Its pretty good for vectorizable Fortran codes like those typically run on supercomputers, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, crash codes, and 3D molecular modeling. These kinds of codes can be scheduled by compilers to take full advantage of the instruction parallelism in Itanic's EPIC instruction set. Itanic is a dog on most of the C and C++ codes most of the rest of the world uses on their computers because compilers have a pretty hard time scheduling four instructions in parallel at compile time on C and C++ codes.
There is a market for Itanic in some traditional supercomputing applications but it is a relatively small market and never been a big growth market. I really doubt Intel and HP will ever recover the billions they've already sunk in to Itanic, let alone another $10 billion.
I imagine the people at AMD are dancing in the streets at this news because Intel and HP are going to keep throwing even more good money after bad trying to salvage this dog. Its money that they wont be investing in R&D in markets that really matter.
AMD can continue their push to dominate servers, workstations and desktops. If they could crack laptops, phones and embedded apps Intel would be in serious trouble.
True to an extent but I would have been happy if the government bought its own treasury notes with it instead of depending on the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans to carry our debtor nation. At least then there would be paper there that the government is obligated to pay back in 20 years instead of NOTHING and NOTHING is what we have for all those payroll taxes.
An even more sane approach would be to adjust the payroll taxes on an annual basis so that the income more or less just covers the outlay. Sure workers are going to get hammered when the baby boomers retire because the taxes will go up, but workers would have been spared the last 20 years of gross overtaxation. With this approach the system would NEVER have surpluses for politicians to squander or short falls to bankrupt it. You would most probably have to raise the retirement age or trim benefits to allow for the fact people are living too long and the health care system is squandering far to much money going to extreme measures to keep people alive at all costs, and in fraud, waste and abuse, all of which would cause the rates to be an excessive burden in some eras without adjustment.
Better still this is an area I really would prefer that I had the ability to just opt out of this program, keep the payroll taxes in my bank account, and forego social security or medicare benefits. I would have more money during the prime of my life and if I spent and invest it wisely I would be covered if and when I made it to retirement. If I squandered it then I would pay the price for personal responsibility when I'm older.
If current trends continue we will reach a point that the young will be financially ruined just supporting a vast population of retired seniors who depend on staggering sums in health and drug benefits to keep them alive indefinitely.
In further irony the boomers and greatest generation in many cases have better financial resource of their own for retirement than younger generations do. They lived through booming economic times in the U.S. Young people today face the prospect of unemployment and declining real income as all their jobs are outsourced to cheap foreign labor. The greatest education was college educated thanks in large part to the GI bill. Todays generation face staggering higher education costs at the same time Republicans are slashing low interest loans, so higher education is increasingly only for the affluent further pushing young people out of the global labor market. I guess today's young people can still join the army and get a college education though as with the greatest generation in World War II you may also get killed, burned or go to college without some of your limbs.
The greatest generation retired 10-20 years ago so they missed most of the steep increases in payroll taxes, they paid very low payroll taxes, but they were the generation that started to reap the benefits of medical advances so they are living in to their 90's in many cases. They are the generation that paid the least in and got the most out.
The baby boomers are going to reap some bug windfall's too but they are just now retiring so they did pay the steeper payroll taxes for a while. In part the hikes in the 1980's were because of the baby boomers and to make them pay some before they retired. If all that surplus had gone in to an investment fund someplace so it would be there to pay for their probably long retirement it would of helped. Instead politicians mostly squandered it.
The greatest generation and the baby boomers are both winners in the current systems so in that I agree with you. Everyone following them is going to get screwed.
"As long as tax money from the rich goes to those who are poor you are socialist."
The rich don't really subsidize social security or medicare or to an extent unemployment insurance in the U.S. Most of it is paid for out of payroll taxes which totally hammer the low and middle income. Counting the employer contribution social security and medicare are an unavoidable 12.5% out of your paycheck even if you are making minimum wage. The upper income pay it up to a cap, but then they are free of this burden. The really rich don't pay for it all if they get their income through investments. They pay other taxes unless they have a good accountant.
The payroll taxes used to be pretty low from 1930's-1970's or so, and most people didn't make it to 65 to reap the benefits. Starting in the '80's the taxes were jacked up to the current steep levels and people started living a lot longer. For the last 20 plus years these payroll taxes were generating large surpluses. This money wasn't put in a "lock box" to pay benefits in 10 and 20 years when the program will go in the red due to longer life spans and healthcare costs. It was squandered by the federal government on defense spending, offsetting tax cuts for the rich and lots and lots of pork. This means when the program goes in the red the benefits will either be cut, money will be borrowed or payroll tax rates will be jacked up again. Much of the money working people paid in to the system in the last 20 years has disappeared never to be seen again. At the moment America's payroll taxes are more a regressive tax to help pay for out of control Federal spending ESPECIALLY by the Republicans while they cut taxes for the wealthy. America's "greatest generation" now in retirement is making out like bandits because they paid very little in and are getting huge social security and medicare benefits out they didn't pay for. They are in effect cannibalizing the younger generations. When people working now get to retirement age chances are the programs will be decimated and they will have paid in vastly more than they will ever get out.
Now welfare and food stamps are more like what you are saying, since I think everyone pays for them in income taxes but welfare was scaled back a lot under the Clinton administration and as long as Republicans stay in power all of these social programs are slowly being eviscerated.
Bottomline is the U.S. kind of looks socialist in some respects but it is a pretty ugly implementation so it barely qualifies. It is mostly certain generations cannibalizing their children, and in 20-30 years I wager its a system that will have collapsed.
All in all I would be overjoyed if Uncle Sam would just give me back what I paid in to payroll taxes and I would have plenty of money to take care of myself, versus the likely scenario that when I get to retirement age the programs will be bankrupt and I'll get back a fraction of what I paid in. And of course if I die before retirement age someone else gets all my money.
I didn't mean to imply they achieved parity with Alpha in their first iteration, but early Pentium Pro and II put Intel on a pretty close footing with MIPS and SGI in particular, especially the lame ass R5000. Add in Windows NT, Glint and Voodoo offering the first low cost 3D GPU's, Microsoft buying Softimage and porting it to this platform and you have the inflection point where PC's started burying RISC workstations and it is the point that SGI and SUN started a long decline in the workstation market.
On the subject of Itanic that was no doubt a key contributor to Intel's current problems in the CPU market. They squandered far to much of their R&D budget on these processors which only work well on supercomputing apps, and were in general a disaster of EPIC proportions, while AMD did 64 bit sensibly and in a way that sells to a mass market.
I wager Intel is going to disappear out of the supercomputing, server, workstation and desktop market, and be forced to survive on ARM and Centrino in devices(phones and settop) and laptops. That's not necessarily a bad thing since it appears that is where much of the future of computing is heading.
Most people forget the battle between CISC and RISC changed when Intel formed an alliance with DEC ostensibly to evaluate adopting DEC's awesome Alpha processors in whole or part. DEC turned over all of the design information for Alpha to Intel. Intel studiously digested it all, presumably copied it all, and then told DEC to go to hell. They then proceeded to incorporate all Alpha's design tricks in to Pentium. I think this was around the Pentium Pro and Pentium II time frame which also happens to be when Pentium closed the performance gap with RISC processors and then went on to pass them. This ascendence of Pentium was also aided by the arrival of Windows NT which offered a somewhat more creditable OS for higher end applications. It should be noted NT was also more or less stolen from DEC via hiring DEC's leading OS architect.
