That the process is FUBAR is a given due to the fact that we're talking about government mandated documentation. I've *never* seen that go right. It's not the outsourcing per se. Again, I work for a shop that does this as a specialty. We'll do fixed fee contracts and make it as loose or tight as you like, just spec it how you'd like it going in. We don't waste our clients' money and testing is all we do. Drop me a line if you're interested.
But let's not pretend that the MS Service Packs that large companies install are the same as the ones that small shops do, they're not. A small shop can afford to take its chances because rollback is a lost weekend for IT at worst. The SP loads that go out in responsible big companies are done later, they've often got subsequent hotfixes slipstreamed into them, and they're tested 6 ways from sunday because a bad rollout is catastrophic, something that could easily hit the boardroom level because of its negative impact on the bottom line.
Yes, yes, the CIA did fund and help train the Mujahadeen. The Mujahadeen were not the same as Al Queda. To assert that is true is to say that the present government of Afghanistan (which has plenty of veterans of the Mujahadeen fight against the USSR) is heavily Al Queda. Obviously it is not. Some people who served in the Mujahadeen later went to Al Queda but this is different from the CIA being the force behind the creation of Al Queda.
I currently do IT for a company that does that testing for pharma on an outsource basis. We've been in business for 17 years now and are likely to stay that way because we specialize in creating and executing testing protocols. This is something that internal pharma people usually aren't as good as us at because it's rare that you're doing changes so frequently that you have a full-time group doing it all the time. People write protocols, do some testing, and then get moved to other projects. All we do is test so we get very good at it and are very serious about maintaining that skill set.
Sorry, it's only apparent to the Left, and the more radical sections of it at that. OBL is a rich kid from a very rich family. I haven't heard any estimates of how much it costs to fund "the base" (not the database) that would seriously tax his personal or family wealth and there were always more money men than the bin Laden's involved. So why take money from the CIA when you can fund it yourself? Try Occam's razor. It'll give a nice clean shave.
Got it, hanging the three germans was ok by you. That's fine, it was ok by me too.
Since Japan was being prepared for an "every person a combatant" style defense in preparation of dying to the last man, woman, and child and we knew it (via those MAGIC intercepts), who wasn't a combatant in 1945 Imperial Japan? Try reading about Operation Downfall.
In addition, the Japanese had organized nearly all adult civilians into the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps to perform combat support, and ultimately combat jobs. Weapons and training were generally lacking, but they were expected to make do with what they had.
One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do.... You must aim for the abdomen." (Richard B. Frank, Downfall)
The US military was reading Japan's mail with the MAGIC intercept program. We knew that the Japanese offers of negotiated surrender were feints. We knew that there was no intention of surrender or allowing Japanese politicians to come to the fore who would permit a surrender. They needed to be shocked out of their idiocy or the great meat grinder of war would chew up a great many people on our side and end Japan as a nation (think of Saipan's cliff jumpers endlessly multiplied). The firebombings were an attempt at providing that shock. The nuclear bombs were a refinement of the tactic that eventually worked. Debate all you like but the estimated casualty figures of conventional war far exceeded the actual casualty figures of nuclear bombardment. So why is your military judgment superior to the professionals of the time?
As for breaking the rules of war as retribution for the other side breaking them, please tell me what the alternative enforcement mechanisms are? Reality is that such retaliation is the only law enforcement we've got in time of war. This is because war crimes are generally tactics that give the war criminals a combat advantage. That combat advantage has to be erased somehow or wars will be tilted in favor of the bad guys. A famous story has it that one day, an isolated american soldier was caught by a german patrol and hung as a spy in a church. The next german patrol that went through that church found three hung german soldiers in the exact same spot, marked as spies, just like the american had been. That was the end of the story as no further hangings occurred in that sector.
So was the retribution dishonorable? How many isolated soldiers' lives were saved by the killing of those three germans? Does it matter?
Japan at the time of their surrender in WW II still had mainland possessions in both China and Korea if I recall correctly. So what would the loss of life have been had we had to fight to eject them from China/Korea to make them an island that could be blockaded?
