Authoritarian (at least the stable) governments generally have less crime than democracies. However, the Chinese are gaining on the U.S. in terms of organized crime. Also, there's whole class of white collar crime in the U.S. which is standard operating procedure in China.
Now, what point was it you were attempting to make?
Clinton had nothing to do with it, other than he and the Republican Congress couldn't agree on how to spend money. So they didn't. The other thing that aided Clinton's budget was the dot-com bubble, about 8 months before Baby Bush took over, the dot-com bubble became the dot-com bust. And aiding the bubble was the year 2000 bug which caused a lot of tech spending. By 2000, most systems had been fixed or determined it wouldn't pay to fix and so were replaced...or left as is.
And Dems are not any more responsible than neo-cons unless you think the current levels of entitlement spending were secretly agreed to by neo-cons.
> 1. Stop Agriculture subsidies: Hear! Hear! but they aren't very large, $20 Billion per year, still, money is money > 2. Stop Ethanol subsidies: Peanuts, but we still shouldn't pay it > 3. Raise the tariffs on goods entering this country from countries like China so our tarrif restricts their exports to us like they restrict our exports to them. The U.S. is still the largest manufacturing country on the planet, tariff them and they'll tariff us in like manner. You save nothing here > 4. Impose a tariff on any US companies' goods that are manufactured over seas so it becomes cheaper for them to be made here. Dunno, but I doubt it would be easy. > 5. Stop bombing brown people First tell the brown people to stop trying to kill us, then we'll stop, I promise. > 6. Quit Being Team America world Police and bring all our troops home from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Canada, Mexico. I think that covers everything Of that lot, only Europe and Asia have any appreciable U.S. presence, and many countries pay the U.S. for it. The U.S. defense budget is about $700 billion, maybe you'd get a whole $50 billion out it, peanuts. > 7. Quit buying military equipment the military doesn't want or need (I'm looking at you F-35 JSF and all your friends) Still peanuts compared to the debt, but I'd agree purchases should be scaled back...at until China does something incredibly stupid and we get caught with our pants down. > 8. Closing tax loopholes, you know ones like the carried interest deduction for hedge fund managers or the ones the allow Exxon to get a check from the government. Oh, I'd go for that. Dunno how much it would bring but it would be substantial. Especially the mortgage deduction. That's where the real money is. Exxon is nothing. > 9. Close down the some federal departments Why? EPA? You don't like clean air and water? FDA? You like dangerous drugs? FAA? You'd like to die in a plane crash. Education? Okay, you got me there. Still the rest perform valuable and necessary functions. And to their credit they have to put up with people like you. > 10. Shit can the TSA airport screener and their scanners Yeah, allow anyone with a gun or bomb onto our planes. What could go wrong? > 11. Adjust congressional pay to so that it matches the median or average pay (I don't know which is lower) of the private sector employees in the country (this won't save much but is more symbolic) Yes, symbolic and not worth the time, most of the congress-critters are already rich. > 12. Quit pissing money away on stupid stimulus spending like bailing out banks, car companies, or any other private entity. Bailing out the banks probably saved us from a total economic collapse. Saving the car companies saved thousand of jobs and their tax payments and cost the U.S. government very little in the end (I think we lost a few billion on Chrysler). The stimulus probably prevented a worse economic pit, yet it was poorly spent. Still, it doesn't contribute to the structural deficit.
Means testing SS and Medicare will be necessary because of the baby boomers who are now starting to retire. They have to be changed just to stay solvent. You seem to have this perverse belief that the SS money is kept in a mattress some place. It is instead a lot of IOUs from the Federal Government. You, and everyone else, are not actually entitled to anything you paid in. Since it is a pay as you go system, you are actually only entitled to the extent the rest of America can afford your sorry retired ass. Keeping more than one thought your head a time helps.
So in sum total, you haven't come close to solving the debt problem, but thanks for playing.