DEC did sue Intel over this theft and did eventually win but by then Intel had reaped vast benefit from their basically criminal behavior and DEC and Alpha was pretty much in collapse. Just goes to show, crime does pay.
Well that's a subject for debate. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Serbian nationalists pretty much insured Austro-Hungarian retaliation against Serbia. There are substantial parallels to 9/11 and U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan, excepting Afghanistan had no allies other than Pakistan and their dictator turned on Afghanistan to curry favor with the U.S.
The Russian's are historically, politically and ethnically aligned with the Serbs which pretty much insured they would attack Austro-Hungary in defense of the Serbs. Russia was more than a little unhappy over the NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo due to the same ties. That tripped the domino effect among the alliances, Germany coming to Austro-Hungary's aid and France to Russia's.
The Serbian front in World War I is largely forgotten. The Serbs mounted a valiant defense initially but they were eventually routed and forced in to a long retreat through mountains that nearly turned in to genocide.
"It's all a moot point anyway as RFID technology will quickly pass the point where simply tin foil will prevent remote snooping."
I think we are rapidly heading towards the sad day that if you are out in public WITHOUT a bunch of RFID tags broadcasting your ID at every portal you walk through that will flag you as a "person of interest" and lead to you being taken aside by security for questioning and possible detention. There will no doubt be other biometric measures to spot check and validate you are wearing the correct dog tags. Of course sometime soon we will begin to implanted the RFID tags at birth soon so at least minor surgery will be required to forge them. This will be done, of course, "to protect the children" from foul play.
It would seem to me that with the current post 9/11, government and media hyped, paranoia that we are rapidly heading to a point where every government/business (and the two have so fused they are nearly one) is going to want to instantly know and validate the ID of everyone and instantaneously judge your threat level based on your credit history, criminal record, ethnic background and religious affiliation(Arab Muslim in particular). The day is coming soon where you will need clean RFID tags to enter any business, government office, subway station, or wait at a bus stop.
What a wonderful safe world we would live in if it we could instantly spot a potential terrorist waiting for a bus and a send a team to rendition them to a prison in Eastern Europe for disposal. Minority report without the problematic R&D needed to develop the psychics. The psychics will be database miners who will spot and flag anyone whose daily routine of movement and financial transactions doesn't conform to social norms. The DOD and Poindexter in particular have already started this program several times. When its exposed and the outrage builds against it they just move it, rename it and continue developing it. This program really needs pervasive RFID tags to extend the database though.
I often wonder how America and Britain survived before we had technology and started down the actual road to big brother police states. In the early 20th century you had "anarchists" filling the role of "terrorist" seeking to tear down civilization yet we mostly survived without a pervasive police state. Ironically civilization nearly destroyed itself in the overreaction when "anarchists", (though they were more nationalists than anarchists) killed an Arch Duke and the so called civilized world proceeded to nearly destroy itself with World War I.
In the 30's we had bank robbers like Dillinger roving the country side and crossing state boundaries with impunity. If we had a pervasive police state, RFID tags and a national database, they wouldn't have lasted a week. Ironically at the time many people sided with, and idolized, the bank robbers for retaliating against the government and financial system that had wiped out their jobs and their life savings in the depression (a depression which rose out of a frenzied stockmart bubble of the roaring 20's where the stock brokers and stock market players were a million times more destructive and criminal than Dillinger ever was).
SGI went down this road. When they were hot they had a cool logo, cool brand names like Indigo and Reality Engine and people WANTED them, it was both coolness factor and they had hardware inside people wanted in certain markets that ran software people wanted. One devoted customer had the logo tattooed on his arm.
Under Rocket Rick Belluzo they decided they needed to rebrand everything to save the company. They ditched the SGI logo which was synonymous with the company in favor of lower case "sgi" in a crappy font they spent a fortune to design. They placed new emphasis on using numbers for their products like the 340 visual workstation, a bad non standard attempt at a PC. It ended up being shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.
Marketing can be important, because bad marketing can sink good products. Its somewhat rare, especially in electronics, for good marketing to save bad products. You really need to have great products people want to buy and then market them well.
When you see companies struggling to produce great products, who are being beat by a competitor, and then they start a massively expensive rebranding campaign where they rebrand everything in sight thinking that is going to "fix" the problem it can be a leading indicator of a company in crisis and they may be starting a death spiral. Once death spirals start in a company they are hard to reverse.
Intel's massive investment in and bet on Itanic was most certainly a strategic blunder of epic proportions. You need a strategic blunder of epic proportions to spring the leak in a monopolist that can eventually turn in to a flood and a sinking ship. Itanic gave AMD at least the window of opportunity they needed to get back in the game. So far they took advantage by doing 64 bit right, and placing emphasis on chips that perform well and are cooler and easier on power. The main Pentium and Itanic line just got bigger, hotter, power hungry and more expensive.
Unless you are a gamer people want computers in their homes that use less electricity and are quieter and cooler. AMD you actually get good performing chips, good for gamers too, but are still affordable, cooler(quiter) and easier on power.
Dude Leroy Jenkins is satire, humour and creative art. Lighten up:) I think you've been raiding a little to much and take WOW a little to serious at the same time you are here ranting about how not serious it is.
They kind of had to stage the wipe to make it in to a spectacle since they aren't able to rewrite Blizzard's instances for best theatrical effect.
Most Hollywood blockbusters are equally "fake", "staged", etc.
"Says analyst Michael Pachter, 'At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction... We play games to escape.' Microsoft's strategy is 'absolutely flawed,' he added.""
Wow, this "analyst" just shredded his credibility with that whopper. He is obviously extrapolating HIS gaming experience to EVERYONE. Blanket generalizations are almost always wrong. He should probably buy a copy of WOW, Battlefield etc, install a copy of vent and come to grips with the fact that millions of people are playing games precisely FOR THE SOCIAL INTERACTION.
Its a simple fact of life that AI's in games are still generally weak and playing against a computer quickly gets old. There is way more satisfaction of beating other human beings than in beating a mediocre AI.
The sweet deal about games like WOW are they are a constant revenue stream of people paying monthly subscriptions versus the boom or bust cycle of sell a box in the store, get a bunch of revenue and then go dry for years while you develop the next one. This is the dream revenue model for companies like Microsoft because it pleases Wall Street to have consistent revenue streams... if your game doesn't suck.
Actually the U.S. has been spying on you and your businesses at least since the creation of the NSA, and probably before. The Patriot Act might enhance the spying some but it certainly wasn't the origin of it. The NSA was prohibited from spying on American citizens without a warrant by the FISA act in 1978, but they've had a pretty free hand to spy on citizens of other countries for as long as they've been in existence. Its pretty much their charter.
Yes it is espionage. The fact is most countries do it, the U.S. just spends vastly more on it than just about everyone else combined so they have pretty extensive capabilities in electronic espionage. Israel, China, Russia, France, Britain and... gasp... Canada all spy on you too if there is any political or economic information you have they are interested in.
As for the U.S. having the right to do it, I'm pretty sure there simply isn't any law that says they don't. About the only avenue Canadians have is for their government to lodge various forms of diplomatic protest over overt espionage within their borders. But there are a few problems:
- much of the spying takes place on radio frequency and fiber optic communications that leak outside of Canada - the Canadian government and the RCMP do more than their share of spying on Canadians and Americans alike. - The Canadian and American governments are probably partners in a lot of the spying and are exchanging tidbits they glean from it
Espionage is right up there with the world's other oldest profession. The only problem we have today is that thanks to computerization of just about everything, the ability to monitor every activity of everyone on the planet is reaching a pretty scary level. Thanks to the pandemic of paranoia and fear mongering governments and citizens alike are giving espionage agencies blank checks to poke in to every nook of everyones lives in the name of SAFETY. Police state are in many respects very safe, as long as you don't count the thuggery the police state perpetrates on its own citizens.
