Clinton illegally invaded Serbia (without Security Council consent)
s/Clinton/NATO/
Illegal? No more illegal than our attack on Iraq. Congress gave Clinton a non-binding resolution supporting action against Yugoslavia too.
And Clinton was bombing Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War right through the 90's.
And he used the same UN resolutions as his excuse that Bush did (a lot of that bombing was in retaliation for attacks on overflights, which was specifically allowed in the resolutions). There is a big difference between punitive bombing and outright conquest, however.
The argument over the President's ability to take this country to war just doesn't fall along Dem/Rep lines, its always been an executive/legislative dispute. You routinely have former Presidents come out and support the current President when the current one takes the country to war without a Congressional DOW. Clinton actually supported Bush's assertion that Hussein needed to be dealt with militarily, he just disagreed with how Bush went about it. So I not only disagree with the beginning of this thread, I also disagree with your attempt portray Clinton as somehow different from any other modern President.
There are 2 different disputes going on here. The first is whether the (second) Iraq war should have happened at all. The second is whether it should have been done the way Bush Jr. did it, as opposed to how his father did it the first time (via a strong UN coalition), or the way Clinton handled Yugoslavia (via NATO action on the European continent). For me its the second issue thats the problem, not the first one.
BTW, its so funny going back and reading the right wing ranting about Clinton's "illegal" war, in light of Bush Jr's attack on Iraq. And before you go ballistic about him having UN authorization, everyone outside the United States knows thats bullshit. The last resolution specifically stated the issue should be brought back to the UN before force was used, but Bush simply ignored that part, and stated he was authorized under "previous" authorizations. Even if that was "technically" true, by having a lawyer splice up those old documents looking for the right phrase, it was clearly a violation of the spirit of the United Nations, because everyone knows the UN would not have authorized Bush's war at that time. Since Bush started moving in military forces before he even mentioned the words "United Nations", no one should be surprised that major powers were unhappy with the fact that Bush clearly intended to attack regardless of what the rest of the world had to say.
So as far as I'm concerned, Bush's war on Iraq is even more illegal than Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia, at least Clinton had NATO and therefore all of Western Europe on his side (UN authorization was impossible because it was obvious that Russia would veto it due to their strong and blind affinity to the Serbs).
newspeak used by the envirowacko crowd to guilt you into letting them run your life.
And this is worse than the propaganda from the anti-environment crowd, how exactly?
Look, there's extremists on both sides of the argument, but the clear consensus within the scientific community is that human activity is damaging the environment.
PS: Unless you live alone on your own private island, *someone*, to some significant degree, is running your life right now.
then I'm all in favor of it. However, using fossil fuels to go everywhere is a short-sighted solution to an problem that can be solved without causing any of the problems like the three above.
I agree, but I don't believe returning to human-powered transportation is either realistic *or* the best we can do. Just consider the problem of the handicapped for one, and the idea becomes a non-starter.
What is needed is a more efficient fuel source capable of the energy we need, not taking a giant 300-year step backwards. There are real reasons why the horse replaced the human, and why the automobile replaced the horse, and those reasons haven't gone away.
Frankly, I think the market is going to start "solving" this problem on its own eventually, even if the government doesn't mandate it. As the cost of fossil fuel rises, and finding and recovering oil cheaply becomes harder, the alternatives become cost effective.
Does anyone read the earlier comments in a thread anymore?
Its already been stated above that he pled guilty to carjacking and kidnapping, but the death penalty came from being found guilty of both those charges *and* the charge of 1st degree murder, which the defendent had pled not guilty to. Basically he claimed he did everything but actually kill the victim, blaming that on the other defendent. However, nobody believed him.
it's the best means of insuring that a person who has utterly broken from civilization and proven so through his actions can never again harm an innocent person.
But what happens when its the convicted person that turns out to be the innocent one?
Look, there are 2 views against the death penalty, one is the moral/religious argument, the other is the fact that the death penalty can't be undone later if we find out we were wrong.
