Given the huge market in gonad swelling products I fail to see how this is a problem. I expect these guys to make a huge return on their investment with all the Sci-Fi babe references and now gonad swelling capabilities.
I am sure you will change your tune when the politicians doing this refuse to stamp your immediate pardon when you are arrested for being involved with prostitution if you had these parties. That is where the problem lies. I don't really give a crap about most of what these clowns do, the fact that they will criminilize it for us second class citizens and dirty commoners while they hold themselves above the law is what pisses me off. Bush twins break numerous laws on underage drinking...they get media time and invites to more parties....us dirty commoners do that we will be shelling out money to the government in the form of court fees and various other fines.
I remember reading a story recently about a guy in a Business Ethics class (they really do exist, and are frequently mandatory for that type of degree). When given the Enron style scenario of you are the new CEO and you find out the old guy had been stealing from retirement funds and other such nonsense...what do you do. He said 9 out of the 10 students said stop the action immediately (well at least they got that right, but probably only for the grade), and then come up with a plausible deniabilty and coverup (wow...). 1 out of 10 said stop immediately and repair the damages.
Yeah...because all those class action lawsuits that SBC faced and lost over various sheisty practices over their early DSL offerings did SOOO much to help us all out get honest deals on DSL from AT&T now that they have all been allowed to remerge together. The people who "won" got all of a few bucks in a check that came almost a year later... I got more bang for my buck just griping at them up the chain for a few hours until I was eventually credited 6 months free DSL for their various screwups. Course it was 6 months of free crappy DSL that still didn't meet what I was promised, but at least it was free and lasted long enough for new competitors that weren't total screwups to enter the market. I have not had Telco direct provided DSL in 8 years because of that.
If you have been paying attention the Bush administration frequently throws a few people to the wolves when things go wrong to placate them so the can continue with their business.
Brownie your doing a heck of a job...wolves
I will not accept Rummys resignation...wolves (And this was the greatest move because they managed to put Mr Gates in place with hardly anyone noticing...the guy responsible for the whole Iran Contra mess...named as our nations "top spy"...among other abortions of the spirit of America)
In the meantime it further damages our economy as it struggles under a growing tide of moronic controls like this. The problem is people do not understand money in regards to time. Money NOW! is the cry of modern America, incredible focus on this quarter to the exclusion of all other information, etc, etc. Leads to all the book cooking, scandals, overzealous outsourcing (not all outsourcing is bad) and other such nonsense that is plaguing American business. I would rather collect small amounts under a long term sustainable business model than large amounts under a short term model that gives immediate large profit but does this kind of damage. Its stupid and shortsighted.
If they collected small reasonable royalties and they actively helped the industry grow, they would be making more money at the end of 10 years than what this moron stunt is going to make them in the next 50 because the whole thing will dry up or move outside of their reach inside a few years.
If it makes you feel any better people got in a world of hurt over 2004 elections too. Jail time IIRC in connection to a fraudulent recount. Hacking Democracy has a bit on it and the rest was covered on blackboxvoting.org
The problem is as much as I don't like the current mess, I'm not sure I want the other side in office either. These idiot protestors run into the highway and lay down to represent dead people in the war...fucking genious assholes...I hope that EMS team or firetruck made it to the emergency on time while they were out being asshats. Or they go out on stilts painted up like mimes and march around in stupid costumes protesting the war...again...bang up job of making it a serious issue...people are fucking dying and these morons think it is effective to dress up like cat in the hat characters with anti-Bush logos to stop the war? I mean shit...this administration at least has plausible reasons for doing their dirty crap...cat in the hat stopping the war doesn't make any kind of damned sense. I don't know if you have actually watched any of the coverage of the various lefty protest groups, but holy crap, these idiot kids they pull out to interview about their cause make Dubya look like he is an award winning speech champion. Get a clue, get real, or go the hell home.
Just to play devils advocate.... I present to you... The Radioactive Boyscout
I have never been sure if I should be impressed by this kids intelligence and ingenuity or a little nervous about the possibilities.
