I thought that Ballmer really demonstrated that he didn't get it with the 20 year old comment. There are a significant number of people in the enterprise who think that MS is still too new, too green, to be included in their bet the business computing environments. Having something that has a 20 year heritage seems pretty good by comparison.
Enlightened self-interest decrees that some things are better given away for free, other things are better sold. Having a public domain, a village commons, or other institution that does not charge money does not make the society that has this or that feature communist.
The tragedy of the commons is that the freeloaders always end up vastly outnumbering those who give back to maintain common property which is why those of us in capitalist societies are driven further and further into privatization as the decades go by. But software is different in that it can sustain a far higher load of freeloaders than just about any enterprise on the planet.
If you write a piece of software and submit it to sourceforge, whether 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000 people use the stuff does not appreciably change the work you do after you've written it or at least anything like most other forms of human endeavor.
Thank you for playing Mr. atheist. Your ignorance of the religious debate over 'ensoulment' is rather profound but let's just say that no major religion that I'm aware of places ensoulment before conception as you posit.
Whether the soul exists at all is something that atheists will always fight with theists and deists. I don't want to hash this out here as it's a long argument. I would point out that the concept of a soul allows the religious to view human beings as an end to themselves and not a means to some other end. The logic is simple and fundamental to western monotheism which covers about 40% of the world's population give or take.
Atheists who have a similar opinion that humans are not just means but ends in and of themselves and thus intrinsicly worthy of human dignity in my experience never come up with arguments that support that position that are very sturdy (at least in comparison to the religious arguments for the same position).
I would suggest that a society where humanity is not an end but a means to other ends is a society that is brutal and inhumane. See the 20th century totalitarians for real world examples.
When Cloneaid came out with their claims, everybody laughed at their particular claims but also they said that there were half a dozen labs doing real work in the field and we're going to get human clones RSN. Those were the scientists (not the cloneaid hoaxers) I was referring to. There's a physician in Italy (don't recall his name) who's a known figure in infertility treatment who I recall is working on this, for example.
As for starting somewhere, I think that sticking to animal models is fine. I'm not against research in animal models at all (and neither is most anyone except the animal rights folk). Until you have several generations of successful higher primate work under your belt, both in modding and in reversing mods if things go wrong, animal mods are pretty much the place where responsible people should stay IMO.
You're right that you have to start somewhere but after so many demonstrated problems in clones, I'd think that we're simply jumping the gun to step up to humans right now.
Taken as a whole is not an acceptable standard. Criminals of all stripes are generally a small minority. You don't need a lot of scientists who are willing to crank out frankenstein kids to end up with a lot of genetically defective kids. The small minority who would ignore the ethics committees and peer pressure can do major damage and it's worth passing laws to make that illegal.
When there is an established track record of higher primate genetic manipulation with no irreversible damage, it's worth discussing lifting restrictions.
What this guy's doing is like Mr. Smithson donating his legacy to the US govt to start the Smithsonian museum. Should Smithsonian let everybody rip off their work too?
Re:Improve upon our faults. OCing the Human Brain?
on
The Rights of GM Humans
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones. We can't even get Democrat/Republican mainstream agreement that birthing so many defective humans in experiments is just wrong. They're bickering over the lost economic opportunity of therapeutic cloning.
There may come a day when we can quickly and without error make clones or gene modifications. At that point we can get into whether human souls need to be carried around in a stock, biological chassis assembled the old fashioned way. We're just not there yet and we need to stop our current crop of frankensteins from creating armies of humans doomed to painful genetic diseases and early death.
Like I said, your experience is atypical. Academic institutions are to MS as crack dealers are to the columbian drug cartels, the footsoldiers in the operation that get people hooked on their product, often with free samples.
I don't disagree that MS offers discounts when it suits them and the biggest discounts have traditionally been given to academic institutions. Whenever it feels strategically threatened MS will lower prices and even instruct its resellers to no longer check whether academic price product is actually going to students/teachers. But this situation is analogous to the proverbial hothouse flower wondering why all those plants out in the open complain about the winter months.
The fact is that in the commercial comparison that kicked off this discussion the idea that Linux pricing is *more* expensive just doesn't hold water. You don't seem to actually be supporting that idea so why not call it quits at that.
A goodly amount of modern OS X software is written as a bundle which is technically a folder but when you double click it, it launches an enclosed application. If you don't think bundles are anything other than folders, than, ok, piles are too. But bundles for most people aren't just folders, they're essentially viewed as an application that can be opened up and you can see the internals.