It also relies on the author's dubious, probably out of his ass, statement about what law enforcement can and cannot grasp. Me thinks the author is still living in the 60's. Law enforcement these days is fairly sophisticated, it is the politicians who aren't.
So...they are building backdoors into software designed to close backdoors? And if they changed Linux, wouldn't they then have to publish the source code? Source code!! Go crazy!!
You mean when the U.S. notices that Venezuela actually exists. That's Chavez's problem, the U.S. doesn't really give flying rat's ass about it. That doesn't prevent Chavez as portraying himself as somehow critical to the U.S. The U.S. made a mistake in supporting a coup against him, it puffed up his already oversized ego. The best thing the U.S. can do is let Chavez run Venezuela...errr...as long as the U.S. doesn't care about the Venezuelans.
And if the Muslim terrorists do get their hands on nukes (a probability in Pakistan, if indeed one does not consider the Pakistani government as already Muslim terrorists...I do, but surely others disagree), and they nuke the U.S., and the U.S. does not retaliate in kind, say hello to Muslim hegemony for the next century. I do not buy that Islam is peaceful or tolerant or any of the other warm fuzzies we are supposed to be PC enough to swallow.
Look at the world. Philippines: Muslim insurrection in the south. Thailand: Muslim atrocities in the south along the border with Malaysia (a Muslim state), Indonesia: periodic pogroms against Christians. Pakistan: repeatedly picks fights with India (Kashmir has repeatedly expressed a desire to be free of both, which Pakistan (and India) will never allow). Africa: a virtual cesspool of Muslim terrorism.
Islam is not, at its heart, an accommodating religion. Non-Muslims are to be either Other or convert. Many other religions are similar. But most other religions (all) have had something like a Reformation.
The Acid Test of monotheistic religions: How do they treat their women? How do they treat their minorities? On both counts, Islam is at the bottom of the heap. Try this: petition Saudi Arabia to open a Christian church or a Jewish temple. See how that flies. Now ask yourself in what countries would either of these raise a problem.
"military contractors, lay off TSA, DEA, ATF, etc. " You mean they could remain on furlough until some heinous crime or terrorist act happens. Then Obama would get screwed. And those aren't the agencies driving the debt. 2/3 of the budget is ENTITLEMENTS. Fail to attack those means you do squat against the debt.
There is another aspect to the debt. The Bush tax cuts were enacted when they "could see surpluses as far as the eye can see". Well, that lasted...well...it didn't last. Why didn't it last? Two elements: (1) Bush never funded the wars, and (2) the Clinton years were the dot.com bubble. Regarding (2), there was deadlock between Congress and the White House, neither would agree to the other's spending plans. So they simply stopped increasing spending lest their enemies get the leg up in the next election.
In addition, the economy changed during the aughts. Companies shifted more of their operations overseas due to shortsighted Business School Product, and an antiquated tax structure that made it prohibitive for Big Business to invent in the U.S. The latter is open to speculation. Anyhow, the anti-regulation atmosphere of the Bush Years (although started under Clinton attempting to "triangulate") allowed investment banks to invade the loan market. They were aided by the credit rating agencies, and Congress who thought any business is good business. Their bright idea was to securitize (sp?) loans and sell them widely...with collateral "guaranteed by the rating agencies".
That alone wouldn't have caused the current mess.The missing element was the American people. Being greedy and too dumb to understand (or read) the fine print, they bought houses they couldn't afford, bought second houses, flipped houses, took equity out of their houses to piss off on large SUVs (thereby distorting the car market), etc.
This encouraged the Contractors. It used to be you found a contractor to build a house the bank decided, based on your financials, to loan you the money to have build. But in the rarefied atmosphere of no-one minding the store, mega-contractors took over. They will buy a 100 acres or more and build speculation houses (spec-houses). And the American people sucked them right up. Being dumb, you could buy one and think it was worth the purchase price. Being greedy, you could buy one with the intention of flipping it.
And now, the chickens have come home to roost. And everyone wants to point fingers. There is plenty of blame to spread around, and I've neglected several miscreants.
