Odd - I too am preoccupied with your girlfriend, who lives in Canada and is pleasantly aromatic and savory between her legs. Are the makers of Sesame Street following me?
Easy - it's complicated and bizarre enough where you think you're smarter for saying you like it. I mean, anyone can understand Go Dog, Go. There's no challenge in that. Dune, on the other hand, is more cryptic than the Biblical Book of Isaiah, and that was nothing more than the deranged ramblings of a madman.
I kid - sort of.
The thing about Dune and the rest of the series is that it gives you an absolutely huge, intricate universe on a silver platter. It's not just huge in a spatial sense - it's huge in a temporal sense. There are actions that happened thousands of years in the past in the series that are still relevant in the "present" and affect the timeline thousands of years into the future. The spatial universe occupies the better part of the galaxy, yet everything revolves around a single planet. Consequently, there are more than enough wrinkles in the universe to get lost in, which a lot of people find incredible and fascinating. Of course, character development takes a bit of a back seat as a result, and is frequently only expressable through the universe's backstory (go ahead, explain Lady Jessica without describing the Bene Gesserit), but there's more than enough there there to keep you distracted from the worst of that.
With all that said, though, I have to admit - I made it through God Emperor of Dune, then forced my way through Heretics of Dune. By that point, I was done. It just didn't feel like Dune anymore. I mean, yeah, I understood that Heretics took place thousands of years in the future and was meant to explain off what Leto's Golden Path meant to humanity, why it was really necessary, and some of the consequences (both positive and negative) after his plan came to fruition ("Woo! Humanity isn't reliant on spice anymore! It's expanding and growing and not anywhere near as stagnant! There are ladies that control people with sex now! There are no "central plans" anymore that can control all of humanity! Yeehaw!"), but I just didn't care. I think that was the point for me when the universe just got a little too big.
Nah - bring in Paul Verhoeven. Starship Troopers clearly showed that he knows a thing or two about tastefully sticking to source material while bringing in excitement, explosions, and nudity.
So, the best way to get people's attention is to do something and not tell anyone about it? Is there some sort of quantum entanglement phenomena that I wasn't previously aware of at work here? Or was this just in the latest issue of Passive Aggressive Business Week?
Seriously though, I hear you, though I'll be happy to point out that I'm part of the problem. Some of those ads are actually rather clever, at least as far as commercial advertisement goes.
Amen! That's why I not only shun sports, I also don't have a gaming console in my house and also avoid partaking in so-called "computer games", for I view them as the childish games they are. Oh, and don't get me started on role-playing games - it's just playing "house" with dice! How childish is that?!
Think of a car and its transmission. Transmissions require fluid changes from time to time. Many transmissions use fluid that conforms to certain industry standards (say, DEXRON, MERCON, ATF, various gear oils of varying viscosity, like 70W-90, etc.) - consequently, you can find fluid for these transmissions from a variety of brands at a variety of price points. Other transmissions, on the other hand, require specialty fluids that are only available from the manufacturer - ECVT transmissions, like the one used in the Nissan Murano, tend to be prone to this.
In the case of a phone, think of Android as a standard-issue transmission that uses industry standard fluid - you can get Android apps from just about anywhere at varying price points, everybody is already kind of unwittingly making them anyway, etc. Meanwhile, think of Apple's iProducts as that fancy transmission that requires very specific fluid to operate. Just like that fancy transmission, there is a chance that Apple's iProduct does certain things that aren't possible or aren't easy to do with regular "fluids", which is why Apple insists on its special fluid - however, just like that fancy transmission, when it comes time to get more "fluid", you have to go through the manufacturer to get it and you're at the manufacturer's whims over whether or not it will continue to carry the "fluid" and at what price it will sell it to you.
Regarding the math, you are absolutely correct, though I'll point out that I was wrong on both the India and the US side, so at least I was consistent in that regard.
(Consistently wrong, that is. I am so fired.)