My problem has always been that arguments in favor of the death penalty, like yours, always assume the judicial system is always right. Sadly, we *know* that it is sometimes wrong, especially in cases involving poor, minority defendents convicted on circumstantial evidence.
Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
on
Mock World Vote
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· Score: 1
And note, I said stop bitching, intelegent debates and conversations are alright. But truly all that I see coming from the left these days is bitching. Before Fahrenheit 9/11 I would have said that I was firmly undescided about who I was going to vote for with a strong possibility that I was going to vote for Kerry, but after seeing that atrocious pack of lies, Im pretty sure Im going to vote for Bush just to cheese off Moore and all his chronies. That is of course if Bush doesn't piss me off anymore than he already has.
How bloody ironic. Swap "right" with "left" and "Kerry" with "Bush" and I could have written that paragraph myself. Jeez, my definition for "atrocious pack of lies" is now the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". There is one difference though: I don't vote to "cheese off" anyone else, I vote for the person I believe is best for the job out of the options I am given. Give me some decent options and I wouldn't vote for Kerry, but give me no other option besides Bush, and its clear to me who I should vote for.
Yes, the Red Army is certainly composed of some tough hombres but at that point in time the Russians had just fought hard action against the Nazis and were only a shadow of what they became.
With all due respect you and the grandparent don't have a clue what you're talking about. Anyone who has looked at this, knows there wasn't a chance in hell of the US being able to defeat or destroy the Red Army at that time, without using nuclear weapons(1).
The Red Army that took Berlin against fanatical, and I mean *fanatical* resistence, was not a shadow of *anything*, it was a powerful veteran army with more armored vehicles (most of which were superior to the ones we had) than we had. The Germans had a number of bitter compliments to the Russians of the later Red Army, many of those compliments had to do with the Russians' fanatical to-the-death defense of their Motherland, and the only way to get rid of Joseph Stalin was to go to Moscow and dig him out of his fortifications. Now defending against a Red Army attack on the West would certainly have been possible, but driving it all the way back to Moscow? Absurd. Truly impossible at that time, which was why Eisenhower told Patton to shut up, because he was being irrational.
No disrespect to Patton, he was a great army commander, his swing movement to bring his army to bear against the southern side of the Bulge in '44 was brilliant, and he did recognize the threat the USSR was going to become, but he completely ignored the fact that the American people were not ready for another multi-year war against a powerful and fanatical enemy, and simply would not have accepted it(2). That is what Eisenhower understood that Patton didn't. Everyone was exhausted from the war.
*1: The USSR detonated their first nuke in '49. Had they been at war with us, they *likely* would have been able to deploy one earlier (rush it into production). Even if an attack on them was politically acceptible, we would probably have had to wait until late '46 to attack, in order to bring our troops from the Pacific (yes, that war was dominated by naval power, but we had a lot of Army troops there as well, including the army involved in the liberation of the Phillipines).
The point is it is not at all clear that we could have gone nuclear and won the war before they got their own nukes. Nor is it clear whether nukes would have been useful to us, because we would have been fighting the Russians in occupied territory, not their own, and politics/ethics might have prevented us from using nukes on non-Soviet cities in order to destroy the Russian defenders.
Pressure for faster demobilization from an articulate public, the Congress, and the troops themselves upset the plans for an orderly demobilization. The Army, which felt the greatest pressure, responded by easing the eligibility requirement and releasing half its eight million troops by the end of 1945. Early in 1946, when the Army cut down the return of troops from abroad in order to meet its overseas responsibilities, a crescendo of protest greeted the move, including troop demonstrations in the Philippines, China, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, and even California. The public cry diminished only after the Army more than halved its remaining strength during the first six months of 1946.
In the meantime, the USSR's European army maintained a massive size, while increasing its combat strength with more production of better weaponry.
Better the death of ten thousand soldiers than the nuking of an entire civilian population.
Ok, *you* go to the American people in 1945, after 4 years of war and tens of thousands of casualties already, and tell them to sacrifice another 10,000 soldiers to spare the lives of however many soldiers/civilians of the enemy (BTW, the estimates of casualties for invading mainland Japan exceeded 100,000 not 10,000). I know what the answer would have been. Sure, I don't agree with it, but you and I weren't alive then and didn't have to suffer through the war the way they did.
