The difference with Apple is that I can easily rip out the iLife apps, Safari and Quicktime Player and install third party apps instead.
So if you suddenly realized Safari could not be uninstalled, your position would change and you'd go after Apple? I've been using OS X for several months and I haven't any idea how to uninstall the system apps. There doesn't seem to be an "add-remove programs" feature.
I wonder what you would say if Shell suddenly turned to producing cars. Not regular cars but cars that only run on Shell fuel while other cars can't use Shell fuel.
I'd say good luck to them- it is a free country. Can you cite any part of the Constitution that would prohibit the producer of one good from starting to produce another? What if the Shell cars got 150 miles to the gallon? What would you say then? To pull off such a stunt, they would have to have this type of innovation.
Would other companies be legally prohibited from producing cars or gas? You see, that is the only thing that would become a problem and I think you'd agree it would a problem, no? If restrictive laws like this are a problem you should also realize that going after Microsoft because an app can't be uninstalled is about the same thing.
In this country in the 1800's, the Constituion prevailed- it meant something. And the results were very good. There were a few contradictions, however most were fixed with amendments. The founding fathers- Jefferson in particular, predicted the current decay of liberty.
It is sad that I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the first comment in defense of Microsoft. The parent should be modded all the way up.
I mean, this is totally absurd. Is everyone pissed that their Mac only comes with OS X and a bunch of iLife apps? They should be SUED! And that Safari browser? Make them unbundle it! And then fine the living shit out of them. A good old fashioned "witch hunt" is in order here. God damned Apple. Safari. Quick Time. bastards! I kringe just thinking about it.
Oh, wait- Apple is not a target because they don't have all the market share MS does and they are not threat to Linux? OK, great, so you're only a target once you become successful. Kinda like people. As soon as you start making any amount of money the voter base dubs you as "wealthy" and sets out to elect the candidate who will force the most money out of your hand (and give it to them.)
Linux can't get any market share and there are so many geeks here that want to see Linux on every home machine that they'll go to any end to make sure any competitor is destroyed whether it is moral or not. I have a feeling most of these people would vote for a political candidate if he supported laws that said by 2010, 40 percent of all PCs sold MUST have Linux installed.
Ignorance of the law is not seen as a valid excuse for breaking it.
It is when laws have progressed to the point of having no rational basis. If the law in some city is that wearing a red shirt on Friday would result in my arrest, is it right that I be arrested and go to jail even if I knew nothing of this obscure law?
Laws have to have a rational basis to them. In the U.S., they should be fairly self evident if a person is already familiar with the Constitution. Unforuntately, with the current state of things, this couldn't be further from the truth.
Or, for 3 1/2's, get out the drill. I still maintain that only pussies bought those devices that would punch square holes into the 3 1/2's. Totally unecessary purchase.
People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5.
If this is the case, and I think it is, we could eventually get rid of a lot of the current Outlook style worm crap by convincing the big PC makers to ship Mozilla as the primary mail client and browser on their OEM consumer boxes. I'm sure this would violate some kind of "agreement" however.
How many of our fathers and grandfathers fought at Normandy and how many now rest there for eternity?
I heard not long ago that the veterans cemetary at Normandy where our soldiers are buried was vandalized. This is the thanks they show the few WW II veternans that remain, and I hate to say it but I think entire nations feel this way now, not just a few vandals. This kid who posted with his "hahaha" attitude is a perfect example.
I have a picture of Hitler posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. It is very unlikely that the German occupation would have ended without the blood of U.S. soldiers. I'm not sure of any price so high that any country has ever paid on behalf of another. The Germans didn't attack us at Pearl Harbour- we had no moral responsibility other than to end Japanese Imperialism.
Do you know what percentage 15 billion is of your country's GDP? If you are going to use that type of argument, then it can be used the opposite way too. Quoting percentages is ridiculous when one total quantity is so much smaller than another.
It is like saying a company whose net income increased 100% has to be better than one that increased 50%. Using your logic, you'd agree, no? Well the 100% net income increase was for a company who make 10 cents last year and now they made 20 cents. Not so good compared to a company that made a billion last year and now makes 1.5 billion huh?
Yet we can give 15 billion of taxpayer money to Africa to fight AIDS. If I'm going to have my money stolen from me and given away, at the very least say it is to fight AIDS in the U.S. or something.
Everybody in the world hates us though. Every Joe taxpayer in this country is helping to fight AIDS in Africa and helping just about everyone and his brother all over the world. We give out more money than any other country at any other point in history, EVER.
