach me to post pre-caffeine. The reason I bothered to post was because of my annoyance with people like you who pontificate about why they won't bother to "believe the hype" without having done anything to learn about why the hype exists.
Sure, be skeptical. But until you've actually tried Ruby/Rails (notice that I am distinguishing between the language and the platform - I use Ruby outside of Rails), your dismissal of it just sounds like cranky curmudgeonly sour grapes.
Take a look at Ruby someday, you may be pleasantly surprised. I have nearly a decade (as both a sysadmin and webapp programmer) invested in Perl/Python, but I love Ruby and use it whenever I can now. Languages are tools, true, but some tools are better than others.
On a bang-for-buck analysis, it's better to lace together OSCommerce, phpBB2, and one of the random CMSes in order to produce an actual workable Web site that, you know, does something.
:P
That must be some good crack you've got there. Have you ever heard of a little company called 37 Signals? No? Go check them out and tell me that their applications aren't useful. Ever heard of a site called Penny Arcade? No? Well, then I guess you're from another planet then, or something. Those are just some quick examples from memory of sites done in Ruby/Rails.
You stick to your *snicker* PHP... I'll be having more fun and getting more done with less code.
Put another way, RoR seems to do things that are simple very simply, and it seems to do things that have already been done quite simply. But for new, radically different applications, you're still back to straight programming and hand-writing SQL.
Opinions are like assholes... Everyone's got one, and often they stink. It's always amusing to watch people (here and elsewhere) spout off about something without even having learned about it.
If you had said "I've tried Rails, and here are xyz reasons why I don't feel compelled to move to it", I might be more interested in what you have to say. As it is, your post is about as useful as tits on a bull.
LOTR Short Version
:)
Thank you! I haven't laughed so much in quite a while. Never thought of it that way...
foo@bar:~$ time for a in $(seq 1 10); do gnome-terminal -e "exit"; done
real 0m2.065s
user 0m0.396s
sys 0m0.076s
foo@bar:~$ time for a in $(seq 1 10); do xterm -e "exit"; done
real 0m2.211s
user 0m0.397s
sys 0m0.077s
This is 2.12, mind.
Does that include the skin lute?
*ka-thud*
That was your lame joke falling flat on its face. A lute is a stringed instrument, dumbass.
Because they volunteered.
You'd have a point if we had a draft, but we don't so you don't.
And I am proud of the men and women who volunteer to serve in our military. I don't fault them. It's not their place to question the wisdom of their orders, as long as they are lawful. That's not my point.
My point is that too often the politicians of this country play chess with real lives. If military service were a prerequisite for higher public office, you could be damn sure that we wouldn't send the military into situations unless we had to. And we'd let them do their job. The military is designed to serve a single purpose: To cause death and mayhem in a controlled fashion, when it's deemed necessary. Any other use of the military is wasteful, and in my opinion, criminal.
Now, how is my point invalidated, again?
Because your government chose to bomb and invade Irak, killing tens of thousands of people, reducing the country's infrastructures to a state which is worse than during Saddam reign ?
Frankly, I don't think that Americans are in any position to complain.
Where in the fuck did you get the idea that I was happy about that? I am mad as hell that we went there to begin with, dummy. It's not my government. I didn't vote for them. I held my nose and voted for the other guys. So did most of the people in my state and my part of the country.
The Iraqi people don't want us there, no matter how many right-wing cheerleaders post pictures of smiling children. If they did, they'd police themselves and settle the fuck down. After the shrine was blown up the other week, there were Iraqi police running around killing Sunnis. There are Shiite death squads (mostly police and army) who've been operating pretty much out in the open for at least a year.
This is not a civilized place, and the people are not ready for democracy. They don't want it. We can't force it on them. We fucked up. We've wasted money and lives. If the islamic world cared about anything besides hating the West, they'd step in and help Iraq help itself.
The US military does not train peacekeepers! They're trained to bring as much death and destruction to an area as they have to in order to achieve a strategic goal. When the military gets involved, people die. I wish our fucking cowboy-in-chief understood that, or cared. Maybe if most of our government officials hadn't gotten deferments in the last big war (oh, sorry, "police action"), they'd understand that.
For the record, lefties annoy me as much as right-wingers. They're two sides of the same (stupid) coin. People don't fucking think for themselves anymore.
Meanwhile in many sections of Iraq, people have their first clean water, their first reliable electricity, their first real sewer system, ever. Hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals exist where no service was available for at least 20 years.
That's great. Why should I have to pay for it? Why should my friends and relatives have to go die for it? I don't give a flying fuck about the Iraqi people, frankly. There are kids here in the US who aren't getting a decent education or nourishment. I have relatives who can't afford good health care, in the most wealthy society on the planet.
Where are all the islamic countries and their aid? Why is it the job of the US to police the world and free the oppressed people (as long as there is some supposed long-term strategic value to doing so)? Look at what's happening in Sudan. Why aren't we sending in the troops? Oh, right... No strategic interests in that part of the world.
People like you make me crazy. Either you're insulting my intelligence by trying to divert my attention with emotional rhetoric, or you're just stupid. I wish the Bush Administration would just have the balls (hear that Rummy?) to just fucking say what they're doing, and why. "We believe that having a friendly country in the middle east will be in our long-term interests. So we took out an unfriendly despot in a country that wasn't particularly liked by its neighbors (a bunch of slightly more friendly despots). But we didn't do the homework on what would happen, and now we're kinda stuck. Oops! Live and learn!"