As for percentages and how much that factors into where you're going to invest, the point of my argument is that an investment in a smaller economy is going to have a much greater percentage impact than it would in a larger economy while accomplishing the same result. If I invest $1 billion in the North Korean economy, I'd singlehandedly be responsible for a 4% gain in their economy. If I invest that same $1 billion in the US, on the other hand, it would account for, what, a 0.00007% gain? Does that mean my money is better spent in North Korea? Probably not - North Korean ideas on property rights aren't conducive toward providing me a profitable return on my investment, among other things. If I did put that money into North Korea anyway, does that mean that the next person with $1 billion to invest should follow my lead since the North Korean economy is now growing at 4% while the US economy is only growing at 0.00007%? Doubtful.
I'm not saying that percentages aren't important. If I'm trying to decide between investing in Mexico and Brazil, seeing which country has a higher rate of growth will give me a good indicator on which country is more likely to give me a positive return on my investment since they both have roughly the same number of people, roughly the same economic weight, and roughly the same infrastructure. However, percentages won't tell me whether I'm better off investing in India or the European Union because they have very different populations, moderately different laws, and wildly divergent levels of infrastructural development.
When looking at the growth rates of developing countries, please keep in mind the raw numbers we're talking about here. For example, in an economy with a GDP of, say, $1 billion, a $100 million project would grow the economy by 10%, while the same project would only grow an economy with a GDP of $10 billion by 1%. A $100 million gain in a $1 billion economy isn't magically more valuable than a $200 million gain in a $10 billion economy because a 10% gain is bigger than a 2% gain, nor does that gain get the smaller economy any closer to the value of the larger economy. To help illustrate this, using 2008 GDP figures, India's 7.3% gain in 2008 corresponds to a roughly $880 million gain in their economy. By comparison, the same $880 million gain would only account for a 0.6% gain in the US economy, which isn't that far off from the 0.4% gain that the US actually reported in 2008.
Percentage gains in GDP are certainly important, of course, and are very helpful when talking about economies of similar sizes. However, when one economy is over an order of magnitude bigger than another economy (the US' economy is more than 10x larger than the Indian economy, even with the latest economic contractions), the percentages really don't tell the whole story. In terms of nominal dollar amounts, emerging economies aren't really growing that much faster than the US.
Last but not least, I'll point out that claiming that all Americans are ignorant is just as stale and tasteless as claiming that all Indians work at call centers or convenience stores. Just because some non-Americans have some exposure to some of the ignorant politicians and entertainers in the US, they have extrapolated it into this whole stereotype for an entire hemisphere. I guess that's just ignorance.
Hungary was actually facing some rather serious economic conditions immediately following World War 2. For example, the biggest documented incidence of hyperinflation (bigger than Zimbabwe!) occurred in Hungary in 1945. This would certainly explain the issues people were having getting sufficient nutrition.
Pfft - please. Where I work, we have to pull our own chicory root, grind it up, and brew it - that's what we call "coffee"! If we want sugar with that, we go out back, pull some sugar beets out of the ground, shred them, boil the shreds, then reduce the resulting liquid to a clear syrup and pour that in our "coffee"! Oh, and we have to do all of this off company time, lest the efficiency director see what we're up to and dock our pay! I haven't slept in months!
Blame the Wagner Act. Basically, back in the '30s, some politicians, business leaders, and labor leaders got a brilliant idea: What if there was some way we could reduce competition, thus providing more opportunities for businesses to profit, thus providing more profit to pass down to employees? The result was Wagner Act unionism, which took a decent idea (improve worker safety and compensation) and corrupted it to hell and back. Unions liked it because they could negotiate a set of work rules and compensation packages with one company, then go to other companies and demand the same package, all while legally requiring the other companies to negotiate with the union. Big corporations liked it because, if they were the top dog and doing well, they could negotiate with the union first and put together a compensation and work rules package that would put its competitors out of business (hence why Studebaker, Kaiser and AMC don't exist anymore and International doesn't sell pick-ups). Government liked it because it reduced competition and reduced the chances that severe deflation would happen like it did at the beginning of the Great Depression (25% deflation - eep), while also ensuring that they have a seat at the negotiating table (meaning they were in a position to be bribed). It was a win-win-win for "everyone".