This being the case I'd like to make every country in the world hate us even more by using all the handouts to boost up NASAs budget to build a colony on Mars or something. At least then maybe they've have a lottery to get some of us off of this rock since its only a matter of time before we get nuked because some country is pissed that we aren't giving them enough foreign aid.
On top of that, to be libel, you acutally have to say something or write something don't you?
Unless I'm missing something, isn't suing Google about like suing the card catalog at your local library? Well, I guess you'd have to sue the library, but you get the picture. This is assuming libraries even still have card catalogs- but again you get the point.
Apple is making virtually no profit with a $0.30-$.35 cut of every song. How would Apple make more money at $.10 a song?
Because they'll sell more songs since the price will be lower? Somewhere there has to be a point when they've covered most of their fixed overhead and their profit margins increase?
Right now Apple spends around 25 cents to distribute each song and they're lucky to make 10 cents per song. So a more practical number might need to give Apple more of a cut. Point is, though, by cutting the RIAA out of the picture, there is room for everyone to be better off financially, including the consumer.
If you want to bitch about something bitch about RIAA taking 90% of that $0.99 when all they did is market the artist in question. The $0.99 itself isn't the problem.
So techincally you could give the artist 50 cents of every song, 15 cents to the record label, and 10 cents to Apple and it everyone involved would be making more than they are now (an incredible increase for the artist, who arguably deserves it the most), and sell the songs for 75 cents, giving the guy who is complaining about the price a 25 cent break.
I don't see a problem with those type of numbers. And why should the consumer give a shit why stuff is overpriced? If it is the RIAA's fault, I don't care. I just don't buy the product just like anything else in the store that I think is overpriced. Someone on the other end (Apple, the artist, whoever) needs to work out the numbers. The RIAA is only alive because someone on the other side of the fence embraces them. The fact the Apple is losing money on the songs at 99 cents means something is way off base here.
Or, increased CD sales could be tied to a bad economy. Perhaps if people don't have disposable money to spend $1000 on a vacation, $50 on dinner, or $150 on concert tickets, they still have $13 to buy a CD and that is what they decide to do. It isn't a replacement for those other things but it is better than nothing.
You're right, there is absolutely no correlation here. People seem to have such a hard time spotting fallacies- but to me they stand out like the biggest sore thumb in the world and end up completely discrediting the source.
Yeah, I don't get this trend. Maybe is is strictly because I am a geek- but-
I don't want one device that does everything because it will always be a primary type of device with other stuff hacked in. I don't want to talk on the phone using my PDA, listen to MP3s on my phone, use my MP3 player as a PDA, or use my camera as a can opener.
Now, the technology exists I'm sure. I have no doubt someone could invent a device that was a near best of breed in all categories- functionality wise. But the form factor would suck! For example, PDA's need to be thin and have a lot of surface area. That form factor doesn't make a good phone however.
I really don't think in the cases of the Patriot Act and so forth that the government is out to become "big brother" in the sense of 1984. I think they honestly believe they are fighting terrorism and they have to take these steps to stop terrorists.
However, I couldn't disagree more. We're COMPLETELY spinning our wheels if we're trying to go after these terrorists one by one. Individual terrorists have little effect on the overall movement. We could have locked up all of the 9-11 terrorists before 9-11 and you know what? They would have been replaced. The government must declare the enemy. Who was the enemy in WWII? Soldiers in Hitler's army? Japanese kamikaze pilots? No, the enemies were Naziism and Imperialism.
We are engaged in this huge "war on terror" as they call it. Yet Bush won't define the enemy- he has not named them. The enemy is not a few individuals that we can weed out with wire taps. I don't know what the hell Bush is afraid of but I'll say it for him- the enemy is militant Islam. Islamic fundamentalism, its followers, and its ideology. Why did we go after Iraq? Who knows. While Iraq was far from innocent and Saddam deserved everything he got, it was a waste of effort if the goal was to make the U.S. a safer place. We should have bombed the shit out of Iran instead. They are well known to be the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and they breed people with the core beliefs that, if they accept it, leaves them with no other choice in life but to want to destroy western culture.
The attitude of the Spanish humors me. They seem to think they can bargain with Al Queda, electing the president Ben Laden would like the most, and withdrawing troops from here or there. This is a joke. Nobody is safe until they abandon every last shred of western beliefs. Fire all your scientists, disband your goverment and let warlords rule the lands by fear, and abandon your interest in this world and focus on the after life exclusively. If you do those things, you will probably be safe.
