My apologies. I should have been more explicit about context. Obviously the profs that are looking out for their more modestly-budgeted students aren't the ones being discussed here. I'm sure you know the atmosphere I'm referring to, and while it may only impact some course material, it only takes a few brushes with the scenario I mentioned to get the bad taste in your mouth.
And, obviously, I was responding to the parent post, which described (predictably, of course) that the whole education system is just a big American Evil Corporate Plot blah blah blah... and that bit of nonsense is just so tiresome that I was a trifle rash in assuming anyone bothering to read my comment (I'm actually shocked!) would understand that I'm referring to the schools/profs that DO stick students with $150 texts that, gee, just happen to be written by people in that school's department and printed by the in-house press. You know what I mean, and sorry if I painted with too broad a brush.
Here, we do whatever we can in the name of corporate profit. This includes screwing the students, which we have been doing since the advent of education.
No, here we do whatever we can to get professors tenure, and to make sure that every insane book that they think you should buy is part of the curriculum. Never mind DRM'd e-books, just look at the texts that you have to buy in good old fashioned paper format. Why does a book like that cost $100? Because they only print a very small number, because everyone knows that the only audience FOR that professor's expensive hard bound book is going to be the students that he says have to buy a copy. The actual publishing of the book is costly, but it wouldn't happen at all if there wasn't an artificial market set up in academia.
Or, you could look at it another way. Say the books ARE worth $100. Who should be paying? The student, or taxpayers? It's pretty much one or the other. Which corporate profit, by the way, are you referring to... the university presses that are woven into this entire incestuous little ecology? It's a completely false economy that could only exist in a college setting. If it can be made to be cheaper by using e-books, so much the better.
BTW, don't forget that a paid-for-by-the-student education, including students buying their materials, goes back long before this country ever existed. Your little US=Bad rant is a little short sighted. Obviously one thing you didn't read was one of those expensive history books.
like web sites that suggest that the administrations...
Yes, those pillars of credibility and intellectual honesty. They and their brothers in integrity (you know, the blogs about alien abduction, angel visitations, and other equally tinfoil-hatted observations)... have you noticed that they're all free to just rant all the hell they want? Or, they are here, anyway. And in Australia, and Britain, and Spain (as long as they're not actually specifically saying to march out and kill people - that's a wee bit different). But they're sure not as able to in Iran. And they sure as hell weren't in Iraq (now sporting 1500 new independent news sources including newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and others that would have been summarily shot under Saddam or by the Taliban in Afghanistan, not that you care, obviously).
if it weren't for the mainstream media's absolute backing of the administration, imagine the horrors we would be subject to?
Are you one of these people that thinks "mainstream media" does NOT include ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, CNN, and so on? They all take endless opportunities to spin precisely against the administration. It's only when they get caught doing something as blatant and in writing as forging documents while trying to influence an election (CBS) that they have to actually show some temporarily neutral ethics and pretend that's not how they lean (and act).
stuff like schools not having to have 75 students per teacher
The average is well less than half that, as you well know, though less is better. But it's not about money, it's about how the schools use it. I live near DC, where the average amount spent per public school student per year is almost $11,000. Do you have any idea the quality of the private education (complete with small classes) you can buy with that sort of money? But the students in DC fail miserably, aren't held to anything like workable standards, and have terrible crime problems.
roads being kept up
Let's see... that would be the roads that were absolutely perfect up until 5 or 6 years ago? Folks like Clinton had every pothole filled and every bridge replaced, and Bush just undid all that fine work? Any chance that state governments and congress have a little to do with that? Doesn't matter - we finally got a decent transportation bill through just last year, and now we'll spend a decade making up for the stuff that wasn't done in the last 20.
hospitals well-funded
Hospitals are very well funded. Unfortunately, things having nothing to do with treating patients tend to sap the life out of them. Things like ambulence chasing lawyers taking millions of dollars per case out a hospital's budget when someone dies from, essentially, old age. Think how many people could be treated with the money that frivalous suits and giant punative awards suck away. And in order to avoid those suits, hospitals trot out $20,000 worth of tests for every uncomfortable patient, effectively making each slightly alarming medical episode consume more in medical costs than the typical patient will ever chip in for health insurance and medicare taxes in their entire lives.
millions of new jobs being created
You mean, like the 4 million jobs that have been created since the bottom of the recession that was under way as Clinton was leaving office? Despite the huge economic impact of 9/11 and the new overhead burdens of dealing with it? Or does 4 million not count as "millions" for you?
those damn ay-rabs are gonna get us
But at least there are 3000 of us they won't get. Um, since they already did.
the air force didn't respond until half an hour after the planes that hit the towers, when normally they respond within seconds
You don't even know what you're talking about, or you know you're BS-ing, which is more likely. The Air Force doesn't respond in seconds to much of anything, and only responds
Or better yet, exchange students. The mythical tri-lingual graduate exchange students are, of course, ideal. They can work on the HTML and translate the content while they're at it. All your footnote are belong to us, etc.