And the Tea Party is not intent on wrecking the economy. The economy is already wrecked, now we are only fighting on how to fix it.
I think you are basically correct. One thing the Tea Party fails to understand is that they do not actually have a mandate. They were born in a crisis, but they have yet to stand for election in how well they manage to alleviate that crisis. They could easily get booted in the next election and merely be a footnote in history.
I don't think the emphasis on fiscal responsibility is the sum total of the Tea Party, at least to hear them talk. The plan to turn Medicare over to the insurance companies was not an entirely fiscal plan. It is loaded with the politics of taking the government out of health care. And it wouldn't actually fix the rise in health care spending, just change who pays for it, and who suffers from it.
A balanced budget amendment is another wookie defense. It sounds good, but it would have prevented the U.S. from mobilizing as it had to during WWII.
I heard a good snippet from a press conference/book advert of Thomas Friedman. It turned out Alan Simpson was in the audience. Someone quipped maybe Simpson and Erskine Bowles should run as a presidential-vp presidential team. The notion got a long, loud applause. Hear, hear, let some adults take control. Simpson mentioned that they calculated there was $1.1 Trillion in tax expenditures. In case you've been brain dead for the last year, a "tax expenditure" is a tax loophole.
More accurately, it is the U.S. Government and the American people that are behind "this budget nonsense". The U.S. Gov. made promises it couldn't keep, and the American people decided sometime in the last decade that they could all be the ME generation.
The American people have another problem: they do not value education. Look at all the Asian Tigers, education is number one with them. Here in the U.S., the Republicans seem to think science either grows on trees or is a liberal plot to re-edit the Christian Bible. The Democrats are all for science as long as it supports their pet beliefs (and if their pols can get some good pork out it, all the better).
American Big Business has forsaken education when they allow a company to be run top to bottom by Business School Product. BSP does not understand how the mettle of a company should be centered on pride of workmanship and new ideas. They only understand widgets. Unless that changes, American Big Business will continue to slowly circle the toilet bowl.
Bingo, the issue isn't that companies are run by Business School Product, it is that companies are being run solely by Business School Product. The ethos of engineers and their craft is lost. One can see this by the amount of jobs shifted out of the U.S. solely on cheaper labor. The whole idea of producing a well-engineered product with proper after the sale support is meaningless to people who would gladly sell widget B over widget A even though their company really only has expertise in widget A.
We recently bought an HP fax machine. That model turns out to have a recurring problem where it screws up the print modules and you are forced to buy new ones. The problem has been out there for awhile but HP has no way of fixing the problem. They've lost control of their own manufacturing. And they've lost any chance of new sales to us.
The Lie that is social security is that you are somehow entitled to the promised benefits. That was always incorrect as anyone can see: you are entitled to amount of promised benefits that the American people can and are willing to afford. No more. So stop thinking there is a some sort of cosmic unity involved in the baby boomers getting their benefits. There isn't, there never was, and there never will be.
Nice straw man you have there: solar - no mention of money, nuclear - billions and millions. I suppose if you were able to back up any of your baloney with real figures, it wouldn't be baloney.
Rather, let ALL the Bush tax cuts expire. 47-49% of American adults pay no income tax. It is time Americans pay for what they have voted for. After that, and with some spending cuts, a balanced budget will make altering the tax code and the spending side much clearer for Americans to decide upon.
You mean the American People? The ones who bought houses they couldn't afford? Bought second houses? Flipped houses? Sucked the equity out of their houses to piss of on consumerism? Them people?
By recent polls, the Taliban are not a popular insurgency. What they be is a Pashtun (and even then with a small base) inspired bunch of Nazies who decides that the Hazaras, Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and host of other small ethnic groups should somehow cede Afghanistan to the Pashtun. They used al Qaeda as their shock strormtroopers to kill off a town before they settled it with Allah-fearing Pashtuns. The Pashtuns went along with it while the Taliban were winning and they got the spoils. After the U.S. took their toy country back from them, many Pashtuns realized they had been bamboozled...not that they got religion since they still think of the other groups as nothing more than cattle, but at least they were chastened enough to stop supporting them very much.
