I guess you've never been to Detroit. The closest thing to a subway that they have is the "People Mover" which is more of an elevated train that goes nowhere.
Not that you'd really want to travel in Detroit anyway...
Then the gorgeous, confident, intelligent housewife/mom saves the day.
Actually, there's a much more obvious reason for this. It turns out that women make many more purchases than men. What product are you going to buy, the one whose ad made you look like an idiot or the one where you were the attractive rescuer?
Sexist? You bet. Does it work? I'll bet it does. You might also notice that beer commercials rarely feature these heroic women; I'm guessing men buy more beer than women do.
If I were in that situation, I wouldn't complain about the money, I'd complain about what they are doing wrong. Taking half their money away isn't going to solve the real problem.
Your mistake is the "they". School systems don't work in a vacuum. The question that should be asked is "What are we doing wrong?" I've read far too many stories recently about parents pressuring school systems to give their children good grades because "My taxes pay your salary." It doesn't seem to matter that the parents don't encourage their kids to learn anything. Or then there's the other extreme, where the parents just think of public school as "free" daycare. They really don't even care if their kid even shows up, just as long as the kid doesn't bother them during the day.
The whole community is an extension of this. Doing well in school has a whole lot to do with the way the community thinks of school. If school is seen as something good and necessary, the children will do well, if it's seen as taxpayer funded daycare, the children won't. This is why children in many poorly funded communities do well; the whole community supports the school as best they can because they see it as important.
I definitely agree with your second point. Taking money away from a poorly performing school district basically changes it to a hugely underperforming district. It's bad enough that you've got a building full of kids who don't want to be there since their parents basically tell them it's all crap they have to endure rather than a chance to improve themselves; it's worse when that building is falling down because they don't have funds to do basic repairs.
The deluge is common across a lot of mythologies, but it makes more sense to assume its role in the Bible is adapted from the Mesopotamian flood stories.
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? The Flood story in there is nearly identical to the one in the Bible. The names are different, there's a few different secondary items, but it's basically the same layout: God(s) decide to flood the earth, God tells guy to build a boat and put all the living things of the world on it, world gets flooded, guy ends up on top of a mountain.
There's a nice summary here.
(Look at Tablet 11.) Interestingly, Utnapishtim (the story's Noah) is immortal when Gilgamesh meets him (well after the flood), very similar to Noah's unusually long lifespan.
We aren't talking about "Hey, there are two flood survival stories in ancient writings!" we're talking about "Hey, the Hebrews seem to have inherited a flood story and then adapted it to their own use."
Re:don't forget about darwinist programming
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 1
Actually, they're completely repeatable, if you use a known pseudo-random number generator and start with the same random seed.
I agree that humans probably have a pretty good chance of survival after a "species-level" extinction event, but humans aren't the only species on this planet and have a particularly high survival ability due to sheer numbers and tech-based adaptability. In fact, every species on this planet is a "single planet" species (unless aardvarks have been colonizing extraterrestial bodies behind our backs).
Just take the pleistocene as an example. Basically, there was a pretty major ice age about 11,000 years ago and a lot of species died off across the world (including sabre tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, etc.). This really isn't even considered a huge extinction event (see here), but that doesn't mean it wasn't a "species-level" event.
Since we're still around, there haven't been any events that have killed off everything as far as we've been able to determine. Some number of species have always dodged the event, even if most didn't.
I happen to believe in the existance of greater being, not because I can cite someones scientific evidence but because there has to be something more to the world that we don't understand.
This is a really horrible argument. This is the old "God is in the unknown" argument (sometimes known as the "God in the gaps" argument since alliteration is always fun), which is really painful to both those with faith and those without.
One of the tenats of most faiths is that this "greater being" is far greater than us. The argument basically says that he's greater because there's a huge number of things that we can't explain. The problem is that we keep explaining more things, which leads to a lessening of this "greater being." If this argument were true, then the "greater being" of 2000BCE was much more powerful than that of 100AD than that of today, since we've been able to explain so much more of our world at each stage. It's just a slow disproof of God.
Those who don't believe in a "greater being" to one extent or the other hate this argument because it always causes another question. It's like a three year old with a continuous series of "why" questions where as each one is explained another one appears until the "I don't know" answer rears its head. At this point, the questioner says, "Ah! There's God!" when, in truth, it just means we haven't figured this aspect of "God" yet.