This system worked well enough for everyone's satisfaction until the '60s came. By then, though, the US wasn't the only country with an intact industrial base anymore (we were basically the world's China after World War 2), most other countries had newer industrial facilities (they had to build from scratch, so they could use more up-to-date tech than we could), and, oh yeah, everyone else enjoyed a much less "adversarial" labor-business climate, so labor costs were much lower. Once the world caught up to us, we were screwed.
What's really frustrating is that we're proving right now that it's perfectly possible to profitably produce things in this country. Japanese, German, and Korean automakers have manufacturing and assembly plants all over the US. They also make it a point to negotiate with labor organizations on their terms and don't deal with labor organizations that insist on "keeping up with the Joneses" with regard to labor practices or compensation. The result is flexible workforces that actually get to keep their jobs and get to produce top-notch products, just like workforces in Europe and Asia.
It depends on what kind of problems you're running into. If you're letting your best people spend their day answering questions like, "Where did the blue W go on my desktop?!", they're probably not putting their skills to the best use possible. Having some entry-level drones at the bottom of the org chart that can answer simple questions like that does have value, both for the organization and for the rest of the IT department. That said, you need to make sure those drones are competent enough to actually answer those simple questions and, just as importantly, when to throw it above their pay grade.
I've used tab saving before when I want to shut my computer off for the night but I have some tabs open with information I want to re-visit the next morning. That way I can finish reading what I was looking through without changing my home page(s) over and over again.
I'm glad you brought this up. Let's go one more level - I want to see all the files in several nested directories in such a way that I know what directory a file is in.
Under the command line, you'd hopefully remember what flag of ls gives you nested directories (-R, for those of you keeping track at home). Assuming you do, you'd then end up with a nice wall of text that looks something like... ./something/somethingelse: yeehaw.doc fun.txt
And so on. Using a sane, simplified GUI, on the other hand (say, GNOME, KDE, or OS X - heck, I think Vista can do this, too), you'd go to whatever root you want to explore (probably your Home directory in GNOME/KDE, the big hard drive-shaped icon on your desktop in OS X, etc.) and start clicking the little arrows next to each folder so you could see the contents of them graphically in hierarchical order. I could even avoid opening directories that I don't want to see the contents of without the use of piping and text filtering.
You can do most of what you just described with the GUI, too - it just takes more steps. GUIs are great for jobs where you're not entirely sure what you're looking for but you'll know it when you see it ("I need to create a Group Policy that controls Internet History caching... hmm..."), for one-off jobs that you do rather infrequently ("Time to set up a DHCP server for my small office LAN"), or for jobs where visualization of the problem really helps to clarify the situation ("What does my Active Directory OU hierarchy look like, anyway?"). CLIs, meanwhile, are great for jobs where you know precisely what you want to do and don't want to waste time wading through clarifying menus to get there ("sudo apt-get install build-essentials") or for jobs that require a substantial amount of repetition ("I have a list of 134 new users that need to be created in Active Directory with Exchange mailboxes and they all need to be added to certain groups").
Can you use a CLI to do everything you can do in a GUI? Probably - just ask any BSD user. Can you use a GUI to do everything you can do in a CLI? Probably - Windows came pretty close to pulling that off with the 2000-generation server packages. Can you use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail? Yeah. Can you use a hammer to get a screw into a board? Sure. Does that mean it's a good idea to get rid of all hammers or all screwdrivers? No.
Yes - his entire post, which is otherwise factually accurate, is completely false now because he typed Symantec instead of Synaptic, both of which are similarly sounding words that are spelled somewhat similar and both involve computers.
You've got to be kidding. Here in the USA, the law is for the rich and their lawyers.
Which, of course, is why the IRS has an entire section dedicated to starting a business and why Nevada also provides the same. Heck, Nevada even has an FAQ, and the IRS gives you a checklist. I'm willing to bet that, if you hit your local Chamber of Commerce, you'll find information there, too. Heck, even my local university has online resources available for new businesses.