"Congress and the Senate, similarly, were populated by votes. Granted there was some dubious redistricting by a guy who's now under criminal investigation - but those offices were all populated by votes and can have their population changed by votes. Again, pretty much democracy in action."
Actually MOST congressional districts are so gerrymandered that very few of the seats are actually seriously contested in each election. The districts have been drawn so that the party that did the gerrymandering pretty much has a lock on the seats so they pick just their man, the voters vote a party line and they usually win. Incumbents almost always win reelection if they run.
Delay in Texas was just one of the more extreme and recent examples of this. The way you seize control of the house is by winning control of state legislatures and then redistricting. You create a jigsaw puzzle of a district overloaded with democrats/blacks and the dems win that seat but you create 4 or 5 suburban districts around it where Republican's have a comfortable majority. I forget exactly but the gerrymandering in Texas gave the Republicans a lock on something like 6 additional seats for their majority. Of course the Democrats have been just as bad at gerrymandering its just they've lost the edge to Republicans lately.
All in all its extraordinarily naive to pretend that the American political system is democratic, that it represents the will of the people or that it works at all. It is a badly broken system.
The fact that the American political systems is dominated by two equally corrupt and morally bankrupt parties with a stranglehold on power means there really is no good choice when you step in to a voting booth.
It is just a very corrupted system and is getting more corrupt every day on both sides of the isle. Lobbyists, big campaign contributions and corporations have a stranglehold on decision making.
Most voters are completely snowed at election time by misinformation, negative campaigning, and misleading TV ads paid for by people who expect a payback when their man wins office. This is why the American taxpayers are footing the bill for a $240 million bridge to no where in Alaska, campaign contributions leading to pork laden payoffs to big companies and rich fat cats.
"It's interesting to see so many half-truths and conspiracy theories nicely woven together."
There isn't a single half truth in my sentence. Everyone one of those abuses of power is well documented fact. Point out where the half truth is?
You are just one of those people with blinders firmly in place refusing to believe your hero of a President is routinely abusing human rights and civil liberties, breaking the law and turning the U.S. in to a nation adhering to the rule of law only when its convenient to the people in the White House. You deserve the slow motion transition to dictatorship you are going to get unless people stand up and expose the extent to which our Constitution is being shredded by power mad Republicans.
"My point being the the particles still had to come from somewhere that we can't comprehend"
The eternal existence of mass and energy is a much more explicable and understandable concept than the eternal existence of an omnipotent being.
You can convert mass to energy and energy to mass but you can't create mass or energy from nothing nor can you turn mass or energy in to nothing. It is inherent in their nature that they would exist forever because they can't be destroyed, all you can do is move them back and forth between the two states.
"The framework of "supreme being" philosophy that Jews, Christians, and Muslims share (I'm pretty sure they're similar on this) is that there is one being that created all and has always existed"
Of course the flaw in their philosophy is they have absolutely no way to prove the existence of this supreme being. They require you take it on faith this being exists. The problem with relying on faith as the basis of your philosophy is you can concoct an infinite series of philosophies, all wrong, and expect people to believe them using the faith based canard. I have no way to prove my religion is the right interpretation, just trust me. That's why there are so many religious variants. Any crack pot can declare himself to be a prophet or messiah and as long he can sucker enough people in to believing him a faith based religion is born. Mormonism is a classic study in how a con job turns in to religion thanks to blind faith.
The basic problem with injecting faith in to education is it completely destroys rational thinking. Why seek truth or provable laws of nature if you can reduce all existence to blind faith in the unknowable and unprovable and in philosophy which might be completely wrong or a complete sham.
The amazing thing about Darwin's work is he had NO knowledge of the mechanism of heredity or DNA when he did his work. He observed the world, analyzed it and created theories which were subsequently verified and strengthened at every turn as the world discovered heredity, DNA and genetic mutation which explained the mechanics of how Darwin's theory worked.
By contrast nothing in the last 2000 years has buttressed the teachings of the bible or Jesus. In fact if you take its timeline literally, which is a naive thing for even religious people to do, it has been proved time and again that the world and mankind isn't a few thousand years old and we can't trace our heritage through the begats back to Adam and Eve. All the evidence thats surfaced in the past 2000 years suggest Darwin was right and the Bible's take on the origin of life is faith based fiction.
"all of those particles that have been floating around to spontaneously create life over the course "billions of years had to all of a sudden "come from somewhere", too."
Those particles are matter and energy and they can move back and forth between the two states. The universe could easily be cycling between a pure energy state, pre big bang, and a matter and energy state, post big bang. Its quite possible there has been a never ending cycle of big bangs so our 14 billion year estimate of the age of the universe might just be this iteration when in fact the mass and energy in universe is more probably infinitely old.
The key point about mass and energy is they have no intellect in their basic state. God on the other hand seams to have existed forever as an omnipotent being with intelligence. Explaining how God acquired his intelligence is a much tougher sell than explaining how evolution randomly strung together organic compounds to create our primitive by comparison intelligence.
If God is infinitely old and intelligent he must be getting extremely bored. Just saying God always existed is again a much tougher sell than saying the universe has always existed as some mix of matter and energy.
"Generally, it boils down to finding examples of complicated structures or systems in biology, and saying "see, this is complex enough that I don't think it could arise by evolution.""
Their is a conundrum here when ID proponents say these supposedly "enormously" complex structures couldn't possibly have spontaneously sprung in to existence on their own.
The entire framework of their philosophy is that God, the most complex entity imaginable, somehow spontaneously sprang in to existence from nothingness.
Randomly throwing together organic molecules over the course of billions of years to produce the basic building blocks and mechanics of life seems trivial by comparison to spontaneous creation of an all powerful, omnipotent being.
My inclination is that if it was impossible to for a bacteria to spring in to existence from pools of organic molecules over the course of billions of years, its even more unlikely that an omnipotent being could likewise spring in to existence from nothing.
Non profit corporations are in fact quite common and thoroughly outlined in the tax codes.
The local irrigation company is the first example I can think of, many charities are incorporated and non profit.
They are incorporated for liability protection and tax purposes, they have employees whom they pay salaries, benefits and have workmen's comp for etc. In the case of the local irrigation company holding shares determines how much water you get and shareholders pay fees to to the company for employees and equipment to maintain the system. The companies goal is not to make profits or pay dividends to share holders its to provide a service to shareholders. It sounds kind of like a cool model for an innovative Linux startup. Its more like a communal service.
I could easily see and I imagine there are non profit companies working in open source. They could still pay salaries to employees who are working there out of love for the work and not to make a killing on stock options. Really the only thing you lose are the dividends and profiteering on stock transactions which go disproportionately to top executives and share holders who aren't doing anything for the company after their initial investment as venture capital or by buying shares at an IPO, or post IPO stock offering. After the shares are sold, and the company banks the cash, most shareholders turn in to more of a liability and nuisance to the company than an asset. They are people you have to please, by driving up the stocks price, even if the process of doing runs counter to the long term health of the company and the well being of its customers.