A central part of the suit was the fact that the spam was actually fraudulant. False claims, phony unsubscribe mechanisms, etc. You do that sort of crap a few billion times, that's exhibiting enough contempt for civil society that jail seems perfectly reasonable.
Not condescending, just not personally feeling hemmed in by OS choices. There's a computer shop a block from me that will put together rock solid machines on nice ASUS, Intel, Tyan, etc mobos, with all the bells and whistles, and your choice of Linux flavors. Nice machines, in rack chassis, desktop towers, quiet media-type boxes, whatever you like. And they'll help out if you break it. My real response in this thread was just to the clown who got on the whole "Microsoft is stealing from you" when you buy their OS. That's just silly, is my point.
Way to make up information that wasn't there, bud.
I personally spend my day working with apps and data on a few dozen servers in a mid-size web farm that's part of a 300-seat operation that in turn takes care of thousands of end user desktops and the back office apps that they use. Your exactly wrong assumptions are exactly the type of BS that gives Linux fanboys such a bad name among so many business decision makers. My team spends a lot of money on desktop and server licenses, and if you actually read the context of the comments in this thread you'll realize that I'm not talking what I do or don't spend on OSes and support, but about exactly when the first twit's comment ranted about ("artificially inflated" prices, blah blah, like using Linux is somehow magically "free" in a business setting - please). I will, though, pass along your "out of my league" comment to the guys in my group that spend all day building apps that run on our RHEL machines. We'd better unplug those, I guess.
if mainstream retailers allowed the customer pay for just the hardware and choose which OS to add on
Well, you could always just go to, say, Wal-Mart, but that may not be mainstream enough for some people. Point is, this landscape is changing very, very rapidly. The real nerds are going to just buy parts anyway.
Last i checked, you don't get much of a corperate support lisence for windows XP at $109
I've been using MS products, and working with others doing so, from the day they started. I've never once needed support from them. I've certainly talked to peers about odd-ball hardware issues, or dealt with a 3rd party on driver craziness, etc... but these days, it's just not much of an issue. Stuff just pretty much works. Certainly Grandma is more likely to need help, but it's going to be through Dell or whomever anyway. The comment I replied to mentioned "artificially inflated" OS prices, and I think you'll agree that's pretty much BS. I'd like to see someone spend only $109 once and get any sort of sustained Linux help that really worked, either. If you're not self-sufficient, then neither OS is a bargain anyway.
Because if you're unwilling to pay, you're pretty damn sure not to get in for free.
But you can use it for free, or just walk away. And people can pony up (or not) for exposure if they want it the way that Yahoo's doing it. It actually is wonderful for Yahoo - and if it turns out to suck, you won't care, because you'll be off using Google anyway. Isn't just not caring and ignoring it easier than bitching about it? Honestly.
Who has the real 'advantage', someone who buys a product at artificially inflated prices
You mean, like Red Hat Linux for servers at $2,499.00? Let me guess: it costs something to support products, so it's OK to charge when you're Red Hat, just not when you're Microsoft, right?
What the hell are you talking about? People buy it because they want it. They've got plenty of other choices if they don't. You can't read slashdot for a week without seeing five stories about how schools, businesses, etc., are choosing to spend $500 each for Linux machines, or cheap Macs, whatever. I know you were just hoping to rant to the MS-hating crowd and assumed they'd just nod their heads and say "amen," but there are at least a few people out here who bother with the bigger picture. If MS are thieves, than so are Sun, IBM, Apple, Novell, Red Hat, and everyone else that charges for the products they sell. Let me guess: money is evil, people who run businesses are thieves, blah blah. Have a nice day.
...will sure light up. There will be so many people trying out-do the not-doing-evil of all of the other search engines that they'll have to resort to being evil just to prove how not evil they are.
When is the last time the US gov gave a dam about any treaties it had signed? The US shows time and time again how much it doesn't care about the rest of the world despite its claims to the contrary
You need to get out more. Maybe take a trip to Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. You know, the place where the U.S. and other NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization - note the word "Treaty") countries saved untold numbers of Muslims from continued "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of corrupt thugs. Eastern European countries have been practically begging to become NATO members exactly because they know of the benefits of being in a treaty relationship with the U.S. (in the case of NATO, they know that they then have the U.S. at their disposal when their own defense organizations can't handle something). The solidness of those treaties is made all the more clear by how irate Russia has been that its former "client" states want nothing more to do with the old Soviet structures, and would rather be NATO members.