Apache has achieved >60% market penetration on exactly the model of free and cheaper. A PAtCHy server was a user led series of patches to the NCSA server and has long eclipsed its parent code.
As the number of eyeballs looking at a particular piece of code goes up, the number of people who actually analyze and test it will also rise, though slowly. This reduces, not increases support costs as the amount each savvy volunteer has to expend drops.
The number of bugs in a piece of code is static. Because the source is open, perhaps one in a thousand will be willing to, able to, and annoyed enough to fix a particular bug. This is something that Microsoft simply can't permit with its codebase so you end up being told that your crucial bug just isn't going to be fixed anytime soon and you can't fix it either.
Any IT project can be implemented badly and not provide the ROI that was promised. Microsoft projects are not immune to this rule and neither are Linux or Mac projects. Incompetence is the ultimate cross-platform reality.
IT staff that is not hobbled by incompetence will create SAMBA servers for file and print and save money on meat and potatoes tasks first. Web servers will soon follow, with database and app servers with their trickier migrations will follow later. Desktops will come last, if at all.
The ubiquity of Linux will drive people to retrain on linux support much as they retrained on MS in previous years. Shortages lead to higher compensation and new entrants that drive compensation down. The labor force is not a static thing.
There are real ROI savings to be had, not least because old hardware that would have to be retired on Windows can do useful work using Linux.
It's the responsibility of the purchasing agent for the company to solicit bids from vendors that cover approximately the same thing. In this case that would either be $9600 and $0 for a software only bid or a bid that would include software and an appropriate level of support for *both* options.
The fault is not with Microsoft but with the grandparent who is simply not pricing things properly.
It's been awhile since I purchased a support 5 pack and made a simple mistake (sorry about that).
One thing that hasn't been covered is that RH doesn't force you to purchase $600 support for each server either. It's possible to download the current version of the software, install on your own, upgrade on your own, and end up 6 years later with a vastly improved software product without ever sending a penny to Red Hat.
I'm very glad that you have managed to avoid calling Microsoft. Your situation, in my experience, is atypical.
My illustration was somewhat artificial as was the grandparent. With a Windows expert, it is possible not to have *any* support calls. Then again, it is just as possible to have the same experience with Linux. In that case the appropriate strategy is to go without support contract on both platforms.
The proper costs in that case would be $9600 for Windows licencses and $0 for support and $0 for Linux licenses and $0 for support, a cost saving of $9600.
The unfairness of the grandparent is that it was comparing apples to oranges, software licenses with no support compared to major ongoing support costs.
This is the real problem with MS these days and no amount of reform on the part of engineering is going to cure it. Win2k3 may be the best thing since sliced bread but pair it with MS legal and the MS corporate culture and it's not a partnership that I'm entirely comfortable recommending to anybody these days, even confirmed MS shops.
I'll probably renew my MCSE credentials in order to help out customers on migration and interoperability but without some forced reform like the Teamsters went through, I can't imagine how the public can trust MS with anything.
The two offerings are not comparable. The MS offering gives you software, the Linux offering gives you support.
If you were to actually be stupid enough to do this, the first time you had a problem with your MS setup you would be thrown to the wolves, otherwise known as per-incident support and you would land there without a support budget.
For Win 2003 standard the support page is available here and in short it's $245 per incident and $1225 for a 5 pack.
The problem with buying that 5 pack of incidents is that it's only good for win2k3 incidents. Unlike the RH support which covers many products, each prepaid pack is only good for the covered product.
You get to have 48 incidents over 6 years (assuming prices do not change) or 8 incidents per year. RH does not set incident limits in its standard support contracts.
If only 8 things go wrong per year in a 6 server MS shop in both server OS and server apps, you're having a very good year. To expect to have 6 very good years in a row is not very probable.
The RH offering costs you $600 per year but each year you get updated to the then current major release. Since MS updates their OS about every 2 years, that's $6k of software cost that hasn't been accounted for to keep things even and that drops you down on the MS end to 4 incidents per year across the OS and the relevant enterprise applications you'll be running. Good luck on having two major OS upgrades over 6 servers and only having 4 incidents per year.
Finally, before anybody starts whining about the free support options or MS' $99 online option they aren't comparable as RH is offering 4 hour support response time, not 24 hour and Linux forums exist with exactly the same price as the MS forums, free.