Given Japan's demonstrated commitment to defense in Saipan including the famous mother with babe mass cliff jumps and the crazy mass assaults in the face of overwhelming fire are important considerations in judging the morality of US actions in the Pacific. We were consistently reading Japanese communications and knew that there was no inclination to surrender (though there were some feints done to try to confuse us). The projected death toll to actually take Japan was 1 million allied forces dead and multiple millions of Japanese dead including a massive civilian death toll. Cowing Japan into submission by demonstrating that we could exterminate them without losing large casualties probably lowered the overall death toll for the war.
There is no US equivalent to Saipan. The aims of Islamists in restoring a caliphate, if advocated nonviolently, are actually more likely to come to fruition under GWB's "imperialist" foreign policy than the preceding decades of bipartisan realism. They aren't going to come to power because what they want is monstrous and we'll step in to ensure that peacefully elected Islamists will get peacefully unelected when their inevitable screw ups make the people angry with them.
Finally, no, we didn't train the Islamists as they didn't even exist as a unitary force. We certainly didn't train them in terror tactics. There were veterans of the Afghan war of liberation against the Soviets on both sides of the subsequent civil war. That war of liberation did immense damage to the USSR and was an important factor in the end of the Cold War. The end of the Soviet threat is an important victory and should be recognized as such even as we still deal with the messy cleanup afterwards.
What eventually was the Taliban formed sometime between 1990 and 1994 and took power in 1996. We'd been aiding the mujahadeen since the 1979 invasion (at first just to bleed the Soviets and then to actually win). But all that aid to the non-Taliban groups doesn't exist in the Left's popular imagination. The complexities of Afghani tribal politics and the nuances and shifting sands on which alliances are built there are completely absent in their analysis. We're at fault for everything. We sent money "over there" and "what came back" were the Taliban. Pakistan, Iran, Russia, all these real world actors in Afghanistan just disappear in the left-wing mind and all that's left is US action and bad consequences.
What was the US Pacific fleet's combat power the day before and the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor? By the strategic accounts of the day, the vast majority of it was destroyed (we developed aircraft carrier strategy because we had to. That was all we had left). If a decapitation strike against your country's major defensive force is not a just cause for war, I don't know what is.
As for surrender, of course it wouldn't have been couched in those terms. It would have been put into a "you keep on your side and we'll keep on our side" of the Pacific form for the treaty to "regularize" "facts on the ground". It's highly unlikely that such a peace would have lasted. Eventually Imperial Japan would have been back and with a united E. Asia behind them to bite off more.
I don't know what country you're talking about but in the US, truckers aren't allowed to drive more than 11 hours a day. Those extra 7 hours you talk about would be profitable, but illegal. US truckers are allowed to drive a maximum of 11 hours a day and 77 hours a week. You have to have 10 continuous hours off a day (I googled this off a trucker magazine so it's likely pretty reliable).
If instead of using logbooks to measure time off the road, you could measure the functional ability of a trucker and allow him to run as long as his attention and body can hold out, you might be able to safely increase driving time.
No, you can't drive drunk. The crime that everybody's trying to nail is driving unsafely under the influence of alcohol. They call it DUI for that reason. You're driving drunk when you've had so much that you're under the influence. If your personal alcohol tolerance is higher (genetics or you're an alcoholic), what is DUI for others is not DUI for you. The whole idea is to create a test that captures that data instead of throwing you in jail/taking away driving privileges unjustly because we can test BAC but can't do functional testing with the same ease.
Truckers often get paid by the mile. If an integrated test console (it'll be the same tech but not for games) can safely permit truckers to drive an hour longer a day by giving them a quicky reflex and observation test, that's money in the trucker's pocket and lower insurance rates for the company.
The killer app for this is to create a functional DUI test for the car. You pass, you drive, you get lower insurance rates and a higher barrier to conviction if you get pulled over and your BAC is over the legal limit. This will likely get rolled out for truckers too.
Apple doesn't make an OS 9 version of iTunes either for the same reason it doesn't make a Windows 9x version, these are obsoleted operating systems. Microsoft ended mainstream support on ME at the end of 2003.
This initiative sort of, kind of has a shot at winning *if* there is a long tail in music stores. I don't think there is.
The long tail is the concept that if you can cater to all the niche products in music, books, etc. in an efficient way, you can make more money on the products that don't sell very well than you can on best sellers. Amazon thrives on the long tail.