It would be nice to see "businesses" like this shut down and the scam artist in handcuffs, but more often than not, people like him are VERY good at disappearing, relocating, and starting up the whole scam again.
Naw, guys like this are fine. It is people like Martha Stewart we need to be protected from. Thank God she'll be in jail! I've suffered the effects of that evil woman already (a bad experience with some homeware items that have her name on it) but this Michael guy, I got no gripe with him. His PC's sound fantastic! Everybody just wants to see a success story like Michael get shot down.
You are right on the money, all their stuff is plain vanilla text. Which made me wonder who would use it? I believe the stuff I looked at even had hard line breaks! I remember trying to get them on my handheld in some sort of a way to where i could read them, and I gave up after a while. I even tried to write some pre-processing code to clean out the line breaks, but preserve what I thought was a valid paragraph break, etc.
Isn't there some royalty free format, (XML if nothing else) that could do a better job? And who uses these things otherwise? Do people sit around reading books in notepad? Otherwise it seems like a completely worthless project to me. A big waste of whoever fronts the money. Hell, you can get a used paperback book for next to nothing at a used bookstore, or go the a public library and check one out. Either of those form factors beats the option of a 500 page book in plain ASCII text.
The shareware industry is good and can be profitable- shareware is nothing more than commercial software that is designed by people who are a lot closer to the pulse of the users, without all the corporate overhead.
If anybody tried to tell me I should open source my stuff and give it away for free, I'd tell them they are crazy. Why on earth would I spend every free moment I have building a robust software package just to give it away? If I make a trade off of time with my family, for example, it will be for my own benefit. Otherwise, what do I have to say for myself someday? I missed my kids baseball game but I developed a great app that a bunch of people were able to leech for free? I'd rather say I missed the ball game but at least made enough cash to move us out of the slums where my kid could pay in the yard safely, or I made enough to help him with college, etc. Now, I contribute to OSS projects that I use in my software- libraries and so forth. I think that is fair.
I've heard that OSS developers who ask for voluntary donations (for things like servers/tools/etc that they need to exist) collect almost nothing. By the same token I've never gotten a thank you letter from someone collecting welfare, unemployment, etc.
Human nature mandates that we participate in voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. This is the basis of a civilized society and is what set the United States apart from all other countries in history. If you think this system sucks, explain to me why people aren't sneaking into Cuba on home made boats. They have a system very similar to what a lot of folks here seem to say they want. Right here in this hemisphere just around 100 miles from Key West! Aye, comrade.
On the third hand, I'm also a shareware author and own my own business on the side. The software I develop on my own is far superior to the stuff I do at the day job- with my own business, I run the show and can utilize my time doing what I think is best. The biggest philosophical difference is that with my own business, I make the decision to build really good software *first* and then market it heavily.
In our organization salespeople drive the development process. Whatever we build is directly dependent on what they think they can sell on a given day. This is the way a lot of shops work and I'm not sure it is the best philosophy for delivering a useful, quality product that people are willing to pay for.
I really respect what they've done. Too many people today go to the press with a bunch of vaporware when someone in the organization has a potential idea for a project, only to leave the interested geeks like us waiting around through delays, cancellations, and things that never materialize.
Good catch, and not only that, but had he bothered to scroll down the page, they arrive at some sort of hourly wage based on a formula.
Most Americans probably know Mexico as Cozumel and Cancun- this is all I know too (first hand), but from I've worked with Mexican nationals and they say that outside of the tourist spots and Mexico City and maybe a Merida or two, things are really poor.
Ford and GM don't have to innovate because the prices of Japanese cars are artifically high in the U.S. due to taxes on imports designed to "level the playing field."
We don't need to have all these tariffs on products imported from countries that have the same standard of living that we do. The Japanese work hard, yes, but they are paid first world salaries so if the prices of their automobiles is low, it is because they are damn good at building cars and if they want to work a little harder than us to do it, more power to them.
On the other hand cars imported from Mexico (like the VW I drive) are produced at the expense of some Mexican making 70 cents an hour. We can't have free trade in this scenerio or we'll all be living in cardboard lean-tos just like our counterparts south of the border.
He probably got it through some type of goverment auction when the facility was decomissioned. I'm sure the feds removed anything of any sensitivity before putting it on the block.
Maybe he should track down whoever ended up buying that F-18/A from a few weeks back... Maybe they need some real estate too!
The U.S. has always been a republic, not a democracy. There is an extremely large difference between the two. A true democracy would be truely frightening.