I still remember by experience with Red Hat when they transitioned from a cool, friendly Linux startup in to a money crazed tool of Wall Street. I'd just bought an annual subscription to their then new update service for Red Hat 8.0. A couple months later they engaged in a sweeping end of lifing of Red Hat 7,8 and 9 and the rest of the subscription I'd just bought became effectively useless, unless I bought their new and expensive offerings. I switched to Gentoo and have never touched anything to do with Red Hat since.
If the New York Time was looking for maximum impact it would have released it about October 2004. The fact they didn't could just as easily be read as their pandering to or fear of the political domination of the country by the Republicans. The Times is probably less afraid of them now because their popularity and power is in steep decline because of the abuses they've perpetrated and been caught at.
I for one think that the Bush administration violating domestic spying laws and abusing its power was something that SHOULD have been revealed before giving the Bush administrations sweeping new domestic spying powers with NO SUNSET clause. One of the cases for making the Patriot act permanent was that it wasn't being abused. The Times article suggests its entirely possible it IS being abused based on track record in the domestic spying case.
I would have preferred this abuse of power had been revealed before Bush came up for reelection. Its widely known they ARE abusing their power with Rendition, holding Jose Padilla without charges or trial, revealing a covert agent's name as a form of petty vengance, authorizing torture and lying the nation in to the war in Iraq, but having proof they are willfully violating the nation's laws, the will of congress and circumventing the FISA courts, which is a crucial check and balance on the executive branch spying on Amricans, just has that special edge to it that says those people shouldn't have control of one of the world's most powerful nations, especially one who makes some increasingly empty claims to being a free nation and a nation that adheres to the rule of law.
The critical point of the domestic spying case is the Bush administration could easily have done the same domestic spying with FISA court authorization and without breaking the law but for some bizarre, probably power mad reason, they decided to break the law instead. The FISA law even allows for domestic spying without a court order if its time critical as long as its brought before the court ASAP after, and if they disallow its use in the case they destroy the evidence.
The bottomline is your tired attempt to make the New York Time the guilty party here is just tired rhetoric Republican's have been using for decades everytime they are caught breaking the law, abusing power or trampling civil liberties. Joe McCarthy used it during his witch hunts in the 50's, Nixon used it when he was seeking to rig his reelection, Reaganauts used it when they were caught willfully violating laws passed by Congress in trading arms for hostages and waging an illegal war in Central America. Oddly you guys forget the so called liberal media filleted LBJ and Bill Clinton just as thoroughly as they did Republican Presidents.
"Even though it was voted against, Bush has stated that he will continue to authorize illegal phone taps and other forms of spycraft on US citizins."
What do you mean by "though it was voted against The law against spying on American citizens dates back to the 1970's when their was a Democratic backlash against domesticating spying abuses by the FBI, CIA and Nixon administration so that hasn't been voted on since then.
The Senate did just filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act which does allow some forms of spying in the U.S. in part because House Republicans rather than reforming it were trying to extend it, and in part because of the New York Time article exposing the fact the Bush administration was abusing its power and most probably violating the 1970's prohibition on domestic spying (without a court order).
It is a bit odd the Bush administration chose to break this law since there is a secret Federal court which rubber stamps nearly all eavesdropping requests so there really was no reason for the Bush administration to do this other than they were:
- just looking to expand their power - looking to ignore or overturn a law the Republican's have despised since the Democrats passed it in the 1970's - seeking to spy on American citizens without a valid reason, perhaps anti Bush and anti war activists for example, and they knew the court wouldn't approve it.
Did you ever see the movie "Logan's Run", well its like that with the 40 year old programmers getting spun up in the air and blown apart.
Unfortunately the under 40 programmers don't get the non stop partying and sex with Farrah Fawcett in their 20's and 30's like they did in Logan's Run. Basically choosing a career in programming is a total gyp so there Americans going in to programmers in the 20-40 bracket are disappearing too. The Indians and Chinese, fortunately for the software sweat shops, are to dumb and hungry to have figured out that going in to business, law, marketing and sales is the road to non stop partying and sex just like Logan's Run.
I think the problem I have with Christianity today is that many Christians and many Christian institutions have strayed so far from the ideals Jesus espoused in the New Testament that I figure Jesus would be aghast if were alive today and saw the idolatry being practiced in his name. It should also be noted the New Testaments were written LONG after Jesus died and it is completely unknown if they are in fact even close to accurately describing him or his teachings.
All in all, I don't have a problem with Narnia or the Christian message in the books or the movies. I do have a problem with the people and companies who are trying to exploit the Christian themes in Narnia to:
A. Make more money by trying to make it in to mandatory viewing for every church goer and their children, just like "The Passion". Disney saw the profit in exploiting the religious obssession overrunning America today and:
1. Made religious themed kids movie 2. ???? 3. PROFIT
I rather doubt Jesus would have been in favor of exploiting his message for profit, he was for example not plussed my the money changers next to the temple profiting off the worship of God.
B. I also have a problem with the people who are trying to use Narnia as a way to seduce children in to Christianity and they are doing it very blatantly. Come here boys and girls and watch these pretty pictures and this exciting story. Did you like that? Yes, well you should be a Christian now even if you don't know what that means or entails. It teeters on brainwashing in much the same way fundamentalists are up in arms about Harry Potter seducing children to the black arts.
In my idealized world I think I would like to see Christians, who if they really believe in the things Jesus said to:
- Abandon their fixation on money and wealth and lead a life where they dedicated themselves to the well being of their fellow man and not to lining their pockets
- Stop supporting politicians and institutions who are proponents and purveyors of wars and killing. For example the U.S. military (the Air Force academy in particular) is coming to be completely dominated by an officer corps of fundamentalist "so called" Christians who pray on Sunday and kill people with little remorse on Monday. That turns my stomach and I'm sure Jesus would gladly climb on another cross in protest against it.
Bottomline if you are going to claim the title Christian you should really walk the walk. If your priorities are to get rich at any cost and you are a big fan of wars and killing you should stop dirtying Jesus' name with your false idolatry of him.
" And you know what, there was NOT ONE civilian killed."
That is naive to the extreme friend, or maybe military propaganda. You can't engage in a knock down drag out fire fight in an urban area without killing civilians. Sure a lot of civilians left before the assault, so did a lot of insurgents.
The point you are completely missing is when soldiers don't wear uniforms you CAN'T tell the difference between a civilian and a soldier in a war zone. The U.S. military quotes these wonderful numbers of how many insurgents they kill in their various offensives, and never report ANY civilian casualties. Why, because they just declare everyone who is KIA to be a terrorist, with some twisted reasoning that if they weren't a terrorist they shouldn't have been there, glossing over that this war is in the middle of people's homes and businesses. If you just declare all the dead as combatants, wallah, no civilian casualties.
You do also forget there is video tape of U.S. soldiers shooting wounded and incapacitated combatant one at point blank range, both by CNN during the invasion and by NBC in Fallujah. If someone did that to an American you would be screaming bloody murder and war crimes.
I feel for all the American soldiers in Iraq, they are in a difficult situation because they are fighting an enemy that doesn't wear uniforms and play by rules. They can't tell a combatant from a civilians. Soldiers placed in that situation are compelled to shoot first, and they make a lot of mistakes. I'm pretty sure most of them know that they are killing civilians, its is just an inevitable part of an insurgency. A key goal of insurgencies is to get the occupying army to kill civilians because its the easiest way to turn the population against the occupier.
All in all your bullshit is little more than disingenuous propaganda. And don't tell me that since I'm not in the Marine Corp and in Iraq killing people that I can't talk.