For the same reason I tell people that no one should be surprised how brutal the Israelis have become after 30+ years of terrorism waged against them, I also say no one should be surprised at the behavior of the Allies at the end of WWII. The people back then simply would not have seen the moral dilemma you and I see. They wanted the war over, with as few further casualties on their own side as possible, but after all the death and destruction of the previous years, they no longer gave a damn how many enemy casualties it took to end the war. They just wanted the war to end.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of the moral supremicists who, from a future era very different from the past one, with the perfect hindsight of history, and without the context of living through a long and painful war, cast judgement on the people from 60 years ago, as if those of us living today would have automatically done things differently. I'm not at all sure *any* of us, born in that time, with their limited knowledge, would have done *anything* differently.
The real moral of the story, is that destructive, long-term warfare (especially modern "total war") must be avoided at all costs, because no matter what the cause, *both* sides will begin to lose their humanity the longer the bloodletting goes on.
the neutron bomb was a public relations disaster, with it's apparent design to "kill people and leave buildings undamaged"
FYI: I don't agree with the original poster about this weapon's intent. You can google this to find a few references to what I'm about to say. The radiation enhanced weapon, from the military's perspective wasn't intended to be used on civilian targets (cities), this weapon was designed to deal with a very specific problem, and the problem was armored targets. Armored targets (from massed tanks to a naval battle group) can withstand substantial blast damage even at relatively close range to ground zero.
The problem here is that ground burst weapons create the highest level of blast damage, but do so in with a small area, whereas air burst weapons create the widest area of significant damage, but do not create the highest shock waves to cause major damage to hardened targets. However armored targets have no protection whatsoever from radiation. Thus the idea of a radiation bomb designed to be dropped on massed armored ground formations, or naval units. The radiation bypasses the armor protection to destroy the target by killing the crew.
Somewhere along the line the idea of using it as a special city buster because it does less blast damage but still kills many inhabitants came up, perhaps from speculation within the military, or perhaps from the anti-nuclear groups. The idea of preserving the enemy's physical assets on the ground was never the purpose, however, since the armored vehicles or buildings or whatever would of course be contaminated with radiation and therefore unusable. From what I remember the military really wanted this as a tactical battlefield weapon (land/sea), not a strategic weapon against cities or military bases.
Of course the anti-nuclear people twisted the facts to give the weapon a new and sinister purpose, and the rest is history.
Uh, its a 104 key keyboard. The standard used to be 101 keys, back with the AT, my old Northgate keyboard was a 101. I'll give you just one guess where the 3 new keys came from.
Computer:
The funny part is if you select the customize option for the $1500 laptop on this page, it doesn't even give you the option to buy without an MS OS. This doesn't exactly help your point.
Best option yet:
A frickin' Mac.
No thanks. The whole reason I bought a PC instead of a Mac all those years ago, was because no one company controlled the future of the machine. Even though MS is trying awfully hard to control its future now, they still aren't in the position to dictate the details (yet). In any event, switching to a machine where the OS *and* the hardware are controlled by one company is not an improvement in my book.
Wow. You started with some pretty bad imagery, yet amazingly managed to still go downhill after that.
It's an OS they can use to make gazillions of dollars on while giving precious little, if anything, back to the people who did the heavy lifting.
IBM has given back a lot of code to the kernel
IBM could have caved in and just paid SCO off, but they decided to (probably) spend *more* money and fight them to a definitive end in a court to assure Linux's future.
IBM is using the GPL in a court of law, something the FS people have wanted to see for a long time. Also something they didn't have to do if they had any doubts about the license.
The GPL doesn't *require* anyone to give anything back unless they redistribute the software. The GPL says *nothing* about the *use* of the software. Since IBM just relies on SUSE/RH/etc for their Linux software, IBM itself is under *no* obligations at all. Yet they continue to willfully give back technology to enhance Linux's performance in enterprise environments (this may not be important to hackers, but its having a *huge* impact on the perception of Linux in the business arena).