In all seriousness, government seems to excel at doing things that either nobody wants to do due to risk versus reward (i.e. early space programs - high costs, few direct economic benefits) or at semi-evenly distributing services that we think everyone should have at least some access to (water, education, roads, possibly health). That said, it's not particularly strong at providing most of those services efficiently or satisfyingly. You have to admit, the Internet certainly became much more interesting once the private sector grabbed a hold of it. Space is also starting to get interesting again thanks to market-driven economics, too. Heck, if the US could find some way to eliminate state-mandated insurance requirements (the North Dakota Chiropractor's Lobby demands chiropractic coverage in all insurance policies sold in North Dakota, and the Wyoming Board of Acupuncturists suggests that all representatives vote for AB123 to include the vital service of acupuncture to all insured patients in Wyoming!) while also allowing (or even requiring) public pricing of medical services, much of the "health reform" nonsense flying through Congress would die a quick and painless death. I mean, if a quote/confirm pricing model works for my mechanic, and if that's what doctors have to use with insurance companies anyway (hence why medical coding is a marketable specialty), why can't they use that with their patients directly?
Agreed! Most importantly, in order for "freedom" to mean anything, you have to be free to make a "bad" decision, which includes paying for and installing closed source proprietary programs on an open source operating system. If you're only free to make a "good" decision, well, that's not really freedom, now is it?
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Odd - I too am preoccupied with your girlfriend, who lives in Canada and is pleasantly aromatic and savory between her legs. Are the makers of Sesame Street following me?
YOU CAN'T HAS KITTEH, SNUFFLEUPAGUS! NOT YOURS!
Easy - it's complicated and bizarre enough where you think you're smarter for saying you like it. I mean, anyone can understand Go Dog, Go. There's no challenge in that. Dune, on the other hand, is more cryptic than the Biblical Book of Isaiah, and that was nothing more than the deranged ramblings of a madman.
I kid - sort of.
The thing about Dune and the rest of the series is that it gives you an absolutely huge, intricate universe on a silver platter. It's not just huge in a spatial sense - it's huge in a temporal sense. There are actions that happened thousands of years in the past in the series that are still relevant in the "present" and affect the timeline thousands of years into the future. The spatial universe occupies the better part of the galaxy, yet everything revolves around a single planet. Consequently, there are more than enough wrinkles in the universe to get lost in, which a lot of people find incredible and fascinating. Of course, character development takes a bit of a back seat as a result, and is frequently only expressable through the universe's backstory (go ahead, explain Lady Jessica without describing the Bene Gesserit), but there's more than enough there there to keep you distracted from the worst of that.
With all that said, though, I have to admit - I made it through God Emperor of Dune, then forced my way through Heretics of Dune. By that point, I was done. It just didn't feel like Dune anymore. I mean, yeah, I understood that Heretics took place thousands of years in the future and was meant to explain off what Leto's Golden Path meant to humanity, why it was really necessary, and some of the consequences (both positive and negative) after his plan came to fruition ("Woo! Humanity isn't reliant on spice anymore! It's expanding and growing and not anywhere near as stagnant! There are ladies that control people with sex now! There are no "central plans" anymore that can control all of humanity! Yeehaw!"), but I just didn't care. I think that was the point for me when the universe just got a little too big.
Nah - bring in Paul Verhoeven. Starship Troopers clearly showed that he knows a thing or two about tastefully sticking to source material while bringing in excitement, explosions, and nudity.
No, pedantry is an adult nerd's only form of entertainment. Please note the proper use of the apostrophe.
Only fourteen steps until equilibrium! Apparently the final phrase is, "My son is a bowl of soup, my wife calls from your party."
So, the best way to get people's attention is to do something and not tell anyone about it? Is there some sort of quantum entanglement phenomena that I wasn't previously aware of at work here? Or was this just in the latest issue of Passive Aggressive Business Week?
Seriously though, I hear you, though I'll be happy to point out that I'm part of the problem. Some of those ads are actually rather clever, at least as far as commercial advertisement goes.