No, they just want distribution which is hard enough to get. At least with CompUSA it's *possible* to get Mac software. Try doing that at Best Buy or Circuit City and they just look at you funny. Anything that they carry that's useful to you is strictly an accident (ie they stock a Windows software title and the mac version comes in the same box).
With this particular method, you end up with a lot of titles available in very little square footage (ie low cost of distribution) and if they require you to swipe a credit card before they burn the title (which would be a smart move) you quite possibly would be out of there *faster* than if you just yanked a box off the shelf and waited in line.
Actually, what's going on is called a pissing contest. The Democrats are playing parliamentary games with some bipartisan PATRIOT act modifications to get at lone wolf terrorists like the Unabomber and starting to talk about adding amendments that weren't in the negotiated agreement. So the Republicans look around and ask themselves what will absolutely get the Democrat party to cut the crap and stick to non-controversial changes. What they came up with was if Democrats sponsor amendments, Republicans will sponser making the act permanent.
In other words, it's a threat to stop some inside political bs, not an ideological commitment or program that's serious. But as expected the Democrat provocation is soft-shoed while the Republican nuclear response is treated like a stand alone initiative.
You can't get away with providing multiple last chances to a three year old, much less a rogue nation. Saddam Hussein's regime has operated under cease fire conditions that they've been breaking for 12 years. After 16 resolutions, #17 said this is your last chance and we're going to whup you if you don't fulfill *all* your cease-fire obligations right now. That was a US initiative under the current administration and it passed unanimously.
Nobody believes that Saddam Hussein is currently in compliance with his obligations and they knew it months ago when he gave a BS declaration of banned weapons instead of the full, complete, and final declaration he was supposed to give.
For whatever reason France has decided that 1441's plain language didn't mean what it said and Saddam should get another last chance. The bad faith is stunning and its severely damaged the UNSC, NATO, and the EU. One thing France was successful in doing though was making us look like the diplomatic bad guys.
Germany's tagged along with this in order to save Schroeder's political viability (he was expected to lose this last election based on screwing up the economy). Russia, as usual, is playing a balancing game between factions and trying to play its weak geopolitical hand as well as possible.
With so much bad faith floating around, it seems to me that it is crucial to demonstrate that the liliputians cannot bind the US Gulliver down by threatening to wreck the international order.
What a strange sense of history you have. Muslims post-date christianity by hundreds of years. All those lost territories the muslims cry over losing to the Crusaders were christian lands before the muslim conquest. After being pushed back to the Pyrennes and losing most of SE Europe, christianity fought back and reclaimed some (never all) of its lands lost to Islam.
As for current grievances, yes, the US has done some things that are inconsistent with its ideals. The cure is to start acting consistently and supporting the end of tyranny in the ME. Oh! that's what we're doing now and are being opposed by people who want to maintain the corrupt status quo.
The terrorists do have mouthpieces, news outlets, and broadcast what they believe on a regular basis. Even if you don't speak arabic, checking what they say is as easy as typing in a few web searches. Read here for some choice bits.
the 3rd Infantry Division, 101st Airborne, et al are doing a smashing job of correcting our Iraq mistakes as we speak. Unfortunately, France, Germany, and Russia are all committed to continuing the same nasty pro-saddam policies of the past.
The 9/11 hijackers were middle to upper class kids from well off families. Poverty's not the problem with this crop of terrorists. The root cause of the terrorism is that imams are preaching in mosques around the world that you get into heaven by blowing yourself up along with a bunch of infidels and have created a muslim death cult.
Fix the death cult and then you only have to get rid of the current crop. Don't go after the imams and they'll just breed more hate zombies with semtex attached.
Actually, just electing a Democrat with Clinton's level of morality would do the trick. It was fascinating how conservative think tanks like the Manhatten Institute came up for so many 'random' IRS audits during the Clinton years.
The price is little high for the country for such a lesson to be worth it.
And that prayer is more necessary than ever since there is a death cult marching the land who thinks it wise to kill themselves and as many others as they can. They want a world where if you are not muslim, your word is not equal to theirs in court. They demand a world where people have to pay differential taxes greater than muslims and minority religions and atheists are just killed out of hand.
Yes, let's pray for peace but not cry out peace, peace, when there is no peace.
Let's also not fool ourselves into thinking that keeping databases is going to do more than paper over the problem of the death cult.
Re:What about Terrasoft? Can't their machines run
on
Beige Box Apple Clone?