The US shows "time and time again" that is doesn't care about the world? Gee, that would be why we're the single largest source of aid, cash, logistics, communications, immunization, food, etc in the world? Why the U.S. has put more cash into fighting AIDS in Africa than the former colonial powers (that would be places like Germany and France) who used to run the place? Or why we put billions of dollars of military hardware, people, and supplies immediately into place, and were the single largest donor of cash, food, and other material to the people that were impacted by the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean?
Wow, we sure are mean, aren't we! We definately would have been more gracious if we'd just let the Germans (twice!) overrun our allies in Europe, or the Soviets take over everything else that they hadn't already turned into a miserable, poisonous, communist slave camp. And what is it that's keeping the oppressive, totalitarian government of China from simply rolling their military over the free people in Taiwan? The promise of U.S. support if they were to have to face that.
Or, you could just pay attention to countless, much less dramatic treaties that govern extradition, currency valuation, tariffs, shipping lanes, endangered species, air traffic, industrial standards... literally thousands of topics. We wouldn't have such a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world (that would the part where they get a lot of our cash for goods they produce) without a stable, treaty-defined environment in which to conduct international business. The fact that you can take your U.S. passport and go catch a U2 concert in Ireland, or go online and order a particlarly hard to find pair of shoes from a shop in Italy and have your purchase FedExed to Indiana, or take paperwork from your vet with you and your dog to Argentina, where they'll honor US documentation on such issues... absent treaties that the U.S. and the rest of the free world do honor and use every day, those sorts of things wouldn't happen.
You'll be a lot more convincing in your rants if you actually get specific, which you weren't. Instead, you're just making a dull "US = Evil" whining sound, even though you're happily typing away across a huge network that was born in the US, and only works overseas because of things like treaties upheld between the US and other countries. Grow up.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
Why be surprised? We knew he had such weapons because we had previously found enormous stockpiles of them, and spent some time destroying mamny of them. But we know they weren't all destroyed because we didn't actually complete that process before the inspectors were kicked out. Then you've got Saddam's people going to a lot of trouble to create all sorts of fake reports about what happened to all that extra VX and other items we know were there (because we saw huge piles of them).
The real irony here is that Saddam himself would appear to have been deceived about the status of his chem weapons. Some of his flunkies have since indicated that they were telling him he had things that he didn't actually have - mostly so they wouldn't get in trouble with him, because they knew that he wanted to convey the impression of a large stockpile as a deterrent more against Iran than anyone else. A lot of his elusive behavior with the weapons inspectors (exactly the sort of behavior that convinced intelligence agencies in a dozen countries that he was holding onto those weapons) turns out to have been based on internal corruption that he himself was falling for... and that added to the general atmosphere of credibility. Of course that fact that he was regularly shooting at the planes patrolling the areas where he had most recently used chemical weapons on his own people - little things like that - didn't help either. Anyway, indications are that at least some of what he really did have piled up from the days when he was making a lot of it or buying it from elesewhere got moved into Syria for safekeeping (or for cash).
I don't think you'll find, in my comments or in the concepts touched on, any support for companies that derive their income from the US market, and depend upon a stable US economy (and the US rule of law, which is a big part of maintaining it), but which conduct themselves in a way to avoid paying appropriate taxes. If a US-based company has to pay taxes on incoming, any company benefitting from doing business with US citizens living in the US should be having to pay the same premium, no question.
It's just that nearly all dot-com companies were way too ambitious and arrogant. This was mostly because they were run by business-oriented individuals (these people tend to be like that). If some of these companies didn't squander away their capital, they would still be in business
I think that's exactly the opposite of what was wrong. The companies were formed and hyped not by business people, but by tech evangelist types. They were passionate enough to attract investors, but not smart enough to be conservative business people. The ones that made it (eBay, for example) actually had real business people help out.
"It's a war on terror. These scammers, they hate freedom. That's the only reason they do this. It isn't about the money. It's about hating freedom, and liberty too, and all the other stuff in that yellowed up paper down in the National Archives. We gots to smoke 'em out of their holes and kill 'em." --G.W. Bush
I think you've got it wrong.