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Its pretty good for vectorizable Fortran codes like those typically run on supercomputers, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, crash codes, and 3D molecular modeling. These kinds of codes can be scheduled by compilers to take full advantage of the instruction parallelism in Itanic's EPIC instruction set. Itanic is a dog on most of the C and C++ codes most of the rest of the world uses on their computers because compilers have a pretty hard time scheduling four instructions in parallel at compile time on C and C++ codes.
There is a market for Itanic in some traditional supercomputing applications but it is a relatively small market and never been a big growth market. I really doubt Intel and HP will ever recover the billions they've already sunk in to Itanic, let alone another $10 billion.
I imagine the people at AMD are dancing in the streets at this news because Intel and HP are going to keep throwing even more good money after bad trying to salvage this dog. Its money that they wont be investing in R&D in markets that really matter.
AMD can continue their push to dominate servers, workstations and desktops. If they could crack laptops, phones and embedded apps Intel would be in serious trouble.
True to an extent but I would have been happy if the government bought its own treasury notes with it instead of depending on the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans to carry our debtor nation. At least then there would be paper there that the government is obligated to pay back in 20 years instead of NOTHING and NOTHING is what we have for all those payroll taxes.
An even more sane approach would be to adjust the payroll taxes on an annual basis so that the income more or less just covers the outlay. Sure workers are going to get hammered when the baby boomers retire because the taxes will go up, but workers would have been spared the last 20 years of gross overtaxation. With this approach the system would NEVER have surpluses for politicians to squander or short falls to bankrupt it. You would most probably have to raise the retirement age or trim benefits to allow for the fact people are living too long and the health care system is squandering far to much money going to extreme measures to keep people alive at all costs, and in fraud, waste and abuse, all of which would cause the rates to be an excessive burden in some eras without adjustment.
Better still this is an area I really would prefer that I had the ability to just opt out of this program, keep the payroll taxes in my bank account, and forego social security or medicare benefits. I would have more money during the prime of my life and if I spent and invest it wisely I would be covered if and when I made it to retirement. If I squandered it then I would pay the price for personal responsibility when I'm older.
If current trends continue we will reach a point that the young will be financially ruined just supporting a vast population of retired seniors who depend on staggering sums in health and drug benefits to keep them alive indefinitely.
In further irony the boomers and greatest generation in many cases have better financial resource of their own for retirement than younger generations do. They lived through booming economic times in the U.S. Young people today face the prospect of unemployment and declining real income as all their jobs are outsourced to cheap foreign labor. The greatest education was college educated thanks in large part to the GI bill. Todays generation face staggering higher education costs at the same time Republicans are slashing low interest loans, so higher education is increasingly only for the affluent further pushing young people out of the global labor market. I guess today's young people can still join the army and get a college education though as with the greatest generation in World War II you may also get killed, burned or go to college without some of your limbs.
The greatest generation retired 10-20 years ago so they missed most of the steep increases in payroll taxes, they paid very low payroll taxes, but they were the generation that started to reap the benefits of medical advances so they are living in to their 90's in many cases. They are the generation that paid the least in and got the most out.
The baby boomers are going to reap some bug windfall's too but they are just now retiring so they did pay the steeper payroll taxes for a while. In part the hikes in the 1980's were because of the baby boomers and to make them pay some before they retired. If all that surplus had gone in to an investment fund someplace so it would be there to pay for their probably long retirement it would of helped. Instead politicians mostly squandered it.
The greatest generation and the baby boomers are both winners in the current systems so in that I agree with you. Everyone following them is going to get screwed.
"As long as tax money from the rich goes to those who are poor you are socialist."
The rich don't really subsidize social security or medicare or to an extent unemployment insurance in the U.S. Most of it is paid for out of payroll taxes which totally hammer the low and middle income. Counting the employer contribution social security and medicare are an unavoidable 12.5% out of your paycheck even if you are making minimum wage. The upper income pay it up to a cap, but then they are free of this burden. The really rich don't pay for it all if they get their income through investments. They pay other taxes unless they have a good accountant.
The payroll taxes used to be pretty low from 1930's-1970's or so, and most people didn't make it to 65 to reap the benefits. Starting in the '80's the taxes were jacked up to the current steep levels and people started living a lot longer. For the last 20 plus years these payroll taxes were generating large surpluses. This money wasn't put in a "lock box" to pay benefits in 10 and 20 years when the program will go in the red due to longer life spans and healthcare costs. It was squandered by the federal government on defense spending, offsetting tax cuts for the rich and lots and lots of pork. This means when the program goes in the red the benefits will either be cut, money will be borrowed or payroll tax rates will be jacked up again. Much of the money working people paid in to the system in the last 20 years has disappeared never to be seen again. At the moment America's payroll taxes are more a regressive tax to help pay for out of control Federal spending ESPECIALLY by the Republicans while they cut taxes for the wealthy. America's "greatest generation" now in retirement is making out like bandits because they paid very little in and are getting huge social security and medicare benefits out they didn't pay for. They are in effect cannibalizing the younger generations. When people working now get to retirement age chances are the programs will be decimated and they will have paid in vastly more than they will ever get out.
Now welfare and food stamps are more like what you are saying, since I think everyone pays for them in income taxes but welfare was scaled back a lot under the Clinton administration and as long as Republicans stay in power all of these social programs are slowly being eviscerated.
Bottomline is the U.S. kind of looks socialist in some respects but it is a pretty ugly implementation so it barely qualifies. It is mostly certain generations cannibalizing their children, and in 20-30 years I wager its a system that will have collapsed.
All in all I would be overjoyed if Uncle Sam would just give me back what I paid in to payroll taxes and I would have plenty of money to take care of myself, versus the likely scenario that when I get to retirement age the programs will be bankrupt and I'll get back a fraction of what I paid in. And of course if I die before retirement age someone else gets all my money.
I didn't mean to imply they achieved parity with Alpha in their first iteration, but early Pentium Pro and II put Intel on a pretty close footing with MIPS and SGI in particular, especially the lame ass R5000. Add in Windows NT, Glint and Voodoo offering the first low cost 3D GPU's, Microsoft buying Softimage and porting it to this platform and you have the inflection point where PC's started burying RISC workstations and it is the point that SGI and SUN started a long decline in the workstation market.
On the subject of Itanic that was no doubt a key contributor to Intel's current problems in the CPU market. They squandered far to much of their R&D budget on these processors which only work well on supercomputing apps, and were in general a disaster of EPIC proportions, while AMD did 64 bit sensibly and in a way that sells to a mass market.
I wager Intel is going to disappear out of the supercomputing, server, workstation and desktop market, and be forced to survive on ARM and Centrino in devices(phones and settop) and laptops. That's not necessarily a bad thing since it appears that is where much of the future of computing is heading.
Most people forget the battle between CISC and RISC changed when Intel formed an alliance with DEC ostensibly to evaluate adopting DEC's awesome Alpha processors in whole or part. DEC turned over all of the design information for Alpha to Intel. Intel studiously digested it all, presumably copied it all, and then told DEC to go to hell. They then proceeded to incorporate all Alpha's design tricks in to Pentium. I think this was around the Pentium Pro and Pentium II time frame which also happens to be when Pentium closed the performance gap with RISC processors and then went on to pass them. This ascendence of Pentium was also aided by the arrival of Windows NT which offered a somewhat more creditable OS for higher end applications. It should be noted NT was also more or less stolen from DEC via hiring DEC's leading OS architect.
DEC did sue Intel over this theft and did eventually win but by then Intel had reaped vast benefit from their basically criminal behavior and DEC and Alpha was pretty much in collapse. Just goes to show, crime does pay.