The Taliban in Pakistan rule their enclaves by brutal suppression of anything that might smack of an independent power source. They survive simply because they are the meanest mother fuckers on the block. There is no peace process possible with such a group. They understand nothing except complete power. And they are not popular.
Not only that, when trees die, their carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. Trees are only a buffer, once full, they won't represent a net carbon sink. Put another way, we've probably already reached an equilibrium where the carbon going back into the atmosphere from dead trees already equals the carbon being sequestered from new, growing trees.
FDA, CIA, NSA, Heath and Human Services, Social Security Administration, NIH, NSF, DARPA, , etc. Actually, most of the federal government works just fine. Most people, when whining about the federal government, hold up a few anecdotal cases and then claim the whole system is corrupt. It isn't and holding government agencies to an ideal of perfection is just plain silly, unless...maybe....your job performance should be similarly held to such an ideal? How about it, eh? One screw up out of you and you should be shitcanned like you would the federal agencies.
Sun never opened up mobile Java because they wanted at least that part of Java to pay off for them. I'm unsure if the patents only cover mobile Java, but Sun already had Google in their sights if you listen to lawyers who put the Snoracle deal together.
Patents are not offensive or defensive, it is how you use them that make them offensive or defensive.
Snoracle could try to kneecap the non-mobile part of java, but they'd have a hard time doing that since the license they have for it is fairly permissive. IBM has their own clean room implementation.
It might help if you at least tried to keep up on the issues instead of confusing them.
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Authoritarian (at least the stable) governments generally have less crime than democracies. However, the Chinese are gaining on the U.S. in terms of organized crime. Also, there's whole class of white collar crime in the U.S. which is standard operating procedure in China.
Now, what point was it you were attempting to make?
Clinton had nothing to do with it, other than he and the Republican Congress couldn't agree on how to spend money. So they didn't. The other thing that aided Clinton's budget was the dot-com bubble, about 8 months before Baby Bush took over, the dot-com bubble became the dot-com bust. And aiding the bubble was the year 2000 bug which caused a lot of tech spending. By 2000, most systems had been fixed or determined it wouldn't pay to fix and so were replaced...or left as is.
And Dems are not any more responsible than neo-cons unless you think the current levels of entitlement spending were secretly agreed to by neo-cons.
> 1. Stop Agriculture subsidies:
Hear! Hear! but they aren't very large, $20 Billion per year, still, money is money
> 2. Stop Ethanol subsidies:
Peanuts, but we still shouldn't pay it
> 3. Raise the tariffs on goods entering this country from countries like China so our tarrif restricts their exports to us like they restrict our exports to them.
The U.S. is still the largest manufacturing country on the planet, tariff them and they'll tariff us in like manner. You save nothing here
> 4. Impose a tariff on any US companies' goods that are manufactured over seas so it becomes cheaper for them to be made here.
Dunno, but I doubt it would be easy.
> 5. Stop bombing brown people
First tell the brown people to stop trying to kill us, then we'll stop, I promise.
> 6. Quit Being Team America world Police and bring all our troops home from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Canada, Mexico. I think that covers everything
Of that lot, only Europe and Asia have any appreciable U.S. presence, and many countries pay the U.S. for it. The U.S. defense budget is about $700 billion, maybe you'd get a whole $50 billion out it, peanuts.
> 7. Quit buying military equipment the military doesn't want or need (I'm looking at you F-35 JSF and all your friends)
Still peanuts compared to the debt, but I'd agree purchases should be scaled back...at until China does something incredibly stupid and we get caught with our pants down.
> 8. Closing tax loopholes, you know ones like the carried interest deduction for hedge fund managers or the ones the allow Exxon to get a check from the government.
Oh, I'd go for that. Dunno how much it would bring but it would be substantial. Especially the mortgage deduction. That's where the real money is. Exxon is nothing.