The implication of exploitation is false, since the people you believe are victims knew that others could take advantage of their work for profit, and chose to contribute anyway. Sex is not rape if both parties voluntarily consented to it.
"He may not be husband of the year, but he sure buys me a lot of nice things."
You need to take a remedial course on analogies. You just got through claiming IBM is victimizing the F/OS people while "giving precious little, if anything, back", yet in your analogy, the victim is allowing the abuse to continue because the abuser is giving her nice baubles. Huh???
Really, I don't see anything really "interesting" about the article other than the fact it is in Newsweek
Jeez, how did you manage to miss the blatantly obvious (and never mind that some thought this was insightful)? This was a story in the mainstream press about the strange relationship between the anti-corporate F/OS people and the biggest corporation of the IT world. This may not be news to *you*, but it is news to a lot of the people that read Newsweek/MSNBC, and good publicity for Linux in the mainstream press seems to always be considered important news here on/..
Besides, to top it all off it had some ESR quotes I hadn't seen before! [ducks-and-covers]
Yeah, they are doing fine now migrating people to Linux; once they're done and people want to upgrade from kernel 2.4 to kernel 2.6, will they still need IBM? I would say 50% will do it on their own, 20% will choose other vendors (HP, local guys, etc.) and 30% will go back to IBM asking low-cost service.
You're not making any sense. You seem to be saying customers will abandon IBM for cheaper support. Well, that depends entirely on how good IBM's support is doesn't it?
IBM is a *services* company, that is their bread and butter. So what if their support is (slightly|moderately) more expensive than the competition, if its also *better* support then they'll still keep a lot of customers in the long run. IBM's customers aren't geeks, man, they don't do upgrades themselves, they are typically substantial business who go with IBM so they don't *have* to do their own updates, thats what the pricey support contract *buys* them. To you, you only see the difference in the price of support, perhaps because you're the type who doesn't *need* a support contract since you can handle things yourself. Thats fine, but it probably means you're not looking at this the way other businesses (without in-house talent) will.
A lot of companies see more than just the price, they're also looking at the quality of service, the reputation, the strength, and longevity of the company. Do you think the phrase "No one has ever been fired for going with IBM" was just completely made up for no particular reason?
IBM didn't start its focus on services last year or something, they've been doing it for a long time, well before linux was on the scene. They seem to still be doing well, despite not having the advantage of the monopoly that MS has.
Think about it: if price was the only thing that mattered, everybody would be using F/OS software now. Well they aren't.
My god, consensus? Debate? Agreeing to disagree? On/.?
I must be new here...
Nah, don't worry, you're a long-time battle-hardened veteran of the/. wars, who just happens to be asleep. You'll wake up from this nightmare any minute now....
Why should the rich, or ANY segment of society, be split equally politically?
This renders most of your last post moot, because an equal split is what you were implying when you said:
For every Rockefeller you have a Kennedy. For every Gates you have a Jobs.
My point is that this isn't true. The Reps are supported by a larger portion of the upper class than the Dems get, so this isn't a sterotype, its a historical fact, at least for the last several decades.
For every Rockefeller you have a Kennedy. For every Gates you have a Jobs.
So why is it that every election the Republicans collect more contributions than the Democrats? If the rich were split equally politically, this discrepency wouldn't exist.
You are letting media created stereotypes rule your thinking. Stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
s/Clinton/NATO/
Illegal? No more illegal than our attack on Iraq. Congress gave Clinton a non-binding resolution supporting action against Yugoslavia too.
And he used the same UN resolutions as his excuse that Bush did (a lot of that bombing was in retaliation for attacks on overflights, which was specifically allowed in the resolutions). There is a big difference between punitive bombing and outright conquest, however.