If the world is as bland as you perpetuate it to be, I don't think I'd ever be prepaired for the endless void that would await me as I cease to exist after my demise.
Like one of the sibling posts has said, I don't see the world as bland, with or without a "greater being"; the complexity of the world is amazing and continuously facinates me. I do understand your fear of the dark and wish that there was some evidence of further existence. Heck, I'll be the first in line to sign up if there is, but, at this point, I haven't ever seen any from any source, religious or otherwise. I cannot fool myself into believing in some greater power, who has never shown itself, just to lessen the fear of death that lingers in one way or another in all people.
Truthfully, in my experience, there are three possibilities for a "greater being":
There isn't one.
There is one, but it doesn't meddle with the world at all. This generally fits well with the Deist beliefs. As an Agnostic Deist, I can see the argument that God kick started the big bang, more or less being equivalent to Plato's "Prime Mover", but that's the last time this greater power had anything to do with the universe and those in it.
There is one and it regularly meddles with the world, but does so in a completely random fashion at a number of different levels. It cares nothing for the faithful or the faithless alike. It will wipe out a city while at the same time giving a perfect growing season to another. It will allow a helpless newborn to die while helping a criminal escape justice. Generally, I attribute most of this possiblity to random chance and its huge variation rather than some chaotic being.
As you may have guessed, I generally subscribe to the second possibility, but I believe that God's existence is unknowable as well, so you could also consider me to be partially in the first possibility.
You're completely ignoring federally issued bonds. This is debt that the government directly owes to the purchasers. The purchasers expect these bonds to be paid off when due with interest. Of course, these bonds probably aren't worth as much as they were when they were purchased due to inflation and the falling dollar, but that doesn't mean that the US government can just ignore them.
Re:I saw ASIMO "in person": it's semi-autonomous
on
Honda Updates ASIMO
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· Score: 1
A few of the markers were triggers for ASIMO to orient itself with before demonstrating an action.
If this is true, this is actually more impressive than it seems. Think of it this way, which is more technically difficult:
Technician presses start button, robot executes program: Walk x steps, turn left 90 degrees, walk y steps...
or
Technician presses start button, robot executes program: Walk until you get out onto the stage, turn toward the taped area on the floor. Walk toward it. Turn down the break in the taped area.
Either will get the same end result, but with the later, the robot has to see the tape, figure out when to turn by the tape placement, etc. This means that from show to show, the tape placement could change without having to rewrite the program.
The press release (thus take this with a large grain of salt) says that in "run" mode, ASIMO is airborne for about a 20th of a second. I'd say that this covers dynamic walking.
They also talk about it when they speak of slip and slide problems in the release also.
This seems to be able the same level a Sony's QRIO except on a larger scale.
A little info on Albie's. I'm originally from MI (actually lower MI where pasties aren't as popular). I've never actually seen an Albie's grocery store, but I have seen a fast food like Albie's in Grayling, MI. It's a very small chain of only a few stores.
Pasties are their main draw, but that's about it. From what I understand, pasties were originally imported from Europe as the early equivalent of a boxed lunch. Something that you could eat when you had your lunch break out in the middle of nowhere.
I wonder if the Hot Pockets people are going to be sued next...
So you're saying that urban math is different than rural math? Or urban physics is different than rural physics?
I'm not saying that the cultures are the same between urban and rural areas (though mass media is definitely uniting the US culture overall), but what is learned doesn't change between one place and another.
There's a major difference between the "big 3" manufacturers and Toyota and Honda: the "big 3" use union labor. I've worked as a computer tech in a couple of assembly plants and union automotive labor isn't there for quality.
I'm not exactly sure how Chrysler handled their plants after the merger with Daimler. Mercedes plants located in the US were non-union, but Chrysler was prohibited by their union shops to run non-union shops.
I'm not against unions overall, but there are many industries where unions are not necessary anymore. Unions were originally created to keep workers from working extra long hours or overly dangerous jobs for nearly no pay. There are jobs that still need unions since they generally get paid dirt for professional level work. And then there's the police who probably need a union, but can't have one. Auto workers on the other hand, work to quota and stand around the rest of the day and in some cases get profit sharing no matter the quality of the work they produce.
Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists. Generally, most Christians would not include Deists among their number. The basic idea of Deism is that God created the universe and hasn't had anything to do with it since. Modern Deism generally does not have an opinion as to whether God created the world literally or just jump started the process.