"It's a struggle against oppression. These noble freedom fighters are simply using the tools of their oppressors to liberate themselves. We can't sit by and idly allow these requests for financial aid to Nigeria go unanswered. It's treason against humanity! That the brave underclass in Nigeria must resort to having their requests badly translated and misunderstood by cynical propogandists like Fox News is just a sign that we're not sending enough money their way. When will George Bush face up to his obligation to the Nigerian community?" --Ted Kennedy
"These Nigerians need to be deported back to Nigeria. What do you mean they're already there? Deport them to some place else then. (Did I say it okay George?)"
--Tony Blair
Well, now that's not fair. The Nigerians (unlike the extreme Islamist jihaddist types that Blair has actually been talking about) have no interest in the destruction of Western civilization. They need Americans and others with money in the bank for their little charade to continue to work.
It's nice to know that the American Dream has reached the far corners of the world. So is Uncle Sam getting his cut of the loot?
How is ripping people off and being a parasite the American Dream? The American Dream is success through work, and the liberty to pursue and enjoy it. There's nothing in the capitalist ethos that supports fraud and theft. That's the domain of people who would rather deceive than work, or would rather force others to work for them (which is to say, communists and other would-be slave owners).
Of course you know all of this, and you're just trolling. Modded "Interesting?" What a crock.
I'm curious how the entertainment balloon industry can afford to fill up the gazillions of party balloons and other inconsequential things that use up, irretrievably, helium. And, is there an alternative, other than hydrogen, which probably one should not use near birthday cake candles?
There is some truth to that, it can also be considered a slippery slope, because then the government has the right to control anything that might be unhealthy and cause hospital bills to rise.
Exactly why government should never be in the healthcare business. Emergency services are one thing, but the day-in, day-out care for people who are coming down with a cold (or with lung cancer) shouldn't be a government activity (or expense to taxpayers). That's what personal insurance is for, in case something catastophic occurs. And then, while you're shopping for that coverage, you can choose a plan that is cheaper for people who don't smoke... and probably WAY cheaper if you happen to get, say, lung cancer, and can show that you're not and never have been a smoker. That's the free market at work (or would be, if the government didn't have its hands in every insurance transaction).
I do understand your point. I think I was responding primarily to another comment that suggested that "rich" people don't have to worry about terrorists because they don't, at least as the implication went, do things like ride the subway.
Certainly bumping off a celebrity would make a huge media circus. But other than quadrupling sales on armored limosines and bodyguards, it wouldn't really add to the general sense of "I could be next" dread that is the goal of any terrorist. Depriving our culture of some beloved (or at least widely known) figure would, I think, mostly just get people angry. And certainly, to the extent that it would bog us down further in law enforcement, that's a negative... but it might actually backfire. We're such a celebrity-centric society that some people indeed would find the loss of Brad Pitt to be somehow more horrible than the loss of a busload of school kids. Horrible, but not in a personally connected way. Your Diana example is a good one, in the sense that people felt the loss very strongly... but it didn't contribute to any sense of their own mortality at the whim of Allah, blah blah, which is a key component in the current terror tactics. My money's still on dead pedestrians, the occasional building collapse, and the cloud of chlorine from a blown up rail car. Big-time personal fear, that's the game for these clowns.
Simple solution to that: do as the Dutch do. Tax the hell out of it. The amount of money brought in from taxes on tobacco in the Netherlands is more than the total annual budget for health care. There's 1 downside though, if everyone stopped smoking at the same time the economy would collapse, but how likely is that to happen?
I'd actually like that idea, except that we (in the US, anyway) have a bad habit of taxing the hell out of something like that, and then throwing the money into some general fund that ends up getting spent on everything from international aid to go-nowhere highways named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia. If there was a way to tie those taxes directly to the societal costs of the behavior, that might be appealing. But remember the huge lawsuits, and the colossal judgements against the tobacco industry? The money that went to the states (billions, and billions of dollars each) was spent almost immediately on balancing state budgets and on general fund type stuff, since the states know that they can lean on the federal coffers for medicare type stuff. Just seems likely that such a tax wouldn't be used correctly to offset the expenses that the non-smokers will continue to bear, much as I like the notion.
As for the economic impact: if the taxes truly, truly were only used within the closed loop of people who smoke, then after a bit of latency, the lack of new smoking taxes would only impact spending on smokers, and not everything else. But, that sure isn't going to happen (you're right: state governments would rather balance their wider budgets on a "sin" tax than reign in their spending on other things or face having to raise taxes on everyone).
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies. I should have been more explicit about context. Obviously the profs that are looking out for their more modestly-budgeted students aren't the ones being discussed here. I'm sure you know the atmosphere I'm referring to, and while it may only impact some course material, it only takes a few brushes with the scenario I mentioned to get the bad taste in your mouth.