Very simple. When MS, Sun, HP, Dell, whoever the hell else goes the way of the dodo IBM will still be there. IBM got huge, abused their power, others caught up, IBM being a rather old company that has spanned many generations of technology has learned how to survive the march of technology.
This is one of those things I fail to understand about modern American business. Everyone is so concerned with the immediate right here right now next quarter earnings infinite growth model. It is stupid at best, it leads to all kinds of scandal, and otherwise destroys a company. Arthur Anderson (the enron accountants) started with "Our loyalties are to the auditors not to our customers" and they got freaking huge...good business is far more profitable in the long run...they cook some books and the entire company gets disolved. IBM isn't actually the only one to have figured this out, just the only one geeks usually talk about. Warren Buffets stuff tends to behave this way as well. He talks like the whole thing is a game, its not about getting rich to him, so much as he likes the economic game and $ is how you keep score. He has done a ton to help others get into the game as well rather than shutting the little guy out (now, it still requires the motivation and the risk taking to play, but its not his job to give everyone gobs of cash)
1+1=3 for sufficiently large values of 1. The trade secret part is simple...if there is any "trade secret" involved in candidate.vote+=1 then it means at some point they are doing something like candidate.vote=candidate.payoff_index*candidate.vo te. They don't want the candidates to know how much money it takes to affect their candidate.payoff_index value or the candidates will only pay the minimum bribes to get the desired multiplier. If its a black box system the candidates will have to bribe more worried that the other candidate may or may not have bribed as well and since all the bribes are secret it ecourages higher bribes to get the same candidate.payoff_index vote multiplier.
Well you see, its because the liberal media is just Bush bashing all the time when all of today's problems really were all caused by Clinton or other liberals. Our glorious leader in his infinite wisdom has even explained it to you Godless liberal heathens. "You Have To Keep Repeating Things To Catapult The Propaganda".
What...do you want the headlines to read 2012 "All Major Issues Fixed, No Platform For Reelection Available" How the hell are people going to get elected without pointless emotional kneejerk reactionary issues to drive the apathetic public to the poles to vote for their hero? You wan't them to actually DO something?! PFt...fool.
Well I think the problem there is that you never hear about patents working correctly, you only ever hear about the assinine abuses of the system. I think by and large they work fairly well to keep things moving the way they should. No news is good news kinda thing.
Why is that? You could kill -9 as many times as you like in a given day... Well unless of course one lawyerd being killed causes more lawyerd instances to spawn and then they all 'sue'. Ok yeah, that could suck.
You are still comparing stealing inventions with and without patents in place to the system as it exists now with patents in place. Microsoft has paid out millions in fines and other such for stealing things, and you can point out a few choice stupid quotes and decisions but they have stolen FAR more early than they did coming late. There was that famous case of MS stealing the GUI from Apple who rightfully stole it from Xerox first. Think Microsoft winning that one might have something to do with current state of insane defensive patents on everything even down to how to make a mouse move on the screen?
I think the patent system is terribly abused these days, but getting rid of altogether would only make the whole thing worse. It makes me sick to see fry cartons with patent pending numbers on them...its a fucking cardboard box meant to hold fries! There is nothing innovative about that in any way shape or form, and no ammount of 'its specially designed to' is going to convince me it was anything more than folding up some cardboard, using some glue, and stuffing greasy potato sticks in it. However, I think things like the transistor should be patentable (remember, patents are supposed to expire providing only a limited time monopoly).
No...it is a very worthless argument that will fall on deaf ears every time. I have tried to explain this argument...I have given historical references for exact duplications of this problem...anyone who will say "I have nothing to hide" will simply not understand this reasoning. That the government could ever possibly do something wrong does not agree with the statement of "I have nothing to hide" let alone "The government could change their mind about what is wrong". The entire statement of "I have nothing to hide" implies an absolute trust of the watcher, and if you have that absolute trust you would not distrust their decisions of what is right and wrong, and more often than not you will honestly believe that nothing YOU do would ever be considered wrong by your trusted watcher government. Unfortunately thats how you wind up in a mass grave or gulag somewhere wondering what went wrong.