But while there is value in offering every piece of music under the sun, where's the value in providing every DRM/payments scheme under the sun? All you're doing is weighting your interface down with complexity. 99% of music yo want is going to be available in iTnes. When that changes, it's pretty simple to add a line in the interface that accommodates the newly poplar method of distribtion. Does anybody remember that iTMS itself was just this sort of add-in once upon a time?
So where's the value added other than adding platform support for all the platforms where Mozilla exists but iTunes does not? You have to posit both a highly fragmented DRM universe and an Apple that refuses to adjust to this new reality of heterogeneous licensing markets. I don't think either are very likely.
Some taxes are levied as punishment. Sin taxes are famous for it but class envy taxes exist, the famous luxury tax of a decade ago lost money for the Treasury on net because the rich had the ability to evade the tax by buying internationally. No doubt, there are other taxes out there like that.
I would strongly suspect that either Bill Gates is going to get named in an awful lot of tax suits in TN in the near future or Microsoft lawyers are going to file amicus briefs in every single case that comes up under this law in order to defend their other rights under current law. Just because we don't own the code doesn't mean that the tax won't go through. It'll just mean that they'll be taxing Oracle, MS, and other companies that "own" software. The lobbying storm this will brew will be a real sight to see.
When you buy cable, you're buying access to channels. When you buy internet service, you're buying bandwidth to send and receive traffic at the best rate possible consistent with available network conditions. When you shuffle the channels around on cable, you aren't changing the basic nature of what you've contracted to buy. When you introduce tiered service, you're changing the basic nature of the network. Now you can do that but what you're selling isn't the Internet but just another version of the old walled gardens that have failed so often in the past to survive in the market.
Neither unadulterated communism nor capitalism has ever existed. There is a significant difference to the societal performance curves as you get closer to each ideal. As you get closer to unadulterated communism, economic growth slows and then, on net, reverses. You get more and more destructive distortions in the economy and all sorts of monstrous results. As you get closer to unadulterated capitalism, economic growth tends to expand, poverty tends to be reduced and then eliminated (poverty remains in much of the 1st world because the poverty line is moved up by government fiat), and all sorts of wonderful results tend to happen.
The platonic ideals are justly judged by the real-world performance of their mixed-system imitators. Capitalism works, by that evaluation system, communism doesn't.
You could always work construction, retail, day laboring, or move to some area that doesn't have a 20% unemployment rate. Or maybe you just don't know how to present yourself.
I had a problem getting hired at one point. I eventually figured out that it was my address. I changed my address on my resume and started getting offers within a couple of weeks. (hint: don't use a NW Indiana address if you want a job in Chicago, it's poison).
It's not quite that simple. Employer provided health insurance is a legitimate shackle that keeps many people tied to a job. They move and they lose that nice group policy and because they, or a family member, are not in good health, they're essentially uninsurable elsewhere. That's not to say that there is no solution to this but it's not simply a matter of self-discipline.
You have to subtract out the normal killing rate the Baathist regime would have undertaken absent the war. That puts quite a dent in the numbers. Depending how you estimate that last one, it might even turn the net into a count of lives saved.
Essentially, the proposer of this system would like the record companies to get more and the artists to get less money by artificially reducing successful acts' success in distributing their music. This is supposed to advance the arts how exactly?
It would be highly undesireable for a joint venture of two companies (the band and the record company form essentially a partnership to promote the music) to, by design, negatively impact the separate business of one of the partners, and the less well paid one (in the joint venture) to boot.
No artist in their right mind would sign up for such a thing. Thus, if it ever happens, it will be very likely through legal trickery and misdirection that such a system would be imposed. In the real world, the idea's just never going to happen.
The problem is that you're analyzing music sales in isolation. The Rolling Stones don't make money just from music sales but also from clothing and other ancillary sales. From a certain viewpoint, the music sale is the gateway into that band's community/fanbase. The smaller the fanbase, the less in ancillary sales. You have to analyze the effect on all income and expenses to all players, not just one isolated facet of a complex system.
Stock prices drop because somebody wants to sell, needs to sell, and there are no buyers at the price of the most recent trade. You end up doing a reverse auction until some buyer steps in at the new, lower price. Here you have a monopoly seller. What makes him lower the price? He's got no interest to and by his past actions (keeping most music owned by labels off the market at any time) he's shown he'd rather nobody hear the song than the price be lowered beyond a particular point.