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The difference with Apple is that I can easily rip out the iLife apps, Safari and Quicktime Player and install third party apps instead.
So if you suddenly realized Safari could not be uninstalled, your position would change and you'd go after Apple? I've been using OS X for several months and I haven't any idea how to uninstall the system apps. There doesn't seem to be an "add-remove programs" feature.
I wonder what you would say if Shell suddenly turned to producing cars. Not regular cars but cars that only run on Shell fuel while other cars can't use Shell fuel.
I'd say good luck to them- it is a free country. Can you cite any part of the Constitution that would prohibit the producer of one good from starting to produce another? What if the Shell cars got 150 miles to the gallon? What would you say then? To pull off such a stunt, they would have to have this type of innovation.
Would other companies be legally prohibited from producing cars or gas? You see, that is the only thing that would become a problem and I think you'd agree it would a problem, no? If restrictive laws like this are a problem you should also realize that going after Microsoft because an app can't be uninstalled is about the same thing.
And always has been.
In this country in the 1800's, the Constituion prevailed- it meant something. And the results were very good. There were a few contradictions, however most were fixed with amendments. The founding fathers- Jefferson in particular, predicted the current decay of liberty.
It is sad that I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the first comment in defense of Microsoft. The parent should be modded all the way up.
I mean, this is totally absurd. Is everyone pissed that their Mac only comes with OS X and a bunch of iLife apps? They should be SUED! And that Safari browser? Make them unbundle it! And then fine the living shit out of them. A good old fashioned "witch hunt" is in order here. God damned Apple. Safari. Quick Time. bastards! I kringe just thinking about it.
Oh, wait- Apple is not a target because they don't have all the market share MS does and they are not threat to Linux? OK, great, so you're only a target once you become successful. Kinda like people. As soon as you start making any amount of money the voter base dubs you as "wealthy" and sets out to elect the candidate who will force the most money out of your hand (and give it to them.)
Linux can't get any market share and there are so many geeks here that want to see Linux on every home machine that they'll go to any end to make sure any competitor is destroyed whether it is moral or not. I have a feeling most of these people would vote for a political candidate if he supported laws that said by 2010, 40 percent of all PCs sold MUST have Linux installed.
Ignorance of the law is not seen as a valid excuse for breaking it.
It is when laws have progressed to the point of having no rational basis. If the law in some city is that wearing a red shirt on Friday would result in my arrest, is it right that I be arrested and go to jail even if I knew nothing of this obscure law?
Laws have to have a rational basis to them. In the U.S., they should be fairly self evident if a person is already familiar with the Constitution. Unforuntately, with the current state of things, this couldn't be further from the truth.
Or, for 3 1/2's, get out the drill. I still maintain that only pussies bought those devices that would punch square holes into the 3 1/2's. Totally unecessary purchase.
People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5.
If this is the case, and I think it is, we could eventually get rid of a lot of the current Outlook style worm crap by convincing the big PC makers to ship Mozilla as the primary mail client and browser on their OEM consumer boxes. I'm sure this would violate some kind of "agreement" however.
How many of our fathers and grandfathers fought at Normandy and how many now rest there for eternity?
I heard not long ago that the veterans cemetary at Normandy where our soldiers are buried was vandalized. This is the thanks they show the few WW II veternans that remain, and I hate to say it but I think entire nations feel this way now, not just a few vandals. This kid who posted with his "hahaha" attitude is a perfect example.
I have a picture of Hitler posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. It is very unlikely that the German occupation would have ended without the blood of U.S. soldiers. I'm not sure of any price so high that any country has ever paid on behalf of another. The Germans didn't attack us at Pearl Harbour- we had no moral responsibility other than to end Japanese Imperialism.
Do you know what percentage 15 billion is of your country's GDP? If you are going to use that type of argument, then it can be used the opposite way too. Quoting percentages is ridiculous when one total quantity is so much smaller than another.
It is like saying a company whose net income increased 100% has to be better than one that increased 50%. Using your logic, you'd agree, no? Well the 100% net income increase was for a company who make 10 cents last year and now they made 20 cents. Not so good compared to a company that made a billion last year and now makes 1.5 billion huh?
Yet we can give 15 billion of taxpayer money to Africa to fight AIDS. If I'm going to have my money stolen from me and given away, at the very least say it is to fight AIDS in the U.S. or something.
Everybody in the world hates us though. Every Joe taxpayer in this country is helping to fight AIDS in Africa and helping just about everyone and his brother all over the world. We give out more money than any other country at any other point in history, EVER.