The argument over the President's ability to take this country to war just doesn't fall along Dem/Rep lines, its always been an executive/legislative dispute. You routinely have former Presidents come out and support the current President when the current one takes the country to war without a Congressional DOW. Clinton actually supported Bush's assertion that Hussein needed to be dealt with militarily, he just disagreed with how Bush went about it. So I not only disagree with the beginning of this thread, I also disagree with your attempt portray Clinton as somehow different from any other modern President.
There are 2 different disputes going on here. The first is whether the (second) Iraq war should have happened at all. The second is whether it should have been done the way Bush Jr. did it, as opposed to how his father did it the first time (via a strong UN coalition), or the way Clinton handled Yugoslavia (via NATO action on the European continent). For me its the second issue thats the problem, not the first one.
BTW, its so funny going back and reading the right wing ranting about Clinton's "illegal" war, in light of Bush Jr's attack on Iraq. And before you go ballistic about him having UN authorization, everyone outside the United States knows thats bullshit. The last resolution specifically stated the issue should be brought back to the UN before force was used, but Bush simply ignored that part, and stated he was authorized under "previous" authorizations. Even if that was "technically" true, by having a lawyer splice up those old documents looking for the right phrase, it was clearly a violation of the spirit of the United Nations, because everyone knows the UN would not have authorized Bush's war at that time. Since Bush started moving in military forces before he even mentioned the words "United Nations", no one should be surprised that major powers were unhappy with the fact that Bush clearly intended to attack regardless of what the rest of the world had to say.
So as far as I'm concerned, Bush's war on Iraq is even more illegal than Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia, at least Clinton had NATO and therefore all of Western Europe on his side (UN authorization was impossible because it was obvious that Russia would veto it due to their strong and blind affinity to the Serbs).
The controversy over funding is just the tip of the iceburg wrt the NCLB.
And this is worse than the propaganda from the anti-environment crowd, how exactly?
Look, there's extremists on both sides of the argument, but the clear consensus within the scientific community is that human activity is damaging the environment.
PS: Unless you live alone on your own private island, *someone*, to some significant degree, is running your life right now.
I agree, but I don't believe returning to human-powered transportation is either realistic *or* the best we can do. Just consider the problem of the handicapped for one, and the idea becomes a non-starter.
What is needed is a more efficient fuel source capable of the energy we need, not taking a giant 300-year step backwards. There are real reasons why the horse replaced the human, and why the automobile replaced the horse, and those reasons haven't gone away.
Frankly, I think the market is going to start "solving" this problem on its own eventually, even if the government doesn't mandate it. As the cost of fossil fuel rises, and finding and recovering oil cheaply becomes harder, the alternatives become cost effective.
Let me see, so for PC operating systems the companies must be:
Wow, I'm sure Microsoft is worried about all that competition!
Does anyone read the earlier comments in a thread anymore?
Its already been stated above that he pled guilty to carjacking and kidnapping, but the death penalty came from being found guilty of both those charges *and* the charge of 1st degree murder, which the defendent had pled not guilty to. Basically he claimed he did everything but actually kill the victim, blaming that on the other defendent. However, nobody believed him.
First lessson of Slashdot: Dont RTFA so the truth doesn't get in the way of a good rant!
:)
But what happens when its the convicted person that turns out to be the innocent one?
Look, there are 2 views against the death penalty, one is the moral/religious argument, the other is the fact that the death penalty can't be undone later if we find out we were wrong.
My problem has always been that arguments in favor of the death penalty, like yours, always assume the judicial system is always right. Sadly, we *know* that it is sometimes wrong, especially in cases involving poor, minority defendents convicted on circumstantial evidence.
How many casualties did we have in Bosnia?
How bloody ironic. Swap "right" with "left" and "Kerry" with "Bush" and I could have written that paragraph myself. Jeez, my definition for "atrocious pack of lies" is now the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". There is one difference though: I don't vote to "cheese off" anyone else, I vote for the person I believe is best for the job out of the options I am given. Give me some decent options and I wouldn't vote for Kerry, but give me no other option besides Bush, and its clear to me who I should vote for.
With all due respect you and the grandparent don't have a clue what you're talking about. Anyone who has looked at this, knows there wasn't a chance in hell of the US being able to defeat or destroy the Red Army at that time, without using nuclear weapons(1).