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That the process is FUBAR is a given due to the fact that we're talking about government mandated documentation. I've *never* seen that go right. It's not the outsourcing per se. Again, I work for a shop that does this as a specialty. We'll do fixed fee contracts and make it as loose or tight as you like, just spec it how you'd like it going in. We don't waste our clients' money and testing is all we do. Drop me a line if you're interested.
But let's not pretend that the MS Service Packs that large companies install are the same as the ones that small shops do, they're not. A small shop can afford to take its chances because rollback is a lost weekend for IT at worst. The SP loads that go out in responsible big companies are done later, they've often got subsequent hotfixes slipstreamed into them, and they're tested 6 ways from sunday because a bad rollout is catastrophic, something that could easily hit the boardroom level because of its negative impact on the bottom line.
Yes, yes, the CIA did fund and help train the Mujahadeen. The Mujahadeen were not the same as Al Queda. To assert that is true is to say that the present government of Afghanistan (which has plenty of veterans of the Mujahadeen fight against the USSR) is heavily Al Queda. Obviously it is not. Some people who served in the Mujahadeen later went to Al Queda but this is different from the CIA being the force behind the creation of Al Queda.
I currently do IT for a company that does that testing for pharma on an outsource basis. We've been in business for 17 years now and are likely to stay that way because we specialize in creating and executing testing protocols. This is something that internal pharma people usually aren't as good as us at because it's rare that you're doing changes so frequently that you have a full-time group doing it all the time. People write protocols, do some testing, and then get moved to other projects. All we do is test so we get very good at it and are very serious about maintaining that skill set.
Sorry, it's only apparent to the Left, and the more radical sections of it at that. OBL is a rich kid from a very rich family. I haven't heard any estimates of how much it costs to fund "the base" (not the database) that would seriously tax his personal or family wealth and there were always more money men than the bin Laden's involved. So why take money from the CIA when you can fund it yourself? Try Occam's razor. It'll give a nice clean shave.
Since Japan was being prepared for an "every person a combatant" style defense in preparation of dying to the last man, woman, and child and we knew it (via those MAGIC intercepts), who wasn't a combatant in 1945 Imperial Japan? Try reading about Operation Downfall.
The US military was reading Japan's mail with the MAGIC intercept program. We knew that the Japanese offers of negotiated surrender were feints. We knew that there was no intention of surrender or allowing Japanese politicians to come to the fore who would permit a surrender. They needed to be shocked out of their idiocy or the great meat grinder of war would chew up a great many people on our side and end Japan as a nation (think of Saipan's cliff jumpers endlessly multiplied). The firebombings were an attempt at providing that shock. The nuclear bombs were a refinement of the tactic that eventually worked. Debate all you like but the estimated casualty figures of conventional war far exceeded the actual casualty figures of nuclear bombardment. So why is your military judgment superior to the professionals of the time?
As for breaking the rules of war as retribution for the other side breaking them, please tell me what the alternative enforcement mechanisms are? Reality is that such retaliation is the only law enforcement we've got in time of war. This is because war crimes are generally tactics that give the war criminals a combat advantage. That combat advantage has to be erased somehow or wars will be tilted in favor of the bad guys. A famous story has it that one day, an isolated american soldier was caught by a german patrol and hung as a spy in a church. The next german patrol that went through that church found three hung german soldiers in the exact same spot, marked as spies, just like the american had been. That was the end of the story as no further hangings occurred in that sector.
So was the retribution dishonorable? How many isolated soldiers' lives were saved by the killing of those three germans? Does it matter?
Japan at the time of their surrender in WW II still had mainland possessions in both China and Korea if I recall correctly. So what would the loss of life have been had we had to fight to eject them from China/Korea to make them an island that could be blockaded?
Given Japan's demonstrated commitment to defense in Saipan including the famous mother with babe mass cliff jumps and the crazy mass assaults in the face of overwhelming fire are important considerations in judging the morality of US actions in the Pacific. We were consistently reading Japanese communications and knew that there was no inclination to surrender (though there were some feints done to try to confuse us). The projected death toll to actually take Japan was 1 million allied forces dead and multiple millions of Japanese dead including a massive civilian death toll. Cowing Japan into submission by demonstrating that we could exterminate them without losing large casualties probably lowered the overall death toll for the war.