This being the case I'd like to make every country in the world hate us even more by using all the handouts to boost up NASAs budget to build a colony on Mars or something. At least then maybe they've have a lottery to get some of us off of this rock since its only a matter of time before we get nuked because some country is pissed that we aren't giving them enough foreign aid.
On top of that, to be libel, you acutally have to say something or write something don't you?
Unless I'm missing something, isn't suing Google about like suing the card catalog at your local library? Well, I guess you'd have to sue the library, but you get the picture. This is assuming libraries even still have card catalogs- but again you get the point.
Apple is making virtually no profit with a $0.30-$.35 cut of every song. How would Apple make more money at $.10 a song?
Because they'll sell more songs since the price will be lower? Somewhere there has to be a point when they've covered most of their fixed overhead and their profit margins increase?
Right now Apple spends around 25 cents to distribute each song and they're lucky to make 10 cents per song. So a more practical number might need to give Apple more of a cut. Point is, though, by cutting the RIAA out of the picture, there is room for everyone to be better off financially, including the consumer.
If you want to bitch about something bitch about RIAA taking 90% of that $0.99 when all they did is market the artist in question. The $0.99 itself isn't the problem.
So techincally you could give the artist 50 cents of every song, 15 cents to the record label, and 10 cents to Apple and it everyone involved would be making more than they are now (an incredible increase for the artist, who arguably deserves it the most), and sell the songs for 75 cents, giving the guy who is complaining about the price a 25 cent break.
I don't see a problem with those type of numbers. And why should the consumer give a shit why stuff is overpriced? If it is the RIAA's fault, I don't care. I just don't buy the product just like anything else in the store that I think is overpriced. Someone on the other end (Apple, the artist, whoever) needs to work out the numbers. The RIAA is only alive because someone on the other side of the fence embraces them. The fact the Apple is losing money on the songs at 99 cents means something is way off base here.
Or, increased CD sales could be tied to a bad economy. Perhaps if people don't have disposable money to spend $1000 on a vacation, $50 on dinner, or $150 on concert tickets, they still have $13 to buy a CD and that is what they decide to do. It isn't a replacement for those other things but it is better than nothing.
You're right, there is absolutely no correlation here. People seem to have such a hard time spotting fallacies- but to me they stand out like the biggest sore thumb in the world and end up completely discrediting the source.
Yeah, I don't get this trend. Maybe is is strictly because I am a geek- but-
I don't want one device that does everything because it will always be a primary type of device with other stuff hacked in. I don't want to talk on the phone using my PDA, listen to MP3s on my phone, use my MP3 player as a PDA, or use my camera as a can opener.
Now, the technology exists I'm sure. I have no doubt someone could invent a device that was a near best of breed in all categories- functionality wise. But the form factor would suck! For example, PDA's need to be thin and have a lot of surface area. That form factor doesn't make a good phone however.
I really don't think in the cases of the Patriot Act and so forth that the government is out to become "big brother" in the sense of 1984. I think they honestly believe they are fighting terrorism and they have to take these steps to stop terrorists. However, I couldn't disagree more. We're COMPLETELY spinning our wheels if we're trying to go after these terrorists one by one. Individual terrorists have little effect on the overall movement. We could have locked up all of the 9-11 terrorists before 9-11 and you know what? They would have been replaced. The government must declare the enemy. Who was the enemy in WWII? Soldiers in Hitler's army? Japanese kamikaze pilots? No, the enemies were Naziism and Imperialism.
We are engaged in this huge "war on terror" as they call it. Yet Bush won't define the enemy- he has not named them. The enemy is not a few individuals that we can weed out with wire taps. I don't know what the hell Bush is afraid of but I'll say it for him- the enemy is militant Islam. Islamic fundamentalism, its followers, and its ideology. Why did we go after Iraq? Who knows. While Iraq was far from innocent and Saddam deserved everything he got, it was a waste of effort if the goal was to make the U.S. a safer place. We should have bombed the shit out of Iran instead. They are well known to be the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and they breed people with the core beliefs that, if they accept it, leaves them with no other choice in life but to want to destroy western culture.
The attitude of the Spanish humors me. They seem to think they can bargain with Al Queda, electing the president Ben Laden would like the most, and withdrawing troops from here or there. This is a joke. Nobody is safe until they abandon every last shred of western beliefs. Fire all your scientists, disband your goverment and let warlords rule the lands by fear, and abandon your interest in this world and focus on the after life exclusively. If you do those things, you will probably be safe.