·
· Score: 1
I thought that Apple used OpenFirmware (IEEE-1275). What's so proprietary about that?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that Ballmer really demonstrated that he didn't get it with the 20 year old comment. There are a significant number of people in the enterprise who think that MS is still too new, too green, to be included in their bet the business computing environments. Having something that has a 20 year heritage seems pretty good by comparison.
Enlightened self-interest decrees that some things are better given away for free, other things are better sold. Having a public domain, a village commons, or other institution that does not charge money does not make the society that has this or that feature communist.
The tragedy of the commons is that the freeloaders always end up vastly outnumbering those who give back to maintain common property which is why those of us in capitalist societies are driven further and further into privatization as the decades go by. But software is different in that it can sustain a far higher load of freeloaders than just about any enterprise on the planet.
If you write a piece of software and submit it to sourceforge, whether 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000 people use the stuff does not appreciably change the work you do after you've written it or at least anything like most other forms of human endeavor.
Bzzt
Thank you for playing Mr. atheist. Your ignorance of the religious debate over 'ensoulment' is rather profound but let's just say that no major religion that I'm aware of places ensoulment before conception as you posit.
Whether the soul exists at all is something that atheists will always fight with theists and deists. I don't want to hash this out here as it's a long argument. I would point out that the concept of a soul allows the religious to view human beings as an end to themselves and not a means to some other end. The logic is simple and fundamental to western monotheism which covers about 40% of the world's population give or take.
Atheists who have a similar opinion that humans are not just means but ends in and of themselves and thus intrinsicly worthy of human dignity in my experience never come up with arguments that support that position that are very sturdy (at least in comparison to the religious arguments for the same position).
I would suggest that a society where humanity is not an end but a means to other ends is a society that is brutal and inhumane. See the 20th century totalitarians for real world examples.
When Cloneaid came out with their claims, everybody laughed at their particular claims but also they said that there were half a dozen labs doing real work in the field and we're going to get human clones RSN. Those were the scientists (not the cloneaid hoaxers) I was referring to. There's a physician in Italy (don't recall his name) who's a known figure in infertility treatment who I recall is working on this, for example.
As for starting somewhere, I think that sticking to animal models is fine. I'm not against research in animal models at all (and neither is most anyone except the animal rights folk). Until you have several generations of successful higher primate work under your belt, both in modding and in reversing mods if things go wrong, animal mods are pretty much the place where responsible people should stay IMO.
You're right that you have to start somewhere but after so many demonstrated problems in clones, I'd think that we're simply jumping the gun to step up to humans right now.
Taken as a whole is not an acceptable standard. Criminals of all stripes are generally a small minority. You don't need a lot of scientists who are willing to crank out frankenstein kids to end up with a lot of genetically defective kids. The small minority who would ignore the ethics committees and peer pressure can do major damage and it's worth passing laws to make that illegal.
When there is an established track record of higher primate genetic manipulation with no irreversible damage, it's worth discussing lifting restrictions.
What this guy's doing is like Mr. Smithson donating his legacy to the US govt to start the Smithsonian museum. Should Smithsonian let everybody rip off their work too?
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones. We can't even get Democrat/Republican mainstream agreement that birthing so many defective humans in experiments is just wrong. They're bickering over the lost economic opportunity of therapeutic cloning.
There may come a day when we can quickly and without error make clones or gene modifications. At that point we can get into whether human souls need to be carried around in a stock, biological chassis assembled the old fashioned way. We're just not there yet and we need to stop our current crop of frankensteins from creating armies of humans doomed to painful genetic diseases and early death.
Like I said, your experience is atypical. Academic institutions are to MS as crack dealers are to the columbian drug cartels, the footsoldiers in the operation that get people hooked on their product, often with free samples.
I don't disagree that MS offers discounts when it suits them and the biggest discounts have traditionally been given to academic institutions. Whenever it feels strategically threatened MS will lower prices and even instruct its resellers to no longer check whether academic price product is actually going to students/teachers. But this situation is analogous to the proverbial hothouse flower wondering why all those plants out in the open complain about the winter months.
The fact is that in the commercial comparison that kicked off this discussion the idea that Linux pricing is *more* expensive just doesn't hold water. You don't seem to actually be supporting that idea so why not call it quits at that.
A goodly amount of modern OS X software is written as a bundle which is technically a folder but when you double click it, it launches an enclosed application. If you don't think bundles are anything other than folders, than, ok, piles are too. But bundles for most people aren't just folders, they're essentially viewed as an application that can be opened up and you can see the internals.