Amen! That's why I not only shun sports, I also don't have a gaming console in my house and also avoid partaking in so-called "computer games", for I view them as the childish games they are. Oh, and don't get me started on role-playing games - it's just playing "house" with dice! How childish is that?!
Being an adult geek/nerd is serious business.
I find your lack of original conversation discouraging.
(Yeah, yeah - I'm just part of the problem, blah blah blah...)
Perhaps I can help.
Think of a car and its transmission. Transmissions require fluid changes from time to time. Many transmissions use fluid that conforms to certain industry standards (say, DEXRON, MERCON, ATF, various gear oils of varying viscosity, like 70W-90, etc.) - consequently, you can find fluid for these transmissions from a variety of brands at a variety of price points. Other transmissions, on the other hand, require specialty fluids that are only available from the manufacturer - ECVT transmissions, like the one used in the Nissan Murano, tend to be prone to this.
In the case of a phone, think of Android as a standard-issue transmission that uses industry standard fluid - you can get Android apps from just about anywhere at varying price points, everybody is already kind of unwittingly making them anyway, etc. Meanwhile, think of Apple's iProducts as that fancy transmission that requires very specific fluid to operate. Just like that fancy transmission, there is a chance that Apple's iProduct does certain things that aren't possible or aren't easy to do with regular "fluids", which is why Apple insists on its special fluid - however, just like that fancy transmission, when it comes time to get more "fluid", you have to go through the manufacturer to get it and you're at the manufacturer's whims over whether or not it will continue to carry the "fluid" and at what price it will sell it to you.
Does that help?
Regarding the math, you are absolutely correct, though I'll point out that I was wrong on both the India and the US side, so at least I was consistent in that regard.
(Consistently wrong, that is. I am so fired.)
As for percentages and how much that factors into where you're going to invest, the point of my argument is that an investment in a smaller economy is going to have a much greater percentage impact than it would in a larger economy while accomplishing the same result. If I invest $1 billion in the North Korean economy, I'd singlehandedly be responsible for a 4% gain in their economy. If I invest that same $1 billion in the US, on the other hand, it would account for, what, a 0.00007% gain? Does that mean my money is better spent in North Korea? Probably not - North Korean ideas on property rights aren't conducive toward providing me a profitable return on my investment, among other things. If I did put that money into North Korea anyway, does that mean that the next person with $1 billion to invest should follow my lead since the North Korean economy is now growing at 4% while the US economy is only growing at 0.00007%? Doubtful.
I'm not saying that percentages aren't important. If I'm trying to decide between investing in Mexico and Brazil, seeing which country has a higher rate of growth will give me a good indicator on which country is more likely to give me a positive return on my investment since they both have roughly the same number of people, roughly the same economic weight, and roughly the same infrastructure. However, percentages won't tell me whether I'm better off investing in India or the European Union because they have very different populations, moderately different laws, and wildly divergent levels of infrastructural development.
When looking at the growth rates of developing countries, please keep in mind the raw numbers we're talking about here. For example, in an economy with a GDP of, say, $1 billion, a $100 million project would grow the economy by 10%, while the same project would only grow an economy with a GDP of $10 billion by 1%. A $100 million gain in a $1 billion economy isn't magically more valuable than a $200 million gain in a $10 billion economy because a 10% gain is bigger than a 2% gain, nor does that gain get the smaller economy any closer to the value of the larger economy. To help illustrate this, using 2008 GDP figures, India's 7.3% gain in 2008 corresponds to a roughly $880 million gain in their economy. By comparison, the same $880 million gain would only account for a 0.6% gain in the US economy, which isn't that far off from the 0.4% gain that the US actually reported in 2008.
Percentage gains in GDP are certainly important, of course, and are very helpful when talking about economies of similar sizes. However, when one economy is over an order of magnitude bigger than another economy (the US' economy is more than 10x larger than the Indian economy, even with the latest economic contractions), the percentages really don't tell the whole story. In terms of nominal dollar amounts, emerging economies aren't really growing that much faster than the US.