And, obviously, I was responding to the parent post, which described (predictably, of course) that the whole education system is just a big American Evil Corporate Plot blah blah blah... and that bit of nonsense is just so tiresome that I was a trifle rash in assuming anyone bothering to read my comment (I'm actually shocked!) would understand that I'm referring to the schools/profs that DO stick students with $150 texts that, gee, just happen to be written by people in that school's department and printed by the in-house press. You know what I mean, and sorry if I painted with too broad a brush.
Here, we do whatever we can in the name of corporate profit. This includes screwing the students, which we have been doing since the advent of education.
No, here we do whatever we can to get professors tenure, and to make sure that every insane book that they think you should buy is part of the curriculum. Never mind DRM'd e-books, just look at the texts that you have to buy in good old fashioned paper format. Why does a book like that cost $100? Because they only print a very small number, because everyone knows that the only audience FOR that professor's expensive hard bound book is going to be the students that he says have to buy a copy. The actual publishing of the book is costly, but it wouldn't happen at all if there wasn't an artificial market set up in academia.
Or, you could look at it another way. Say the books ARE worth $100. Who should be paying? The student, or taxpayers? It's pretty much one or the other. Which corporate profit, by the way, are you referring to... the university presses that are woven into this entire incestuous little ecology? It's a completely false economy that could only exist in a college setting. If it can be made to be cheaper by using e-books, so much the better.
BTW, don't forget that a paid-for-by-the-student education, including students buying their materials, goes back long before this country ever existed. Your little US=Bad rant is a little short sighted. Obviously one thing you didn't read was one of those expensive history books.
He probably IS the intern...
Touche!
like web sites that suggest that the administrations...
Yes, those pillars of credibility and intellectual honesty. They and their brothers in integrity (you know, the blogs about alien abduction, angel visitations, and other equally tinfoil-hatted observations)... have you noticed that they're all free to just rant all the hell they want? Or, they are here, anyway. And in Australia, and Britain, and Spain (as long as they're not actually specifically saying to march out and kill people - that's a wee bit different). But they're sure not as able to in Iran. And they sure as hell weren't in Iraq (now sporting 1500 new independent news sources including newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and others that would have been summarily shot under Saddam or by the Taliban in Afghanistan, not that you care, obviously).
if it weren't for the mainstream media's absolute backing of the administration, imagine the horrors we would be subject to?
Are you one of these people that thinks "mainstream media" does NOT include ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, CNN, and so on? They all take endless opportunities to spin precisely against the administration. It's only when they get caught doing something as blatant and in writing as forging documents while trying to influence an election (CBS) that they have to actually show some temporarily neutral ethics and pretend that's not how they lean (and act).
stuff like schools not having to have 75 students per teacher
The average is well less than half that, as you well know, though less is better. But it's not about money, it's about how the schools use it. I live near DC, where the average amount spent per public school student per year is almost $11,000. Do you have any idea the quality of the private education (complete with small classes) you can buy with that sort of money? But the students in DC fail miserably, aren't held to anything like workable standards, and have terrible crime problems.
roads being kept up
Let's see... that would be the roads that were absolutely perfect up until 5 or 6 years ago? Folks like Clinton had every pothole filled and every bridge replaced, and Bush just undid all that fine work? Any chance that state governments and congress have a little to do with that? Doesn't matter - we finally got a decent transportation bill through just last year, and now we'll spend a decade making up for the stuff that wasn't done in the last 20.
hospitals well-funded
Hospitals are very well funded. Unfortunately, things having nothing to do with treating patients tend to sap the life out of them. Things like ambulence chasing lawyers taking millions of dollars per case out a hospital's budget when someone dies from, essentially, old age. Think how many people could be treated with the money that frivalous suits and giant punative awards suck away. And in order to avoid those suits, hospitals trot out $20,000 worth of tests for every uncomfortable patient, effectively making each slightly alarming medical episode consume more in medical costs than the typical patient will ever chip in for health insurance and medicare taxes in their entire lives.
millions of new jobs being created
You mean, like the 4 million jobs that have been created since the bottom of the recession that was under way as Clinton was leaving office? Despite the huge economic impact of 9/11 and the new overhead burdens of dealing with it? Or does 4 million not count as "millions" for you?
those damn ay-rabs are gonna get us
But at least there are 3000 of us they won't get. Um, since they already did.
the air force didn't respond until half an hour after the planes that hit the towers, when normally they respond within seconds
You don't even know what you're talking about, or you know you're BS-ing, which is more likely. The Air Force doesn't respond in seconds to much of anything, and only responds
The correct answer should be grad students
Or better yet, exchange students. The mythical tri-lingual graduate exchange students are, of course, ideal. They can work on the HTML and translate the content while they're at it. All your footnote are belong to us, etc.