The Red Army that took Berlin against fanatical, and I mean *fanatical* resistence, was not a shadow of *anything*, it was a powerful veteran army with more armored vehicles (most of which were superior to the ones we had) than we had. The Germans had a number of bitter compliments to the Russians of the later Red Army, many of those compliments had to do with the Russians' fanatical to-the-death defense of their Motherland, and the only way to get rid of Joseph Stalin was to go to Moscow and dig him out of his fortifications. Now defending against a Red Army attack on the West would certainly have been possible, but driving it all the way back to Moscow? Absurd. Truly impossible at that time, which was why Eisenhower told Patton to shut up, because he was being irrational.
No disrespect to Patton, he was a great army commander, his swing movement to bring his army to bear against the southern side of the Bulge in '44 was brilliant, and he did recognize the threat the USSR was going to become, but he completely ignored the fact that the American people were not ready for another multi-year war against a powerful and fanatical enemy, and simply would not have accepted it(2). That is what Eisenhower understood that Patton didn't. Everyone was exhausted from the war.
*1: The USSR detonated their first nuke in '49. Had they been at war with us, they *likely* would have been able to deploy one earlier (rush it into production). Even if an attack on them was politically acceptible, we would probably have had to wait until late '46 to attack, in order to bring our troops from the Pacific (yes, that war was dominated by naval power, but we had a lot of Army troops there as well, including the army involved in the liberation of the Phillipines).
The point is it is not at all clear that we could have gone nuclear and won the war before they got their own nukes. Nor is it clear whether nukes would have been useful to us, because we would have been fighting the Russians in occupied territory, not their own, and politics/ethics might have prevented us from using nukes on non-Soviet cities in order to destroy the Russian defenders.
*2: From here:
In the meantime, the USSR's European army maintained a massive size, while increasing its combat strength with more production of better weaponry.
Ok, *you* go to the American people in 1945, after 4 years of war and tens of thousands of casualties already, and tell them to sacrifice another 10,000 soldiers to spare the lives of however many soldiers/civilians of the enemy (BTW, the estimates of casualties for invading mainland Japan exceeded 100,000 not 10,000). I know what the answer would have been. Sure, I don't agree with it, but you and I weren't alive then and didn't have to suffer through the war the way they did.
For the same reason I tell people that no one should be surprised how brutal the Israelis have become after 30+ years of terrorism waged against them, I also say no one should be surprised at the behavior of the Allies at the end of WWII. The people back then simply would not have seen the moral dilemma you and I see. They wanted the war over, with as few further casualties on their own side as possible, but after all the death and destruction of the previous years, they no longer gave a damn how many enemy casualties it took to end the war. They just wanted the war to end.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of the moral supremicists who, from a future era very different from the past one, with the perfect hindsight of history, and without the context of living through a long and painful war, cast judgement on the people from 60 years ago, as if those of us living today would have automatically done things differently. I'm not at all sure *any* of us, born in that time, with their limited knowledge, would have done *anything* differently.
The real moral of the story, is that destructive, long-term warfare (especially modern "total war") must be avoided at all costs, because no matter what the cause, *both* sides will begin to lose their humanity the longer the bloodletting goes on.
FYI: I don't agree with the original poster about this weapon's intent. You can google this to find a few references to what I'm about to say. The radiation enhanced weapon, from the military's perspective wasn't intended to be used on civilian targets (cities), this weapon was designed to deal with a very specific problem, and the problem was armored targets. Armored targets (from massed tanks to a naval battle group) can withstand substantial blast damage even at relatively close range to ground zero.
The problem here is that ground burst weapons create the highest level of blast damage, but do so in with a small area, whereas air burst weapons create the widest area of significant damage, but do not create the highest shock waves to cause major damage to hardened targets. However armored targets have no protection whatsoever from radiation. Thus the idea of a radiation bomb designed to be dropped on massed armored ground formations, or naval units. The radiation bypasses the armor protection to destroy the target by killing the crew.