Last but not least, I'll point out that claiming that all Americans are ignorant is just as stale and tasteless as claiming that all Indians work at call centers or convenience stores. Just because some non-Americans have some exposure to some of the ignorant politicians and entertainers in the US, they have extrapolated it into this whole stereotype for an entire hemisphere. I guess that's just ignorance.
Exactly! Why, with the private sector, we could have had two crappy robots stuck in the sand for the price NASA paid for their Government Rover!
So... when I "kill kittens", I'm killing Microsoft? That explains a lot, actually.
Hungary was actually facing some rather serious economic conditions immediately following World War 2. For example, the biggest documented incidence of hyperinflation (bigger than Zimbabwe!) occurred in Hungary in 1945. This would certainly explain the issues people were having getting sufficient nutrition.
Pfft - please. Where I work, we have to pull our own chicory root, grind it up, and brew it - that's what we call "coffee"! If we want sugar with that, we go out back, pull some sugar beets out of the ground, shred them, boil the shreds, then reduce the resulting liquid to a clear syrup and pour that in our "coffee"! Oh, and we have to do all of this off company time, lest the efficiency director see what we're up to and dock our pay! I haven't slept in months!
Damn bourgeoisie and their real coffee...
Blame the Wagner Act. Basically, back in the '30s, some politicians, business leaders, and labor leaders got a brilliant idea: What if there was some way we could reduce competition, thus providing more opportunities for businesses to profit, thus providing more profit to pass down to employees? The result was Wagner Act unionism, which took a decent idea (improve worker safety and compensation) and corrupted it to hell and back. Unions liked it because they could negotiate a set of work rules and compensation packages with one company, then go to other companies and demand the same package, all while legally requiring the other companies to negotiate with the union. Big corporations liked it because, if they were the top dog and doing well, they could negotiate with the union first and put together a compensation and work rules package that would put its competitors out of business (hence why Studebaker, Kaiser and AMC don't exist anymore and International doesn't sell pick-ups). Government liked it because it reduced competition and reduced the chances that severe deflation would happen like it did at the beginning of the Great Depression (25% deflation - eep), while also ensuring that they have a seat at the negotiating table (meaning they were in a position to be bribed). It was a win-win-win for "everyone".
This system worked well enough for everyone's satisfaction until the '60s came. By then, though, the US wasn't the only country with an intact industrial base anymore (we were basically the world's China after World War 2), most other countries had newer industrial facilities (they had to build from scratch, so they could use more up-to-date tech than we could), and, oh yeah, everyone else enjoyed a much less "adversarial" labor-business climate, so labor costs were much lower. Once the world caught up to us, we were screwed.
What's really frustrating is that we're proving right now that it's perfectly possible to profitably produce things in this country. Japanese, German, and Korean automakers have manufacturing and assembly plants all over the US. They also make it a point to negotiate with labor organizations on their terms and don't deal with labor organizations that insist on "keeping up with the Joneses" with regard to labor practices or compensation. The result is flexible workforces that actually get to keep their jobs and get to produce top-notch products, just like workforces in Europe and Asia.
It depends on what kind of problems you're running into. If you're letting your best people spend their day answering questions like, "Where did the blue W go on my desktop?!", they're probably not putting their skills to the best use possible. Having some entry-level drones at the bottom of the org chart that can answer simple questions like that does have value, both for the organization and for the rest of the IT department. That said, you need to make sure those drones are competent enough to actually answer those simple questions and, just as importantly, when to throw it above their pay grade.
I've used tab saving before when I want to shut my computer off for the night but I have some tabs open with information I want to re-visit the next morning. That way I can finish reading what I was looking through without changing my home page(s) over and over again.
You can do that through the command line in XP, too - it's just a royal pain in the rear. I think the exact syntax is something like...
netsh interface ip add address name="Local Area Connection" addr=192.168.1.100 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.254
I never use it, though.
I'm glad you brought this up. Let's go one more level - I want to see all the files in several nested directories in such a way that I know what directory a file is in.