An interesting fact is that Thomas Jefferson once edited a large portion of the New Testament covering the life of Jesus ("The Jefferson Bible"). His main changes were the complete removal of miracles and direct references to Jesus being the son of God. I'm assuming that most Christians would disagree with his editorial.
You're speaking from a narrow point of view. Currently in the US, you can basically marry just about anyone you want, with nearly no notice. Heck, in Las Vegas, I doubt you even have to be conscious to do it.
You seem to think that there needs to be some approval from the community to get married. Other than whether you're trying to marry your own sister, I don't think that any Justice of the Peace would blink an eye marrying anyone. I'm guessing that most don't even have the right to deny a marriage without some very specific cause.
If marriage is so important to the community at large, why aren't various levels of government banning divorce? And why aren't adulterers punished more harshly? (That last one's easy: half of congress would be in jail right now.)
Well, even if their actual membership was 700,000, that really isn't very many people on the scope of the population of the US. We're clocked in at over 300,000,000. That puts them at about 0.2% of the population. And that's ignoring your argument about their membership, which I happen to agree with.
From a furthering your genes point of view, this is true, but among most higher animals, this isn't the whole truth. To put it simply, children with parents have a higher chance of survival than those without. We aren't snakes; our children are unable to survive without caregivers for many years.
This is has also been used as the reason why menopause occurs. There is no reason for women ever to stop being fertile from a child bearing perspective. In fact, it seems rather dumb that women stop bearing children; more children mean more chances for their genes to pass on, etc. Well, it turns out that bearing children into old age kills more women. Heck, it's only about this last century that childbirth wasn't one of the leading causes of death for women (in developed countries at least).
Keeping these older women from dying has a purpose: mothers need help. A grandmother, having had children of her own, can pass on her knowledge to her children, thus preserving her genes in the form of her grandchildren. Keeping your genes going by having children is one thing, keeping those children alive to have their own children is also important.
One second, first you're stating that RISC didn't work out, but then you say that every CISC processor is actually a RISC, which seems to say that RISC worked out very well.
In truth, all current desktop processors are RISC with a variety of decoders ahead of them. The processors labeled as RISC, such as the PowerPC line, tend to have more orderly instruction sets, same instruction size for everything, etc., but overally their architectures have more similarities than differences.
I think that it's far too early to tell how this line of cell processors will be used. They're definitely going to be used in several million PS3s, which is nothing to sneeze at. They're definitely going to be used in a bunch of development stations for those PS3s. They're probably going to be used in a number of consumer devices from Sony. And there's a fair chance that they'll get a nice chunk of the graphics workstation market too, since I can see these being excellent render farms that are incredibly expandable.
In addition to this, it should be remembered that IBM is going to be the supplier for all three of the next generation game stations processors, which all seem to be based on the POWER/Power/PowerPC architecture. So things are probably going to be very interesting for the Mac market and also non-Mac lower end PPC workstations.
However, I would not worry as you will always have certain portions of the population that will label this the "Mark of the beast" and not partake.
There will be portions of the population that will see this as unnatural or unholy or un-something and will refuse to partake, but unless they are willing to kill all of the people who did get age extension treatments, there's a simple solution: wait.
I can see the conversation now: Opposer: You're unnatural and you should not have decided to live forever. Immortal: Okay, see you in a century. Oops, no, I won't.
Basically, anyone who lives a few hundred years, outlives any of their detractors who thought that people shouldn't ever live that long. And with each succeeding generation, exposure to this concept makes it more and more normal, acceptable and desirable.
Corey Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" discusses this concept quite well. (BTW, it's available for download from his site, www.craphound.com.)
Yeah, but how often do bombers get into dogfights?
You can't dogfight at Mach 10 (or really Mach anything), so what's left? A bomber. This would seriously ease a nation's dependence on foreign bases since the airfield could be halfway around the world. I'm sure the various air forces would love this kind of thing since it would partially take back some of what aircraft carriers have removed from air force influence.
Tom Thumb had some form of dwarfism, which can be caused by a variety of conditions. The major difference between Tom and these floresiensis is that Tom didn't breed true for over a few thousand years. I'm also going to make a good guess that Tom's skull wasn't the size of a grapefruit either.
It's one thing to be short in stature, it's another to actually have a much smaller brain as compared to the species they probably descended from, homo erectus.