So your argument against this scenario is "big companies aren't good at making money on new gadgets, are too slow to steal inventions, and upstarts just replace the big slow companies anyways until they become big slow companies" Have you not been paying attention in the last, say, 10 years? Microsoft's entire business is built around stealing other peoples inventions. You seem to equate morally bankrupt corporate behavior with ineffective behavior, and that absolutely is not the case. That has got to be the most insane argument against patents I have ever heard.
Oh, and by the way...unless you are doing the mfg yourself in your garage, you have to go to a third party. So you walk in with your shiney gadget's plans and an order for 50 of them. They realize "hey this is a neat gadget, I bet MegaTech would pay to mfg 5000 of them, lets give them a call". Once again, under the patentless system you are screwed again chum. Under a patentless system I imagine that would actually be standard practice, is for anyone involved in the mfg of damn near anything to auction off copies of the plans to generate more orders. Because so long as SOMEONE wants them built, the mfg folks win regardless of who is marketing the product. (well, ignoring that most of it would probably get shipped overseas and built by the poor for pennies a day while some fat bastard who didn't actually do anything other than agree that stealing your design could be profitable gets fatter dumber and happier)
Just because noone seems to understand this, and people cry about patents all the time. Patents are not bad. The concept is terribly important, the practice however is a bit flawed in implementation.
So...you develop some fancy wizbang gadget, brand new, totally innovative, breaking new barriors. The moment you sell the first one, MegaTechCorp will purchase one, use its highly paid engineers to disassemble it, maybe make a few 'enhancements', bundle it back up, mass market it, and totally screw you out of business. You will have sold 1 at incredible personal cost in R&D and MFG, MegaTechCorp will have bought 1, mass produced them, mass marketed them, and made millions. You on the other hand are left wimpering about how the rich have an unfair advantage because they can just snatch up the little guys inventions and call them their own and push the little guy out of business. Which ironically is what the primary complaint about patents is now...except if they go away the problem gets worse and becomes 100% legal. At least with the undestanding that patents are imporant there is some hope of fixing the patent system to allow fewer abuses.
I think Microsoft has considerably larger pull in the industry then Enron did. MS has about 7x more employees than Enron did, it has quite a few more governments in its pocket. Enron failed because they told you they were a far more relevant company when they really were not.
The US economy recovered from the great depression, it recovered from the dot com bubble, but that doesn't mean that it didn't hurt to go through them. I'm not saying MS falling apart will cause another great depression, but there would be a significant impact. Also there is a considerable difference between them being wiped out of existance, and being broken into smaller pieces. Broken into smaller pieces would have a pretty minimal impact, being shut down completely and being gone tomorrow would have a crushing impact. The same would happen if AT&T got shut down instead of broken up. My point is its all well and good to not like MS, but to go on about how nothing would happen if they were to suddenly be shut down is just ignorant at best, terminally stupid at worse, and I hope and pray that while someone does come in and handle this MS problem, that they don't attempt that moronic approach and screw us all in the process.
You have a stunning ignorance of how the economy works. Yes, millions of Windows machines would chug along as if nothing happened, and maybe a few would hickup because of their call home stuff, but largely there would be all kinds of support places springing up to field tech support calls for the deployed systems. So if MS died tomorrow the sheltered IT staff would barely notice, other than having to change the phone numbers they dial when shit breaks.
However, economic damage would be unbelievable. You don't get to be the richest guy in the world by taking every dime you make and putting it in a giant tower and swimming like scrooge McDuck. You invest, you move your money, etc, etc, etc. Then there are the shareholders too... If any company that size suddenly disappeared our economy would be in shambles for quite a while.
I have always wondered about that. We can't do anything to catch them because that would be wrong, and violate their freedom, but once we got the little bastards its an execution order away from a late night snuff show. God forbid we apply any kind of common sense to these sorts of things. Pretty damned pointless when a cop can go to jail for shooting a suspect who pointed an unloaded gun at him. We had a cop here that got stabbed to death...by a guy who had already been to prison for killing a pizza boy and was let out months later because "he was crazy". So...poor crazy persons rights were violated when they locked him away for putting a dinner plate hole in the pizza guy when he came to the door. So the cop tells him to stop waving the knife...three times...and then got stabbed to death. As much as I don't want trigger happy cops running around...we need to give them better weapons of the horribly painful nonlethal type...or send a clear message to them "If that guy is waving guns or knives you are pretty much clear to put holes in him".