./something/somethingelse:
./something/totallydifferent:
./something/totallydifferent/idontcarewhatsinhere
Under the command line, you'd hopefully remember what flag of ls gives you nested directories (-R, for those of you keeping track at home). Assuming you do, you'd then end up with a nice wall of text that looks something like...
yeehaw.doc
fun.txt
morestuff.info
great.png
thanks.jpg
blergh.doc
idontcare.doc
ireallydontcare.odf
And so on. Using a sane, simplified GUI, on the other hand (say, GNOME, KDE, or OS X - heck, I think Vista can do this, too), you'd go to whatever root you want to explore (probably your Home directory in GNOME/KDE, the big hard drive-shaped icon on your desktop in OS X, etc.) and start clicking the little arrows next to each folder so you could see the contents of them graphically in hierarchical order. I could even avoid opening directories that I don't want to see the contents of without the use of piping and text filtering.
Different tools for different jobs.
You can do most of what you just described with the GUI, too - it just takes more steps. GUIs are great for jobs where you're not entirely sure what you're looking for but you'll know it when you see it ("I need to create a Group Policy that controls Internet History caching... hmm..."), for one-off jobs that you do rather infrequently ("Time to set up a DHCP server for my small office LAN"), or for jobs where visualization of the problem really helps to clarify the situation ("What does my Active Directory OU hierarchy look like, anyway?"). CLIs, meanwhile, are great for jobs where you know precisely what you want to do and don't want to waste time wading through clarifying menus to get there ("sudo apt-get install build-essentials") or for jobs that require a substantial amount of repetition ("I have a list of 134 new users that need to be created in Active Directory with Exchange mailboxes and they all need to be added to certain groups").
Can you use a CLI to do everything you can do in a GUI? Probably - just ask any BSD user. Can you use a GUI to do everything you can do in a CLI? Probably - Windows came pretty close to pulling that off with the 2000-generation server packages. Can you use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail? Yeah. Can you use a hammer to get a screw into a board? Sure. Does that mean it's a good idea to get rid of all hammers or all screwdrivers? No.
Yes - his entire post, which is otherwise factually accurate, is completely false now because he typed Symantec instead of Synaptic, both of which are similarly sounding words that are spelled somewhat similar and both involve computers.
Which, of course, is why the IRS has an entire section dedicated to starting a business and why Nevada also provides the same. Heck, Nevada even has an FAQ, and the IRS gives you a checklist. I'm willing to bet that, if you hit your local Chamber of Commerce, you'll find information there, too. Heck, even my local university has online resources available for new businesses.
For the rich and the lawyers indeed.
Indeed.
In all seriousness, government seems to excel at doing things that either nobody wants to do due to risk versus reward (i.e. early space programs - high costs, few direct economic benefits) or at semi-evenly distributing services that we think everyone should have at least some access to (water, education, roads, possibly health). That said, it's not particularly strong at providing most of those services efficiently or satisfyingly. You have to admit, the Internet certainly became much more interesting once the private sector grabbed a hold of it. Space is also starting to get interesting again thanks to market-driven economics, too. Heck, if the US could find some way to eliminate state-mandated insurance requirements (the North Dakota Chiropractor's Lobby demands chiropractic coverage in all insurance policies sold in North Dakota, and the Wyoming Board of Acupuncturists suggests that all representatives vote for AB123 to include the vital service of acupuncture to all insured patients in Wyoming!) while also allowing (or even requiring) public pricing of medical services, much of the "health reform" nonsense flying through Congress would die a quick and painless death. I mean, if a quote/confirm pricing model works for my mechanic, and if that's what doctors have to use with insurance companies anyway (hence why medical coding is a marketable specialty), why can't they use that with their patients directly?
But I digress...
Agreed! Most importantly, in order for "freedom" to mean anything, you have to be free to make a "bad" decision, which includes paying for and installing closed source proprietary programs on an open source operating system. If you're only free to make a "good" decision, well, that's not really freedom, now is it?