..."Intern"
Send people to jail for sending email? C'mon...
A central part of the suit was the fact that the spam was actually fraudulant. False claims, phony unsubscribe mechanisms, etc. You do that sort of crap a few billion times, that's exhibiting enough contempt for civil society that jail seems perfectly reasonable.
Not condescending, just not personally feeling hemmed in by OS choices. There's a computer shop a block from me that will put together rock solid machines on nice ASUS, Intel, Tyan, etc mobos, with all the bells and whistles, and your choice of Linux flavors. Nice machines, in rack chassis, desktop towers, quiet media-type boxes, whatever you like. And they'll help out if you break it. My real response in this thread was just to the clown who got on the whole "Microsoft is stealing from you" when you buy their OS. That's just silly, is my point.
Way to make up information that wasn't there, bud.
I personally spend my day working with apps and data on a few dozen servers in a mid-size web farm that's part of a 300-seat operation that in turn takes care of thousands of end user desktops and the back office apps that they use. Your exactly wrong assumptions are exactly the type of BS that gives Linux fanboys such a bad name among so many business decision makers. My team spends a lot of money on desktop and server licenses, and if you actually read the context of the comments in this thread you'll realize that I'm not talking what I do or don't spend on OSes and support, but about exactly when the first twit's comment ranted about ("artificially inflated" prices, blah blah, like using Linux is somehow magically "free" in a business setting - please). I will, though, pass along your "out of my league" comment to the guys in my group that spend all day building apps that run on our RHEL machines. We'd better unplug those, I guess.
if mainstream retailers allowed the customer pay for just the hardware and choose which OS to add on
Well, you could always just go to, say, Wal-Mart, but that may not be mainstream enough for some people. Point is, this landscape is changing very, very rapidly. The real nerds are going to just buy parts anyway.
Well, yeah. But if everyone did that, we wouldn't have a Slashdot.
Touche!
Last i checked, you don't get much of a corperate support lisence for windows XP at $109
I've been using MS products, and working with others doing so, from the day they started. I've never once needed support from them. I've certainly talked to peers about odd-ball hardware issues, or dealt with a 3rd party on driver craziness, etc... but these days, it's just not much of an issue. Stuff just pretty much works. Certainly Grandma is more likely to need help, but it's going to be through Dell or whomever anyway. The comment I replied to mentioned "artificially inflated" OS prices, and I think you'll agree that's pretty much BS. I'd like to see someone spend only $109 once and get any sort of sustained Linux help that really worked, either. If you're not self-sufficient, then neither OS is a bargain anyway.
Because if you're unwilling to pay, you're pretty damn sure not to get in for free.
But you can use it for free, or just walk away. And people can pony up (or not) for exposure if they want it the way that Yahoo's doing it. It actually is wonderful for Yahoo - and if it turns out to suck, you won't care, because you'll be off using Google anyway. Isn't just not caring and ignoring it easier than bitching about it? Honestly.
Who has the real 'advantage', someone who buys a product at artificially inflated prices
You mean, like Red Hat Linux for servers at $2,499.00? Let me guess: it costs something to support products, so it's OK to charge when you're Red Hat, just not when you're Microsoft, right?
artificially inflated prices
Mac OS X v10.4 = $129.00 (at Apple)
Windows XP Pro = $108.99 (shop around).
stealing it
What the hell are you talking about? People buy it because they want it. They've got plenty of other choices if they don't. You can't read slashdot for a week without seeing five stories about how schools, businesses, etc., are choosing to spend $500 each for Linux machines, or cheap Macs, whatever. I know you were just hoping to rant to the MS-hating crowd and assumed they'd just nod their heads and say "amen," but there are at least a few people out here who bother with the bigger picture. If MS are thieves, than so are Sun, IBM, Apple, Novell, Red Hat, and everyone else that charges for the products they sell. Let me guess: money is evil, people who run businesses are thieves, blah blah. Have a nice day.
...will sure light up. There will be so many people trying out-do the not-doing-evil of all of the other search engines that they'll have to resort to being evil just to prove how not evil they are.