Apache has achieved >60% market penetration on exactly the model of free and cheaper. A PAtCHy server was a user led series of patches to the NCSA server and has long eclipsed its parent code.
As the number of eyeballs looking at a particular piece of code goes up, the number of people who actually analyze and test it will also rise, though slowly. This reduces, not increases support costs as the amount each savvy volunteer has to expend drops.
The number of bugs in a piece of code is static. Because the source is open, perhaps one in a thousand will be willing to, able to, and annoyed enough to fix a particular bug. This is something that Microsoft simply can't permit with its codebase so you end up being told that your crucial bug just isn't going to be fixed anytime soon and you can't fix it either.
Any IT project can be implemented badly and not provide the ROI that was promised. Microsoft projects are not immune to this rule and neither are Linux or Mac projects. Incompetence is the ultimate cross-platform reality.
IT staff that is not hobbled by incompetence will create SAMBA servers for file and print and save money on meat and potatoes tasks first. Web servers will soon follow, with database and app servers with their trickier migrations will follow later. Desktops will come last, if at all.
The ubiquity of Linux will drive people to retrain on linux support much as they retrained on MS in previous years. Shortages lead to higher compensation and new entrants that drive compensation down. The labor force is not a static thing.
There are real ROI savings to be had, not least because old hardware that would have to be retired on Windows can do useful work using Linux.
It's the responsibility of the purchasing agent for the company to solicit bids from vendors that cover approximately the same thing. In this case that would either be $9600 and $0 for a software only bid or a bid that would include software and an appropriate level of support for *both* options.
The fault is not with Microsoft but with the grandparent who is simply not pricing things properly.
It's been awhile since I purchased a support 5 pack and made a simple mistake (sorry about that).
One thing that hasn't been covered is that RH doesn't force you to purchase $600 support for each server either. It's possible to download the current version of the software, install on your own, upgrade on your own, and end up 6 years later with a vastly improved software product without ever sending a penny to Red Hat.
I'm very glad that you have managed to avoid calling Microsoft. Your situation, in my experience, is atypical.
My illustration was somewhat artificial as was the grandparent. With a Windows expert, it is possible not to have *any* support calls. Then again, it is just as possible to have the same experience with Linux. In that case the appropriate strategy is to go without support contract on both platforms.
The proper costs in that case would be $9600 for Windows licencses and $0 for support and $0 for Linux licenses and $0 for support, a cost saving of $9600.
The unfairness of the grandparent is that it was comparing apples to oranges, software licenses with no support compared to major ongoing support costs.
This is the real problem with MS these days and no amount of reform on the part of engineering is going to cure it. Win2k3 may be the best thing since sliced bread but pair it with MS legal and the MS corporate culture and it's not a partnership that I'm entirely comfortable recommending to anybody these days, even confirmed MS shops.
I'll probably renew my MCSE credentials in order to help out customers on migration and interoperability but without some forced reform like the Teamsters went through, I can't imagine how the public can trust MS with anything.
The two offerings are not comparable. The MS offering gives you software, the Linux offering gives you support.
If you were to actually be stupid enough to do this, the first time you had a problem with your MS setup you would be thrown to the wolves, otherwise known as per-incident support and you would land there without a support budget.
For Win 2003 standard the support page is available here and in short it's $245 per incident and $1225 for a 5 pack.
The problem with buying that 5 pack of incidents is that it's only good for win2k3 incidents. Unlike the RH support which covers many products, each prepaid pack is only good for the covered product.
You get to have 48 incidents over 6 years (assuming prices do not change) or 8 incidents per year. RH does not set incident limits in its standard support contracts.
If only 8 things go wrong per year in a 6 server MS shop in both server OS and server apps, you're having a very good year. To expect to have 6 very good years in a row is not very probable.
The RH offering costs you $600 per year but each year you get updated to the then current major release. Since MS updates their OS about every 2 years, that's $6k of software cost that hasn't been accounted for to keep things even and that drops you down on the MS end to 4 incidents per year across the OS and the relevant enterprise applications you'll be running. Good luck on having two major OS upgrades over 6 servers and only having 4 incidents per year.
Finally, before anybody starts whining about the free support options or MS' $99 online option they aren't comparable as RH is offering 4 hour support response time, not 24 hour and Linux forums exist with exactly the same price as the MS forums, free.
UX? No, MS marketing is sure to put a * in the middle.