Well that's a subject for debate. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Serbian nationalists pretty much insured Austro-Hungarian retaliation against Serbia. There are substantial parallels to 9/11 and U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan, excepting Afghanistan had no allies other than Pakistan and their dictator turned on Afghanistan to curry favor with the U.S.
The Russian's are historically, politically and ethnically aligned with the Serbs which pretty much insured they would attack Austro-Hungary in defense of the Serbs. Russia was more than a little unhappy over the NATO war against Serbia over Kosovo due to the same ties. That tripped the domino effect among the alliances, Germany coming to Austro-Hungary's aid and France to Russia's.
The Serbian front in World War I is largely forgotten. The Serbs mounted a valiant defense initially but they were eventually routed and forced in to a long retreat through mountains that nearly turned in to genocide.
"It's all a moot point anyway as RFID technology will quickly pass the point where simply tin foil will prevent remote snooping."
I think we are rapidly heading towards the sad day that if you are out in public WITHOUT a bunch of RFID tags broadcasting your ID at every portal you walk through that will flag you as a "person of interest" and lead to you being taken aside by security for questioning and possible detention. There will no doubt be other biometric measures to spot check and validate you are wearing the correct dog tags. Of course sometime soon we will begin to implanted the RFID tags at birth soon so at least minor surgery will be required to forge them. This will be done, of course, "to protect the children" from foul play.
It would seem to me that with the current post 9/11, government and media hyped, paranoia that we are rapidly heading to a point where every government/business (and the two have so fused they are nearly one) is going to want to instantly know and validate the ID of everyone and instantaneously judge your threat level based on your credit history, criminal record, ethnic background and religious affiliation(Arab Muslim in particular). The day is coming soon where you will need clean RFID tags to enter any business, government office, subway station, or wait at a bus stop.
What a wonderful safe world we would live in if it we could instantly spot a potential terrorist waiting for a bus and a send a team to rendition them to a prison in Eastern Europe for disposal. Minority report without the problematic R&D needed to develop the psychics. The psychics will be database miners who will spot and flag anyone whose daily routine of movement and financial transactions doesn't conform to social norms. The DOD and Poindexter in particular have already started this program several times. When its exposed and the outrage builds against it they just move it, rename it and continue developing it. This program really needs pervasive RFID tags to extend the database though.
I often wonder how America and Britain survived before we had technology and started down the actual road to big brother police states. In the early 20th century you had "anarchists" filling the role of "terrorist" seeking to tear down civilization yet we mostly survived without a pervasive police state. Ironically civilization nearly destroyed itself in the overreaction when "anarchists", (though they were more nationalists than anarchists) killed an Arch Duke and the so called civilized world proceeded to nearly destroy itself with World War I.
In the 30's we had bank robbers like Dillinger roving the country side and crossing state boundaries with impunity. If we had a pervasive police state, RFID tags and a national database, they wouldn't have lasted a week. Ironically at the time many people sided with, and idolized, the bank robbers for retaliating against the government and financial system that had wiped out their jobs and their life savings in the depression (a depression which rose out of a frenzied stockmart bubble of the roaring 20's where the stock brokers and stock market players were a million times more destructive and criminal than Dillinger ever was).
SGI went down this road. When they were hot they had a cool logo, cool brand names like Indigo and Reality Engine and people WANTED them, it was both coolness factor and they had hardware inside people wanted in certain markets that ran software people wanted. One devoted customer had the logo tattooed on his arm.
Under Rocket Rick Belluzo they decided they needed to rebrand everything to save the company. They ditched the SGI logo which was synonymous with the company in favor of lower case "sgi" in a crappy font they spent a fortune to design. They placed new emphasis on using numbers for their products like the 340 visual workstation, a bad non standard attempt at a PC. It ended up being shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.
Marketing can be important, because bad marketing can sink good products. Its somewhat rare, especially in electronics, for good marketing to save bad products. You really need to have great products people want to buy and then market them well.
When you see companies struggling to produce great products, who are being beat by a competitor, and then they start a massively expensive rebranding campaign where they rebrand everything in sight thinking that is going to "fix" the problem it can be a leading indicator of a company in crisis and they may be starting a death spiral. Once death spirals start in a company they are hard to reverse.
Intel's massive investment in and bet on Itanic was most certainly a strategic blunder of epic proportions. You need a strategic blunder of epic proportions to spring the leak in a monopolist that can eventually turn in to a flood and a sinking ship. Itanic gave AMD at least the window of opportunity they needed to get back in the game. So far they took advantage by doing 64 bit right, and placing emphasis on chips that perform well and are cooler and easier on power. The main Pentium and Itanic line just got bigger, hotter, power hungry and more expensive.
Unless you are a gamer people want computers in their homes that use less electricity and are quieter and cooler. AMD you actually get good performing chips, good for gamers too, but are still affordable, cooler(quiter) and easier on power.
Dude Leroy Jenkins is satire, humour and creative art. Lighten up :) I think you've been raiding a little to much and take WOW a little to serious at the same time you are here ranting about how not serious it is.
They kind of had to stage the wipe to make it in to a spectacle since they aren't able to rewrite Blizzard's instances for best theatrical effect.
Most Hollywood blockbusters are equally "fake", "staged", etc.
"Says analyst Michael Pachter, 'At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction ... We play games to escape.' Microsoft's strategy is 'absolutely flawed,' he added.""
Wow, this "analyst" just shredded his credibility with that whopper. He is obviously extrapolating HIS gaming experience to EVERYONE. Blanket generalizations are almost always wrong. He should probably buy a copy of WOW, Battlefield etc, install a copy of vent and come to grips with the fact that millions of people are playing games precisely FOR THE SOCIAL INTERACTION.
Its a simple fact of life that AI's in games are still generally weak and playing against a computer quickly gets old. There is way more satisfaction of beating other human beings than in beating a mediocre AI.
The sweet deal about games like WOW are they are a constant revenue stream of people paying monthly subscriptions versus the boom or bust cycle of sell a box in the store, get a bunch of revenue and then go dry for years while you develop the next one. This is the dream revenue model for companies like Microsoft because it pleases Wall Street to have consistent revenue streams... if your game doesn't suck.
Actually the U.S. has been spying on you and your businesses at least since the creation of the NSA, and probably before. The Patriot Act might enhance the spying some but it certainly wasn't the origin of it. The NSA was prohibited from spying on American citizens without a warrant by the FISA act in 1978, but they've had a pretty free hand to spy on citizens of other countries for as long as they've been in existence. Its pretty much their charter.
... gasp ... Canada all spy on you too if there is any political or economic information you have they are interested in.
Yes it is espionage. The fact is most countries do it, the U.S. just spends vastly more on it than just about everyone else combined so they have pretty extensive capabilities in electronic espionage. Israel, China, Russia, France, Britain and
As for the U.S. having the right to do it, I'm pretty sure there simply isn't any law that says they don't. About the only avenue Canadians have is for their government to lodge various forms of diplomatic protest over overt espionage within their borders. But there are a few problems:
- much of the spying takes place on radio frequency and fiber optic communications that leak outside of Canada
- the Canadian government and the RCMP do more than their share of spying on Canadians and Americans alike.