There is no US equivalent to Saipan. The aims of Islamists in restoring a caliphate, if advocated nonviolently, are actually more likely to come to fruition under GWB's "imperialist" foreign policy than the preceding decades of bipartisan realism. They aren't going to come to power because what they want is monstrous and we'll step in to ensure that peacefully elected Islamists will get peacefully unelected when their inevitable screw ups make the people angry with them.
Finally, no, we didn't train the Islamists as they didn't even exist as a unitary force. We certainly didn't train them in terror tactics. There were veterans of the Afghan war of liberation against the Soviets on both sides of the subsequent civil war. That war of liberation did immense damage to the USSR and was an important factor in the end of the Cold War. The end of the Soviet threat is an important victory and should be recognized as such even as we still deal with the messy cleanup afterwards.
What eventually was the Taliban formed sometime between 1990 and 1994 and took power in 1996. We'd been aiding the mujahadeen since the 1979 invasion (at first just to bleed the Soviets and then to actually win). But all that aid to the non-Taliban groups doesn't exist in the Left's popular imagination. The complexities of Afghani tribal politics and the nuances and shifting sands on which alliances are built there are completely absent in their analysis. We're at fault for everything. We sent money "over there" and "what came back" were the Taliban. Pakistan, Iran, Russia, all these real world actors in Afghanistan just disappear in the left-wing mind and all that's left is US action and bad consequences.
What was the US Pacific fleet's combat power the day before and the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor? By the strategic accounts of the day, the vast majority of it was destroyed (we developed aircraft carrier strategy because we had to. That was all we had left). If a decapitation strike against your country's major defensive force is not a just cause for war, I don't know what is.
As for surrender, of course it wouldn't have been couched in those terms. It would have been put into a "you keep on your side and we'll keep on our side" of the Pacific form for the treaty to "regularize" "facts on the ground". It's highly unlikely that such a peace would have lasted. Eventually Imperial Japan would have been back and with a united E. Asia behind them to bite off more.
I don't know what country you're talking about but in the US, truckers aren't allowed to drive more than 11 hours a day. Those extra 7 hours you talk about would be profitable, but illegal. US truckers are allowed to drive a maximum of 11 hours a day and 77 hours a week. You have to have 10 continuous hours off a day (I googled this off a trucker magazine so it's likely pretty reliable).
If instead of using logbooks to measure time off the road, you could measure the functional ability of a trucker and allow him to run as long as his attention and body can hold out, you might be able to safely increase driving time.
No, you can't drive drunk. The crime that everybody's trying to nail is driving unsafely under the influence of alcohol. They call it DUI for that reason. You're driving drunk when you've had so much that you're under the influence. If your personal alcohol tolerance is higher (genetics or you're an alcoholic), what is DUI for others is not DUI for you. The whole idea is to create a test that captures that data instead of throwing you in jail/taking away driving privileges unjustly because we can test BAC but can't do functional testing with the same ease.
Truckers often get paid by the mile. If an integrated test console (it'll be the same tech but not for games) can safely permit truckers to drive an hour longer a day by giving them a quicky reflex and observation test, that's money in the trucker's pocket and lower insurance rates for the company.
The killer app for this is to create a functional DUI test for the car. You pass, you drive, you get lower insurance rates and a higher barrier to conviction if you get pulled over and your BAC is over the legal limit. This will likely get rolled out for truckers too.
Apple doesn't make an OS 9 version of iTunes either for the same reason it doesn't make a Windows 9x version, these are obsoleted operating systems. Microsoft ended mainstream support on ME at the end of 2003.
This initiative sort of, kind of has a shot at winning *if* there is a long tail in music stores. I don't think there is.
The long tail is the concept that if you can cater to all the niche products in music, books, etc. in an efficient way, you can make more money on the products that don't sell very well than you can on best sellers. Amazon thrives on the long tail.