I think being sufficiently stupid in front of a cop meant to protect us justifies getting your ass kicked. This is why we need cameras on cops too. So when the asskicking is not justified we can punish the cop, but when it is we can show it on primetime and give the guy a medal and tell everyone else "If you act like a god damned moron like this guy, you are gunna get your ass kicked".
You are somewhat correct. If you assume slavery could be considered legal under the constitution ever, then yes, the states were well within their rights, and what Lincoln did was a mess. However, most of the amendments we have had deal with stupid bigotry and pathetic legal wrangling of our various founding documents. All men are created equal... things like the various civil rights changes really amount to "And now we officially admit that niggers and bitches are citizens worth protecting" They always should have been protected, but we came up with clever things like "chattle" so we could count slaves as cattle that are only human enough to give their owners extra votes.
Well as you pointed out, there is a ton of military tech that has made it into the civilian world much to everyones benefit. Now...most of that tech was developed during wars (necessity mother of all invention and such). Now Dubya n crew have broke the bank on their stupid fiasco, and the military needs new tech but all the money is in Halliburton coffers. What choice do they have other than to take their last few bucks and try to gamble it off on something that may have a decent return.:) Worst case scenario noone quite meets the requirements, the government says "look, sorry, no prize, but you were close, so instead we will just buy a bunch of them".
Now...I guess I didn't address the quality issue in my other post. So here it goes. If we are going to call an MRE that has been baking in the desert sun in cardboard boxes for weeks to months "Food", I am going to say those DVDs at the little huts are HDDVD quality. If you have really been you cannot POSSIBLY disagree. It wasn't until I was back stateside that I realized that the cheese isn't normally supposed to be all lumpy with all the oil separated out...it actually resembles normal squeezy cheese type products.
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Given the huge market in gonad swelling products I fail to see how this is a problem. I expect these guys to make a huge return on their investment with all the Sci-Fi babe references and now gonad swelling capabilities.
I am sure you will change your tune when the politicians doing this refuse to stamp your immediate pardon when you are arrested for being involved with prostitution if you had these parties. That is where the problem lies. I don't really give a crap about most of what these clowns do, the fact that they will criminilize it for us second class citizens and dirty commoners while they hold themselves above the law is what pisses me off. Bush twins break numerous laws on underage drinking...they get media time and invites to more parties....us dirty commoners do that we will be shelling out money to the government in the form of court fees and various other fines.
I remember reading a story recently about a guy in a Business Ethics class (they really do exist, and are frequently mandatory for that type of degree). When given the Enron style scenario of you are the new CEO and you find out the old guy had been stealing from retirement funds and other such nonsense...what do you do. He said 9 out of the 10 students said stop the action immediately (well at least they got that right, but probably only for the grade), and then come up with a plausible deniabilty and coverup (wow...). 1 out of 10 said stop immediately and repair the damages.
Yeah...because all those class action lawsuits that SBC faced and lost over various sheisty practices over their early DSL offerings did SOOO much to help us all out get honest deals on DSL from AT&T now that they have all been allowed to remerge together. The people who "won" got all of a few bucks in a check that came almost a year later... I got more bang for my buck just griping at them up the chain for a few hours until I was eventually credited 6 months free DSL for their various screwups. Course it was 6 months of free crappy DSL that still didn't meet what I was promised, but at least it was free and lasted long enough for new competitors that weren't total screwups to enter the market. I have not had Telco direct provided DSL in 8 years because of that.
If you have been paying attention the Bush administration frequently throws a few people to the wolves when things go wrong to placate them so the can continue with their business.