- The Canadian and American governments are probably partners in a lot of the spying and are exchanging tidbits they glean from it
Espionage is right up there with the world's other oldest profession. The only problem we have today is that thanks to computerization of just about everything, the ability to monitor every activity of everyone on the planet is reaching a pretty scary level. Thanks to the pandemic of paranoia and fear mongering governments and citizens alike are giving espionage agencies blank checks to poke in to every nook of everyones lives in the name of SAFETY. Police state are in many respects very safe, as long as you don't count the thuggery the police state perpetrates on its own citizens.
"Congress and the Senate, similarly, were populated by votes. Granted there was some dubious redistricting by a guy who's now under criminal investigation - but those offices were all populated by votes and can have their population changed by votes. Again, pretty much democracy in action."
Actually MOST congressional districts are so gerrymandered that very few of the seats are actually seriously contested in each election. The districts have been drawn so that the party that did the gerrymandering pretty much has a lock on the seats so they pick just their man, the voters vote a party line and they usually win. Incumbents almost always win reelection if they run.
Delay in Texas was just one of the more extreme and recent examples of this. The way you seize control of the house is by winning control of state legislatures and then redistricting. You create a jigsaw puzzle of a district overloaded with democrats/blacks and the dems win that seat but you create 4 or 5 suburban districts around it where Republican's have a comfortable majority. I forget exactly but the gerrymandering in Texas gave the Republicans a lock on something like 6 additional seats for their majority. Of course the Democrats have been just as bad at gerrymandering its just they've lost the edge to Republicans lately.
All in all its extraordinarily naive to pretend that the American political system is democratic, that it represents the will of the people or that it works at all. It is a badly broken system.
The fact that the American political systems is dominated by two equally corrupt and morally bankrupt parties with a stranglehold on power means there really is no good choice when you step in to a voting booth.
It is just a very corrupted system and is getting more corrupt every day on both sides of the isle. Lobbyists, big campaign contributions and corporations have a stranglehold on decision making.
Most voters are completely snowed at election time by misinformation, negative campaigning, and misleading TV ads paid for by people who expect a payback when their man wins office. This is why the American taxpayers are footing the bill for a $240 million bridge to no where in Alaska, campaign contributions leading to pork laden payoffs to big companies and rich fat cats.
"It's interesting to see so many half-truths and conspiracy theories nicely woven together."
There isn't a single half truth in my sentence. Everyone one of those abuses of power is well documented fact. Point out where the half truth is?
You are just one of those people with blinders firmly in place refusing to believe your hero of a President is routinely abusing human rights and civil liberties, breaking the law and turning the U.S. in to a nation adhering to the rule of law only when its convenient to the people in the White House. You deserve the slow motion transition to dictatorship you are going to get unless people stand up and expose the extent to which our Constitution is being shredded by power mad Republicans.
"My point being the the particles still had to come from somewhere that we can't comprehend"
The eternal existence of mass and energy is a much more explicable and understandable concept than the eternal existence of an omnipotent being.
You can convert mass to energy and energy to mass but you can't create mass or energy from nothing nor can you turn mass or energy in to nothing. It is inherent in their nature that they would exist forever because they can't be destroyed, all you can do is move them back and forth between the two states.
Mass and energy are inherently eternal.
"The framework of "supreme being" philosophy that Jews, Christians, and Muslims share (I'm pretty sure they're similar on this) is that there is one being that created all and has always existed"
Of course the flaw in their philosophy is they have absolutely no way to prove the existence of this supreme being. They require you take it on faith this being exists. The problem with relying on faith as the basis of your philosophy is you can concoct an infinite series of philosophies, all wrong, and expect people to believe them using the faith based canard. I have no way to prove my religion is the right interpretation, just trust me. That's why there are so many religious variants. Any crack pot can declare himself to be a prophet or messiah and as long he can sucker enough people in to believing him a faith based religion is born. Mormonism is a classic study in how a con job turns in to religion thanks to blind faith.
The basic problem with injecting faith in to education is it completely destroys rational thinking. Why seek truth or provable laws of nature if you can reduce all existence to blind faith in the unknowable and unprovable and in philosophy which might be completely wrong or a complete sham.
The amazing thing about Darwin's work is he had NO knowledge of the mechanism of heredity or DNA when he did his work. He observed the world, analyzed it and created theories which were subsequently verified and strengthened at every turn as the world discovered heredity, DNA and genetic mutation which explained the mechanics of how Darwin's theory worked.
By contrast nothing in the last 2000 years has buttressed the teachings of the bible or Jesus. In fact if you take its timeline literally, which is a naive thing for even religious people to do, it has been proved time and again that the world and mankind isn't a few thousand years old and we can't trace our heritage through the begats back to Adam and Eve. All the evidence thats surfaced in the past 2000 years suggest Darwin was right and the Bible's take on the origin of life is faith based fiction.
"all of those particles that have been floating around to spontaneously create life over the course "billions of years had to all of a sudden "come from somewhere", too."
Those particles are matter and energy and they can move back and forth between the two states. The universe could easily be cycling between a pure energy state, pre big bang, and a matter and energy state, post big bang. Its quite possible there has been a never ending cycle of big bangs so our 14 billion year estimate of the age of the universe might just be this iteration when in fact the mass and energy in universe is more probably infinitely old.
The key point about mass and energy is they have no intellect in their basic state. God on the other hand seams to have existed forever as an omnipotent being with intelligence. Explaining how God acquired his intelligence is a much tougher sell than explaining how evolution randomly strung together organic compounds to create our primitive by comparison intelligence.
If God is infinitely old and intelligent he must be getting extremely bored. Just saying God always existed is again a much tougher sell than saying the universe has always existed as some mix of matter and energy.
"Generally, it boils down to finding examples of complicated structures or systems in biology, and saying "see, this is complex enough that I don't think it could arise by evolution.""
Their is a conundrum here when ID proponents say these supposedly "enormously" complex structures couldn't possibly have spontaneously sprung in to existence on their own.
The entire framework of their philosophy is that God, the most complex entity imaginable, somehow spontaneously sprang in to existence from nothingness.
Randomly throwing together organic molecules over the course of billions of years to produce the basic building blocks and mechanics of life seems trivial by comparison to spontaneous creation of an all powerful, omnipotent being.
My inclination is that if it was impossible to for a bacteria to spring in to existence from pools of organic molecules over the course of billions of years, its even more unlikely that an omnipotent being could likewise spring in to existence from nothing.
Non profit corporations are in fact quite common and thoroughly outlined in the tax codes.
The local irrigation company is the first example I can think of, many charities are incorporated and non profit.
They are incorporated for liability protection and tax purposes, they have employees whom they pay salaries, benefits and have workmen's comp for etc. In the case of the local irrigation company holding shares determines how much water you get and shareholders pay fees to to the company for employees and equipment to maintain the system. The companies goal is not to make profits or pay dividends to share holders its to provide a service to shareholders. It sounds kind of like a cool model for an innovative Linux startup. Its more like a communal service.
I could easily see and I imagine there are non profit companies working in open source. They could still pay salaries to employees who are working there out of love for the work and not to make a killing on stock options. Really the only thing you lose are the dividends and profiteering on stock transactions which go disproportionately to top executives and share holders who aren't doing anything for the company after their initial investment as venture capital or by buying shares at an IPO, or post IPO stock offering. After the shares are sold, and the company banks the cash, most shareholders turn in to more of a liability and nuisance to the company than an asset. They are people you have to please, by driving up the stocks price, even if the process of doing runs counter to the long term health of the company and the well being of its customers.