I'm not sure when "The Transparent Society" was published, but in Brin's novel, "Earth" (Hugo nominee and runner up 1991), this concept was one of the themes of the book. Earth takes place "50 years in the future" in a society where, basically, personal surveillance is readily available to everyone. In fact, it's generally more costly to not be observed than just allowing it. For example, one of the characters in the book uses a pad of very expensive paper ($4 a sheet if I remember right) to work through an idea because her ultra-cheap computer, etc., can be easily accessed.
He also covers one of the negative aspects of this society: the recordings made by others can be used without your permission. A minor character in the book is recorded by another, the footage is later editing into a documentary which is then sold by the film maker. If I remember right, the filmed character does get paid out of the profits, but he did not know that he was being filmed. None of the character's activities were illegal, but at least one (when he hits on a girl) would definitely have been considered embarassing.
If this type of society does happen, I wouldn't be surprised if there was suddenly a market for reality series just based on people's lives. Can you imagine a lovely movie being released without your permission that's the equivalent of a gag reel starring you?
There you go. A textbook example of competition in action.
Did you miss where the DOJ pressure was applied? That wasn't competition in action. If MS had had its choice, there would be no Intuit right now. And since Intuit is basically their only competition in that arena, MS Money would've disappeared and MS would have another monopoly.
SNIP
The problem with the "extension" wasn't that it happened, it was where they put the new classes.
Actually, the problem wasn't that MS added classes to their JVM, it was that they didn't implement part of the Java spec, but still marketed the JVM as a full Java implementation. Basically, some standard Java stuff broke when you tried to run it on the MS JVM. If I remember right, it had to do with reflection architecture, but my recall might not be correct. Frankly, if MS had just had a full Java implementation, they would've been home free. Their's was overall a better implementation for windows and they were a licensee from SUN.
Re:interesting article
on
The Long Tail
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· Score: 1
That's not exactly an error. Yes, maybe a single record in, say 1959, cost $0.99, but, according to this inflation calculator, $0.99 in 1959 is about $6 in 2003 currency.
So we're talking the equivalent of $3.00 a track. Not to mention since you have to buy them in groups of two and one of them might be crap, you might be wasting $3.00.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that you'd really want to travel in Detroit anyway...
Actually, there's a much more obvious reason for this. It turns out that women make many more purchases than men. What product are you going to buy, the one whose ad made you look like an idiot or the one where you were the attractive rescuer?
Sexist? You bet. Does it work? I'll bet it does. You might also notice that beer commercials rarely feature these heroic women; I'm guessing men buy more beer than women do.
Your mistake is the "they". School systems don't work in a vacuum. The question that should be asked is "What are we doing wrong?" I've read far too many stories recently about parents pressuring school systems to give their children good grades because "My taxes pay your salary." It doesn't seem to matter that the parents don't encourage their kids to learn anything. Or then there's the other extreme, where the parents just think of public school as "free" daycare. They really don't even care if their kid even shows up, just as long as the kid doesn't bother them during the day.
The whole community is an extension of this. Doing well in school has a whole lot to do with the way the community thinks of school. If school is seen as something good and necessary, the children will do well, if it's seen as taxpayer funded daycare, the children won't. This is why children in many poorly funded communities do well; the whole community supports the school as best they can because they see it as important.
I definitely agree with your second point. Taking money away from a poorly performing school district basically changes it to a hugely underperforming district. It's bad enough that you've got a building full of kids who don't want to be there since their parents basically tell them it's all crap they have to endure rather than a chance to improve themselves; it's worse when that building is falling down because they don't have funds to do basic repairs.
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? The Flood story in there is nearly identical to the one in the Bible. The names are different, there's a few different secondary items, but it's basically the same layout: God(s) decide to flood the earth, God tells guy to build a boat and put all the living things of the world on it, world gets flooded, guy ends up on top of a mountain.
There's a nice summary here. (Look at Tablet 11.) Interestingly, Utnapishtim (the story's Noah) is immortal when Gilgamesh meets him (well after the flood), very similar to Noah's unusually long lifespan.
We aren't talking about "Hey, there are two flood survival stories in ancient writings!" we're talking about "Hey, the Hebrews seem to have inherited a flood story and then adapted it to their own use."
Actually, they're completely repeatable, if you use a known pseudo-random number generator and start with the same random seed.