When is the last time the US gov gave a dam about any treaties it had signed? The US shows time and time again how much it doesn't care about the rest of the world despite its claims to the contrary
You need to get out more. Maybe take a trip to Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. You know, the place where the U.S. and other NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization - note the word "Treaty") countries saved untold numbers of Muslims from continued "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of corrupt thugs. Eastern European countries have been practically begging to become NATO members exactly because they know of the benefits of being in a treaty relationship with the U.S. (in the case of NATO, they know that they then have the U.S. at their disposal when their own defense organizations can't handle something). The solidness of those treaties is made all the more clear by how irate Russia has been that its former "client" states want nothing more to do with the old Soviet structures, and would rather be NATO members.
The US shows "time and time again" that is doesn't care about the world? Gee, that would be why we're the single largest source of aid, cash, logistics, communications, immunization, food, etc in the world? Why the U.S. has put more cash into fighting AIDS in Africa than the former colonial powers (that would be places like Germany and France) who used to run the place? Or why we put billions of dollars of military hardware, people, and supplies immediately into place, and were the single largest donor of cash, food, and other material to the people that were impacted by the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean?
Wow, we sure are mean, aren't we! We definately would have been more gracious if we'd just let the Germans (twice!) overrun our allies in Europe, or the Soviets take over everything else that they hadn't already turned into a miserable, poisonous, communist slave camp. And what is it that's keeping the oppressive, totalitarian government of China from simply rolling their military over the free people in Taiwan? The promise of U.S. support if they were to have to face that.
Or, you could just pay attention to countless, much less dramatic treaties that govern extradition, currency valuation, tariffs, shipping lanes, endangered species, air traffic, industrial standards... literally thousands of topics. We wouldn't have such a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world (that would the part where they get a lot of our cash for goods they produce) without a stable, treaty-defined environment in which to conduct international business. The fact that you can take your U.S. passport and go catch a U2 concert in Ireland, or go online and order a particlarly hard to find pair of shoes from a shop in Italy and have your purchase FedExed to Indiana, or take paperwork from your vet with you and your dog to Argentina, where they'll honor US documentation on such issues... absent treaties that the U.S. and the rest of the free world do honor and use every day, those sorts of things wouldn't happen.
You'll be a lot more convincing in your rants if you actually get specific, which you weren't. Instead, you're just making a dull "US = Evil" whining sound, even though you're happily typing away across a huge network that was born in the US, and only works overseas because of things like treaties upheld between the US and other countries. Grow up.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
Why be surprised? We knew he had such weapons because we had previously found enormous stockpiles of them, and spent some time destroying mamny of them. But we know they weren't all destroyed because we didn't actually complete that process before the inspectors were kicked out. Then you've got Saddam's people going to a lot of trouble to create all sorts of fake reports about what happened to all that extra VX and other items we know were there (because we saw huge piles of them).
The real irony here is that Saddam himself would appear to have been deceived about the status of his chem weapons. Some of his flunkies have since indicated that they were telling him he had things that he didn't actually have - mostly so they wouldn't get in trouble with him, because they knew that he wanted to convey the impression of a large stockpile as a deterrent more against Iran than anyone else. A lot of his elusive behavior with the weapons inspectors (exactly the sort of behavior that convinced intelligence agencies in a dozen countries that he was holding onto those weapons) turns out to have been based on internal corruption that he himself was falling for... and that added to the general atmosphere of credibility. Of course that fact that he was regularly shooting at the planes patrolling the areas where he had most recently used chemical weapons on his own people - little things like that - didn't help either. Anyway, indications are that at least some of what he really did have piled up from the days when he was making a lot of it or buying it from elesewhere got moved into Syria for safekeeping (or for cash).
I don't think you'll find, in my comments or in the concepts touched on, any support for companies that derive their income from the US market, and depend upon a stable US economy (and the US rule of law, which is a big part of maintaining it), but which conduct themselves in a way to avoid paying appropriate taxes. If a US-based company has to pay taxes on incoming, any company benefitting from doing business with US citizens living in the US should be having to pay the same premium, no question.
It's just that nearly all dot-com companies were way too ambitious and arrogant. This was mostly because they were run by business-oriented individuals (these people tend to be like that). If some of these companies didn't squander away their capital, they would still be in business
I think that's exactly the opposite of what was wrong. The companies were formed and hyped not by business people, but by tech evangelist types. They were passionate enough to attract investors, but not smart enough to be conservative business people. The ones that made it (eBay, for example) actually had real business people help out.
"It's a war on terror. These scammers, they hate freedom. That's the only reason they do this. It isn't about the money. It's about hating freedom, and liberty too, and all the other stuff in that yellowed up paper down in the National Archives. We gots to smoke 'em out of their holes and kill 'em." --G.W. Bush
I think you've got it wrong.