Somewhere along the line the idea of using it as a special city buster because it does less blast damage but still kills many inhabitants came up, perhaps from speculation within the military, or perhaps from the anti-nuclear groups. The idea of preserving the enemy's physical assets on the ground was never the purpose, however, since the armored vehicles or buildings or whatever would of course be contaminated with radiation and therefore unusable. From what I remember the military really wanted this as a tactical battlefield weapon (land/sea), not a strategic weapon against cities or military bases.
Of course the anti-nuclear people twisted the facts to give the weapon a new and sinister purpose, and the rest is history.
Uh, its a 104 key keyboard. The standard used to be 101 keys, back with the AT, my old Northgate keyboard was a 101. I'll give you just one guess where the 3 new keys came from.
The funny part is if you select the customize option for the $1500 laptop on this page, it doesn't even give you the option to buy without an MS OS. This doesn't exactly help your point.
No thanks. The whole reason I bought a PC instead of a Mac all those years ago, was because no one company controlled the future of the machine. Even though MS is trying awfully hard to control its future now, they still aren't in the position to dictate the details (yet). In any event, switching to a machine where the OS *and* the hardware are controlled by one company is not an improvement in my book.
You're new here, aren't you.
Wow. You started with some pretty bad imagery, yet amazingly managed to still go downhill after that.
You need to take a remedial course on analogies. You just got through claiming IBM is victimizing the F/OS people while "giving precious little, if anything, back", yet in your analogy, the victim is allowing the abuse to continue because the abuser is giving her nice baubles. Huh???
Jeez, how did you manage to miss the blatantly obvious (and never mind that some thought this was insightful)? This was a story in the mainstream press about the strange relationship between the anti-corporate F/OS people and the biggest corporation of the IT world. This may not be news to *you*, but it is news to a lot of the people that read Newsweek/MSNBC, and good publicity for Linux in the mainstream press seems to always be considered important news here on
Besides, to top it all off it had some ESR quotes I hadn't seen before! [ducks-and-covers]
You're not making any sense. You seem to be saying customers will abandon IBM for cheaper support. Well, that depends entirely on how good IBM's support is doesn't it?
IBM is a *services* company, that is their bread and butter. So what if their support is (slightly|moderately) more expensive than the competition, if its also *better* support then they'll still keep a lot of customers in the long run. IBM's customers aren't geeks, man, they don't do upgrades themselves, they are typically substantial business who go with IBM so they don't *have* to do their own updates, thats what the pricey support contract *buys* them. To you, you only see the difference in the price of support, perhaps because you're the type who doesn't *need* a support contract since you can handle things yourself. Thats fine, but it probably means you're not looking at this the way other businesses (without in-house talent) will.
A lot of companies see more than just the price, they're also looking at the quality of service, the reputation, the strength, and longevity of the company. Do you think the phrase "No one has ever been fired for going with IBM" was just completely made up for no particular reason?
IBM didn't start its focus on services last year or something, they've been doing it for a long time, well before linux was on the scene. They seem to still be doing well, despite not having the advantage of the monopoly that MS has.
Think about it: if price was the only thing that mattered, everybody would be using F/OS software now. Well they aren't.
Nah, don't worry, you're a long-time battle-hardened veteran of the
Hey, if its Big Iron you want, you can't do any better...
This year yes, but not in every election.
This renders most of your last post moot, because an equal split is what you were implying when you said:
My point is that this isn't true. The Reps are supported by a larger portion of the upper class than the Dems get, so this isn't a sterotype, its a historical fact, at least for the last several decades.
But the victim does have the right to live, thats why murder is a crime in the first place.
Spending the rest of their life in prison is hardly what I would call "letting them off the hook".
If the ballot were designed and printed out correctly, yes.
So why is it that every election the Republicans collect more contributions than the Democrats? If the rich were split equally politically, this discrepency wouldn't exist.
You first.
Awe Mom, I said I was gonna vote this time, and I really really really mean it this time!
If I remember right, aren't you over 60, Mom?