Just take the pleistocene as an example. Basically, there was a pretty major ice age about 11,000 years ago and a lot of species died off across the world (including sabre tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, etc.). This really isn't even considered a huge extinction event (see here), but that doesn't mean it wasn't a "species-level" event.
Since we're still around, there haven't been any events that have killed off everything as far as we've been able to determine. Some number of species have always dodged the event, even if most didn't.
This is a really horrible argument. This is the old "God is in the unknown" argument (sometimes known as the "God in the gaps" argument since alliteration is always fun), which is really painful to both those with faith and those without.
One of the tenats of most faiths is that this "greater being" is far greater than us. The argument basically says that he's greater because there's a huge number of things that we can't explain. The problem is that we keep explaining more things, which leads to a lessening of this "greater being." If this argument were true, then the "greater being" of 2000BCE was much more powerful than that of 100AD than that of today, since we've been able to explain so much more of our world at each stage. It's just a slow disproof of God.
Those who don't believe in a "greater being" to one extent or the other hate this argument because it always causes another question. It's like a three year old with a continuous series of "why" questions where as each one is explained another one appears until the "I don't know" answer rears its head. At this point, the questioner says, "Ah! There's God!" when, in truth, it just means we haven't figured this aspect of "God" yet.
If the world is as bland as you perpetuate it to be, I don't think I'd ever be prepaired for the endless void that would await me as I cease to exist after my demise.
Like one of the sibling posts has said, I don't see the world as bland, with or without a "greater being"; the complexity of the world is amazing and continuously facinates me. I do understand your fear of the dark and wish that there was some evidence of further existence. Heck, I'll be the first in line to sign up if there is, but, at this point, I haven't ever seen any from any source, religious or otherwise. I cannot fool myself into believing in some greater power, who has never shown itself, just to lessen the fear of death that lingers in one way or another in all people.
Truthfully, in my experience, there are three possibilities for a "greater being":
As you may have guessed, I generally subscribe to the second possibility, but I believe that God's existence is unknowable as well, so you could also consider me to be partially in the first possibility.
You're completely ignoring federally issued bonds. This is debt that the government directly owes to the purchasers. The purchasers expect these bonds to be paid off when due with interest. Of course, these bonds probably aren't worth as much as they were when they were purchased due to inflation and the falling dollar, but that doesn't mean that the US government can just ignore them.
If this is true, this is actually more impressive than it seems. Think of it this way, which is more technically difficult:
Technician presses start button, robot executes program: Walk x steps, turn left 90 degrees, walk y steps...
or
Technician presses start button, robot executes program: Walk until you get out onto the stage, turn toward the taped area on the floor. Walk toward it. Turn down the break in the taped area.
Either will get the same end result, but with the later, the robot has to see the tape, figure out when to turn by the tape placement, etc. This means that from show to show, the tape placement could change without having to rewrite the program.
They also talk about it when they speak of slip and slide problems in the release also.
This seems to be able the same level a Sony's QRIO except on a larger scale.
Pasties are their main draw, but that's about it. From what I understand, pasties were originally imported from Europe as the early equivalent of a boxed lunch. Something that you could eat when you had your lunch break out in the middle of nowhere.
I wonder if the Hot Pockets people are going to be sued next...
I'm not saying that the cultures are the same between urban and rural areas (though mass media is definitely uniting the US culture overall), but what is learned doesn't change between one place and another.
I'm not exactly sure how Chrysler handled their plants after the merger with Daimler. Mercedes plants located in the US were non-union, but Chrysler was prohibited by their union shops to run non-union shops.
I'm not against unions overall, but there are many industries where unions are not necessary anymore. Unions were originally created to keep workers from working extra long hours or overly dangerous jobs for nearly no pay. There are jobs that still need unions since they generally get paid dirt for professional level work. And then there's the police who probably need a union, but can't have one. Auto workers on the other hand, work to quota and stand around the rest of the day and in some cases get profit sharing no matter the quality of the work they produce.
An interesting fact is that Thomas Jefferson once edited a large portion of the New Testament covering the life of Jesus ("The Jefferson Bible"). His main changes were the complete removal of miracles and direct references to Jesus being the son of God. I'm assuming that most Christians would disagree with his editorial.
You seem to think that there needs to be some approval from the community to get married. Other than whether you're trying to marry your own sister, I don't think that any Justice of the Peace would blink an eye marrying anyone. I'm guessing that most don't even have the right to deny a marriage without some very specific cause.