"It's a struggle against oppression. These noble freedom fighters are simply using the tools of their oppressors to liberate themselves. We can't sit by and idly allow these requests for financial aid to Nigeria go unanswered. It's treason against humanity! That the brave underclass in Nigeria must resort to having their requests badly translated and misunderstood by cynical propogandists like Fox News is just a sign that we're not sending enough money their way. When will George Bush face up to his obligation to the Nigerian community?" --Ted Kennedy
"These Nigerians need to be deported back to Nigeria. What do you mean they're already there? Deport them to some place else then. (Did I say it okay George?)" --Tony Blair
Well, now that's not fair. The Nigerians (unlike the extreme Islamist jihaddist types that Blair has actually been talking about) have no interest in the destruction of Western civilization. They need Americans and others with money in the bank for their little charade to continue to work.
It's nice to know that the American Dream has reached the far corners of the world. So is Uncle Sam getting his cut of the loot?
How is ripping people off and being a parasite the American Dream? The American Dream is success through work, and the liberty to pursue and enjoy it. There's nothing in the capitalist ethos that supports fraud and theft. That's the domain of people who would rather deceive than work, or would rather force others to work for them (which is to say, communists and other would-be slave owners).
Of course you know all of this, and you're just trolling. Modded "Interesting?" What a crock.
I'm curious how the entertainment balloon industry can afford to fill up the gazillions of party balloons and other inconsequential things that use up, irretrievably, helium. And, is there an alternative, other than hydrogen, which probably one should not use near birthday cake candles?
There is some truth to that, it can also be considered a slippery slope, because then the government has the right to control anything that might be unhealthy and cause hospital bills to rise.
Exactly why government should never be in the healthcare business. Emergency services are one thing, but the day-in, day-out care for people who are coming down with a cold (or with lung cancer) shouldn't be a government activity (or expense to taxpayers). That's what personal insurance is for, in case something catastophic occurs. And then, while you're shopping for that coverage, you can choose a plan that is cheaper for people who don't smoke... and probably WAY cheaper if you happen to get, say, lung cancer, and can show that you're not and never have been a smoker. That's the free market at work (or would be, if the government didn't have its hands in every insurance transaction).
I do understand your point. I think I was responding primarily to another comment that suggested that "rich" people don't have to worry about terrorists because they don't, at least as the implication went, do things like ride the subway.
Certainly bumping off a celebrity would make a huge media circus. But other than quadrupling sales on armored limosines and bodyguards, it wouldn't really add to the general sense of "I could be next" dread that is the goal of any terrorist. Depriving our culture of some beloved (or at least widely known) figure would, I think, mostly just get people angry. And certainly, to the extent that it would bog us down further in law enforcement, that's a negative... but it might actually backfire. We're such a celebrity-centric society that some people indeed would find the loss of Brad Pitt to be somehow more horrible than the loss of a busload of school kids. Horrible, but not in a personally connected way. Your Diana example is a good one, in the sense that people felt the loss very strongly... but it didn't contribute to any sense of their own mortality at the whim of Allah, blah blah, which is a key component in the current terror tactics. My money's still on dead pedestrians, the occasional building collapse, and the cloud of chlorine from a blown up rail car. Big-time personal fear, that's the game for these clowns.
Simple solution to that: do as the Dutch do. Tax the hell out of it. The amount of money brought in from taxes on tobacco in the Netherlands is more than the total annual budget for health care. There's 1 downside though, if everyone stopped smoking at the same time the economy would collapse, but how likely is that to happen?
I'd actually like that idea, except that we (in the US, anyway) have a bad habit of taxing the hell out of something like that, and then throwing the money into some general fund that ends up getting spent on everything from international aid to go-nowhere highways named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia. If there was a way to tie those taxes directly to the societal costs of the behavior, that might be appealing. But remember the huge lawsuits, and the colossal judgements against the tobacco industry? The money that went to the states (billions, and billions of dollars each) was spent almost immediately on balancing state budgets and on general fund type stuff, since the states know that they can lean on the federal coffers for medicare type stuff. Just seems likely that such a tax wouldn't be used correctly to offset the expenses that the non-smokers will continue to bear, much as I like the notion.
As for the economic impact: if the taxes truly, truly were only used within the closed loop of people who smoke, then after a bit of latency, the lack of new smoking taxes would only impact spending on smokers, and not everything else. But, that sure isn't going to happen (you're right: state governments would rather balance their wider budgets on a "sin" tax than reign in their spending on other things or face having to raise taxes on everyone).