No, they just want distribution which is hard enough to get. At least with CompUSA it's *possible* to get Mac software. Try doing that at Best Buy or Circuit City and they just look at you funny. Anything that they carry that's useful to you is strictly an accident (ie they stock a Windows software title and the mac version comes in the same box).
With this particular method, you end up with a lot of titles available in very little square footage (ie low cost of distribution) and if they require you to swipe a credit card before they burn the title (which would be a smart move) you quite possibly would be out of there *faster* than if you just yanked a box off the shelf and waited in line.
Actually, what's going on is called a pissing contest. The Democrats are playing parliamentary games with some bipartisan PATRIOT act modifications to get at lone wolf terrorists like the Unabomber and starting to talk about adding amendments that weren't in the negotiated agreement. So the Republicans look around and ask themselves what will absolutely get the Democrat party to cut the crap and stick to non-controversial changes. What they came up with was if Democrats sponsor amendments, Republicans will sponser making the act permanent.
In other words, it's a threat to stop some inside political bs, not an ideological commitment or program that's serious. But as expected the Democrat provocation is soft-shoed while the Republican nuclear response is treated like a stand alone initiative.
You can't get away with providing multiple last chances to a three year old, much less a rogue nation. Saddam Hussein's regime has operated under cease fire conditions that they've been breaking for 12 years. After 16 resolutions, #17 said this is your last chance and we're going to whup you if you don't fulfill *all* your cease-fire obligations right now. That was a US initiative under the current administration and it passed unanimously.
Nobody believes that Saddam Hussein is currently in compliance with his obligations and they knew it months ago when he gave a BS declaration of banned weapons instead of the full, complete, and final declaration he was supposed to give.
For whatever reason France has decided that 1441's plain language didn't mean what it said and Saddam should get another last chance. The bad faith is stunning and its severely damaged the UNSC, NATO, and the EU. One thing France was successful in doing though was making us look like the diplomatic bad guys.
Germany's tagged along with this in order to save Schroeder's political viability (he was expected to lose this last election based on screwing up the economy). Russia, as usual, is playing a balancing game between factions and trying to play its weak geopolitical hand as well as possible.
With so much bad faith floating around, it seems to me that it is crucial to demonstrate that the liliputians cannot bind the US Gulliver down by threatening to wreck the international order.
Iraq's a demonstration for that
What a strange sense of history you have. Muslims post-date christianity by hundreds of years. All those lost territories the muslims cry over losing to the Crusaders were christian lands before the muslim conquest. After being pushed back to the Pyrennes and losing most of SE Europe, christianity fought back and reclaimed some (never all) of its lands lost to Islam.
As for current grievances, yes, the US has done some things that are inconsistent with its ideals. The cure is to start acting consistently and supporting the end of tyranny in the ME. Oh! that's what we're doing now and are being opposed by people who want to maintain the corrupt status quo.
Your argument doesn't hold up.
The terrorists do have mouthpieces, news outlets, and broadcast what they believe on a regular basis. Even if you don't speak arabic, checking what they say is as easy as typing in a few web searches. Read here for some choice bits.
the 3rd Infantry Division, 101st Airborne, et al are doing a smashing job of correcting our Iraq mistakes as we speak. Unfortunately, France, Germany, and Russia are all committed to continuing the same nasty pro-saddam policies of the past.
The 9/11 hijackers were middle to upper class kids from well off families. Poverty's not the problem with this crop of terrorists. The root cause of the terrorism is that imams are preaching in mosques around the world that you get into heaven by blowing yourself up along with a bunch of infidels and have created a muslim death cult.
Fix the death cult and then you only have to get rid of the current crop. Don't go after the imams and they'll just breed more hate zombies with semtex attached.
Actually, just electing a Democrat with Clinton's level of morality would do the trick. It was fascinating how conservative think tanks like the Manhatten Institute came up for so many 'random' IRS audits during the Clinton years.
The price is little high for the country for such a lesson to be worth it.
And that prayer is more necessary than ever since there is a death cult marching the land who thinks it wise to kill themselves and as many others as they can. They want a world where if you are not muslim, your word is not equal to theirs in court. They demand a world where people have to pay differential taxes greater than muslims and minority religions and atheists are just killed out of hand.
Yes, let's pray for peace but not cry out peace, peace, when there is no peace.
Let's also not fool ourselves into thinking that keeping databases is going to do more than paper over the problem of the death cult.
I thought that Apple used OpenFirmware (IEEE-1275). What's so proprietary about that?