It would be nice to see "businesses" like this shut down and the scam artist in handcuffs, but more often than not, people like him are VERY good at disappearing, relocating, and starting up the whole scam again.
Naw, guys like this are fine. It is people like Martha Stewart we need to be protected from. Thank God she'll be in jail! I've suffered the effects of that evil woman already (a bad experience with some homeware items that have her name on it) but this Michael guy, I got no gripe with him. His PC's sound fantastic! Everybody just wants to see a success story like Michael get shot down.
You are right on the money, all their stuff is plain vanilla text. Which made me wonder who would use it? I believe the stuff I looked at even had hard line breaks! I remember trying to get them on my handheld in some sort of a way to where i could read them, and I gave up after a while. I even tried to write some pre-processing code to clean out the line breaks, but preserve what I thought was a valid paragraph break, etc.
Isn't there some royalty free format, (XML if nothing else) that could do a better job? And who uses these things otherwise? Do people sit around reading books in notepad? Otherwise it seems like a completely worthless project to me. A big waste of whoever fronts the money. Hell, you can get a used paperback book for next to nothing at a used bookstore, or go the a public library and check one out. Either of those form factors beats the option of a 500 page book in plain ASCII text.
The shareware industry is good and can be profitable- shareware is nothing more than commercial software that is designed by people who are a lot closer to the pulse of the users, without all the corporate overhead.
If anybody tried to tell me I should open source my stuff and give it away for free, I'd tell them they are crazy. Why on earth would I spend every free moment I have building a robust software package just to give it away? If I make a trade off of time with my family, for example, it will be for my own benefit. Otherwise, what do I have to say for myself someday? I missed my kids baseball game but I developed a great app that a bunch of people were able to leech for free? I'd rather say I missed the ball game but at least made enough cash to move us out of the slums where my kid could pay in the yard safely, or I made enough to help him with college, etc. Now, I contribute to OSS projects that I use in my software- libraries and so forth. I think that is fair.
I've heard that OSS developers who ask for voluntary donations (for things like servers/tools/etc that they need to exist) collect almost nothing. By the same token I've never gotten a thank you letter from someone collecting welfare, unemployment, etc.
Human nature mandates that we participate in voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. This is the basis of a civilized society and is what set the United States apart from all other countries in history. If you think this system sucks, explain to me why people aren't sneaking into Cuba on home made boats. They have a system very similar to what a lot of folks here seem to say they want. Right here in this hemisphere just around 100 miles from Key West! Aye, comrade.
On the third hand, I'm also a shareware author and own my own business on the side. The software I develop on my own is far superior to the stuff I do at the day job- with my own business, I run the show and can utilize my time doing what I think is best. The biggest philosophical difference is that with my own business, I make the decision to build really good software *first* and then market it heavily.
In our organization salespeople drive the development process. Whatever we build is directly dependent on what they think they can sell on a given day. This is the way a lot of shops work and I'm not sure it is the best philosophy for delivering a useful, quality product that people are willing to pay for.
I really respect what they've done. Too many people today go to the press with a bunch of vaporware when someone in the organization has a potential idea for a project, only to leave the interested geeks like us waiting around through delays, cancellations, and things that never materialize.
Good catch, and not only that, but had he bothered to scroll down the page, they arrive at some sort of hourly wage based on a formula. Most Americans probably know Mexico as Cozumel and Cancun- this is all I know too (first hand), but from I've worked with Mexican nationals and they say that outside of the tourist spots and Mexico City and maybe a Merida or two, things are really poor.
Ford and GM don't have to innovate because the prices of Japanese cars are artifically high in the U.S. due to taxes on imports designed to "level the playing field."
We don't need to have all these tariffs on products imported from countries that have the same standard of living that we do. The Japanese work hard, yes, but they are paid first world salaries so if the prices of their automobiles is low, it is because they are damn good at building cars and if they want to work a little harder than us to do it, more power to them.
On the other hand cars imported from Mexico (like the VW I drive) are produced at the expense of some Mexican making 70 cents an hour. We can't have free trade in this scenerio or we'll all be living in cardboard lean-tos just like our counterparts south of the border.
He probably got it through some type of goverment auction when the facility was decomissioned. I'm sure the feds removed anything of any sensitivity before putting it on the block.
Maybe he should track down whoever ended up buying that F-18/A from a few weeks back... Maybe they need some real estate too!
The U.S. has always been a republic, not a democracy. There is an extremely large difference between the two. A true democracy would be truely frightening.