Brownie your doing a heck of a job...wolves
I will not accept Rummys resignation...wolves (And this was the greatest move because they managed to put Mr Gates in place with hardly anyone noticing...the guy responsible for the whole Iran Contra mess...named as our nations "top spy"...among other abortions of the spirit of America)
In the meantime it further damages our economy as it struggles under a growing tide of moronic controls like this. The problem is people do not understand money in regards to time. Money NOW! is the cry of modern America, incredible focus on this quarter to the exclusion of all other information, etc, etc. Leads to all the book cooking, scandals, overzealous outsourcing (not all outsourcing is bad) and other such nonsense that is plaguing American business. I would rather collect small amounts under a long term sustainable business model than large amounts under a short term model that gives immediate large profit but does this kind of damage. Its stupid and shortsighted.
If they collected small reasonable royalties and they actively helped the industry grow, they would be making more money at the end of 10 years than what this moron stunt is going to make them in the next 50 because the whole thing will dry up or move outside of their reach inside a few years.
"I would like to solve this problem for less than the cost of a bullet" seems to apply here more than anywhere else it has been used.
If it makes you feel any better people got in a world of hurt over 2004 elections too. Jail time IIRC in connection to a fraudulent recount. Hacking Democracy has a bit on it and the rest was covered on blackboxvoting.org
The problem is as much as I don't like the current mess, I'm not sure I want the other side in office either. These idiot protestors run into the highway and lay down to represent dead people in the war...fucking genious assholes...I hope that EMS team or firetruck made it to the emergency on time while they were out being asshats. Or they go out on stilts painted up like mimes and march around in stupid costumes protesting the war...again...bang up job of making it a serious issue...people are fucking dying and these morons think it is effective to dress up like cat in the hat characters with anti-Bush logos to stop the war? I mean shit...this administration at least has plausible reasons for doing their dirty crap...cat in the hat stopping the war doesn't make any kind of damned sense. I don't know if you have actually watched any of the coverage of the various lefty protest groups, but holy crap, these idiot kids they pull out to interview about their cause make Dubya look like he is an award winning speech champion. Get a clue, get real, or go the hell home.
Just to play devils advocate.... I present to you...
The Radioactive Boyscout I have never been sure if I should be impressed by this kids intelligence and ingenuity or a little nervous about the possibilities.
Very simple. When MS, Sun, HP, Dell, whoever the hell else goes the way of the dodo IBM will still be there. IBM got huge, abused their power, others caught up, IBM being a rather old company that has spanned many generations of technology has learned how to survive the march of technology.
This is one of those things I fail to understand about modern American business. Everyone is so concerned with the immediate right here right now next quarter earnings infinite growth model. It is stupid at best, it leads to all kinds of scandal, and otherwise destroys a company. Arthur Anderson (the enron accountants) started with "Our loyalties are to the auditors not to our customers" and they got freaking huge...good business is far more profitable in the long run...they cook some books and the entire company gets disolved. IBM isn't actually the only one to have figured this out, just the only one geeks usually talk about. Warren Buffets stuff tends to behave this way as well. He talks like the whole thing is a game, its not about getting rich to him, so much as he likes the economic game and $ is how you keep score. He has done a ton to help others get into the game as well rather than shutting the little guy out (now, it still requires the motivation and the risk taking to play, but its not his job to give everyone gobs of cash)
1+1=3 for sufficiently large values of 1. The trade secret part is simple...if there is any "trade secret" involved in candidate.vote+=1 then it means at some point they are doing something like candidate.vote=candidate.payoff_index*candidate.vo te. They don't want the candidates to know how much money it takes to affect their candidate.payoff_index value or the candidates will only pay the minimum bribes to get the desired multiplier. If its a black box system the candidates will have to bribe more worried that the other candidate may or may not have bribed as well and since all the bribes are secret it ecourages higher bribes to get the same candidate.payoff_index vote multiplier.
Well you see, its because the liberal media is just Bush bashing all the time when all of today's problems really were all caused by Clinton or other liberals. Our glorious leader in his infinite wisdom has even explained it to you Godless liberal heathens. "You Have To Keep Repeating Things To Catapult The Propaganda".
What...do you want the headlines to read 2012 "All Major Issues Fixed, No Platform For Reelection Available" How the hell are people going to get elected without pointless emotional kneejerk reactionary issues to drive the apathetic public to the poles to vote for their hero? You wan't them to actually DO something?! PFt...fool.