> 9. Close down the some federal departments
Why? EPA? You don't like clean air and water? FDA? You like dangerous drugs? FAA? You'd like to die in a plane crash. Education? Okay, you got me there. Still the rest perform valuable and necessary functions. And to their credit they have to put up with people like you.
> 10. Shit can the TSA airport screener and their scanners
Yeah, allow anyone with a gun or bomb onto our planes. What could go wrong?
> 11. Adjust congressional pay to so that it matches the median or average pay (I don't know which is lower) of the private sector employees in the country (this won't save much but is more symbolic)
Yes, symbolic and not worth the time, most of the congress-critters are already rich.
> 12. Quit pissing money away on stupid stimulus spending like bailing out banks, car companies, or any other private entity.
Bailing out the banks probably saved us from a total economic collapse. Saving the car companies saved thousand of jobs and their tax payments and cost the U.S. government very little in the end (I think we lost a few billion on Chrysler). The stimulus probably prevented a worse economic pit, yet it was poorly spent. Still, it doesn't contribute to the structural deficit.
Means testing SS and Medicare will be necessary because of the baby boomers who are now starting to retire. They have to be changed just to stay solvent. You seem to have this perverse belief that the SS money is kept in a mattress some place. It is instead a lot of IOUs from the Federal Government. You, and everyone else, are not actually entitled to anything you paid in. Since it is a pay as you go system, you are actually only entitled to the extent the rest of America can afford your sorry retired ass. Keeping more than one thought your head a time helps.
So in sum total, you haven't come close to solving the debt problem, but thanks for playing.
It also relies on the author's dubious, probably out of his ass, statement about what law enforcement can and cannot grasp. Me thinks the author is still living in the 60's. Law enforcement these days is fairly sophisticated, it is the politicians who aren't.
Please try to keep up. Sun GPL'd the non-mobile version of Java, not the mobile version which is at issue here.
Also, the GPL doesn't mention patents, it is concerned with copyright.
All the same, I do hope Uncle Larry gets those patents shoved where the Sun don't shine.
So...they are building backdoors into software designed to close backdoors? And if they changed Linux, wouldn't they then have to publish the source code? Source code!! Go crazy!!
The author put in the blurb about Florian Mueller simply as a troll for hits. Give it a rest. We all know Florian's just another dim blogger.
You mean when the U.S. notices that Venezuela actually exists. That's Chavez's problem, the U.S. doesn't really give flying rat's ass about it. That doesn't prevent Chavez as portraying himself as somehow critical to the U.S. The U.S. made a mistake in supporting a coup against him, it puffed up his already oversized ego. The best thing the U.S. can do is let Chavez run Venezuela...errr...as long as the U.S. doesn't care about the Venezuelans.
And if the Muslim terrorists do get their hands on nukes (a probability in Pakistan, if indeed one does not consider the Pakistani government as already Muslim terrorists...I do, but surely others disagree), and they nuke the U.S., and the U.S. does not retaliate in kind, say hello to Muslim hegemony for the next century. I do not buy that Islam is peaceful or tolerant or any of the other warm fuzzies we are supposed to be PC enough to swallow.
Look at the world. Philippines: Muslim insurrection in the south. Thailand: Muslim atrocities in the south along the border with Malaysia (a Muslim state), Indonesia: periodic pogroms against Christians. Pakistan: repeatedly picks fights with India (Kashmir has repeatedly expressed a desire to be free of both, which Pakistan (and India) will never allow). Africa: a virtual cesspool of Muslim terrorism.
Islam is not, at its heart, an accommodating religion. Non-Muslims are to be either Other or convert. Many other religions are similar. But most other religions (all) have had something like a Reformation.
The Acid Test of monotheistic religions: How do they treat their women? How do they treat their minorities? On both counts, Islam is at the bottom of the heap. Try this: petition Saudi Arabia to open a Christian church or a Jewish temple. See how that flies. Now ask yourself in what countries would either of these raise a problem.