But while there is value in offering every piece of music under the sun, where's the value in providing every DRM/payments scheme under the sun? All you're doing is weighting your interface down with complexity. 99% of music yo want is going to be available in iTnes. When that changes, it's pretty simple to add a line in the interface that accommodates the newly poplar method of distribtion. Does anybody remember that iTMS itself was just this sort of add-in once upon a time?
So where's the value added other than adding platform support for all the platforms where Mozilla exists but iTunes does not? You have to posit both a highly fragmented DRM universe and an Apple that refuses to adjust to this new reality of heterogeneous licensing markets. I don't think either are very likely.
Some taxes are levied as punishment. Sin taxes are famous for it but class envy taxes exist, the famous luxury tax of a decade ago lost money for the Treasury on net because the rich had the ability to evade the tax by buying internationally. No doubt, there are other taxes out there like that.
I would strongly suspect that either Bill Gates is going to get named in an awful lot of tax suits in TN in the near future or Microsoft lawyers are going to file amicus briefs in every single case that comes up under this law in order to defend their other rights under current law. Just because we don't own the code doesn't mean that the tax won't go through. It'll just mean that they'll be taxing Oracle, MS, and other companies that "own" software. The lobbying storm this will brew will be a real sight to see.
When you buy cable, you're buying access to channels. When you buy internet service, you're buying bandwidth to send and receive traffic at the best rate possible consistent with available network conditions. When you shuffle the channels around on cable, you aren't changing the basic nature of what you've contracted to buy. When you introduce tiered service, you're changing the basic nature of the network. Now you can do that but what you're selling isn't the Internet but just another version of the old walled gardens that have failed so often in the past to survive in the market.
Neither unadulterated communism nor capitalism has ever existed. There is a significant difference to the societal performance curves as you get closer to each ideal. As you get closer to unadulterated communism, economic growth slows and then, on net, reverses. You get more and more destructive distortions in the economy and all sorts of monstrous results. As you get closer to unadulterated capitalism, economic growth tends to expand, poverty tends to be reduced and then eliminated (poverty remains in much of the 1st world because the poverty line is moved up by government fiat), and all sorts of wonderful results tend to happen.
The platonic ideals are justly judged by the real-world performance of their mixed-system imitators. Capitalism works, by that evaluation system, communism doesn't.
You could always work construction, retail, day laboring, or move to some area that doesn't have a 20% unemployment rate. Or maybe you just don't know how to present yourself.
I had a problem getting hired at one point. I eventually figured out that it was my address. I changed my address on my resume and started getting offers within a couple of weeks. (hint: don't use a NW Indiana address if you want a job in Chicago, it's poison).
It's not quite that simple. Employer provided health insurance is a legitimate shackle that keeps many people tied to a job. They move and they lose that nice group policy and because they, or a family member, are not in good health, they're essentially uninsurable elsewhere. That's not to say that there is no solution to this but it's not simply a matter of self-discipline.
You have to subtract out the normal killing rate the Baathist regime would have undertaken absent the war. That puts quite a dent in the numbers. Depending how you estimate that last one, it might even turn the net into a count of lives saved.
Essentially, the proposer of this system would like the record companies to get more and the artists to get less money by artificially reducing successful acts' success in distributing their music. This is supposed to advance the arts how exactly?
It would be highly undesireable for a joint venture of two companies (the band and the record company form essentially a partnership to promote the music) to, by design, negatively impact the separate business of one of the partners, and the less well paid one (in the joint venture) to boot.
No artist in their right mind would sign up for such a thing. Thus, if it ever happens, it will be very likely through legal trickery and misdirection that such a system would be imposed. In the real world, the idea's just never going to happen.
The problem is that you're analyzing music sales in isolation. The Rolling Stones don't make money just from music sales but also from clothing and other ancillary sales. From a certain viewpoint, the music sale is the gateway into that band's community/fanbase. The smaller the fanbase, the less in ancillary sales. You have to analyze the effect on all income and expenses to all players, not just one isolated facet of a complex system.
Stock prices drop because somebody wants to sell, needs to sell, and there are no buyers at the price of the most recent trade. You end up doing a reverse auction until some buyer steps in at the new, lower price. Here you have a monopoly seller. What makes him lower the price? He's got no interest to and by his past actions (keeping most music owned by labels off the market at any time) he's shown he'd rather nobody hear the song than the price be lowered beyond a particular point.