Well I think the problem there is that you never hear about patents working correctly, you only ever hear about the assinine abuses of the system. I think by and large they work fairly well to keep things moving the way they should. No news is good news kinda thing.
Why is that? You could kill -9 as many times as you like in a given day... Well unless of course one lawyerd being killed causes more lawyerd instances to spawn and then they all 'sue'. Ok yeah, that could suck.
You are still comparing stealing inventions with and without patents in place to the system as it exists now with patents in place. Microsoft has paid out millions in fines and other such for stealing things, and you can point out a few choice stupid quotes and decisions but they have stolen FAR more early than they did coming late. There was that famous case of MS stealing the GUI from Apple who rightfully stole it from Xerox first. Think Microsoft winning that one might have something to do with current state of insane defensive patents on everything even down to how to make a mouse move on the screen?
I think the patent system is terribly abused these days, but getting rid of altogether would only make the whole thing worse. It makes me sick to see fry cartons with patent pending numbers on them...its a fucking cardboard box meant to hold fries! There is nothing innovative about that in any way shape or form, and no ammount of 'its specially designed to' is going to convince me it was anything more than folding up some cardboard, using some glue, and stuffing greasy potato sticks in it. However, I think things like the transistor should be patentable (remember, patents are supposed to expire providing only a limited time monopoly).
This is an outrage. You cannot 'sue' without lawyerd! What about the required functionality of 'sue --counter' and 'appeal'?!
No...it is a very worthless argument that will fall on deaf ears every time. I have tried to explain this argument...I have given historical references for exact duplications of this problem...anyone who will say "I have nothing to hide" will simply not understand this reasoning. That the government could ever possibly do something wrong does not agree with the statement of "I have nothing to hide" let alone "The government could change their mind about what is wrong". The entire statement of "I have nothing to hide" implies an absolute trust of the watcher, and if you have that absolute trust you would not distrust their decisions of what is right and wrong, and more often than not you will honestly believe that nothing YOU do would ever be considered wrong by your trusted watcher government. Unfortunately thats how you wind up in a mass grave or gulag somewhere wondering what went wrong.
So your argument against this scenario is "big companies aren't good at making money on new gadgets, are too slow to steal inventions, and upstarts just replace the big slow companies anyways until they become big slow companies" Have you not been paying attention in the last, say, 10 years? Microsoft's entire business is built around stealing other peoples inventions. You seem to equate morally bankrupt corporate behavior with ineffective behavior, and that absolutely is not the case. That has got to be the most insane argument against patents I have ever heard.
Oh, and by the way...unless you are doing the mfg yourself in your garage, you have to go to a third party. So you walk in with your shiney gadget's plans and an order for 50 of them. They realize "hey this is a neat gadget, I bet MegaTech would pay to mfg 5000 of them, lets give them a call". Once again, under the patentless system you are screwed again chum. Under a patentless system I imagine that would actually be standard practice, is for anyone involved in the mfg of damn near anything to auction off copies of the plans to generate more orders. Because so long as SOMEONE wants them built, the mfg folks win regardless of who is marketing the product. (well, ignoring that most of it would probably get shipped overseas and built by the poor for pennies a day while some fat bastard who didn't actually do anything other than agree that stealing your design could be profitable gets fatter dumber and happier)
Just because noone seems to understand this, and people cry about patents all the time. Patents are not bad. The concept is terribly important, the practice however is a bit flawed in implementation.
So...you develop some fancy wizbang gadget, brand new, totally innovative, breaking new barriors. The moment you sell the first one, MegaTechCorp will purchase one, use its highly paid engineers to disassemble it, maybe make a few 'enhancements', bundle it back up, mass market it, and totally screw you out of business. You will have sold 1 at incredible personal cost in R&D and MFG, MegaTechCorp will have bought 1, mass produced them, mass marketed them, and made millions. You on the other hand are left wimpering about how the rich have an unfair advantage because they can just snatch up the little guys inventions and call them their own and push the little guy out of business. Which ironically is what the primary complaint about patents is now...except if they go away the problem gets worse and becomes 100% legal. At least with the undestanding that patents are imporant there is some hope of fixing the patent system to allow fewer abuses.