One OS to rule them, One OS to bind them, One OS....to lead them all to perdition.
"That's a very astute observation." No, it isn't. Apple makes this claim itself...repeatedly.
Silicone? You'd be surprised at the latest shapes and sizes recently available for butt implants, and there are many more in store.
"military contractors, lay off TSA, DEA, ATF, etc. " You mean they could remain on furlough until some heinous crime or terrorist act happens. Then Obama would get screwed. And those aren't the agencies driving the debt. 2/3 of the budget is ENTITLEMENTS. Fail to attack those means you do squat against the debt.
There is another aspect to the debt. The Bush tax cuts were enacted when they "could see surpluses as far as the eye can see". Well, that lasted...well...it didn't last. Why didn't it last? Two elements: (1) Bush never funded the wars, and (2) the Clinton years were the dot.com bubble. Regarding (2), there was deadlock between Congress and the White House, neither would agree to the other's spending plans. So they simply stopped increasing spending lest their enemies get the leg up in the next election.
In addition, the economy changed during the aughts. Companies shifted more of their operations overseas due to shortsighted Business School Product, and an antiquated tax structure that made it prohibitive for Big Business to invent in the U.S. The latter is open to speculation. Anyhow, the anti-regulation atmosphere of the Bush Years (although started under Clinton attempting to "triangulate") allowed investment banks to invade the loan market. They were aided by the credit rating agencies, and Congress who thought any business is good business. Their bright idea was to securitize (sp?) loans and sell them widely...with collateral "guaranteed by the rating agencies".
That alone wouldn't have caused the current mess.The missing element was the American people. Being greedy and too dumb to understand (or read) the fine print, they bought houses they couldn't afford, bought second houses, flipped houses, took equity out of their houses to piss off on large SUVs (thereby distorting the car market), etc.
This encouraged the Contractors. It used to be you found a contractor to build a house the bank decided, based on your financials, to loan you the money to have build. But in the rarefied atmosphere of no-one minding the store, mega-contractors took over. They will buy a 100 acres or more and build speculation houses (spec-houses). And the American people sucked them right up. Being dumb, you could buy one and think it was worth the purchase price. Being greedy, you could buy one with the intention of flipping it.
And now, the chickens have come home to roost. And everyone wants to point fingers. There is plenty of blame to spread around, and I've neglected several miscreants.
And the Tea Party is not intent on wrecking the economy. The economy is already wrecked, now we are only fighting on how to fix it.
I think you are basically correct. One thing the Tea Party fails to understand is that they do not actually have a mandate. They were born in a crisis, but they have yet to stand for election in how well they manage to alleviate that crisis. They could easily get booted in the next election and merely be a footnote in history.
I don't think the emphasis on fiscal responsibility is the sum total of the Tea Party, at least to hear them talk. The plan to turn Medicare over to the insurance companies was not an entirely fiscal plan. It is loaded with the politics of taking the government out of health care. And it wouldn't actually fix the rise in health care spending, just change who pays for it, and who suffers from it.
A balanced budget amendment is another wookie defense. It sounds good, but it would have prevented the U.S. from mobilizing as it had to during WWII.
I heard a good snippet from a press conference/book advert of Thomas Friedman. It turned out Alan Simpson was in the audience. Someone quipped maybe Simpson and Erskine Bowles should run as a presidential-vp presidential team. The notion got a long, loud applause. Hear, hear, let some adults take control. Simpson mentioned that they calculated there was $1.1 Trillion in tax expenditures. In case you've been brain dead for the last year, a "tax expenditure" is a tax loophole.
More accurately, it is the U.S. Government and the American people that are behind "this budget nonsense". The U.S. Gov. made promises it couldn't keep, and the American people decided sometime in the last decade that they could all be the ME generation.
The American people have another problem: they do not value education. Look at all the Asian Tigers, education is number one with them. Here in the U.S., the Republicans seem to think science either grows on trees or is a liberal plot to re-edit the Christian Bible. The Democrats are all for science as long as it supports their pet beliefs (and if their pols can get some good pork out it, all the better).