No, they have to pull out this stupid "Think of the happy Iraqi children!" bullshit.
Bah.
From reference.com (whoever they are):
According to the 'dict' utility on my workstation, it WAS only an adjective as of the 1913 Webster's, but times have changed since then. A little.
I see what you are saying but it seems to me that international corporations mostly make their profits by producing goods in a cheap labour market and selling them in expensive ones.
Do you think that all Asian economies will always remain sources of cheap labor? It's still somewhat alarmist hand-waving to predict that China/India will suddenly become economic superpowers on a par with the US/Europe, but that does seem to be the trend. They are cranking out huge numbers of PhDs over there, and China especially is pouring TONS of government money into research. The way the US used to pour money into research when it was trying to win the space race and cold war. Now the US is distracted by "The War on Terror", and "The War on Drugs", and "The War on Teen Sex." US Congresscritters live and die by how much pork they bring home for their constituents (who aren't necessarily their electorate), which makes them pretty short-sighted.
Sure, there will always be someone lower down on the ladder to provide the cheap labor (think Africa), but it's a mistake to think that the US will always be at the top of the consumer pile. Check out "The World Is Flat", by Thomas Friedman sometime.
It's even worse on Unix; due to my perpetual inability to figure out the "find" syntax (and I'd really like to slap the guy who wrote that MAN page) - so I usually just ls -alrtR | grep . It works. Is it wrong? Am I perverse?
Wrong? No. Somewhat inefficient? Yes. With just one extra fork/exec, it's not too bad. But if you don't force yourself to learn find, you may wind up stringing together an unnecessarily long pipeline to do something that you could do with just one command. I suppose that may be the time to force yourself to learn, when you need something more efficient, but I like to try to be efficient by default.
As others have said "locate" is pretty handy too, but only if the file(s) in question were put down on disk before the last updatedb ran. If you're sifting through a huge source tree that you just checked out or whatever, find is pretty damned handy. find + xargs is even handy-er.
Nice Tricky lyric, btw. Was just listening to that the other day.
...and as they steam faster and faster into 'streamlining' and 'outsourcing' they will find that the consumers who are on the bottom end of their supply chain have no money to spend on their products or the products of their customers. Not to worry though, the current CEO's will probably have retired by that point!
Here's the thing that people don't get... Most big corporations are multinationals. They may give the appearance of being US-based, because that's what they were historically. Not anymore. As the US consumer base dries up and the middle-class hollows out, these corporations will simply move on to greener pastures. So, if you want to avoid being left behind, better start brushing up on your Cantonese or Hindi!
The CEO of DuPont was quoted in the latest Time (proxy):
"If the U.S. doesn't get its act together, Du Pont is going to go to the countries that do, and so are IBM and Intel. We'd much rather be here, but we have an obligation to our employees and shareholders to bring value where we can."
The context of the quote is in an article about how the US has been slowly losing its edge in Math and Science. Take a look at the rest of the article, it's pretty interesting (if depressing).
Bleah.
Do I really need to make a list of innovations that originated outside of the military and then adopted by the military?
It would certainly help your argument more than posturing without presenting any facts. Face it, he's right. No, not everything is invented because of a military need, but the world would be pretty freakin' different without military spending. Do you really and truly believe that ARPANET would have been developed by private enterprise? What would the justification have been, assuming it even occurred to them? The Internet was around for nearly two decades before private enterprise even had a clue about what they could do with it.
Don't let idealism blind you to reality. You don't have to like reality to accept it. The alternative is to waste time and energy on quixotic crusades when you could be working within the system to change it.
But then I'm an invertebrate punster. (so slug me!)
Nice... *POW*
Yeah, like a Republican Congress under the Bush Administration would even [i]threaten[/i] to nationalize [i]anything[/i].
You know, this being the Intarweb and all, that you can actually use HTML tags, instead of [b]pseudo[/b]-tags?
Nitpicks aside, what makes you think that Democrats are any more likely than Republicans to nationalize anything? They're two sides of the same coin.
Dude, bashing AMD for heat/power issues is sooo 1999... Or do you suppose that Cray (among others) now builds supercomputers with AMD Opterons just for the fuck of it?
Tool.
Why the ISP and not the people who got the spam...
While I'm sure it's annoying and possibly inconvenient for the individual recipients to receive spam, there is relatively little economic impact (don't blather at me about the time spent cleaning inboxes...) for them. For the ISP, on the other hand, there is a huge economic impact as a result of dealing with spam. Think of all the extra bandwidth, disk space, CPU cycles, and man-hours spent just on dealing with your normal, every-day spam. Then think about what happens when spammers decide to do a spam run against your servers... Or when spammers joe-job your domain... etc. etc.
Fighting spam isn't just about keeping v1gr4 ads out of the inboxes of kids, it's about punishing the jackasses who ruin the Commons (the public Internet), and waste resources.
Quicken for Mac is awful.
I'm glad to know I'm not alone in this sentiment. I tried migrating from Quicken 2005 for Windows (running in VMWare) to Quicken for Mac 2006 and it was a disaster. Migration issues aside, when I managed to get enough imported to start using it, it crashed left and right. Intuit's "support" consisted of a painful java-based chat with some ESL monkey who was totally unhelpful...
Now I'm working on getting my money back and figuring out some other way to get my wife involved with the finances.