I still remember by experience with Red Hat when they transitioned from a cool, friendly Linux startup in to a money crazed tool of Wall Street. I'd just bought an annual subscription to their then new update service for Red Hat 8.0. A couple months later they engaged in a sweeping end of lifing of Red Hat 7,8 and 9 and the rest of the subscription I'd just bought became effectively useless, unless I bought their new and expensive offerings. I switched to Gentoo and have never touched anything to do with Red Hat since.
If the New York Time was looking for maximum impact it would have released it about October 2004. The fact they didn't could just as easily be read as their pandering to or fear of the political domination of the country by the Republicans. The Times is probably less afraid of them now because their popularity and power is in steep decline because of the abuses they've perpetrated and been caught at.
I for one think that the Bush administration violating domestic spying laws and abusing its power was something that SHOULD have been revealed before giving the Bush administrations sweeping new domestic spying powers with NO SUNSET clause. One of the cases for making the Patriot act permanent was that it wasn't being abused. The Times article suggests its entirely possible it IS being abused based on track record in the domestic spying case.
I would have preferred this abuse of power had been revealed before Bush came up for reelection. Its widely known they ARE abusing their power with Rendition, holding Jose Padilla without charges or trial, revealing a covert agent's name as a form of petty vengance, authorizing torture and lying the nation in to the war in Iraq, but having proof they are willfully violating the nation's laws, the will of congress and circumventing the FISA courts, which is a crucial check and balance on the executive branch spying on Amricans, just has that special edge to it that says those people shouldn't have control of one of the world's most powerful nations, especially one who makes some increasingly empty claims to being a free nation and a nation that adheres to the rule of law.
The critical point of the domestic spying case is the Bush administration could easily have done the same domestic spying with FISA court authorization and without breaking the law but for some bizarre, probably power mad reason, they decided to break the law instead. The FISA law even allows for domestic spying without a court order if its time critical as long as its brought before the court ASAP after, and if they disallow its use in the case they destroy the evidence.
The bottomline is your tired attempt to make the New York Time the guilty party here is just tired rhetoric Republican's have been using for decades everytime they are caught breaking the law, abusing power or trampling civil liberties. Joe McCarthy used it during his witch hunts in the 50's, Nixon used it when he was seeking to rig his reelection, Reaganauts used it when they were caught willfully violating laws passed by Congress in trading arms for hostages and waging an illegal war in Central America. Oddly you guys forget the so called liberal media filleted LBJ and Bill Clinton just as thoroughly as they did Republican Presidents.
"Even though it was voted against, Bush has stated that he will continue to authorize illegal phone taps and other forms of spycraft on US citizins."
What do you mean by "though it was voted against The law against spying on American citizens dates back to the 1970's when their was a Democratic backlash against domesticating spying abuses by the FBI, CIA and Nixon administration so that hasn't been voted on since then.
The Senate did just filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act which does allow some forms of spying in the U.S. in part because House Republicans rather than reforming it were trying to extend it, and in part because of the New York Time article exposing the fact the Bush administration was abusing its power and most probably violating the 1970's prohibition on domestic spying (without a court order).
It is a bit odd the Bush administration chose to break this law since there is a secret Federal court which rubber stamps nearly all eavesdropping requests so there really was no reason for the Bush administration to do this other than they were:
- just looking to expand their power
- looking to ignore or overturn a law the Republican's have despised since the Democrats passed it in the 1970's
- seeking to spy on American citizens without a valid reason, perhaps anti Bush and anti war activists for example, and they knew the court wouldn't approve it.
Did you ever see the movie "Logan's Run", well its like that with the 40 year old programmers getting spun up in the air and blown apart.
Unfortunately the under 40 programmers don't get the non stop partying and sex with Farrah Fawcett in their 20's and 30's like they did in Logan's Run. Basically choosing a career in programming is a total gyp so there Americans going in to programmers in the 20-40 bracket are disappearing too. The Indians and Chinese, fortunately for the software sweat shops, are to dumb and hungry to have figured out that going in to business, law, marketing and sales is the road to non stop partying and sex just like Logan's Run.
I think the problem I have with Christianity today is that many Christians and many Christian institutions have strayed so far from the ideals Jesus espoused in the New Testament that I figure Jesus would be aghast if were alive today and saw the idolatry being practiced in his name. It should also be noted the New Testaments were written LONG after Jesus died and it is completely unknown if they are in fact even close to accurately describing him or his teachings.
All in all, I don't have a problem with Narnia or the Christian message in the books or the movies. I do have a problem with the people and companies who are trying to exploit the Christian themes in Narnia to:
A. Make more money by trying to make it in to mandatory viewing for every church goer and their children, just like "The Passion". Disney saw the profit in exploiting the religious obssession overrunning America today and:
1. Made religious themed kids movie
2. ????
3. PROFIT
I rather doubt Jesus would have been in favor of exploiting his message for profit, he was for example not plussed my the money changers next to the temple profiting off the worship of God.
B. I also have a problem with the people who are trying to use Narnia as a way to seduce children in to Christianity and they are doing it very blatantly. Come here boys and girls and watch these pretty pictures and this exciting story. Did you like that? Yes, well you should be a Christian now even if you don't know what that means or entails. It teeters on brainwashing in much the same way fundamentalists are up in arms about Harry Potter seducing children to the black arts.
In my idealized world I think I would like to see Christians, who if they really believe in the things Jesus said to:
- Abandon their fixation on money and wealth and lead a life where they dedicated themselves to the well being of their fellow man and not to lining their pockets
- Stop supporting politicians and institutions who are proponents and purveyors of wars and killing. For example the U.S. military (the Air Force academy in particular) is coming to be completely dominated by an officer corps of fundamentalist "so called" Christians who pray on Sunday and kill people with little remorse on Monday. That turns my stomach and I'm sure Jesus would gladly climb on another cross in protest against it.
Bottomline if you are going to claim the title Christian you should really walk the walk. If your priorities are to get rich at any cost and you are a big fan of wars and killing you should stop dirtying Jesus' name with your false idolatry of him.
Why hire writers when you can get them to work for free under the guise of a contest :)
" And you know what, there was NOT ONE civilian killed."
That is naive to the extreme friend, or maybe military propaganda. You can't engage in a knock down drag out fire fight in an urban area without killing civilians. Sure a lot of civilians left before the assault, so did a lot of insurgents.
The point you are completely missing is when soldiers don't wear uniforms you CAN'T tell the difference between a civilian and a soldier in a war zone. The U.S. military quotes these wonderful numbers of how many insurgents they kill in their various offensives, and never report ANY civilian casualties. Why, because they just declare everyone who is KIA to be a terrorist, with some twisted reasoning that if they weren't a terrorist they shouldn't have been there, glossing over that this war is in the middle of people's homes and businesses. If you just declare all the dead as combatants, wallah, no civilian casualties.
You do also forget there is video tape of U.S. soldiers shooting wounded and incapacitated combatant one at point blank range, both by CNN during the invasion and by NBC in Fallujah. If someone did that to an American you would be screaming bloody murder and war crimes.
I feel for all the American soldiers in Iraq, they are in a difficult situation because they are fighting an enemy that doesn't wear uniforms and play by rules. They can't tell a combatant from a civilians. Soldiers placed in that situation are compelled to shoot first, and they make a lot of mistakes. I'm pretty sure most of them know that they are killing civilians, its is just an inevitable part of an insurgency. A key goal of insurgencies is to get the occupying army to kill civilians because its the easiest way to turn the population against the occupier.
All in all your bullshit is little more than disingenuous propaganda. And don't tell me that since I'm not in the Marine Corp and in Iraq killing people that I can't talk.