American Big Business has forsaken education when they allow a company to be run top to bottom by Business School Product. BSP does not understand how the mettle of a company should be centered on pride of workmanship and new ideas. They only understand widgets. Unless that changes, American Big Business will continue to slowly circle the toilet bowl.
Bingo, the issue isn't that companies are run by Business School Product, it is that companies are being run solely by Business School Product. The ethos of engineers and their craft is lost. One can see this by the amount of jobs shifted out of the U.S. solely on cheaper labor. The whole idea of producing a well-engineered product with proper after the sale support is meaningless to people who would gladly sell widget B over widget A even though their company really only has expertise in widget A.
We recently bought an HP fax machine. That model turns out to have a recurring problem where it screws up the print modules and you are forced to buy new ones. The problem has been out there for awhile but HP has no way of fixing the problem. They've lost control of their own manufacturing. And they've lost any chance of new sales to us.
The Lie that is social security is that you are somehow entitled to the promised benefits. That was always incorrect as anyone can see: you are entitled to amount of promised benefits that the American people can and are willing to afford. No more. So stop thinking there is a some sort of cosmic unity involved in the baby boomers getting their benefits. There isn't, there never was, and there never will be.
Nice straw man you have there: solar - no mention of money, nuclear - billions and millions. I suppose if you were able to back up any of your baloney with real figures, it wouldn't be baloney.
Rather, let ALL the Bush tax cuts expire. 47-49% of American adults pay no income tax. It is time Americans pay for what they have voted for. After that, and with some spending cuts, a balanced budget will make altering the tax code and the spending side much clearer for Americans to decide upon.
You mean the American People? The ones who bought houses they couldn't afford? Bought second houses? Flipped houses? Sucked the equity out of their houses to piss of on consumerism? Them people?
By recent polls, the Taliban are not a popular insurgency. What they be is a Pashtun (and even then with a small base) inspired bunch of Nazies who decides that the Hazaras, Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and host of other small ethnic groups should somehow cede Afghanistan to the Pashtun. They used al Qaeda as their shock strormtroopers to kill off a town before they settled it with Allah-fearing Pashtuns. The Pashtuns went along with it while the Taliban were winning and they got the spoils. After the U.S. took their toy country back from them, many Pashtuns realized they had been bamboozled...not that they got religion since they still think of the other groups as nothing more than cattle, but at least they were chastened enough to stop supporting them very much.
The Taliban in Pakistan rule their enclaves by brutal suppression of anything that might smack of an independent power source. They survive simply because they are the meanest mother fuckers on the block. There is no peace process possible with such a group. They understand nothing except complete power. And they are not popular.
Not only that, when trees die, their carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. Trees are only a buffer, once full, they won't represent a net carbon sink. Put another way, we've probably already reached an equilibrium where the carbon going back into the atmosphere from dead trees already equals the carbon being sequestered from new, growing trees.
FDA, CIA, NSA, Heath and Human Services, Social Security Administration, NIH, NSF, DARPA, , etc. Actually, most of the federal government works just fine. Most people, when whining about the federal government, hold up a few anecdotal cases and then claim the whole system is corrupt. It isn't and holding government agencies to an ideal of perfection is just plain silly, unless...maybe....your job performance should be similarly held to such an ideal? How about it, eh? One screw up out of you and you should be shitcanned like you would the federal agencies.
Sun never opened up mobile Java because they wanted at least that part of Java to pay off for them. I'm unsure if the patents only cover mobile Java, but Sun already had Google in their sights if you listen to lawyers who put the Snoracle deal together.
Patents are not offensive or defensive, it is how you use them that make them offensive or defensive.
Snoracle could try to kneecap the non-mobile part of java, but they'd have a hard time doing that since the license they have for it is fairly permissive. IBM has their own clean room implementation.
It might help if you at least tried to keep up on the issues instead of confusing them.
Still fighting the Vietnam war, are ye?