I think Microsoft has considerably larger pull in the industry then Enron did. MS has about 7x more employees than Enron did, it has quite a few more governments in its pocket. Enron failed because they told you they were a far more relevant company when they really were not.
The US economy recovered from the great depression, it recovered from the dot com bubble, but that doesn't mean that it didn't hurt to go through them. I'm not saying MS falling apart will cause another great depression, but there would be a significant impact. Also there is a considerable difference between them being wiped out of existance, and being broken into smaller pieces. Broken into smaller pieces would have a pretty minimal impact, being shut down completely and being gone tomorrow would have a crushing impact. The same would happen if AT&T got shut down instead of broken up. My point is its all well and good to not like MS, but to go on about how nothing would happen if they were to suddenly be shut down is just ignorant at best, terminally stupid at worse, and I hope and pray that while someone does come in and handle this MS problem, that they don't attempt that moronic approach and screw us all in the process.
You have a stunning ignorance of how the economy works. Yes, millions of Windows machines would chug along as if nothing happened, and maybe a few would hickup because of their call home stuff, but largely there would be all kinds of support places springing up to field tech support calls for the deployed systems. So if MS died tomorrow the sheltered IT staff would barely notice, other than having to change the phone numbers they dial when shit breaks.
However, economic damage would be unbelievable. You don't get to be the richest guy in the world by taking every dime you make and putting it in a giant tower and swimming like scrooge McDuck. You invest, you move your money, etc, etc, etc. Then there are the shareholders too... If any company that size suddenly disappeared our economy would be in shambles for quite a while.
I have always wondered about that. We can't do anything to catch them because that would be wrong, and violate their freedom, but once we got the little bastards its an execution order away from a late night snuff show. God forbid we apply any kind of common sense to these sorts of things. Pretty damned pointless when a cop can go to jail for shooting a suspect who pointed an unloaded gun at him. We had a cop here that got stabbed to death...by a guy who had already been to prison for killing a pizza boy and was let out months later because "he was crazy". So...poor crazy persons rights were violated when they locked him away for putting a dinner plate hole in the pizza guy when he came to the door. So the cop tells him to stop waving the knife...three times...and then got stabbed to death. As much as I don't want trigger happy cops running around...we need to give them better weapons of the horribly painful nonlethal type...or send a clear message to them "If that guy is waving guns or knives you are pretty much clear to put holes in him".
I think being sufficiently stupid in front of a cop meant to protect us justifies getting your ass kicked. This is why we need cameras on cops too. So when the asskicking is not justified we can punish the cop, but when it is we can show it on primetime and give the guy a medal and tell everyone else "If you act like a god damned moron like this guy, you are gunna get your ass kicked".
You are somewhat correct. If you assume slavery could be considered legal under the constitution ever, then yes, the states were well within their rights, and what Lincoln did was a mess. However, most of the amendments we have had deal with stupid bigotry and pathetic legal wrangling of our various founding documents. All men are created equal... things like the various civil rights changes really amount to "And now we officially admit that niggers and bitches are citizens worth protecting" They always should have been protected, but we came up with clever things like "chattle" so we could count slaves as cattle that are only human enough to give their owners extra votes.
Well as you pointed out, there is a ton of military tech that has made it into the civilian world much to everyones benefit. Now...most of that tech was developed during wars (necessity mother of all invention and such). Now Dubya n crew have broke the bank on their stupid fiasco, and the military needs new tech but all the money is in Halliburton coffers. What choice do they have other than to take their last few bucks and try to gamble it off on something that may have a decent return. :) Worst case scenario noone quite meets the requirements, the government says "look, sorry, no prize, but you were close, so instead we will just buy a bunch of them".
Now...I guess I didn't address the quality issue in my other post. So here it goes. If we are going to call an MRE that has been baking in the desert sun in cardboard boxes for weeks to months "Food", I am going to say those DVDs at the little huts are HDDVD quality. If you have really been you cannot POSSIBLY disagree. It wasn't until I was back stateside that I realized that the cheese isn't normally supposed to be all lumpy with all the oil separated out...it actually resembles normal squeezy cheese type products.