If marriage is so important to the community at large, why aren't various levels of government banning divorce? And why aren't adulterers punished more harshly? (That last one's easy: half of congress would be in jail right now.)
Well, even if their actual membership was 700,000, that really isn't very many people on the scope of the population of the US. We're clocked in at over 300,000,000. That puts them at about 0.2% of the population. And that's ignoring your argument about their membership, which I happen to agree with.
This is has also been used as the reason why menopause occurs. There is no reason for women ever to stop being fertile from a child bearing perspective. In fact, it seems rather dumb that women stop bearing children; more children mean more chances for their genes to pass on, etc. Well, it turns out that bearing children into old age kills more women. Heck, it's only about this last century that childbirth wasn't one of the leading causes of death for women (in developed countries at least).
Keeping these older women from dying has a purpose: mothers need help. A grandmother, having had children of her own, can pass on her knowledge to her children, thus preserving her genes in the form of her grandchildren. Keeping your genes going by having children is one thing, keeping those children alive to have their own children is also important.
In truth, all current desktop processors are RISC with a variety of decoders ahead of them. The processors labeled as RISC, such as the PowerPC line, tend to have more orderly instruction sets, same instruction size for everything, etc., but overally their architectures have more similarities than differences.
I think that it's far too early to tell how this line of cell processors will be used. They're definitely going to be used in several million PS3s, which is nothing to sneeze at. They're definitely going to be used in a bunch of development stations for those PS3s. They're probably going to be used in a number of consumer devices from Sony. And there's a fair chance that they'll get a nice chunk of the graphics workstation market too, since I can see these being excellent render farms that are incredibly expandable.
In addition to this, it should be remembered that IBM is going to be the supplier for all three of the next generation game stations processors, which all seem to be based on the POWER/Power/PowerPC architecture. So things are probably going to be very interesting for the Mac market and also non-Mac lower end PPC workstations.
There will be portions of the population that will see this as unnatural or unholy or un-something and will refuse to partake, but unless they are willing to kill all of the people who did get age extension treatments, there's a simple solution: wait.
I can see the conversation now:
Opposer: You're unnatural and you should not have decided to live forever.
Immortal: Okay, see you in a century. Oops, no, I won't.
Basically, anyone who lives a few hundred years, outlives any of their detractors who thought that people shouldn't ever live that long. And with each succeeding generation, exposure to this concept makes it more and more normal, acceptable and desirable.
Corey Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" discusses this concept quite well. (BTW, it's available for download from his site, www.craphound.com.)
You can't dogfight at Mach 10 (or really Mach anything), so what's left? A bomber. This would seriously ease a nation's dependence on foreign bases since the airfield could be halfway around the world. I'm sure the various air forces would love this kind of thing since it would partially take back some of what aircraft carriers have removed from air force influence.
It's one thing to be short in stature, it's another to actually have a much smaller brain as compared to the species they probably descended from, homo erectus.
Work better for you?
He also covers one of the negative aspects of this society: the recordings made by others can be used without your permission. A minor character in the book is recorded by another, the footage is later editing into a documentary which is then sold by the film maker. If I remember right, the filmed character does get paid out of the profits, but he did not know that he was being filmed. None of the character's activities were illegal, but at least one (when he hits on a girl) would definitely have been considered embarassing.
If this type of society does happen, I wouldn't be surprised if there was suddenly a market for reality series just based on people's lives. Can you imagine a lovely movie being released without your permission that's the equivalent of a gag reel starring you?
Did you miss where the DOJ pressure was applied? That wasn't competition in action. If MS had had its choice, there would be no Intuit right now. And since Intuit is basically their only competition in that arena, MS Money would've disappeared and MS would have another monopoly.
SNIP
The problem with the "extension" wasn't that it happened, it was where they put the new classes.
Actually, the problem wasn't that MS added classes to their JVM, it was that they didn't implement part of the Java spec, but still marketed the JVM as a full Java implementation. Basically, some standard Java stuff broke when you tried to run it on the MS JVM. If I remember right, it had to do with reflection architecture, but my recall might not be correct. Frankly, if MS had just had a full Java implementation, they would've been home free. Their's was overall a better implementation for windows and they were a licensee from SUN.
So we're talking the equivalent of $3.00 a track. Not to mention since you have to buy them in groups of two and one of them might be crap, you might be wasting $3.00.